Where did Western music come from? Most historical accounts credit composers with the first formations of simple tunes, which eventually led to “early music” and later classical music and the many popular forms that have since sprung up. But acoustic ecologists and musicologists have been talking lately about a different foundation: the earliest temples and cathedrals, which literally shaped musical notes and rests that led to song and symphony. Buildings determined how religious leaders chanted and how musicians composed using the first harmonies.
The shape and dimensions of early Israeli temples—notably Solomon’s Temple, said to have been built in the decade of 950 B.C.E—were designed to help words spoken at the altar reach people in attendance. The most effective interior design had a certain ratio of length to width to height and took into account the building materials and furnishings. Both the dimensions and materials affected the sound that leaders were able to deliver.
Aware of this interplay, early music composers chose pitches, silence (rests), rhythms and simple harmonies that sounded well throughout the physical building. When ornamentation was added inside, limiting reverberation, the basic dynamics of classical music were set, even as it spread among different societies and religions. Within the nave, as the main interior part of the church came to be called, the early creators of classical music, such as Pérotin (known by his mononymous name) in the 1200s, and John Dunstaple and Guillaume Dufay in the 1400s, were able to organize and explore sound. They eventually created polyphony, the layering of simultaneous voices—the harmonies much loved to this day. In this view, the “house” provided the acoustics for early music creations, and by the late 15th century, the basics of Western music were in place. Even today, many concert halls mimic the plan and dimensions of cathedrals.
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While scholars have lauded the visual qualities of the basilica style, few have explored the auditory. One landmark study, Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics, by architectural historians Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti, examines this. Lifelong ethnomusicologists like myself have long recognized the importance of context for music but failed to recognize its importance in the development of Western classical music. In May at the biannual Rupert’s Land Colloquium at the University of Winnipeg, and in June at the Eighth International Conference on Analytical Approaches to World Musics at the University of Bologna in Italy, I argued for the importance of “habitat” for human music. Studying the space in which music was created adds a new dimension to our understanding of music: the importance of early architecture.
Most of us have lost sight of how deeply rooted we are in our physical environment—as ethnomusicologist Simha Arom described so well when discussing the tall, cathedral-like tropical forests of the central Congo basin, where the Aka people and other groups sing multilayered choral pieces. The history of Western music often begins with ancient Greece, especially its music theory. Yet for acoustical reasons, the origin of Western harmony is not within Greek buildings—and especially not in Greek or Roman temples because, as art historian Nikolaus Pevsner wrote in his book An Outline of European Architecture, “A Greek temple’s interior mattered infinitely less than its exterior.... The faithful did not enter it and spend hours of communication with the Divine in it, as they do in a church.”
When humans moved into buildings with impenetrable walls, song changed. In my research, I’ve proposed that Solomon’s Temple in ancient Israel was the prototype for a sonic interior in which people could control and elaborate on music and that the ancient Hebrews designed an indoor space, the temple’s interior holy place, with proportions that made possible both clarity of sound and the repetition needed for focused contemplation.
Isaac Newton, as we might expect of a mathematician and physicist of the time, described the physical dimensions of Solomon’s Temple in masterful Latin. There were many rooms of acoustic interest, but the one of lasting musical influence is the nave. Newton and others gave the relative proportions of this room as a length of six, a width of two, and a height of three.
In modern-day churches, this temple-inspired shape is an oblong hall, often with aisles on either side. At one end there is a narthex, or entrance space. At the opposite end is the elevated platform where the sacred altar sits. In Solomon’s Temple, it is likely that the temple’s two towers functioned as a sort of loudspeaker. This architecture allows for the untrammeled movement of sound waves and leads to musicologist Denis Stevens’s observation that even simple doubling of sung intervals of fourths, fifths and octaves in a large building such as an abbey or cathedral is “magnificently sonorous.” Curtains like those of early Christian basilicas were installed on special occasions to help reduce reverberation, keep the sound within the Gothic nave and help the tonal continuity of liturgical melodies.
Today, in similar fashion, most concert halls feature a forecourt or lobby and then an oblong space approximately two thirds of the hall’s total length for the audience. This long, narrow, rectangular space carries sound well. Music and music performance also depends on the ability to create and maintain silence. Silence allows us to discern and demarcate music boundaries; specific rests in music are crucial to structuring a work.
A room of right angles supports artistic and social hierarchy, too; there is no circle of equality. The people standing higher and often in front of a group readily control the sound space. This seems very similar to the provenance of the concert stage today.
High ceilings were copied in successive churches to the present. Height enriches singing with a longer path of travel for sound waves, thereby prolonging sound. Even higher ceilings are better for instrumental music, which may have been more prevalent in Solomon’s Temple than many records suggest. This arrangement is now an accepted visual and acoustic shape.
Ancient temples were often constructed of stone covered with wooden floors and walls. Cherubs, palm trees and flowers carved into the wide planks of wood described in the Bible can sufficiently absorb sound waves. Another effective absorber in Solomon’s Temple would have been the veil of variegated linen that was said to have been at the entrance to the innermost chamber, called the Holy of Holies, which, incidentally, would have been a near-totally silent room. In such a cube-shaped space, probably by design, equally sized sound waves cancel each other, resulting in a quieter sound, particularly at the center of the room.
It seems that our sound-aware predecessors understood the absorptive effects of materials and objects in the temple and in the Christian churches that followed. Surfaces, be they rough or porous, alter sound in an enclosed space. Acoustic engineers now assign an absorption coefficient to surfaces, a number indicating how easily an object is penetrated by sound waves. A low coefficient means that sound waves pass through the object with relatively little attenuation. A high coefficient indicates that sound waves are well absorbed. People in ancient times apparently knew well how to adjust objects in an indoor space to optimize the absorption coefficient or reverberation needed for humans to hear the message clearly.
Each building we occupy is a sonic niche that affects what we hear and perform. It is likely that temple builders were assisted by priests to fine-tune a desirable sound space. The intoned, low-pitched vowels and syllables of the exclusively male priests’ speech would have been heard clearly, one pitch at a time, to optimize comprehension. Perhaps the designers allowed just enough resonance for some echoing to create a sense of a far distant sound that they considered sacred—the word of God.
History, from ancient times to the present, shows us how this “container” for music lived on. By 300 B.C.E. the Bible’s Old Testament had a Greek translation called the Septuagint. Greek was the lingua franca of the time and of historian Flavius Josephus, who was born around C.E. 37. Josephus’s compelling historical works, which included a description of Solomon’s Temple, were carried across the Middle East and finally into Europe. Josephus, who was Jewish, mentioned Jesus several times, a fact that made his works more acceptable to the new Christians of the time.
While Jews were dispersed, Christians became a multitude. With the efflorescence of Christianity, a religion rooted in the Old Testament, through the Septuagint, knowledge of the temple spread.Temple imagery pervaded medieval church construction, iconography and biblical sermons, and its liturgy carried in verse and music. The long nave design of Christian churches and their endemic music spread west and north—even to England, with William the Conqueror. In 1137 the Norman-English began work in present-day Scotland on St. Magnus Cathedral, known to this day for its good acoustics.
As musicologist Craig Wright observed of Solomon’s Temple in a 1994 paper, “This monument of great spiritual importance to the people of Israel quickly assumed equal significance with the early Christians.... Every sanctuary in Christendom drew upon the vision of the Temple of Jerusalem as the source of its spiritual authority and external form.”
In medieval times, music experimentation abounded, but it was within the “house” where an intimation of the possibilities of organized, layered and unvarying human sound—that is, Western classical music—was to come. Old St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, which stood from the fourth to 16th centuries C.E., had a long colonnaded nave that drew attention to the main altar. The nave was central to the great Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals that followed, such as the Basilica of Saint-Denis, built in 1135 in France, in which the vaulting was higher than in previous cathedrals and stained-glass windows replaced parts of solid stone walls, further enriching the acoustics. Western churches soared to new heights, as did their music. Musicologist Richard Terry is said to have remarked that a mass by Robert Fayrfax, a Renaissance composer and organist, was composed with three parts in voices and a fourth part provided by the church building.
While the temple design was the crucible for music change, individual musicians, who used their surroundings to create music, should be acknowledged. Recognition is often difficult because we don’t have recordings, of course, but written records of the time do point to a few individual composers, often in their church context. Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, with a nave that is 115 feet high, provided the setting for the composer Léonin to use drone (sustained) notes for the tenor voice part, Pérotin to use four voice parts for a type of plainchant melody called organum, and both composers to experiment with polyphony. Another great musical innovator, Josquin des Prez, who lived from about 1450 to 1521, worked at a series of sacred buildings in France: Cambrai cathedral, the chapel at Saint-Germain-en-Laye castle and the Sainte Chapelle chapel.
We do know of the specific music innovations of Dunstaple, who composed and played in St. Albans cathedral, a Norman cathedral said to have the longest nave in England, in the 15th century. Dunstaple, an English composer, traveled to the French Burgundian court, where he introduced and formalized the new English musical sound. Other composers such as Leonel Power and Dufay were part of the new art.
The increasing standardization of sound promoted exchanges of music ideas between continental Europe and England. The control of sound facilitated sonic organization of pitch and rhythm using silences and layering of sound. Repetition with fidelity led, with the aid of print, to longer organized forms such as the motet, a vocal music composition, and the conductus, a Latin song with a rhythmic structure.
By the end of the 15th century the die was cast: Western classical music was on its determined path. By the late Renaissance, the elements of Western music were established and it sounded best in decorated, rectangular cathedrals and churches, aristocratic chapels and, soon to follow, dedicated concert halls.
Ancient people saw a need to control their sound space, so they designed the temple. Its plan lives on in cathedrals and concert halls, and almost all the significant contributors to Western music composed within a cathedral space. Although I have provided strong indirect evidence, researchers today could use digital data to recreate interior soundscapes to provide acoustical proof that connects early temple and cathedral spaces with classical music and the explosion of music compositions that has followed. All of us are deeply rooted in our sound environment, and the spaces of the past can inspire us to give further thought to sound in our life.