Part Two - The Middle Ages

By the time the Middle Ages rolled around, music had also become a medium for entertainment. It was still most definitely a religious experience, but people had started to train specifically for singing and playing instruments, to become musicians. Then, and now, musicians used their music to express their own agenda and opinions in the form of satirical verse.

Somewhere between the chanting accompanied by drums and flutes, and the era of wandering troubadours, minstrels and trouveres, someone figured out that you can put poetry to music.  This was a time when poems expressed love that could never be, fierce family pride and exposed kings and lords as buffoons. Being that  few people could read or write, setting the poems to music, which makes them easier to remember, became quite the fashion. Soon after this it became almost a battle of wits and wealth, because lords, dukes and kings would hire minstrels to pen a verse put to music about some of their enemies then spread the resulting song to the masses. One had to be especially careful when satirizing a king however...

The need of minstrels to make more and more obscure references led to the formation of many slang terms and also to the commercialization of music. How you ask? Because there were a skilled few who were in hot demand. The bidding war started! At first, the offers consisted of room and board, then moved to horses, clothing, women and finally to gold.

Minstrels, troubadours and trouveres had a nomadic lifestyle. They moved from shire to shire, village to village, kingdom to kingdom, not just to share the music that was already known, but to expose their own work in the hopes that they would make enough money to live on when they could no longer play. So for a duke or minor lord or even a king to offer room, board and everything that they could possibly need for the rest of their lives plus gold besides...it was an offer they couldn't refuse!

But they should have because they were then under pressure to KEEP being so clever and bold. This led to further developments in musical style and form that took so long that nothing really earth shattering came along  until composers like Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky to name a few, hit the scene...but that is for the next Blog!