Plainchant where all voices sing in unison, begins in the third century. Plainchant is wrongly ascribed to Pope Gregory I, who had nothing to do with "Gregorian chants."
By the 6th century, chants are sung in octaves, often using boys to sing the upper octave melody.
Next, organum chants were sung with an underlying continuing single note drone tone (drone tones still exist in Scottish bagpipe music).
Kassia of Constantinople (810 - 865), the first woman musician in recorded history of western music, combines parallel organum with drone organum.
By 9th century, the first musical notations, neumes, were created to spread Christian music throughout Charlemagne's Carolingian empire (roughly, modern France and Germany).
C. 1020. Guido of Arrezo, creates the first modern musical notation using our line staves (sing. staff) Today we use five line staves). Five-line staves appeared in Italy in the 13th century and it was promoted by Ugolino da Forlì; staves with four, five, and six lines were used as late as 1600.
Some definitions to know:
Monophony (adj. monophonic) Monophony is the simplest of musical textures, consisting of a melody (or "tune"), typically sung by a single singer or played by a single instrument player without accompanying harmony or chords. A melody is also considered to be monophonic if a group of singers (e.g., a choir) sings the same melody together at the unison (exactly the same pitch) or with the same melody notes duplicated at the octave (such as when men and women sing together). If an entire melody is played by two or more instruments or sung by a choir with a fixed interval, such as a perfect fifth, it is also said to be monophony (or "monophonic").
Polyphony (adj. monophonic) consists of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to a musical texture with just one voice, Monophony, or a texture with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords, which is called homophony. Within the context of the Western musical tradition, the term polyphony is usually used to refer to music of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Baroque forms such as a fugue, which might be called polyphonic, are usually described instead as contrapuntal (noun. counterpoint).
Sidebar: some technical stuff: (online piano)
An octave is the interval between one musical pitch and another with double its frequency. So, if the A below middle C oscillates at a frequency of 220 hertz, the A above Middle C oscillates at 440 hertz. Pythagoras did not understand hertz, but he understood the 2:1 ratio between octaves - and more).
By the 8th century chants are sung in "parallel" with harmonies of the 4th or 5th of scale. This is called organum. Pythagoras also knew that the 5th harmony was 1.5 times the note, so the note A at 220 hz times 1.5 means that the fifth (the note E above A) oscillates at 330 hz. The 4th oscillates at 1.333 of the tonic, the 3rd at 1.25 of the tonic. At least this is the way it is in natural harmonies. But natural harmonies were replaced with man-made harmonies a couple centuries ago to solve problems composers had with natural harmonies. More on this when we get to Bach.
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