Medieval

before about 1400

From the first surviving notation to the early fifteenth century. Most of what survives is single-line chant for the church; second and third lines were added on top of it later, and that is where polyphony begins. Notation learned to record pitch long before it learned to record rhythm, so early pieces often have no audible beat at all and move with the stress of the words instead. Little of it reaches a concert hall today, and the foundations of everything after it are here.

What to listen for

Chant carries no harmony: the line rises and falls with the Latin stresses.
In organum two voices mostly move in parallel, like one line thickened.
The fourteenth-century Ars nova layers rhythms deliberately: the earliest music you can hear being calculated.

Medieval in Shanghai

All concerts

We hold nothing from this period yet. It appears very rarely in Shanghai concert programmes; when it is scheduled, it will be here.

The dates are a reading aid, not a boundary. Bach died writing counterpoint that Haydn's generation had already given up, and Rachmaninoff was writing romantic concertos while Webern wrote twelve-tone miniatures. Any two neighbouring periods overlap by decades.