2. 考研
  3. Notation gave western music a means of written record, but at first only for a kind of music, chant, that was believed to have o

Notation gave western music a means of written record, but at first only for a kind of music, chant, that was believed to have o

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问题    Notation gave western music a means of written record, but at first only for a kind of music, chant, that was believed to have originated half a millennium and more in the past—to be effectively, ageless. Early medieval chants sprang from the whole time of eternal sameness, which they so readily convey, and similarly there was no measure of the time within them—the rhythm. Then measure came. And with it came the first identifiable composers and precisely datable works.
   Where chant was of a piece with other musical traditions in being self-sufficient melody, working within a modal system, belonging to no creator (but to God) and designed for worship, the new music of the twentieth century opened a distinctively western path. The measuring of time was the beginning not only of rhythmic notation—known, far beyond Europe, to the Indian theorist Sarngadeva in the first half of the thirteenth century—but also of music involving coordination among singers carrying different melodies, of polyphony. This, too, was by no means confined to the wedge of land between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic : the gamelan music of Bali, a tradition independent of Europe, is comparable with early western polyphony in its snperposition of different time streams, fast and slow, while the music of many sub-Saharan African peoples often piles up dissimilar rhythmic layers in ways foreign to Europe outside certain special repertories (fourteenth-century song and some music since 1950). But, from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, polyphony in the west gradually moved away from the repetitive structures that were retained on Bali or in central Africa as Europeans discovered how harmony could result in continuous flow.
   The source, as of so much in western culture, was a misunderstanding of classical Greek knowledge, again acquired through Boethius. He had nothing to say about harmony in the sense of chords, but he conveyed a Geek satisfaction in the primacy of the octave and the fifth, which medieval musicians took as models of consonance (the euphonious combining notes). Just as essential were dissonant combinations, lacking euphony, for these would intensify the need for consonance. A dissonance placed immediately before a final consonance would produce a firmly conclusive ending—a cadence, such as became an essential of western musiC. Extending back from the cadence, the forces of harmony, marshaled through relationships between each chord and the next, could amplify the directional sense already present in the melody—the sense of movement towards a resting point on the last note. Thus time measured became time decisively having a goal, and music could emulate the progress in every human soul towards eternity.
   Music mirrored, too, how time generally was being told. Guido’s staff notation came roughly when water clocks were reintroduced from Byzantium and Islam, enabling monks to know when a service was due from the level reached by water slowly filling a vessel. Thus reading, whether of a chantbook or a water gauge, substituted for memory and intuition. Exact synchrony between music and time was lost a little when clockwork mechanisms appeared in the mid-thirteenth century, half a century later than the gear-driven music produced at Notre Dame in Paris. However, the perfection of hour-chiming with hour-chiming capabilities, in the astronomical clock made by Richard Wallingford for St. Albans Abbey (1327-36), strikingly coincided with the perfection of rhythmic notation that spread from Paris and gave music its own machinery of time lengths.
Which of the following is the most appropriate title for this passage?
选项 A、The Development of Rhythm
B、Time Measured.
C、Notation and Time
D、Music and Civilization
答案D
解析 本文讲了音乐如何随着历史的演变而不断发展，第二、三、四段揭示了音乐与不同地区、不同历史发展阶段、不同文化之间的关系。所以选项D最合适，揭示了音乐与文明之间的关系。
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