“The Middle Ages” is a catchall term for nearly a thousand years of European history, extending from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century C.E. to the advent of new learning, technology, and political organization in the age of Columbus. Even though life and culture changed slowly in those days, this is obviously too broad a span of time to mean much as a single historical period.

Nowhere is this clearer than in music. Music changed radically from the beginning to the end of the Middle Ages, more than in any other historical period. Two of the central features of later Western music, tune and polyphony, originated around the middle of this long period.