Polyphony — the simultaneous combination of two or more melodies — must have arisen in medieval Europe because people took pleasure in the sensuous quality of music, in the rich sounds of intertwining melodic lines with their resulting harmony. However it got started, the development of polyphonic music in the late Middle Ages represents a decisive turn in the history of Western music.
We know about the earliest European polyphony only from its uses within the church (for, once again, most of what we know about very early music comes from the writing of monks and other clerics). And within the church, the sensuous aspect of polyphony had to be carefully controlled. Polyphony was justified as a way of embellishing Gregorian chants — that is, as yet another way of enhancing the all-