French Music Research Paper

French Music: The Past French Music, Musicians, and composers have both influenced and been influenced by the world with mass quantities of styles of genres. Among the earliest of these styles are those of the Church. The earliest French influence on western music is found in the plainsong of the Christian Church. It is believed that Gregorian chant as it is known today is an 8th- or 9th-century Gallican interpretation of Roman chant, but it is difficult to distinguish the Gallican work from its Roman basis. It has been said that the basic theory of the trope (an outburst in a preexistent hymn) is Gallican and that the surviving body of medieval tropes and sequences had a French influence. The French were not just popular for their Church influences; they were also popular for the varieties that they introduced later on. Amongst the later Middle Ages, France led in the development of European music in all its forms. Some of the earliest manuscripts containing organum (the earliest form of polyphony, multiple melodies,) are found from the 10th century in Chartres, Montpellier, Fleury, Tours, and other French cities. Especially important was the group of
Opera was the ruling 17th-century form, and French composers wrote operas of a uniquely French type. Beginning with Balthazar de Beaujoyeux's Ballet comique de la reine (1580), French composers combined elements of opera, ballet, and spoken drama in a form sometimes called opera-ballet. The arias were simple and songlike, in contrast to the long, florid arias of Italian music, and the influence of Italian recitative is slight. The foremost French operas in the 17th century were those of Jean Baptiste Lully and in the 18th century those of Jean Philippe Rameau. Ballet, spoken dialogue, and the absence of the Italian-style recitative-aria remained characteristic of French opera comique through the 19th