Making beautiful moo-sic

I took a long weekend. But then I always feel the need to bulk up on posts to make up for it.

From composer Aaron Copland's 1939 book (and revised 18 years later), "What To Listen for in Music": "By comparison with rhythm and melody, harmony is the most sophisticated of the three musical elements. We are so accustomed to thinking of music in terms of harmonic music that we are likely to forget how recent an innovation it is, by comparison with the other elements. Rhythm and melody came naturally to man, but harmony gradually evolved from what was partly an intellectual conception -- no doubt one of the most original conceptions of the human mind.

"Harmony, in the sense that we think of it, was quite unknown in music until about the ninth century. Up until that time, all music of which we have any record consisted of a single melodic line.... The anonymous composers who first began experimenting with harmonic effects were destined to change all music that came after them, at least among Occidental nations....

"The birth of harmony is generally placed in the ninth century, because it is first mentioned in treatises of that period. As might be expected, the early forms of harmony sound crudely primitive to our ears." This nascent harmony was the "organum," and consisted simply of repeating the main theme at an interval below (the fourth) or (fifth) above. The end.

It took almost 300 years longer to come up with the descant.