ABSTRACT
Folk-song and plainsong are the only survivors, except perhaps Jewish cantillation, into modern Western music of the ancient monodic music of the Mediterranean civilizations. The Greeks disliked harmony when they accidentally heard it and the preoccupation of the Near East with single-line melody forced all the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean to cultivate subtlety of line for purposes of expression, whether by the differentiation of mode, or of microtones or of ornamentation. When around the first millennium ad the exciting possibilities of harmony were first glimpsed these features diminished in importance, but they remain for monophonic music. The development of polyphony through five centuries of the Middle Ages, reaching its first culminating peak in Palestrina and his fellow composers of the Golden Age of polyphony provided so many new resources that the modes and the microtones were eliminated in favour of diatonicism and the key system.
