Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

AMBROSE!

OK, not that sexy, I admit, but still, eh? Don't shoot Melinda Messenger, as it were.

t's fair enough, really. Ambrose was, indeed, the Bishop of Milan, elected in a bizarre manner when he was thirty-five. It's said during a gathering to find a new bishop, at which Ambrose was present but not actually a contender, a child from the crowd began to chant the words: 'Ambrose… bishop… Ambrose… bishop'. Taking this as divine intervention, of course, rather than, say, just plain odd, a rather reluctant Ambrose was given the office.

I lie reason a reluctant bishop makes it into the SFI amp;UHoCM is I» i.u use his big claim to fame was not theological or liturgical, at all, Inn musical. Up to Ambrose's time, music in church was generally performed by professional chanters, who would more or less monop-? ill/i- all the best tunes. Ambrose opened up the singing to the people, wiili antiphonal chanting, which was enough to move St Augustine, lor one, to tears.

It's blown now as 'Ambrosian Chant' and is still practised today in i IK- northern part of Italy, favoured over the now almost wall-to-wall t iugorian chant (after Pope Gregory IX - more on him in a minute). To put it into context, this was around the time that the Roman legions started the mass exodus from the inclement little outpost they i.illcd Britain - something to do with muttered complaints of 'It's,i I ways raining…' and 'You can't get a good latte…'.

Ambrosian chant, Gregorian chant - it all comes under the banner headline 'plainsong': generally sung by monks in monasteries, on one note, with occasional organ accompaniment. I always think it is an unfortunate phrase because it's often far from 'plain' at all. It's beautiful stuff.

This whole period of Ambrose and Gregory is, to be fair, considered by many to be more or less the start of classical music, as we know it today, mainly because it is the first period where we really got anything like a sizeable chunk of the stuff written down. Of course, as we've seen, there had been music around long, long before this. The Sumerians playing from their wedge-shaped tablets, the Greeks on their aulos, and even the Egyptians on their flutes. See? Clever chaps, the Egyptians - even had James Galway before everyone else.