Western music, Music produced in Europe as well as the music derived from European forms from ancient times to the 21st century. All ancient civilizations entered historical times with a flourishing musical culture. The primary function was apparently religious. Other musical occasions were equally functional: stirring incitements to military zeal, soothing accompaniments to labour, heightening aids to dramatic spectacles, and enlivening backgrounds to social gatherings. In every case, musical sounds accompanied bodily movement (dance, march, play, or work) or song. Evidence indicates that the inhabitants of the Mesopotamian region around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—the Sumerians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians (fl. c. 3500–c. 500 bce)—had instruments of every basic type: idiophones, aerophones, chordophones, and membranophones. An undecipherable hymn engraved in stone, dating to c. 800 bce, is evidence of an early system of musical notation. Of the eastern Mediterranean cultures, it was the Greeks, with their system of modes (ways of ordering the notes of a scale to build melodies), who furnished the most direct link with the musical development of western Europe, by way of the Romans, who defeated the Greeks militarily but adopted much of their culture intact. With the decline of the Roman Empire, the institution that perpetuated the musical heritage of antiquity was the Christian church. Beginning in the late 6th century, according to tradition, early church music was codified and organized by Pope Gregory I. Gregorian chant began expanding in the 9th century, with the use of a trope (a text or a melodic section added to a preexisting melody or a combination of text and music incorporated into existing liturgical music). The Gregorian repertory was further enriched by the revolutionary concept of polyphony, the simultaneous sounding of two or more melodic lines. Undoubtedly, secular music also thrived during the early Middle Ages, but, aside from sporadic references, the earliest accounts of such music in the Western world describe the music of the goliards—itinerant minor clerics and students who, from the 7th century on, roamed the land singing and playing songs dealing with love as well as war, famine, and other issues of the day. During the 12th and 13th centuries the troubadour movement burgeoned, beginning among noblemen of southern France who circulated among the leading courts of the region, writing and singing poetry in the vernacular. The flourishing and secularization of music in the early 15th century is commonly accepted as the beginning of the musical Renaissance. Polyphony and the early precursors of modern tonality (organization of music around a focal tone) were developed. The term Baroque refers to the grandiose, dramatic, energetic spirit in art that prevailed during the period from about 1600 to about 1750. This period saw a reduction of the number of modes to two (the major and minor scales and the contrasting sets of notes and chords deriving from them) and the initial efforts to compose with large musical forms (opera, oratorio, sonata, and concerto). The Baroque era reached its zenith in the work of Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. In the Classical period that followed, the elaborate contrapuntal texture of Baroque music gave way to music of subtle dynamic differentiation, often based on simple folk materials (rhythms and melodies). The relationships between tonal materials and large musical forms achieved their highest state in the sonata and in opera. The fundamental changes that distinguished the Classical style from the Baroque were refined and stabilized particularly by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Christoph Willibald Gluck, and the young Ludwig van Beethoven. The latter’s music exemplified a transition from the Classical style to the Romantic. Beethoven’s early works were crafted in the hope of financial rewards, but his later works, from c. 1820 on, were made independently of such concerns, written only as his imagination dictated. Thus, Beethoven helped establish individuality, subjectivity, and emotional expression as the standard for Romantic composers, including Richard Wagner, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Sergei Rachmaninov. Opera remained a flourishing genre throughout the 19th century, and Italian opera continued as the dominant type during the first half of the century, especially in the hands of Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, and Gaetano Donizetti. However, the man who perhaps best personified Italian opera of the period was Giuseppe Verdi, whose works are still among the most performed. Late in the 19th century the tendency toward more realistic and topical subject matter produced the verismo (“realism”) school of Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni, and Giacomo Puccini. One of the most popular types of music in the Romantic era, thanks to the rapid technical development of the piano and the growing demand for recreation and entertainment from the newly affluent middle class, was piano music. Music for stylized dances continued to be popular, but nationalistic types, such as the polonaise and mazurka, and the waltz replaced the staid minuets of the previous era. Frédéric Chopin, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, and Johannes Brahms were the major composers of piano music after Beethoven. The vocal counterpart of the keyboard character piece was the solo song with piano accompaniment. With the rise of the German Romantic poetry of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, and others, about the beginning of the 19th century, the German lied (“song”) flourished. A pioneer and the most prolific composer of lieder was Franz Schubert. His chief successors, in chronological order, were Karl Loewe, Felix Mendelssohn, Hugo Wolf, and Richard Strauss. The last decades of the 19th century witnessed what might be termed the diffusion of Romanticism, when significant departures from the current musical vocabulary appeared in the Impressionistic style represented by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. The amorphous rhythmic patterns, the whole-tone scale, the concept of free relationship of adjacent harmonies, and the kaleidoscopic textures of that Impressionism were musical manifestations of the aesthetic movements current in painting and literature. The experimental works of Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky about 1910 heralded a new epoch in music. Schoenberg discarded traditional harmonic concepts of consonance and dissonance, leading to the development of atonality and 12-tone technique (in which all 12 tones of the octave are serialized, or given an ordered relationship). Stravinsky’s revolutionary style concentrated on metric imbalance and percussive dissonance. Beginning about 1950, two leading groups began experimenting with electronic music, one in Cologne and the other in Paris. The two approaches shared pitch, intensity, duration, and quality with music of the past, but all other concepts of musical organization were discarded, including the necessity of a performer. The dehumanizing of music was carried several steps further by the use of mathematics and computers to determine the nature of sound materials—either electronic or produced by more conventional means—and their organization. Another result of advances in electronics was the tremendous growth of popular music during the 20th century. New techniques made possible high-fidelity reproduction of sound and its widespread and rapid dissemination through radio, phonograph, tape recorder, television, compact disc, and, later, the Internet and streaming services. One new form that popular music took was the blues, a secular folk music that had emerged among African Americans in the southern U.S. by the late 19th century. Blues performers give musical expression to sadness by using vocal techniques such as melisma, rhythmic techniques such as syncopation, and instrumental techniques such as “choking” (manipulating guitar strings to create a whining sound). The blues were a key influence, along with ragtime, on the development of another originally African American musical form: jazz. This primarily instrumental music typically features syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of improvisation, often deliberate deviations of pitch, and the use of original timbres. Early in the 20th century the novelty of jazz rhythms attracted composers of art music, who occasionally incorporated jazz idioms into their works. From about 1930 the influence worked in both directions, and jazz gradually adopted techniques that had originated in art music. Jazz allowed the emergence of various styles, including swing and bebop. Besides jazz, the blues greatly influenced the development, from the mid-20th century, of rhythm and blues, soul music, and rock. Yet another musical form with African American roots was rap, which emerged in New York City’s hip-hop scene in the late 1970s. It featured half-spoken rhymes delivered over rhythmic instrumental tracks that sometimes drew on DJ mixing techniques and samples of preexisting recordings.