Louis Marchand

Musique ancienne (French for “early music”) denotes the historically informed performance of medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque repertoire on period instruments and with period-specific techniques. Rather than a single historical style, it is a practice and aesthetic: performers consult original sources, treatises, and surviving instruments to recreate articulation, ornamentation, tuning, tempo, and ensemble balance as they likely sounded before the Classical era. Hallmarks include gut strings, low and flexible pitch standards (e.g., A=415 for Baroque, variable for Renaissance/medieval), meantone or well temperaments, natural trumpets, cornetts and sackbuts, recorders and traversos, theorbos and lutes, viol consorts, organo and harpsichord continuo, and an emphasis on dance rhythms and text-driven phrasing. Today the term also implies an interpretive ethos—clarity of counterpoint, rhetorical delivery, and stylistic diversity across centuries—applied to sacred and secular works from monody and polyphony to dance suites, madrigals, and early opera.

Baroque is a period and style of Western art music spanning roughly 1600–1750. It is characterized by the birth of functional tonality, the widespread use of basso continuo (figured bass), and a love of contrast—between soloist and ensemble, loud and soft, and different timbres. Hallmark genres and forms of the era include opera, cantata, oratorio, concerto (especially the concerto grosso), dance suite, sonata, and fugue. Textures range from expressive monody to intricate counterpoint, and melodies are richly ornamented with trills, mordents, and appoggiaturas. Baroque music flourished in churches, courts, and theaters across Europe, with regional styles (Italian, French, German, English) shaping distinctive approaches to rhythm, dance, harmony, and ornamentation.

Gregorian chant is the central Western tradition of plainchant: a monophonic, unaccompanied sacred song in Latin (and occasionally Greek) used in the Roman Catholic liturgy. It employs free rhythm guided by the prosody of the text rather than by strict meter, and is sung in unison by clerics or scholas. Its melodies are organized by the system of eight church modes, with characteristic finalis (final), tenor/reciting tones, and melodic formulas. Repertoires include the Proper and Ordinary of the Mass (e.g., Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory, Communion, Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei) and the Divine Office (e.g., Antiphons, Responsories, Hymns, Psalms). Although legend credits Pope Gregory I, modern scholarship sees Gregorian chant as a Carolingian synthesis of Old Roman and Gallican chants, standardized across Frankish realms and later the broader Latin West.