Why the Dark Ages Were Never Dark

4. Gregorian Chant
Before the brilliance of Beethoven or the magic of Mozart, another kind of music spread across Europe. This music — as haunting as it is ancient — used no instruments and wasn’t performed in concert halls. Nonetheless, it quickly became the musical lifeblood of the Middle Ages.
Gregorian chant grew out of the Judaic practice of chanting Psalms. In monasteries, where monks were required to recite Psalms seven times a day, chant was necessary: it allowed them to standardize their liturgies so that they could sing together.
Still, the early centuries of the church saw a proliferating patchwork of singing styles: communities developed their own variations, and certain figures like St. Ambrose left behind their own personal influence.
It wasn’t until Pope St. Gregory ascended the papal throne that chant gained the recognizable form we know today. Under Gregory, Christian chant became relatively standardized in a form that still bears his name today.
Chant was such a cornerstone of medieval life that it (quite literally) shaped cathedrals — architects designed churches for auditory aesthetics, just as much as visual ones. The acoustics amplified singers’ voices so that a single chanter could be heard throughout the entire building, and seconds-long reverbs came from a single note.
Without Gregorian chant, the great classical music of later centuries wouldn’t exist. It pioneered musical notation (using four lines and large blocks to mark notes), and this method of sketching down and reading music would later develop into the modern 5-line staff that’s still used today.
But Gregorian chant is more than a precursor to classical music. It’s a stunning art form of its own. When you listen to it, you won’t hear the dramatic highs and lows of later classical music, and it doesn’t explore an individual artist’s vision or emotion.
Instead, it’s like the voice of the ancient past — solemn and remote, yet profoundly peaceful. You can feel the weight of millennia of history, and it still haunts us.
If you’re skeptical, try listening to a recording, or better, find an in-person performance. You’ll find that it shares the voice of the faith from centuries past, and the beauty that sustained generations through unimaginably precarious times.
Drama in the Darkness
Toward the end of the medieval period, Renaissance art exploded onto the cultural landscape and drastically altered our attitudes and assumptions about what art is. That makes it relatively easy for a modern person to relate to the cultural output of the 15th, 16th, and subsequent centuries.
But peering further back in cultural history reveals a stranger and more challenging time. The creations of earlier centuries are less intuitive to us. But that doesn’t mean the Medieval era was the cultural nadir that the term “Dark Ages” implies.
The medieval era engaged with a mythologically rich universe, not focusing on individual artists but on the adventure of living — its art reflects the glory of that enchanted worldview…