MONODY. - From the Greek μόνος = alone and ὠδή = song, today every form of singing, choral or soloistic, ancient or modern, with or without instrumental accompaniment, in which the overlapping of sung parts is lacking, is considered m., so that singing is monodic even with several voices, male or female, if these simultaneously perform one and the same melodic line. It is precisely the linearity of the musical design that constitutes the characteristic of m.
M. is the only stylistic framework in which the refined Hellenic culture manifested itself in the field of music: the doubling at the octave with the figurations of heterophony does not represent a notable variant to the law of m. Complexity enters Greek m. with the multiplication of the harmonic genera (chromatic and enharmonic in addition to the diatonic); of the poetic-metric types; of the choral structures, among which the tritic - strophe, antistrophe, epode - soon reached the golden form of a classical model. In Christian-Latin m., the evolutionary process was held back by almost ascetic limits, suggested by the lofty purpose for which the musical compositions were destined. The hieratic character of liturgical m. asserts itself with the choice of the musical texts, taken from Sacred Scripture, in the 5th, 6th, 7th centuries, which are those of the most abundant and genuine production. The performance itself, far from overly contrasting effects, maintains an atmosphere of gravity and sweetness.
The constructive technique of Christian m., even with the rise of liturgical-musical poetry, from the 9th to the 13th century (tropes, sequences, versus, verbets, planetus, hymns), remains generally faithful to the generating principle of Greek m. itself, in which the curves delineated by the intonations of the verbal accents sketch the reliefs of the melodic development. The religious music of the sequences and tropes flows into the liturgical drama, which does not entirely create its own lyric, but takes antiphons and responsories already known and often destined for the "dramatized" celebration of the liturgical offices, while secular music exploits the new orientations of modal rhythm in the m. of the troubadours, trouvères and Minnesänger. Later the Lied will take up again the fundamental idea of m. in a music adhering to the literary text, so as to transform the musical elements of language (rhythm, phraseological accentuation, cadences) into melody translated into conventional semeio-graphy. But between troubadour music and the Lied there will flourish precisely in Italy a period of great splendor and decisive influence with close references to sacred music.
It appears from the historical vicissitudes of the monodic genre how erroneous it would be to consider such a genre as an elementary and initial manifestation of musical sensibility and technique; rather, in some concrete realizations, monophony reached the most coveted heights of art with the refinement of its figurations, while in others, as in the modern little song, it responds to an immediate tendency of popular lyrical elocution.