MONODY. — From the Greek μόνος = alone and ᾠδή = song, today every form of singing, choral or solo, ancient or modern, with or without instrumental accompaniment, in which there is no overlapping of sung parts is considered monody, so that even polyphonic singing in unison by male or female voices is monodic when these voices perform simultaneously the same melodic line. It is precisely the linearity of the musical design that constitutes the characteristic of monody.
Monody is the only stylistic framework in which refined Hellenic culture manifested itself in the field of music: the doubling at the octave with the embellishments of heterophony does not represent a significant variation on the law of monody. Complexity enters Greek monody with the multiplication of harmonic genera (chromatic and enharmonic in addition to the diatonic); of poetic-metric types; of choral structures, among which the triad—strophe, antistrophe, epode—quickly reached the golden form of a classical model. In Christian-Latin monody, the evolutionary process was indeed born from almost ascetic limits, suggested by the lofty end to which musical compositions were destined. The hieratic character of liturgical monody is affirmed by the choice of musical texts, drawn from Holy Scripture, in the 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries, which are those of the most abundant and genuine production. The performance itself, far removed from overly contrasting effects, maintains an atmosphere of gravity and sweetness.
The constructive technique of Christian monody, even with the rise of liturgical-musical poetry from the 9th to the 13th centuries (tropes, sequences, versus, verbeta, planctus, hymns), generally remained faithful to the generative principle of Greek monody, in which the curves outlined by the intonation of verbal accents sketch the reliefs of melodic development. The religious music of sequences and tropes blossoms into liturgical drama, which does not entirely create its own lyricism but takes antiphons and responsories already known and often intended for the “dramatized” celebration of liturgical offices, while secular music exploits the new trends of modal rhythm in the monody of the troubadours, trouvères, and Minnesänger. Later, the Lied will resume the fundamental idea of monody in music closely tied to the literary text, transforming the musical elements of language (rhythm, phrasal accentuation, cadences) into melody expressed in conventional selection. But between troubadour music and the Lied, a period of great splendor and decisive influence, with close references to sacred music, flourished precisely in Italy.
From the historical vicissitudes of the monodic genre, it appears how erroneous it would be to consider this genre as an elementary and initial manifestation of musical sensitivity and technique; rather, in some concrete realizations, monotony reached the most coveted heights of art with the refinement of embellishments, while in others, such as the modern popular song, it responds to an immediate tendency of popular lyrical elocution.