Polyphony
/pəˈlɪfəni/noun
Music in which several independent melodic lines sound at once.
The Greek roots
Literally: “many voices”
The story of the word
In Greek πολυφωνία meant a babble, a confusion of noises, and could be thrown at someone as an insult about talking too much. The musical sense describes something the Greeks did not write: their music was overwhelmingly a single line, doubled at the octave when men and boys sang together. Western polyphony grew out of ninth-century organum, one voice moving against a plainchant, and by Josquin's generation it had become the ordinary speech of church music. Bakhtin later stole the word for the novel, meaning a book where characters argue with their author.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Four lines of polyphony and you stop hearing the words entirely, which is what the Council of Trent complained about.