At this time, western music was almost the sole property of the Christian Church. Gregorian Chant Early Christians derived their music from Jewish and Byzantine religious chant. The melodies are free and seem to wander, dictated by the Latin liturgical texts to which they are set. As these chants spread throughout Europe, they were embellished and developed along many different lines in various regions. Although his actual contribution to this enormous body of music remains unknown, his name has been applied to this music, and it is known as Gregorian Chant .
Gregorian chant remains among the most spiritually moving and profound music in western culture.
An idea of its pure, floating melody can be heard in the Easter hymn, Victimae paschali laudes . Many years later, composers of Renaissance polyphony very often used plainchant melodies as the basis for their sacred works. Notre Dame and the Ars Antiqua Sometime during the ninth century, music theorists in the Church began experimenting with the idea of singing two melodic lines simultaneously at parallel intervals, usually at the fourth, fifth, or octave. The resulting hollow-sounding music was called organum and very slowly developed over the next hundred years. This music was slowly supplanted by the smoother contours of the polyphonic music of the fourteenth century, which became known as the Ars Nova .