In the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes, in the French countryside, the monks still sing Gregorian chant every day of the year. The monks file in, one by one, the church bells clang and smoke from the incense drifts upward, catching the light streaming in through the stained glass windows. The monks lift their voices in melodies that are over one thousand years old. This onlooker thinks, is what hearing music in the Middle Ages might have been like.
Medieval music is the earliest known significant body of music composed in Western Europe.
But Gregorian chant is only one example of it. Musicians of the time, both inside and outside the church, had very active imaginations, and courtly love poetry dance music, and traces of popular melodies have all survived the ages. Western Europe was not isolated during the Middle Ages. The Muslim conquest of Spain in 711 and the crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries, along with international trade, brought medieval Europe in touch with the rest of the world, and with its music. Islamic scholarship was responsible for transmitting much of ancient Greek music theory to medieval Europe, where it cast a long spell on composers from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance.