Rooted in the patronage of churches and royal courts in Western Europe,^[1] early medieval music was chiefly religious, monophonic and vocal, with the music of ancient Greece and Rome influencing its thought and theory. The earliest extant music manuscripts date from the Carolingian Empire (800–888),^[3] around the time which Western plainchant gradually unified into what is termed Gregorian chant.^[4] Musical centers existed at the Abbey of Saint Gall, the Abbey of Saint Martial and Saint Emmeram's Abbey, while the 11th-century saw the development of staff notation and increasing output from medieval music theorists. By the mid-12th century France became the major European musical center:^[3] the religious Notre-Dame school first fully explored organized rhythms and polyphony, while secular music flourished with the troubadour and trouvère traditions led by poet-musician nobles.^[5] This culminated in the court sponsored French ars nova and Italian Trecento, which evolved into ars subtilior, a stylistic movement of extreme rhythmic diversity.^[5] Beginning in the early 15th-century, Renaissance composers of the influential Franco-Flemish School built off the harmonic principles in the English contenance angloise, bringing sacred music to new standards, particularly the mass and motet.^[6] Northern Italy soon emerged as the central musical region, where the Roman School engaged in highly sophisticated methods of polyphony in genres such as the madrigal,^[6] which inspired the brief English Madrigal School.

Music types