Ed Zubrow wrote:

>Can anyone explain the difference between homophony (homophonic
>music) and monody (monodic music)?

Although these terms have fairly straight-forward definitions, they can
also lead to a lot of haggling over details.  For an extended discussion
of just that, I might suggest that you search one of the newsgroup archives
(such as www.deja.com or whatever) for the arguments which occurred on
rec.music.theory.  Essentially, once one attempts to incorporate various
world music styles from other cultures into the terms, they become less
clear.

In the case of Western music, they have fairly clear historical origins,
and so that helps to clarify any abstract meaning.

Homophony is multiple-voice (a "voice" here being a musical line of some
sort, perhaps instrumental) music in which each part moves in the same
rhythm.  You can think of it like a shifting series of fully articulated
chords.

This would be as opposed to polyphony, under whose general definition
as simply music with more than one voice homophony would fit, but which
generally implies some rhythmic distinction between the parts and maybe
even some form of rhythmic independence.

The analogous term for music with only one musical voice, or melody, would
be monophony.  This would be the case for Gregorian chant, although the
purist might make the argument that multiple singers in unison makes such
a performance a kind of homophony.  Such a label would not typically be
applied outside of historical chant specialists.

Monody is a somewhat different thing, with a historical origin.  The 16th
century madrigal was a polyphonic secular song form, with melodic interest
shared between the (most frequently 5) voices.  In the development of the
more soloistic style which was one of the driving forces in the origin of
the Baroque, and with it modern tonality, emphasis was shifted to a single
upper line for melodic interest as *accompanied* by instrumental voices
to fill a harmonic texture beneath it.  In the prototypical example, the
latter would be chords on a lute.  Monody was the name given to this style.
>From this perspective, one might note that even recent orchestral music is
frequently "monodic":  a primary melody in the upper range accompanied
harmonically.

Todd McComb
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