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 [log in to unmask]