'is, today, a massive global phenomenon.'

And so it's hard for us to imagine a time, when, in centuries gone by,

people could go weeks without hearing any music at all.

Even in the 19th century,

you might hear your favourite symphony four or five times

in your whole lifetime, in the days before music could be recorded.

'The story of music, successive waves of discoveries, breakthroughs

'and inventions, is an ongoing process.'

The next great leap forward may take place in a backstreet of Beijing

or upstairs in a pub in South Shields.

ORCHESTRA PLAYS: "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga

# Can't read my Can't read my

# No he can't read my poker face

# She's got to love nobody. #

Whatever music you're into,

Monteverdi or Mantovani, Mozart or Motown, Machaut or mash-up,

the techniques it relies on didn't happen by accident.

Someone, somewhere, thought of them first.

Music can make us weep or make us dance.

It's reflected the times in which it was written.

It has delighted, challenged, comforted and excited us.

In this series, I'm tracing the story of music from scratch.

To follow it on its miraculous journey, there'll be no need

for misleading jargon or fancy labels.

Terms like Baroque, Impressionism or Nationalism

are best put to one side.

Instead, try to imagine how revolutionary and how exhilarating

many of the innovations we take for granted today

were to people at the time.

There are a million ways of telling the story of music. This is mine.

MUSIC: "Arrival Of The Queen Of Sheba by Handel

The years 1650 to 1750 were an age of invention and rapid innovation.

Great discoveries were made in science and in music.

Musical structures were transformed in the hands of composers

like Handel and Bach.

This period also saw the rise and rise of purely instrumental music,

and the birth of what became the modern orchestra.

It was an age of transition where music blossomed

from being a private affair to a public spectacle.

Small wonder that the music of this age of invention

is still staggeringly popular in our own 21st century,

from the shores of Tristan da Cunha, to the concert halls of Beijing.

We live in a technological age,

so we can identify with what it was like

to live in the late 17th century,

when innovations were also coming thick and fast.

And to understand our music today, we need to go back to a time

when many of its now-familiar components simply didn't exist.

Imagine a time when leaping from this chord...

to this chord...

was a painful experience, or from this one...

..to this one...

Imagine a time when an oboe and a trumpet

struggled to play the same tune together.

Imagine a time when no-one thought of stringing together

a chain of chords in a pleasing sequence,

like the one that begins this song by Keane.

HOWARD PLAYS "Somewhere Only We Know" by Keane

# I walked across an empty land

# I knew the pathway Like the back of my hand... #

What makes so much of the music we enjoy today

sound the way it does is a series of discoveries

that burst into life in the 17th and early 18th centuries.

Laws governing the use of chords, which chords you could use

and what instruments you could play them on all slid into place,

like the parts of a magical and intricate machine.

People of the period were obsessed with the interplay of cog and wheel,

the laws of motion and gravity

and the understanding of the dimension of time itself.

No wonder it was a period that saw great advances in clock making.

Listen to the music of this period and you hear the ticking of clocks,

the perfectly calibrated whirring and spinning of cogs,

the turning of wheels and the to and fro of pendulums.

The most striking thing about this age of invention is how the

exhilarating speed of scientific investigation

was reflected in constant experiment and innovation in music.

In the 100 years between 1650 and 1750,

music underwent a massive upgrade.

It went from this...

..to this.

Though nowadays it includes instruments of all shapes,

sizes and types,

the orchestra grew from just one leg-of-ham-sized package.

A folk fiddle version of the violin had been around for some time,

but the more sophisticated type we recognise today

began its journey in Italian workshops in the late 16th century,

only really coming in to its own as leader of the instrumental pack

in the following century.

The violin's rise went hand-in-glove

with that of the extravagant absolute Kings of France,

Louis XIII and XIV, who brought in Italian experts to play

for their flamboyant royal ballets.

Louis XIV, the Sun King, was a passionate fan of the ballet,

even giving himself starring roles in them,

no doubt to gasps of Gallic delight from the assembled courtiers.

The ballets were on a fantastic scale,

often performed in palace halls or outdoors,

so the bright, edgy sound of the violin was just the ticket

to fill the space.

In fact, not just one violin, but loads of them.

One violin good, 24 violins better.

You might have 10 or 12 or even 24 violins playing the same tune.

Similarly, when they started adding in larger, deeper-toned models

of the violin family, like violas and cellos,

they were also grouped together to play the same musical line.

This, then, was the beginning of the modern orchestra.

The musician in charge of the royal violin band for over 30 years

was Jean-Baptiste Lully,

who created a thicker, grander ensemble style

especially for this beefed-up ensemble.

There was another important innovation

for which dance was responsible.

Louis XIV's long colourful ballets would begin with a self-contained

instrumental introduction, or opening,

the French word for which is overture.

The Italians called it Sinfonia.

These overtures were soon borrowed by opera, too.

They then began to develop into longer and longer orchestral pieces,

eventually becoming the symphony.

The symphony's basic structure was also to come from dance.

Sections of different dance music, pavannes, sarabandes, gigues etc,

began to be gathered together into suites, often in groups of three.

That's right, the three-piece suite was actually invented

by 17th century musicians.

But the idea of linked music at different speeds came to dominate

the symphony, and did so until the end of the 19th century.

In the late 17th century, another crucial part

of the musical tool-kit was put into place.

The composer who first introduced many of the innovations

that Vivaldi, Bach and Handel built on,

and which we now take for granted, was Arcangelo Corelli.

Corelli was the first violin virtuoso,

and he built on his love of the violin

an idea that took off spectacularly.

He gathered stringed instruments together into groups

and created for them a new form, the concerto.

Now, a concerto,

where a small group of players alternates with a larger group,

makes its impact by contrasting loud and soft passages,

like the juxtaposition of light and shade, chiaroscuro, in painting.

Corelli's innovation was called the concerto grosso,

literally the big concert,

and in it he explored the contrast between a small group,

just two violins and a cello, called concertino, and a bigger group

of everyone else called the ripieno, meaning the stuffing.

Every composer in Italy now had a stab at writing concerti grossi.

One young Venetian admirer of Corelli

was to make the concerto as famous as pizza.

His name was Antonio Vivaldi.

Vivaldi took the big group, little group idea one step further,

casting a charismatic solo violin against the whole ensemble.

The solo concerto announced its arrival on the musical stage,

with a set of pieces that were to become,

in the 20th century, deservedly ubiquitous.

Vivaldi's concertos introduced a sense of drama and virtuosity

that took his contemporaries' breath away.

In effect, he was turning his violinists and cellists into divas,

to match the opera stars of the day.

What makes Vivaldi's music so exhilarating

is its sense of forward momentum.

How this was achieved was in itself a giant leap forward.

It's all about the movement of chords,

and it's one of the most fun things in all music.

Whatever you're playing, just having one chord

after another in a random succession is not really very appealing.

Which is why hardly anyone ever does it.

So how do you decide how to string chords together in patterns

that don't sound like random twaddle?

In the 17th century, by experimenting with chains

of certain chords in a sequence, composers stumbled across a concept

students of music call harmonic progression,

but could just have easily be described as musical gravity.

The laws governing actual gravity had been formulated

in the late 17th century by Sir Isaac Newton.

Just as he revealed the inner workings of the universe,

so too musicians, at the same time,

worked out the inner gravity of music.

They made the important discovery that some chords

have an attraction to other chords.

So this chord, known to every guitarist as G7,

is drawn magnetically towards the chord C.

To put it another way, chord five yearns for chord one,

especially when it's corrupted by the 7th note.

Here's chord five,

and here it is with the corrupting 7th note,

and here is where it wants now to go.

The same law of magnetism

applies to every key family, no matter which one you chose,

so A flat 7...

..leads to D flat.

B7...

leads to E.

F7...

leads to B flat.

And so on.

In the 1600s, musicians became obsessed

with these laws of attraction.

Composers found that stringing sequences of chords together

to trigger this attraction drove the music along.

A master of this technique was English composer Henry Purcell.

Born just around the corner from Westminster Abbey,

where he later worked, Purcell survived the plague

and the Great Fire of London,

so he knew a thing or two about moving on.

His music makes creating imaginative chains of chords look effortless.

All he needed was a short sequence that repeated itself a number

of times and he'd constructed for himself a whole song.

In his Evening Hymn, published in 1688,

he sets up a simple sequence of chords.

This sequence he then repeats five times, followed by a middle bit

where he has a second sequence, then he returns to his original chord

sequence for another 13 times, to finish the song off.

The amazing thing is you don't get bored with the sequence,

despite its repetition.

That's because Purcell overlays onto it a ravishingly beautiful melody

that follows its own meandering path across the top.

# Now, now that the sun

# Hath veil'd his light

# And bid the world good night

# To the soft bed

# To the soft

# The soft bed

# My body I dispose

# But where

# Where shall my soul repose?

# Dear, dear God. #

Look at this painting by Vermeer, which was finished in 1664.

At first sight, the colours appear to be vivid and well-defined.

But look closer and we discover that Vermeer creates this effect

by layering colour upon colour, each subtly blending into the next.

This melding of colours is like the way harmony works in music.

Notes are laid on top of each other, to make constantly shifting chords.

# ..praise the mercy

# That prolongs thy days. #

The chord progression in Purcell's Evening Hymn was to pop up

in countless other pieces by other composers