The Monody Argument

Monody: "all styles of accompanied solo singing practiced in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (as distinct from monophony, which is unaccompanied melody)." (A History of Western Music, B., G., P., pg. 312)

The Argument: that the harmonic direction of Classical music was a direct consequence of Monody and the Florentine Camerata.

Camerata:
(a) founded for "the purpose of rediscovering the manner in which the Greeks had used music with the drama". (A History of Music, Finney, 228)
(b) "The sense of the drama depended upon the words being audible to the hearers, and the early experiments of the Camerata were directed toward the discovery of a style of music which would make that possible." (ibid.)

Consequently, "these men began by discarding the whole polyphonic method" because
(a) "Only a solo melody, [G. Mei] said, could enhance the natural speech inflections of a good orator or actor." (A History of Western Music, B., G., P., pg. 311)
(b) "When several voices simultaneously sang different melodies and words, in different rhythms and registers, some low and some high, some rising and others descending, some in slow notes and others in fast [i.e. polyphony], the resulting chaos of contradictory impressions could never deliver the emotional message of the text." (ibid.)

The Monody Argument asserts that this establishment of melody and accompaniment directed the course of this style of music [i.e. Classical music] towards a primacy of harmony because

(a) harmonic interest is a necessity of the dry recitative
(b) harmonic interest necessity of the primacy of emotion (at least in the mind of the monodists and consequently in the mind of Classical music)

Chorale of the Holy Mountain

High Music and Folk Music, Part I

Johannes Tinctoris, in his treatise Concerning the Skill of Counterpoint, begins with a quote from Horace's Ars Poetica:

"Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons." That is, to understand or to have knowledge (sapere) is the first principle and the fountain (principium et fons) of writing well (scribendi recte).

It's worth noting that Tinctoris is drawing a pretty clear corollary between the skill of poetry (ars poetica) and the skill of counterpoint (ars contrapuncti). He's importing a principle from the one for the other so he can explain to his reader the difference between just scribendum (writing) and scribendum recte (writing well). The difference is sapere.

Understanding this in cultural context is important. In the 15th century, counterpoint is the not-uncertain capital of the Church. The French chansons, the obvious exception to the vast majority of contrapuntal pieces serving a liturgical function, was stylistically not all that different from the many of the liturgical pieces (take, for example, the similarity between Josquin's Absolon fili mi and his Je ne me puis tenir d'aimer). Obviously, because of the lack of commercialization and the printing press, the audiences to this sort of secular music was extremely limited, probably to nobility and their clergy.

So, when Tinctoris starts off saying that knowledge is key to writing well, he's not talking about writing a nice tune that a troubadour might sing or the latest local hit song in the tavern. Tinctoris is talking about High music. And the first thing he points out about this music that distinguishes it from just any music (hence the recte, "well" qualifying scribendi, "writing") is the possession of a body of facts concerning counterpoint.

Folk music is music centered around the village square or the domestic hearth. In the 20th century, with the rise of commercial music, it may center around the LP or the iPod, but I think it's still the same principle. There's a fundamental difference between this and High music. High music can be described as requiring ars or τεχνη or skill. That skill comes only through a knowledge of the theoretical techniques and musical precedent.

"The Obselescence of Epic"

Brooks Otis, in his Virgil: A Study In Civilized Poetry, devotes his second chapter to exploring the "epics" written after Homer, the Callimachan rejection of any sort of modern epic, and then the set-up in ancient Rome that would allow the Maecenas group (which included Horace and Vergil) to write polished, continuous epic once again. Otis notes several interesting things:

(a) Homer had written the Greek epic and it was the specific output of his culture and milieu. Callimachus and Theocritus argued that their contemporary relation to the subject matter of the Iliad and the Odyssey was such that a recreation of that was impossible. "It was not only the genius of Homer which made him unapproachable: it was also his age and his ideas." (Otis, Brooks. Virgil: A Study In Civilized Poetry. "The Obsolescence of Epic", pg. 6.)
(b) In positing that epic could no longer be written, Callimachus and Theocritus were not trying to subvert the path of poetry radically by killing or finishing off the epic form, saying "It's impossible to write epic any more. And, just in case it is possible, I'll give it a few more stabs." Otis says, "Unlike Euripides, [Callimachus and Theocritus] had no new, iconoclastic ideas, but at least they were willing to accept the results of his iconoclasm and to acknowledge the almost complete obsolescence of the heroic-mythical world view." (ibid., pg. 9)
(c) "The fact that long epics still continued to be written did not [for the Callimachan school] in the least alter this general situation." (ibid., pg. 16.)
(d) The definition of poetry, subsequent to Callimachus and the rise of "light" and lyric poetry, had been dominated by the Homeric subject matter to the degree that the Greeks hardly considered poetry not dealing with the heroics of men and the deeds of gods to be poetry at all. "This was [Homer's] mythical subject-matter—more exactly, his limitation of poetry's proper content to a cycle of heroic myths in which men were almost inextricably mingled with gods and other divinities.... Homer's influence and reputation had in effect fixed heroic myth as the proper subject of poetry." (ibid., pg. 6.)