<P> These musical innovations appeared in a greater context of societal change . After the first millennium, European monks decided to start translating the works of Greek philosophers into the vernacular . Western Europeans were aware of Plato, Socrates, and Hippocrates during the Middle Ages . However they had largely lost touch with the content of their surviving works because the use of Greek as a living language was restricted to the lands of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium). Once these ancient works started being translated thus becoming accessible, the philosophies had a great impact on the mind of Western Europe . This sparked a number of innovations in medicine, science, art, and music . </P> <P> European polyphony rose prior to, and during the period of the Western Schism . Avignon, the seat of the antipopes, was a vigorous center of secular music - making, much of which influenced sacred polyphony . </P> <P> It was not merely polyphony that offended the medieval ears, but the notion of secular music merging with the sacred and making its way into the papal court . It gave church music more of a jocular performance quality removing the solemn worship they were accustomed to . The use of and attitude toward polyphony varied widely in the Avignon court from the beginning to the end of its religious importance in the fourteenth century . Harmony was not only considered frivolous, impious, and lascivious, but an obstruction to the audibility of the words . Instruments, as well as certain modes, were actually forbidden in the church because of their association with secular music and pagan rites . Dissonant clashes of notes give a creepy feeling that was labeled as evil, fueling their argument against polyphony as being the devil's music . After banishing polyphony from the Liturgy in 1322, Pope John XXII spoke in his 1324 bull Docta Sanctorum Patrum warning against the unbecoming elements of this musical innovation . Pope Clement VI, however, indulged in it . </P> <P> The oldest extant polyphonic setting of the mass attributable to one composer is Guillaume de Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame, dated to 1364, during the pontificate of Pope Urban V . </P>

The lowest part in early polyphony is called