During the Middle Ages, most music was unaccompanied vocals because the church felt that it would be pure to have a single melody in the music sung for prayer. However, once composers of the time started using homophony in their work, instruments became incorporated in the music due to the choice to have a second voice or instrument during a performance. During the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, lots of instruments emerged as instrumental music, both sacred and secular, was becoming popular. These new emergences included two types of organs, the portative and positive organs. While organs have been around since before the Common Era, what was known of the organ was lost during the fall of Rome and wasn’t reintroduced to the west until 757 CE. The two organs developed at the time were called the portative organ and the positive organ. …show more content…
Portative organs usually included only one manual (a keyboard played by hand) with one to two octaves, one to two layers of pipes, and bellows (what pushes wind through the pipes to create the sound) on the back of the instrument to be played by the free hand, not on the manual. The portative was a popular choice as it could be in the players’ lap during a performance or practice. In artwork, the portative organ is symbolic of “music,” as an artist would paint the organ and a musician to represent the idea of music, not specific to any kind. In other forms of symbolism, when a musician would have a portrait done, often the artist would include a portative organ on the lap of the subject to represent his or her musicianship. It is agreeably assumed that this organ was commonly the accompaniment to secular music in the early Middle Ages, accompanying singers and embellishing the general melody of the vocalists’ part. It is also thought to be associated with courtly and religious figures in