The Cambridge Companion To Medieval Music

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music
From the emergence of plainsong to the end of the fourteenth

century, this Companion covers all the key aspects of medieval music.
Divided into three main sections, the book first of all discusses
repertory, styles and techniques – the key areas of traditional music
histories; next takes a topographical view of the subject – from Italy,
German-speaking lands, and the Iberian peninsula; and concludes
with chapters on such issues as liturgy, vernacular poetry and
reception. Rather than presenting merely a chronological view of the
history of medieval music, the volume instead focuses on technical
and cultural aspects of the subject. In nineteen chapters, seventeen
world-leading scholars give a perspective on the music of the Middle
Ages that will serve as a point of orientation for the informed listener
and reader; the book is a must-have guide for anyone with an interest
in listening to and understanding medieval music.
mark everist is Professor of Music and Associate Dean in The

Faculty of Humanities at the University of Southampton. His
research focuses on the music of western Europe in the period
1150–1330, French opera in the first half of the nineteenth century,
Mozart, reception theory, and historiography. He is the author of
Polyphonic Music in Thirteenth-Century France (1989), French Motets
in the Thirteenth Century (1994), Music Drama at the Paris Odéon,
1824–1828 (2002), and Giacomo Meyerbeer and Music Drama in
Nineteenth-Century Paris (2005) as well as editor of three volumes of
the Magnus Liber Organi (2001–3).
The Cambridge Companion to
MEDIEVAL
MUSIC
............
edited by
Mark Everist
University of Southampton
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The Cambridge companion to medieval music / edited by Mark Everist.
p. cm. – (Cambridge companions to music)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-521-84619-6 (hardback)
1. Music – 500–1400 – History and criticism. I. Everist, Mark. II. Title. III. Series.
ML172.C32 2010
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ISBN 978-0-521-84619-6 Hardback

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websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In memoriam Samantha Jane Verschueren
25 August 1985–22 August 2009
Contents
List of illustrations [page ix]

List of music examples [x]
Notes on contributors [xiii]
Chronology [xv]
List of manuscripts and their abbreviations [xxii]
Introduction Mark Everist [1]
Part I • Repertory, styles and techniques

1 Plainsong Susan Boynton [9]
2 Enriching the Gregorian heritage Michael McGrade [26]
3 Early polyphony to circa 1200 Sarah Fuller [46]
4 The thirteenth century Mark Everist [67]
5 The fourteenth century Elizabeth Eva Leach [87]
Part II • Topography
6 England Peter M. Lefferts [107]
7 Italy to 1300 Marco Gozzi [121]
8 The trecento Marco Gozzi [136]
9 The Iberian peninsula Nicolas Bell [161]
10 Music east of the Rhine Robert Curry [171]
Part III • Themes, topics and trajectories

11 Music and liturgy Sam Barrett [185]
12 Vernacular poetry and music Ardis Butterfield [205]
13 Latin poetry and music Leofranc Holford-Strevens [225]
14 Compositional trajectories Peter M. Lefferts [241]
15 Ecclesiastical foundations and secular institutions Rebecca A. Baltzer [263]
16 Theory and notation Dolores Pesce [276]
17 Music manuscripts Emma Dillon [291]
[vii]
viii Contents
18 The geography of medieval music Christopher Page [320]

19 Reception Lawrence Earp [335]
Notes [371]
Bibliography [417]
Index [465]
Illustrations
1.1 Aquitanian neumes in a late-eleventh-century antiphoner

(collection of author): antiphons and psalm incipits for the office of
lauds on the Tuesday of Holy Week [page 21]
1.2 Central Italian neumes in a twelfth-century antiphoner (collection
of author): responsories, antiphons and psalm incipits for matins
on the feast of St Martin [22]
2.1 Melismatic additions to the introit Sacerdotes tui domine (CH-SGs
484, p. 186) [29]
2.2a East Frankish notation of a sequence ( CH-SGs 378, p. 223) [35]
2.2b West Frankish notation of a sequence (F-Pa 1169, fols. 40v–41r) [36]
3.1 Cumulative phases of early organum production [48]
3.2a Text and translation of Per partum virginis [57]
3.2b Text structure and musical phrases in Per partum virginis [57]
5.1 Anon., En la maison Dedalus, from the Berkeley theory manuscript
(US-BEm 744, fol. 31v) [101]
10.1 States of East Central Europe, ca1480 (adapted from Paul R.
Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Eastern Europe [Seattle and London:
University of Washington Press, 1993], p. 32) [172]
10.2 Reconstituted fragments containing part of two Magnus Liber office
organa (end of Dum complerentur. V. Repleti sunt and beginning of
Inter natos. V. Fuit homo) recovered from the binding of a
Franciscan gradual at St Kinga’s Poor Clare monastery (PL-STk 2) [177]
17.1 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut.29.1, fol. 12r [302]
17.4 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 846
(Chansonnier Cangé), fol. 1 [307]
(Chansonnier du Roi), fol. 14r [308]
(Chansonnier du Roi), fol. 14v [309]
17.7 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 146, fol. 1r [311]
17.8 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 146, fol. 1v [312]
18.1 The geography of medieval music expressed as circuits of
communication and long-term political history [321]
19.1 Adam de la Halle, Tant con je vivray (rondeau) (transcribed by F.-J.
[ix] Fétis [ca1827], B-Bc X 27.935 [unnumbered folio]) [356]
Music examples
1.1 Gloria Christe tuo tibi personat in benedicto, twelfth responsory for
matins of St Benedict in an eleventh-century antiphoner from
St-Maur-des-Fossés (F-Pn fonds lat. 12044, fol. 63r) [page 13]
1.2 Alleluia. Ascendens Christus, in a thirteenth- or fourteenth-
century Parisian gradual (F-Pn fonds lat. 1337, fol. 158v) [16]
1.3 Comparison of the Gregorian and Old Roman melodies for the
antiphon O mors ero mors tua in F-Pn fonds lat. 12044, fol. 99r and
I-RVat ASP B 79, fol. 102v [20]
2.1 Opening of Sancti Spiritus adsit nobis gratia
(CH-SGs 383, p. 85) [37]
2.2 Sixth and seventh versicles of Sancti Spiritus adsit nobis gratia
(CH-SGs 383, pp. 86–7) [38]
2.3 Opening of Templum cordis adornemus (F-Pn fonds lat. 14817,
fol. 60r) [41]
3.1a Musica Enchiriadis, Chapter 15, Sit gloria Domini, diaphony at the
fifth with octave doublings [50]
3.1b Guido of Arezzo, Micrologus, Chapter 19, Ipsi soli, flexible diaphony
at the fourth [50]
3.2 Winchester organum, Alleluia. Ascendens Christus through first
phrase of verse (principal voice, GB-Ob Bodley 775, fol. 79v;
organal voice, GB-Ccc 473, fol. 167r) [52]
3.3a Ad organum faciendum, modes of organum I, II, III and V on
incipit of Alleluia. Justus ut palma [54]
3.3b Ad organum faciendum, beginning of verse, Alleluia. Justus ut palma [54]
3.4a Aquitanian versus Per partum virginis, first couplet (GB-Lbl add.
36881, fol. 4r) [58]
3.4b Aquitanian versus Per partum virginis, last couplet and final verse
(F-Pn fonds lat. 3549, fol. 151v) [59]
3.5a Consonance reduction, first phrase, Per partum virginis (see
Example 3.4a) [61]
3.5b Consonance reduction, final melisma of Per partum virginis (see
Example 3.4b) [61]
3.6 First line, Per partum virginis, two versions (B = F-Pn fonds lat.
3549, f. 150v; D = GB-Lbl add. 36881, fol. 4r) [62]
3.7a Codex Calixtinus, opening of matins responsory O adjutor (E-SC,
fol. 217r/188r). Plainchant continuation, fol. 110v. [65]
[x]
xi List of music examples
3.7b Codex Calixtinus, first part of verse, responsory O adjutor (E-SC,

fols. 217v/188v) [65]
4.1 Two-part conductus sine caudis, Virtus moritur, 1–20 (I-Fl Plut.
29.1, fols. 322r–322v) [69]
4.2 Two-part conductus cum caudis, Luget Rachel iterum, 1–68 (I-Fl
Plut. 29.1, fols. 359v–360) [70]
4.3 Luget Rachel iterum. Text, translation and analysis [71]
4.4 Text of gradual Constitues eos. V. Pro patribus [74]
4.5 Two-part organum Constitues eos. V. Pro patribus, V. 1–65. (I-Fl
Plut. 29.1, fols. 121v–122r) [75]
4.6a Two-part clausula [Immo]latus est, 1–39 (I-Fl Plut. 29.1, fol. 158r) [78]
4.6b Two-part motet Immolata paschali victima / Latus, 1–39 (I-Fl Plut.
29.1, fols. 411r–411v) [78]
4.7 Immolata paschali victima / Latus. Analysis of motetus text [79]
4.8a Two-part motet Amis vostre demoree / Pro patribus, 26–46
(F-MOf H. 196, fol. 249r) [83]
4.8b Monophonic song: Moniot d’Arras, Amours me fait renvoisier et
chanter, refrain (F-Pn fonds fr. 844, fol. 118v) [83]
4.9 Three-part motet Aucun ont trouvé chant par usage / Lonctans me
sui tenu / Annun[tiantes], 1–16 (F-MOf H. 196, fols. 273r–274r) [84]
7.1 First part of Angelorum glorie / Pacem bonis (Benedicamus trope)
(I-Ao 13, fol. 85r) [124]
7.2 First part of Credo Regis (cantus fractus) by Robert of Anjou
(I-PAac F-09, fols. 140v–148) [127]
7.3 Refrain and three stanzas of the lauda Venite a laudare (I-CT 91,
fol. 1r) [131]
8.1 Jacopo da Bologna, Non al so amante (F-Pn fonds italien 568,
fols. 4v–5r) [150]
8.2 Nella foresta (caccia) (I-REas Mischiati Fragment, fol. Av) [153]
8.3 Gherardello da Firenze, I’ vo’ bene (I-Fl Palatino 87, fol. 29r) [157]
12.1 Can vei la lauzeta (‘When I see the lark’) by Bernart de Ventadorn
(Hendrik van der Werf and Gerald A. Bond, eds., The Extant
Troubadour Melodies: Transcriptions and Essays for Performers and
Scholars [Rochester, NY: authors, 1984], pp. 62–71) [212]
12.2 Li noveaus tanz et mai et violette (‘The new season, May, the violet’)
by the Châtelain de Couci (F-Pn fonds fr. 12615, fol. 155r) [217]
12.3 Jolietement m’en vois; jolietement (‘Happily I go; happily’) (The
Montpellier Codex, ed. Hans Tischler, trans. Susan Stakel and Joel
C. Relihan, 4 vols., Recent Researches in the Music of the Middle
Ages and Early Renaissance 2–8 [Madison, WI: A-R Editions,
1978–85]; hereafter Mo; Mo 260, vol. III, pp. 78–9) [218]
xii List of music examples
12.4a, En mai, quant rosier sont flouri / L’autre jour, par un matin / Hé,
12.4b resvelle toi [Robin] (‘In May with rose bushes blooming / The other
day, in morningtide / Hey, wake up Robin’) (Mo 269, vol. III,
pp. 93–5) [219]
14.1 Anon., respond of Exsurge domine, a Gregorian gradual of ca800 [245]
14.2 Hildegard of Bingen, beginning of In principio, 1140s [246]
14.3 Anon., sequence Fulgens preclara, ninth century [248]
14.4 Anon., versus Ortum floris, twelfth century [251]
14.5a Guido, modified parallel organum at the fourth below from
Micrologus, ca1025 [254]
14.5b Anon., reciting tone for a Christmas matins lesson, ca1300 [254]
14.5c Burgos, Monasterio de Las Huelgas 9, fol. 54v, from the sequence
Victime paschali laudes [254]
14.5d London, British Library, Additional 16975, fol. 166, from the hymn
Conditor alme siderum [254]
14.6a Anon., Nobilis humilis [255]
14.6b Anon., Laudes deo, troped lesson from Christmas midnight mass,
mid fourteenth century [255]
14.6c Anon., Ave celi regina virginum [256]
14.7 Anon., clausula on Nostrum, early thirteenth century [256]
14.8 Guillaume de Machaut, refrain of virelai Se je souspir, mid
fourteenth century [257]
14.9 Giovanni da Firenze, first text line of madrigal Nel meço, mid
fourteenth century [258]
14.10 Anon., conductus Soli nitorem, early thirteenth century [259]
19.1 Philippe Royllart, end of first talea of motet, Rex Karole / Leticie,
pacis / Virgo prius ac posterius [369]
Notes on contributors
Rebecca A. Baltzer is Professor emerita at the University of Texas at Austin. Her

published work includes an edition of Notre Dame clausulae and articles on the
sources of Notre Dame polyphony, the early motet, and the liturgical context of
medieval polyphony.
Sam Barrett is Lecturer in music at the University of Cambridge, co-editor of Music
and Letters and a board member of Early Music History. He has published sev-
eral articles in the field of early medieval Latin song, culminating in a recent
edition with Francesco Stella (Corpus rhythmorum musicum saec. iv–ix). He is
currently finishing an edition and commentary on notated metra from Boethius’s
De consolatione philosophiae.
Nicolas Bell is Curator of Music Manuscripts at the British Library, London. His pub-
lications include a commentary to the facsimile edition of the Las Huelgas Codex.
He is reviews editor of the journal Plainsong & Medieval Music and Secretary of
the Henry Bradshaw Society.
Susan Boynton, Associate Professor of Historical Musicology at Columbia University,
works on medieval Western liturgy, chant, monasticism, music drama, prayer, the
history of childhood, and troubadour song. She is the author of Shaping a Monastic
Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000–1125 (2006)
Ardis Butterfield is Professor of English at University College London. Her books
include Poetry and Music in Medieval France from Jean Renart to Guillaume de
Machaut (Cambridge University Press, 2002). She has recently been awarded
a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2008–11) to work on the origins of
English song.
Robert Curry is principal of the Conservatorium High School and Honorary Senior
Lecturer in the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Sydney. His research
focuses on music and monasticism in Central Europe. He is co-editor of Variations
on the Canon: Essays on Music from Bach to Boulez in Honor of Charles Rosen and
author of Ars antiqua Music and the Clarist Order in Central Europe (forthcoming)
Emma Dillon is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. She is
a specialist on French medieval music and manuscripts, and author of Medieval
Music-Making and the Roman de Fauvel.
Lawrence Earp is Professor of Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is
the author of Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (1995). His published
articles focus on music in late medieval France.
Mark Everist is Professor of Music and Associate Dean in The Faculty of Humanities
at the University of Southampton and has written on the Middle Ages, ninetenth-
century opera in France, and Mozart reception. He is the editor of the two-part
organa from the Magnus liber organi, 3 vols. (2001–3).
Sarah Fuller is Professor of Music at Stony Brook University, New York. Her research
focuses on medieval music theory and analysis of early music. Her succinct
[xiii]
xiv Notes on contributors
conspectus of organum, discant and contrapunctus theory from the ninth to the
fifteenth century appears in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory.
Marco Gozzi is Associate Professor of Musicology and Music History in the Facoltà di
Lettere e Filosofia at Trento University. He has published widely on late medieval
music, cantus fractus, and liturgical books, and is also an active performer.
Leofranc Holford-Strevens is Consultant Scholar-Editor at Oxford University Press.
A classicist by training, he has written on a wide range of topics, classical, medieval,
humanistic, calendrical and musicological, this last especially with regard to texts
that composers have set.
Elizabeth Eva Leach is University Lecturer in Music at the University of Oxford and
a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. She has published widely on the music and poetry
of Guillaume de Machaut as well as on issues in fourteenth-century music theory.
Her book Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages was
published in 2007; her monograph on Machaut is forthcoming.
Peter M. Lefferts is Professor of Music History in the School of Music at the University
of Nebraska-Lincoln. His work in medieval music has concentrated on English
polyphony, mensural notation, tonal behaviour, and music theory.
Michael McGrade is a musicologist with interests in medieval music, opera, and
music in the late eighteenth century. He was a member of the faculty at Brandeis
University and Williams College, and is currently Director of Graduate Admissions
at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts.
Christopher Page is Reader in Medieval Music and Literature in the University
of Cambridge and Vice-Master of Sidney Sussex College. The founder of the
acclaimed ensemble Gothic Voices, he has written numerous books and articles
on aspects of medieval music. His major study The Christian West and Its Singers:
The First Thousand Years is published in 2010.
Dolores Pesce is Professor of Musicology at Washington University in St Louis. Her
medieval publications focus on pitch theory and thirteenth-century motets. She
also writes about the music and life of Franz Liszt.
Chronology
ca150 Justin Martyr’s account of a Sunday

community meal at Rome with gospel
reading and homily
313 Emperor Constantine’s legalization of
Christianity in the Edict of Milan
330 Constantine moves the imperial capital from
Rome to Byzantium, refounded as
Constantinople
347–420 Saint Jerome
354–430 Saint Augustine
395 Permanent political division between the
Eastern and Western Roman Empire
first half of 5th century Martianus Capella fl.
410 Fall of Rome to the Visigoths under Alaric
480–524 Boethius fl.
485–580 Cassiodorus fl.; codifies scheme of seven
liberal arts
ca540 Rule drawn up by Saint Benedict of Nursia
for the monks of Monte Cassino
559–636 Isidore of Seville fl.
late 7th century Consolidation of Roman schola cantorum (?)
early 8th century Ordo Romanus I
711 Arab and Berber invasion of the Iberian
peninsula
28 July 754 Pépin, king of the Franks, consecrated by
Pope Stephen II at St Denis
760s Simeon, member of the Roman schola
cantorum, teaches Frankish singers in Rouen
784–91 Arrival at the Frankish court of the
Gregorian Sacramentary (Hadrianum) sent
to Charlemagne by Pope Hadrian I
789 Admonitio generalis instructs Frankish clergy
to learn Roman chant in conformity with
Pépin’s suppression of Gallican chant. First
Viking invasion of British Isles
Christmas Day 800 Coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor of
[xv] the Romans by Pope Leo III
xvi Chronology
ca800 Earliest unnotated mass antiphoners.

Antiphoner of Mt Blandin instructs singers
to add sequentiae to alleluias
ca810–15 Supplement to the Hadrianum composed by
?Benedict of Aniane
816 Council of Aachen enjoins observance of the
Benedictine Rule in all Frankish monasteries
ca830 Amalarius of Metz describes the neuma
triplex
ca835 Psalle modulamina – perhaps the earliest
example of neumatic notation
840–50 Aurelian fl.
ca840–930 Hucbald introduces the tetrachord of the
finals D, E, F, G as the primary building
block of the medieval gamut
843 Treaty of Verdun. Division of Carolingian
Empire into three kingdoms
848 The Council of Meaux condemns the
performance of prosulae, Gloria tropes and
‘other creations’
870 Treaty of Meersen. Old Carolingian Empire
now two kingdoms, roughly corresponding
to modern-day France and Germany
ca877 First notated sequentiae found in Antiphoner
of Compiègne
end of the 9th century Musica enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis
provide the earliest instruction in
improvising organum or polyphony. First
notated cantatoria and graduals
ca900 Sequences, singly or in small groups, first
appear in manuscripts
ca900 Alia musica presents an early attempt to link
medieval modes with Greek tribal names and
their associated octave species
910 Foundation of monastery at Cluny
923–4 Earliest extant notated troper: Paris,
Bibliothèque nationale, fonds lat. 1240
ca925–50 Expansion of trope repertory at St Gall
begins; earliest extant tropers from East
Francia (?)
ca930 Expansion of trope repertory in Aquitania
begins
xvii Chronology
after 933 Revival of the abbey of Gorze by Bishop

Adalbero of Metz
ca950 Romano-German Pontifical first appears in
Germany
ca950 Large collections of sequences first appear;
earliest extant copies of Notker’s Liber
hymnorum
962 Coronation of Otto I as Holy Roman
Emperor
970s Composition of Bishop Aethelwold of
Winchester’s Regularis Concordia for English
Benedictines
late 10th century Dialogus de musica codifies A B C D E F G
with octave duplication as standard
nomenclature
ca1000–ca1050 Winchester Organa (GB-Ccc MS 473)
ca1030 Guido of Arezzo devises staff notation; writes
four treatises including Micrologus
ca1050 Appearance of ‘transitional’ sequences;
Eastern and Western practices of notating
sequences begin to converge
1054 Schism between Eastern and Western
churches
1058 Pope Stephen IX forbids the singing of
Beneventan chant at Monte Cassino
1066 Norman invasion of British Isles
1071 Earliest surviving manuscript of Old Roman
chant
1071–1126 Guillaume IX, Duke of Aquitaine, first
known troubadour
1079 Murder of Archbishop Stanislaus in Cracow
Cathedral
1081 or 1083 Monks of Glastonbury rebel against
Thurstan of Caen’s imposition of chant from
Normandy
1085 Alfonso VI of Castile and León, encouraged
by Pope Gregory VII, suppresses the Old
Hispanic rite
1096–9 Copying of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de
France, fonds latin 1139, containing
liturgical drama
xviii Chronology
1098 Foundation of Cı̂teaux, the mother house of

the Cistercian Order
1100 Johannes Affligemensis fl.
ca1100 Tropes have been replaced by versus as a
medium of liturgical expression in southern
France.
ca1100 First surviving written version of single
Occitan religious song
ca1100 Ad organum faciendum
ca1100 Early MSS of Aquitanian polyphony
before 1107 Adam is precentor of Paris
1108 Abbey of St Victor founded by William of
Champeaux
1125–48 Jaufre Raudel fl.
1147–70 Bernart de Ventadorn fl.
ca1150 Codex Calixtinus
1158 Foundation of University of Bologna
1159 John of Salisbury, Policraticus
ca1160 Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris under
construction
1160–1200 Leoninus fl.
ca1160–after 1213 Gace Brulé
ca1160–26 December 1236 Philip the Chancellor
1177 Completion of choir of Notre Dame de Paris
ca1177–1236 Gautier de Coinci, Les Miracles de Nostre
Dame
1180–1220 Perotinus fl.
1182 Dedication of high altar of Notre Dame de
Paris
1198 and 1199 Bishop Odo of Sully regulates use of
polyphony and other liturgical matters at
Notre Dame de Paris
Before ca1200 Repertory of Victorine sequences carefully
revised and organized to express an
Augustinian theology
ca1200 Walther von der Vogelweide fl.
early 13th century Old Ordinal and Consuetudinary of
Salisbury Use drawn up under Richard Poore
1203 Death of Gui, Châtelain de Couci
1208 Foundation of University of Paris
1209 Saint Francis of Assisi gives his followers
their first rule
xix Chronology
1213–16 Pope Innocent III’s revision of mass and

office of the papal court
ca1220 First texting of clausula to create motet
1220–1 Formal constitution of the Dominican order
of friars
1220–30 Assembly of Carmina Burana
1223 Franciscans adopt the Use of the papal court
ca1230 Copying of Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August
Bibliothek 628 (677)
1231 Agnes of Prague founds first Clarist
monastery in Bohemia. Foundation of
University of Oxford
1245–55 Copying of Florence, Biblioteca Medicea
Laurenziana, Plut. 29.1
mid 13th century Johannes de Garlandia, De mensurabili
musica, discusses the rhythmic modes
underlying Notre Dame polyphony
1248 and 1252 Papal authorizations for the use of the Slavic
liturgy
1250 Four Dominican brothers commissioned to
visit Metz to draw up a standard liturgy for
the Dominican Order
ca1250 Copying of Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August
Bibliothek 1099 (1206)
ca1250 Revision of the Roman liturgy by Haymo of
Faversham, General of the Franciscan Order
1250–75 Copying of Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de
España 20846
ca1250–88 Adam de la Halle
1250–92 Guiraut Riquier fl.
ca1260–after 1330 Jacobus of Liège
before 1265 Composition of ‘Sumer is icumen in’
1267 Pope Clement IV approves the revision of the
Dominican liturgy by Humbert of Romans
ca1270 Copying of the majority of music in the
Worcester Fragments
1270s Copying of the majority of chansonniers.
Copying of the Montpellier Codex =
Montpellier, Université Montpellier 1,
Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Médecine,
H.196 (with additions into the early 1300s)
xx Chronology
after 1272 Anonymous 4, an English witness to Parisian

polyphony
1275–1300 Copying of first section of Bamberg,
Staatsbibliothek, lit. 115
1279 St Emmeram Anonymous
after 1279 Franco of Cologne, Ars cantus mensurabilis
codifies mensural notation
after 1279 Hieronymus de Moravia, untitled treatise
ca1290–1328 Nicole de Margival’s Dit de la panthère
d’amours
ca1290– after 1344 Johannes de Muris
1291–5 Pontifical of William of Durandus
1291–1361 Philippe de Vitry
1298–1316 Walter Odington fl.
end 13th century Copying of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de
France, fonds français 25566
early 14th century Copying of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce
308
ca1300 Copying of main part of Burgos, Monasterio
de Las Huelgas 9
ca1300 Jakemès, Le Roman du castelain de Couci
ca1300 Johannes de Grocheio, untitled treatise
ca1300–77 Guillaume de Machaut
1303–5 Dante, De vulgari eloquentia
1317 or 1318 Marchetto da Padova, Lucidarium
after May 1317 Copying of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de
1319–21 Johannes de Muris, Notitia artis musicae
ca1320 Ars nova, formerly attributed to de Vitry
after 1330 Jacobus of Liège, Speculum musice, largest
surviving medieval treatise on music
1332 Jehan Acart de Hesdin’s La Prise Amoureuse
1344 Prague raised to status of archbishopric
1348 Foundation of the Charles University, Prague
mid 14th century New Ordinal of Salisbury Use
1364 Foundation of the Jagellonian University,
Cracow
xxi Chronology
ca1370 Philippus de Caserta, Tractatus de diversis

figuris, describes ars subtilior music and its
notation
1370–2 Copying of Kansas City, Private Collection of
Elizabeth J. and James E. Ferrell, MS without
shelfmark currently on loan to Cambridge,
Corpus Christi College (Mach Vg)
1392 Eustache Deschamps L’Art de Dictier
late 14th century Berkeley Manuscript
ca1410 Copying of Modena, Biblioteca Estense,
α.M.5.24 (olim Lat. 568)
1410–20 Copying of Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Musée
Condé 564 (formerly 1047)
1435–42 Copying of second, third and fourth parts of
Aosta, Biblioteca del Seminario Maggiore, 15
(olim A1 D 19)
1440–50 Copying of Modena, Biblioteca Estense,
α.X.1.11 (olim Lat. 471)
Manuscripts and their abbreviations
By location
Aosta, Biblioteca del Seminario Maggiore 13 I-AO 13

Aosta, Biblioteca del Seminario Maggiore 15 I-AO 15
Arezzo, Museo Diocesano, s.n., C.216 I-AR s.n. C.216
Assisi, Biblioteca Comunale, MS 338 I-Ac 338
Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, lit. 115 (Ba) D-BAs lit. 115
Barcelona, Arxiu Eclesistic de Vic 105 E-VI 105
Benevento, Biblioteca Capitolare 34 I-BV 34
Berkeley Castle, Select Roll 55 GB-BER sel. 55
Berkeley, University of California, Music Library 744 US-BEm 744 (olim
(olim Phillipps 4450) Phillipps 4450)
Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria 2216 I-Bu 2216
Bologna, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica Q15 I-Bc Q15
Bratislava, Archı́v mesta Bratislavy 33 SK-BRm 33
Bratislava, Univerzitná knižnica 318 SK-BRu 318
Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique/Koninklijke B-Br 10127–10144
Bibliotheek van België 10127–10144
Brussels, Conservatoire Royal/Koninklijk Conservatorium X B-Bc X 27.935
27.935
Burgos, Monasterio de Las Huelgas 9 (Hu) E-BUlh 9
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 473 GB-Ccc 473
Cambridge, Gonville & Caius College 512/543 GB-Cgc 512/543
Cambridge, University Library, additional 710 (Dublin GB-Cu Add.710
Troper)
Cambridge, University Library, Hh. vi. 11 GB-Cu Hh. Vi. II
Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Musée Condé 564 (formerly 1047) F-CH 564
Cividale del Friuli, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, I-CFm 35
Biblioteca 35
Cividale del Friuli, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Biblioteca I-CFm 58
58
Cividale del Friuli, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Biblioteca I-CFm 79
79
Cleveland, Museum of Art 21140 US-CLm 21140
Cortona, Biblioteca Comunale e dell’Accademia Etrusca 91 I-CT 91
Cracow, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Biblioteka Jagiellońska 257 PL-Kj 257
[xxii]
xxiii List of manuscripts and their abbreviations
Cracow, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Biblioteka Jagiellońska PL-Kj 40098

40098
Dendermonde, Sint-Pieter- en Paulusabdij Codex 9 B-DEa cod. 9
Einsiedeln, Kloster Einsiedeln, Musikbibliothek 121 (1151) CH-E 121 (1151)
Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale MS 117 (Codex Faenza) I-FZc 117
Florence, Archivio di Stato, Notarile Antecosimiano, n. I-Fas n. 17879
17879
Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Archivio I-Fl 2211
Capitolare di San Lorenzo 2211
Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Palatino 87 I-Fl Palatino 87
(Squarcialupi Codex)
Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 29.1 (F ) I-Fl Plut. 29.1
Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Banco Rari 18 I-Fn Banco Rari 18
Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Banco Rari 20 I-Fn Banco Rari 20
Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Panciatichiano 26 I-Fn Panciatichiano
26
Foligno, Archivio di Stato, MS without shelfmark I-FOLas
Gorizia, Seminario Teologico Centrale, Biblioteca, H, c. 274 I-GO H c. 274
Grottaferrata, Badia Greca, Biblioteca, collocazione I-GR 187
provvisoria 197
Gubbio, Archivio di Stato, Fondo S. Domenico, Corale O I-GUBa Corale O
Hradec Kralové, Statnı́ vedecka knihovna II A 7 CZ-HK II A 7
Ivrea, Biblioteca Capitolare, 115 I-IV 115
Kansas City, Private Collection of Elizabeth J. and James US-KAferrell on loan
E. Ferrell, MS without shelfmark (Mach Vg; to GB-Ccc
Ferrell-Vogüé Manuscript) currently on loan to
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College
London, British Library, Additional 16975 GB-Lbl add. 16975
London, British Library, Additional 57950 (Old Hall GB-Lbl add. 57950
Manuscript)
London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian B. VI GB-Lbl Cotton Vesp.
B. VI
London, British Library, Egerton 2615 (LoA) GB-Lbl Egerton 2615
London, British Library, Harley 3965 GB-Lbl Harley 3965
Lucca, Archivio di Stato 184 I-La 184
Lucca, Biblioteca Statale 1061 I-Lg 1061
Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España 10029 (Azagra E-Mn 10029
Codex)
Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España 10069 (Cantigas de E-Mn 10069
Santa Maria)
Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España 20486 (Ma) E-Mn 20486
Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, Biblioteca, Aemil. 56 E-Mh Aemil. 56
xxiv List of manuscripts and their abbreviations
Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Tesoro della Basilica di I-Ma Cod. CIX

S. Giovanni, Cod. CIX
Modena, Biblioteca Estense, α.X.1.11 (olim. Lat. 471) I-MOe α.X.1.11
Modena, Biblioteca Estense, α.M.5.24 (olim. Lat. 586) I-MOe α.M.5.24
Modena, Biblioteca Estense, α.R.I.6 I-MOe α.R.I.6
Montefiore dell’Aso, Francesco Egidi, private collection I-MDAegidi
Montpellier, Université Montpellier 1, Bibliothèque de la F-MOf H.159
Faculté de Médecine, H.159 (Tonary of St Bénigne of
Dijon)
Montpellier, Université Montpellier 1, Bibliothèque de la F-MOf H.196
Faculté de Médecine, H.196 (Mo; The Montpellier Codex)
Montserrat, Biblioteca de l’Abadia de Montserrat 1 (Llibre E-MO 1
Vermell)
Monza, Basilica di S. Giovanni Battista, Biblioteca I-MZ L12
Capitolare e Tesoro L 12
Monza, Basilica di S. Giovanni Battista, Biblioteca I-MZ L13
Monza, Basilica di S. Giovanni Battista, Biblioteca I-MZ CIX
Capitolare e Tesoro CIX
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 4660 D-Mbs clm 4660
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 9543 D-Mbs clm 9543
New York, Pierpont Morgan Library M.979 US-NYpm M.979
Orléans, Bibliothèque Municipale 201 F-O 201
Ostiglia, Opera pia Greggiati, Biblioteca 201 I-OS 201
Ostiglia, Opera pia Greggiati, Biblioteca E.46 I-OS E.46
Ostiglia, Opera pia Greggiati, Biblioteca, rari 35 I-OS rari 35
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 775 GB-Ob Bodley 775
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canonici misc. 213 GB-Ob Can. misc.
213
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308 GB-Ob Douce 308
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson G. 22 GB-Ob Rawl. G. 22
Padua, Duomo, Biblioteca Capitolare C 56 I-Pc C. 56
Padua, Duomo, Biblioteca Capitolare, Curia Vescovile, A.20 I-Pc A.20
Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal 1169 F-Pa 1169
Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal 5198 (Chansonnier de F-Pa 5198
l’Arsenal)
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 146 F-Pn fonds fr. 146
(Fauv; Roman de Fauvel)
(Chansonnier du Roi)
(Chansonnier Cangé)
xxv List of manuscripts and their abbreviations
(Chansonnier de Clairambault)
(MachA)
(MachB)
(MachC)
(MachE)
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français F-Pn fonds fr. 12615
12615 (Chansonnier de Noailles)
22545 (MachF)
22546 (MachG)
25566 (Chansonnier of Adam de la Halle)
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds italien 568 F-Pn fonds italien
(Pit) 568
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds latin 112 F-Pn fonds lat. 112
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds latin 10587 F-Pn fonds lat.
10587
12044
(Tonary of St Riquier) 13159
14817
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouvelles F-Pn n.a.f. 1050
acquisitions françaises 1050 (Chansonnier de
Clairambault)
acquisitions françaises 6771 (Codex Reina)
acquisitions françaises 13521 (La Clayette Manuscript)
Parma, Duomo, Archivio Capitolare con Archivio della I-PAac F-09
Fabbriceria F-09
xxvi List of manuscripts and their abbreviations
Perugia, Biblioteca Comunale Augusta 3065 I-PEc 3065

Piacenza, Biblioteca e Archivio Capitolare 65 I-PCd 65
Pistoia, Biblioteca dell’Archivio Capitolare C.102 I-PS C.102
Poznań, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, Sekcja Zbiorów PL-Pu 7022
Muzycznych w Oddziale Zbiorów Specjalnych 7022
Prague, Narodnı́ muzeum – Muzeum České hudby, CZ-Pnm II C 7
hudebnı́ archiv II C 7
Reggio Emilia, Archivio di Stato, Mischiati Fragment I-REas Mischiati
Fragment
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat. 560 I-Rvat Barb. lat. 560
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat. 657 I-Rvat Barb. lat. 657
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. lat. 1490 I-Rvat Reg. lat. 1490
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rossi 215 (Rossi I-Rvat Rossi 215
Codex)
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Archivio San Pietro I-Rvat ASP B 79
B 79
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 4770 I-Rvat Vat. lat. 4770
Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 10654 I-Rvat Vat. lat. 10654
San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Biblioteca del Real Monasterio, E-E b.I.2 (j.b.2)
b.I.2 (j.b.2) (Cantigas de Santa Maria)
San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Biblioteca del Real Monasterio, E-E T.I.1
T.I.1 (Cantigas de Santa Maria)
San Millán de la Cogolla, Rioja, MS without shelfmark
Santiago de Compostela, Catedral Metropolitana E-SC Codex
(Codex Calixtinus) Calixtinus
Santo Domingo de Silos, Archivo Musical de la Abadı́a 4 E-SI 4
St Gall, Kantonsbibliothek (Vadiana) 317 CH-SGv 317
St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 359 CH-SGs 359
St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 390 (Hartker Antiphonal) CH-SGs 390–391
Stary Sa̧cz, Biblioteka Klasztoru Sióstr Klarysek pod PL-STk 2
wezwaniem św.Kingi.
Todi, Biblioteca Comunale Lorenzo Leonj 73 I-TOD 73
Trento, Biblioteca dei Padri Francescani di S. Bernardino I-TRsf 310
310
Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, T. III. 2 I-Tn T. III. 2
Turin, Biblioteca Reale, Vari 42 I-Tr Vari 42
Udine, Duomo, Archivio Capitolare 10 I-UD 10
Udine, Duomo, Archivio Capitolare 27 I-UD 27
Uppsala, Universitetsbiblioteket, c.233 S-Uu c.233
Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare 89 I-VEcap 89
xxvii List of manuscripts and their abbreviations
Vyššı́ Brod, Knihovna cisterciackého klaštera 42 CZ-VB 42

Warsaw,Biblioteka Narodowa, Lat.F.I.378 PL-Wn 378
Warsaw, Biblioteka Narodowa 8054 PL-Wn 8054
Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek MS 2 (Riesenkodex) D-WIl 2
Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek 628 (677) (W1 ) D-W 628
Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek 1062 D-W 1062
Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek 1099 (1206) (W2 ) D-W 1099
By siglum
B-Bc X 27.935 Brussels, Conservatoire Royal/Koninklijk Conservatorium X
27.935
B-Br 10127–10144 Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique/Koninklijke
Bibliotheek van België 10127–10144
B-DEa cod. 9 Dendermonde, Sint-Pieter- en Paulusabdij Codex 9
Ba Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, lit. 115 (D-BAs lit. 115)
CH-E 121 (1151) Einsiedeln, Kloster Einsiedeln, Musikbibliothek 121 (1151)
CH-SGs 359 St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 359
CH-SGs 390–391 St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 390 (Hartker Antiphonal)
CH-SGv 317 St Gall, Kantonsbibliothek (Vadiana) 317
CZ-HK II A 7 Hradec Kralové, Statnı́ vedecka knihovna II A 7
CZ-Pnm II C 7 Prague, Narodnı́ muzeum – Muzeum České hudby, hudebnı́
archiv II C 7
CZ-VB 42 Vyššı́ Brod, Knihovna cisterciackého klaštera 42
D-BAs lit. 115 Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, lit. 115 (Ba)
D-Mbs clm 4660 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 4660
D-Mbs clm 9543 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 9543
D-WIl 2 Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek MS 2 (Riesenkodex)
D-W 628 Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek 628 (677) (W1 )
D-W 1062 Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek 1062
D-W 1099 Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek 1099 (1206) (W2 )
E-BUlh 9 Burgos, Monasterio de Las Huelgas 9 (Hu)
E-E b.I.2 (j.b.2) San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Biblioteca del Real Monasterio,
b.I.2 (j.b.2) (Cantigas de Santa Maria)
San Millán de la Cogolla, Rioja, MS without shelfmark
E-E T.I.1 San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Biblioteca del Real Monasterio,
T.I.1 (Cantigas de Santa Maria)
E-Mh Aemil. 56 Madrid, Real Academia de la Historia, Biblioteca, Aemil. 56
E-Mn 10029 Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España 10029 (Azagra
Codex)
xxviii List of manuscripts and their abbreviations
E-Mn 10069 Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España 10069 (Cantigas de

Santa Maria)
E-Mn 20486 Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España 20486 (Ma)
E-MO 1 Montserrat, Biblioteca de l’Abadia de Montserrat 1 (Llibre
Vermell)
E-SC Codex Santiago de Compostela, Catedral Metropolitana
Calixtinus (Codex Calixtinus)
E-SI 4 Santo Domingo de Silos, Archivo Musical de la Abadı́a 4
E-VI 105 Barcelona, Arxiu Eclesistic de Vic 105
F Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 29.1
Fauv Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 146
(F-Pn fonds fr. 146; Le Roman de Fauvel)
F-CH 564 Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Musée Condé 564 (formerly
1047)
F-MOf H.159 Montpellier, Université Montpellier 1, Bibliothèque de la
Faculté de Médecine, H.159 (Tonary of St Bénigne of
Dijon)
F-MOf H.196 Montpellier, Université Montpellier 1, Bibliothèque de la
Faculté de Médecine, H.196 (Mo; The Montpellier
Codex)
F-O 201 Orléans, Bibliothèque Municipale 201
F-Pa 1169 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal 1169
F-Pa 5198 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal 5198 (Chansonnier de
l’Arsenal)
F-Pn n.a.f. 1050 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouvelles
acquisitions françaises 1050 (Chansonnier de
Clairambault)
F-Pn fonds fr. 146 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 146
(Fauv; Roman de Fauvel)
(Chansonnier du Roi)
(Chansonnier Cangé)
(Chansonnier de Clairambault)
(MachA)
(MachB)
(MachC)
(MachE)
xxix List of manuscripts and their abbreviations
F-Pn fonds fr. 12615 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français
12615 (Chansonnier de Noailles)
22543
22545 (MachF)
22546 (MachG)
25566 (Chansonnier of Adam de la Halle)
F-Pn fonds italien Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds italien 568
568 (Pit)
F-Pn fonds lat. 112 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds latin 112
F-Pn fonds lat. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds latin 10587
10587
12044
13159 (Tonary of St Riquier)
14817
acquisitions françaises 6771 (Codex Reina)
acquisitions françaises 13521 (La Clayette Manuscript)
GB-BER sel. 55 Berkeley Castle, Select Roll 55
GB-Ccc 473 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 473
GB-Cgc 512/543 Caius College 512/543 & Cambridge, Gonville
GB-Cu Add.710 Cambridge, University Library, additional 710 (Dublin
Troper)
GB-Cu Hh. Vi. II Cambridge, University Library, Hh. vi. 11
GB-Lbl add. 16975 London, British Library, Additional 16975
GB-Lbl add. 57950 London, British Library, Additional 57950 (Old Hall
Manuscript)
GB-Lbl Cotton Vesp. London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian B. VI
B. VI
GB-Lbl Egerton 2615 London, British Library, Egerton 2615 (LoA)
xxx List of manuscripts and their abbreviations
GB-Lbl Harley 3965 London, British Library, Harley 3965

GB-Ob Bodley 775 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 775
GB-Ob Can. misc. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canonici misc. 213
213
GB-Ob Douce 308 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308
GB-Ob Rawl. G. 22 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson G. 22
Hu Burgos, Monastario de Las Huelgas, 9 (E-BUlh 9)
I-Ac 338 Assisi, Biblioteca Comunale, MS 338
I-AO 13 Aosta, Biblioteca del Seminario Maggiore 13
I-AO 15 Aosta, Biblioteca del Seminario Maggiore 15
I-AR s.n. C.216 Arezzo, Museo Diocesano, s.n., C.216
I-Bc Q15 Bologna, Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica
Q15
I-Bu 2216 Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria 2216
I-BV 34 Benevento, Biblioteca Capitolare 34
I-CFm 35 Cividale del Friuli, Museo Archeologico Nazionale,
Biblioteca 35
Biblioteca 58
Biblioteca 79
I-CT 91 Cortona, Biblioteca Comunale e dell’Accademia Etrusca 91
I-Fas n. 17879 Florence, Archivio di Stato, Notarile Antecosimiano, n.
17879
I-Fl 2211 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Archivio
Capitolare di San Lorenzo 2211
I-Fl Palatino 87 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Palatino 87
(Squarcialupi Codex)
I-Fl Plut. 29.1 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 29.1 (F )
I-Fn Banco Rari 18 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Banco Rari 18
I-Fn Banco Rari 20 Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Banco Rari 20
I-Fn Panciatichiano Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Panciatichiano 26
26
I-FOLas Foligno, Archivio di Stato, MS without shelfmark
I-FZc 117 Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale MS 117 (Codex Faenza)
I-GO H c. 274 Gorizia, Seminario Teologico Centrale, Biblioteca, H, c. 274
I-GR 187 Grottaferrata, Badia Greca, Biblioteca, collocazione
provvisoria 197
I-GUBa Corale O Gubbio, Archivio di Stato, Fondo S. Domenico, Corale O
I-IV 115 Ivrea, Biblioteca Capitolare, 115
I-La 184 Lucca, Archivio di Stato 184
I-Lg 1061 Lucca, Biblioteca Statale 1061
I-Ma Cod. CIX Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Tesoro della Basilica di
S. Giovanni, Cod. CIX
xxxi List of manuscripts and their abbreviations
I-MDAegidi Montefiore dell’Aso, Francesco Egidi, private collection

I-MOe α.M.5.24 Modena, Biblioteca Estense, α.M.5.24 (olim. Lat. 586)
I-MOe α.R.I.6 Modena, Biblioteca Estense, α.R.I.6
I-MOe α.X.1.11 Modena, Biblioteca Estense, α.X.1.11 (olim. Lat. 471)
I-MZ CIX Monza, Basilica di S. Giovanni Battista, Biblioteca
Capitolare e Tesoro CIX
I-MZ L12 Monza, Basilica di S. Giovanni Battista, Biblioteca
I-MZ L13 Monza, Basilica di S. Giovanni Battista, Biblioteca
I-OS 201 Ostiglia, Opera pia Greggiati, Biblioteca 201
I-OS E.46 Ostiglia, Opera pia Greggiati, Biblioteca E.46
I-OS rari 35 Ostiglia, Opera pia Greggiati, Biblioteca, rari 35
I-PAac F-09 Parma, Duomo, Archivio Capitolare con Archivio della
Fabbriceria F-09
I-PCd 65 Piacenza, Biblioteca e Archivio Capitolare 65
I-Pc A.20 Padua, Duomo, Biblioteca Capitolare, Curia Vescovile, A.20
I-Pc C. 56 Padua, Duomo, Biblioteca Capitolare C 56
I-PEc 3065 Perugia, Biblioteca Comunale Augusta 3065
I-PS C.102 Pistoia, Biblioteca dell’Archivio Capitolare C.102
I-REas Mischiati Reggio Emilia, Archivio di Stato, Mischiati Fragment
Fragment
I-Rvat ASP B 79 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Archivio San Pietro
B 79
I-Rvat Barb. lat. 560 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat. 560
I-Rvat Barb. lat. 657 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat. 657
I-Rvat Reg. lat. 1490 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. lat. 1490
I-Rvat Rossi 215 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rossi 215 (Rossi
Codex)
I-Rvat Vat. lat. 10654 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 10654
I-Rvat Vat. lat. 4770 Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 4770
I-Tn T. III. 2 Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, T. III. 2
I-TOD 73 Todi, Biblioteca Comunale Lorenzo Leonj 73
I-TRsf 310 Trento, Biblioteca dei Padri Francescani di S. Bernardino
310
I-Tr Vari 42 Turin, Biblioteca Reale, Vari 42
I-UD 10 Udine, Duomo, Archivio Capitolare 10
I-UD 27 Udine, Duomo, Archivio Capitolare 27
I-VEcap 89 Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare 89
LoA London, British Library, Egerton 2615 (GB-Lbl Egerton
2615)
Ma Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, 20486 (E-Mn
20486)
Mach A Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 1548
(F-Pn fonds fr. 1548)
xxxii List of manuscripts and their abbreviations
Mach B Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 1585

Mach C Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 1586
Mach E Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 9221
Mach F Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français
22545 (F-Pn fonds fr. 22545)
Mach G Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français
22546 (F-Pn fonds fr. 22546)
Mach Vg Kansas City, Private Collection of Elizabeth J. and James
E. Ferrell, MS without shelfmark (Ferrell-Vogüé
Manuscript) currently on loan to Cambridge, Corpus
Christi College (US-KAferrell on loan to GB-Ccc)
Pit Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds italien 568
(F-Pn fonds italien 568)
PL-Kj 257 Cracow, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Biblioteka Jagiellońska
257
PL-Kj 40098 Cracow, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Biblioteka Jagiellońska
40098
PL-Pu 7022 Poznań, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, Sekcja Zbiorów
Muzycznych w Oddziale Zbiorów Specjalnych 7022
PL-STk 2 Stary Sa̧cz, Biblioteka Klasztoru Sióstr Klarysek pod
wezwaniem św.Kingi.
PL-Wn 8054 Warsaw, Biblioteka Narodowa 8054
PL-Wn 378 Warsaw,Biblioteka Narodowa, Lat.F.I.378
S-Uu c.233 Uppsala, Universitetsbiblioteket, c.233
SK-BRm 33 Bratislava, Archı́v mesta Bratislavy 33
SK-BRu 318 Bratislava, Univerzitná knižnica 318
US-BEm 744 (olim Berkeley, University of California, Music Library 744
Phillipps 4450) (olim Phillipps 4450)
US-CLm 21140 Cleveland, Museum of Art 21140
US-KAferrell on loan Kansas City, Private Collection of Elizabeth J. and James
to GB-Ccc E. Ferrell, MS without shelfmark (Mach Vg;
Ferrell-Vogüé Manuscript) currently on loan to
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College
US-NYpm M.979 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library M.979
W1 Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, 628 (677) (D-W
628 (677))
W2 Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, 1099 (1206) (D-W
1099 (1206))
Cambridge Companions to Music
Topics
The Cambridge Companion to Ballet
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The Cambridge Companion to the Concerto
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Introduction
mark everist
‘O sing unto the Lord a new song’ is the text introduced by the initial on
the cover of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music. But our two
Austin canons pictured in the initial stand with their mouths resolutely
closed. Furthermore, it is difficult to square the elaborate ligatures on the
roll before which the two Augustinians stand with any sort of psalmody; at
the very least the music looks more like a melisma from a gradual, alleluia
or responsory; the more optimistic modern gaze might even see the tenor
of a polyphonic work there. And while the cleric on the right is pointing to
the notation on the roll, there is very little doubt that the one on the left
is indicating solmization syllables on his hand (although never described
by Guido d’Arezzo, this practice was known throughout the Middle Ages
as the Guidonian Hand). In many ways, then, the initial that adorns this
book addresses issues raised by its contents: monophony and polyphony,
psalmody and composed chant, written and unwritten, codex and rotulus,
musical literacy, cheironomy, silence and sound.
The component parts of our ‘Cantate’ initial are very much the concerns
of the contributors to The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music. We
are interested, of course, in following the path of music history from the
middle of the first millennium to around 1400, but we are also interested
in the ways in which plainsong and polyphony interact: there is always the
risk in any book of this sort of treating monophony – liturgical, sacred
and vernacular – as something that stopped as soon as someone sang a
fifth above a fundamental, and our accounts, for example, of the role of
plainsong in trecento Italy or in Parisian organum of the twelfth century,
or the weight given to Machaut’s monophonic songs will make clear our
reluctance to fall prey to this sort of reasoning. The friction between theory
and practice – perfectly dramatized by our two Austin canons – lies at the
heart of much of the volume, and our chapters on liturgy and institution
take us right to the centre of the question of when and when not music was
composed, performed and consumed.
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music is a totally different propo-
sition to almost every other volume in the Cambridge Companions series.
Whereas The Cambridge Companion to Stainer or The Cambridge Compan-
ion to the Ocarina, when they are written, will have their scope relatively
[1] straightforwardly defined by their subject matter, our attempt to assemble
2 Mark Everist
a companion to a body of music that spans the best part of a millennium,

and most of what is now considered Europe, is an exercise fraught with
ambiguity and uncertainty. So while The Cambridge Companion to Mozart
and The Cambridge Companion to Rossini treat the life, works and contexts
of their respective subjects in clearly different ways, there is little doubt as
to how many concert arias the former wrote or how long the latter spent
in Naples. Furthermore, in companions with such clearly defined limits,
the scope for the examination and analysis of, say, Mozart’s Requiem or
Rossini’s Guillaume Tell is broad; by contrast, the luxury of more than a
handful of exemplary analyses to support general points would have made
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music significantly longer than it
already is. We focus, then, on repertories and their contexts rather than on
groups of works defined by composer.
‘Composer’ is of course a highly contested term. In a post-Romantic age
that professionalizes the composer in a way largely unknown before the past
two hundred years, it is helpful to return to the idea of composition as some-
thing that went hand in hand with singing, instruction and theorizing. In
particular, coming back to the idea of composition as the placing together –
as its etymology (componere) suggests – gives a context to the common
medieval practices of reworking text and music sometimes over a period of
centuries. This is no less a process of composition than the one portrayed in
the images of Beethoven composing the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony or of Haydn
composing in his best clothes. Time and time again in the pages that follow,
the question of composition and authorship will surface in very different
ways, and our understanding and enjoyment of medieval music will be
impoverished if reworking and embellishment are treated as something on
a lower plane than what we understand today as ‘composition’. There is
a sense then that the canticum novum sung by our Austin Canons might
allude to almost any part of the music of the Middle Ages: all could be
considered old, and all could also be counted as new.
What are the Middle Ages, and what should a Companion to Medieval
Music include? Both beginnings and endings are severely problematic, to
say nothing of the general question of periodization. One could speculate
on what the successor to this volume might be called: The Cambridge
Companion to Music of the Early Modern Period – in acknowledgement of
the unease that the terms Renaissance and Reformation have generated? An
answer to this question might assist with finding an end point for our study.
But at the beginning of the period treated by this volume, the problem can
be articulated through a number of questions: how does the formulation
‘late antiquity’ play into the history of music? Is there a place for the concept
of the Dark Ages? What criteria might one use for answering such questions?
Yet at the end of the period, there are almost more answers than questions:
3 Introduction
the fall of Constantinople (1453), the end of the Wars of the Roses (1485),
the beginnings of the colonization of America (1492) or the beginnings
of the Reformation (1517). But as these examples show, decisions about
periodization are largely formed along disciplinary lines: different fields
of study prefer different solutions (European history, English history, the
history of colonization, and so on). And if such divisions are marked by
events that are deemed of significance in individual subject areas, it might
seem, there should be little difficulty in doing the same for music, although
even here there are significant differences even between different areas of
study: Du Fay seems fairly placed in the ‘Renaissance’ whereas arguments
are made for considering Dunstaple ‘medieval’, although Reese’s Music in
the Middle Ages was unique in including the composer. Looking further
afield – and this is the case in Robert Curry’s chapter on medieval music
east of the Rhine – the points of change may be even more marked. It of
course goes without saying that Lawrence Earp’s chapter on the modern
reception of medieval music largely begins where the rest of the book
leaves off.
It is easy to subject the question of periodization to endless interro-
gation and to overlook the equally important issues of geography and
topography. In this regard, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music
is simultaneously conservative and path-breaking: conservative in its con-
ventional distinction – made by the choices of chapter and author in Part
II – between England, Italy, the Iberian peninsula and Eastern Europe,
but path-breaking in the synoptic view of the Middle Ages provided by
Christopher Page, which, among other things, looks back to third-century
Carthage as the origins of the gradual, in the context of what he calls
‘circuits of communication’. There is an important counterpoint in the
volume between the disciplining of musical repertories that are given in
Part II and an account of modes of musical transmission found in Page’s
chapter.
Needless to say, such an organization – regional studies in Part II and
a chronological account of musical repertories in Part I – opens up the
unattractive prospect of a Hauptcorpus identified with French mainstream
repertories in Part I and subsidiary corpora in Part II, coupled to the
implication that the French music that forms the basis of the chapters in
Part I somehow represents a centre to which the music discussed in
Part II is a periphery. Such a view is of course as pernicious as the analogous
one that holds Austro-German music of later periods a centre with other
repertories as ‘national’ – as if there were little or no national importance to
Austro-German music or that non-Austro-German repertories had no role
to play east of the Rhine. Page’s chapter goes a long way towards blurring the
boundaries between centre and periphery, but it would be a wilfully blind
4 Mark Everist
editor who denied that any volume such as this is to a degree a prisoner of
its disciplinary and scholarly past.
And in other ways, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music differs
from previous studies in its attempts to control the music of the Middle Ages.
While questions of performance, instrumental music and iconography are
treated in those chapters where they belong, rather than being selected for
special attention, Part III deploys the knowledge gained from Parts I and II
to give a synoptic view on such subjects as the liturgy, institutions, poetry,
composition, manuscripts and music theory. Thus, some repertories will
appear both in Part III and in either Part I or II. This bifocal view enables the
reader constantly to balance a view of the subject based both on repertories
and on musical cultures.
There is always an irony about writing about music: the one thing that
characterizes music – its sonic quality, whether in modern recorded sound
or musica instrumentalis – is absent, and the closed mouths of the Austin
canons in our ‘Cantate’ initial bear eloquent testimony here. There is a
further irony in writing about medieval music in that almost the only wit-
nesses that come down to us are essentially visual, whether in terms of the
manuscripts that preserve musical repertories or those that record theoret-
ical and other writings about music (again our initial is emblematic). And
while this irony has only recently been acknowledged in literary studies in
the wake of the so-called New Philology, in music the importance of the
visual – the manuscript evidence – has always been paramount. Nowhere is
this more clear than in the dozens of published facsimiles of medieval music
manuscripts that grace library shelves, both public and private. Hardly sur-
prisingly, then, contributors have made regular reference to the particular
wealth of visual material also available to readers of The Cambridge Com-
panion to Medieval Music. Useful collections of facsimiles are also in print
(all listed in the bibliography), and may well be viewed as addenda to this
volume. Particularly useful are Cullin’s L’image musique, Besseler’s Schrift-
bild der mehrstimmigen Musik, Bell’s Music in Medieval Manuscripts, and,
more important perhaps, the online Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music
(www.diamm.ac.uk/index.html) where some of the material discussed in
this volume is presented in high-quality colour images. Such initiatives are
certain to continue with individual libraries presenting treasures of their
own in an open-access digital format; major sources from St Gall and
Montpellier have been made available during the final stages of work on
this project, and more will certainly have emerged by the time of the book’s
publication.
Acknowledgements in a multi-authored volume such as this, beyond
the editor’s thanks to his contributors, are probably superfluous; each con-
tributor recognizes the debts, both acknowledged and unacknowledged,
5 Introduction
to the giants on whose shoulders we sit. I am however personally grateful

to Penny Souster who first broached the idea of this project, and to Vicki
Cooper who has supported it with such enthusiasm. Thanks must also go
to Rebecca Taylor, Laura Davey and Jodie Barnes at Cambridge University
Press who have made our typescript such a beautiful and accurate object.
Antonio Cascelli translated chapters 7 and 8, and prepared the index. The
chronology was prepared by Samantha Verscheuren, the list of manuscripts
by Amy Williamson and the music examples by David Bretherton. And
finally, the editor thanks British Airways for cancelling flight BA 329 to
Baltimore Washington International Airport in April 2008; had the editor
travelled on that flight, Chapter 18 would not have figured in the volume.
part one
Repertory, styles and techniques

1 Plainsong
susan boynton
After the introduction of public Christian worship services in the fourth and
fifth centuries, chant genres of varying styles developed gradually as the parts
of the services sung by the congregation became distinguished from those
performed by a soloist and choir. Already in the fourth century, responsorial
psalmody, performed by a soloist with congregational responses, followed
the readings in the first part of the mass. Descriptions of Western liturgical
practice in the fourth and fifth centuries suggest an emerging repertory of
chant along the lines of the full annual cycle that was established in the
Jerusalem liturgy by the middle of the fifth century.1 Patristic writings such
as the sermons of Saint Augustine and Pope Leo I refer to commentary by the
celebrant at mass on a psalm verse just performed, but at first the liturgical
assignments of these verses were not entirely fixed.2 The emphasis of early
writers on the psalms in the liturgy is part of a broader intellectual movement
in late antiquity that made the Book of Psalms central to Christian liturgy
and exegesis; as early as Augustine and Cassiodorus, commentary traditions
present the psalms as prophetic texts, and allegorical readings of the psalms
profoundly shaped the choice of those psalm verses that were used as chant
texts.3
The principal scriptural influence on the shape of the annual liturgical
cycle was the gospel reading at mass. The Roman cycle of gospel readings for
the Sundays and principal feast days of the liturgical year was established
by the end of the sixth century.4 The gospel reading reflected the event
commemorated on that day or occupied a place in a series that emerged
from the continuous reading of the gospels over the course of the year. The
theme of the gospel often shaped the texts of the liturgy for the day as a
whole.
Another important consideration governing the selection of chants for
the liturgy was the difference between proper texts, which change accord-
ing the liturgical occasion, and common texts, which remain essentially
unchanged (throughout the year, during a liturgical season, or on the same
day of every week). Over the course of the Middle Ages, the number of
propers increased with the introduction of new feasts and cults of saints.
Patristic writings suggest that the responsorial proper chants of the
mass were already florid, virtuosic pieces. However, liturgical books from
[9] the period before 900 provide only the texts for the chant repertory, and
10 Susan Boynton
even with the development of Western musical notations in the ninth and
tenth centuries, the unheighted neumes of Latin chant must still be inter-
preted in light of sources with staff lines. Each genre of plainsong had a
particular musical style and liturgical function. In the divine office, the
focus of individual hours on the communal chanting of psalms and can-
ticles seems to have fostered musical settings that are fairly unadorned
except in some of the antiphons for the canticles, and in the great respon-
sories of matins and vespers. In the mass, the ritual focus on the Eucharist
and the diverse responsibilities of the ministers involved in this celebra-
tion engendered both a wider range of styles than in the office and a more
complex distribution of musical roles. The liturgy included many differ-
ent forms of musically heightened declamation that correspond to various
points on a continuum between song and the spoken word. Readings were
sung to reciting tones that varied from place to place and also by occa-
sion, with the most elaborate tones reserved for major feasts.5 The psalms
pervaded the Latin liturgy both as the source for the texts of individ-
ual chants in practically all the genres of plainsong (except for the ordi-
nary of the mass and the office hymn), and in the form of entire psalms,
which comprised the foundation of the eight daily services of the divine
office.
Chant in the office

By the early Middle Ages the singing of psalms in the daily office followed
a particular ordering which distributed the totality of the psalter over the
hours of the day and the days of the week; the distribution employed in
monastic churches, found in the Benedictine Rule, differed from that in
collegiate or cathedral churches, where services employed fewer psalms.6
Certain feast days had particular series of psalms, which like the ferial psalm
series differed slightly in monastic and secular churches.
The psalms of the office were sung to tones consisting of melodic for-
mulas employed in the syllabic chanting of a psalm verse on a single pitch;
each formula had its own melody for the intonation and intermediary pause
in the middle of the verse. The conclusion of a psalm verse was sung to a
cadential termination formula known as a differentia; each psalm tone had
several different possible differentiae.7 The lesser doxology (Gloria Patri et
filio et spiritui sancto sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in secula
seculorum amen) was performed at the end of a psalm or a group of psalms.
In many chant manuscripts the vowels of the last two words in the doxology
(e u o u a e) are written below the melodies of the differentiae as a guide to
singers.
11 Plainsong
The performance practice of psalms in the monastic office changed over

time from responsorial singing in late antiquity to antiphonal singing in
the Carolingian period.8 Beginning in the ninth century, the psalm tones
were linked to the modes; each mode was represented by one psalm tone,
and the psalm tone and possible cadences of each mode were listed in
tonaries (catalogues of chants by mode). Other texts in the divine office that
were sung to recitation tones were the New Testament canticles at vespers
(the Magnificat) and lauds (the Benedictus).9 Over the course of the Middle
Ages, the modality of chants came to be categorized in reference to the
characteristics associated with these tones.10
The office genre with the largest repertory is the antiphon, a brief chant
of relatively simple style sung chorally in alternation with psalms. Antiphons
were performed before and after each psalm or group of psalms (and in
the early Middle Ages, the antiphon seems to have been sung after each
psalm verse). Antiphons for the daily office had texts drawn from the
psalms with which they alternated; greater textual variety characterizes
the antiphons for feast days. The mode of an office antiphon determined
the choice of the psalm-tone cadence so as to ensure that the termina-
tion of the psalm was in the same mode as the melody of the antiphon.
Antiphons for the psalms illustrate the relationship between mode and
formulaic structure; most antiphons in mode 1 exhibit similar turns of
phrase, such as a minor third from D to F and a leap of a fifth between
D and A.11 These gestures combine in a melodic contour that reflects
the characteristics associated with the mode. Consequently, many differ-
ent antiphon texts have similar or nearly identical melodies. Longer and
often more complex than the psalm antiphons are those sung with the
Magnificat at vespers and the Benedictus at lauds. These chants (known
as gospel antiphons because the Magnificat and Benedictus originated in
the gospels) usually have texts from the gospel reading of the day’s mass.
Still more elaborate antiphons are those sung at the beginning of matins
with the invitatory psalm (Psalm 94, Venite exultemus), and repeated after
each verse. Even antiphons that are not part of such a cohesive group draw
upon similar melodic conventions. Nevertheless, the medieval repertory of
office antiphons, which numbers in the thousands, exhibits enough diver-
sity that more study is required to achieve an adequate description of the
whole.
Two further antiphon types are distinct from the rest of the repertory in
that they were sung independently, without psalms. Processional antiphons
were performed during the processions on major feasts of the church year
such as Palm Sunday, Christmas, and the Rogation Days. Another genre
of independent antiphon was the Marian antiphon, which emerged in the
twelfth century for use in devotions to the Virgin, including the procession
12 Susan Boynton
after compline that concluded with the performance of a Marian antiphon

in front of an image of the Virgin.
Each hour of the divine office also included a hymn, sung to a melody
(usually strophic) in strophic form.12 Hymns were introduced into the
office as early as the fifth century, but their melodies were rarely recorded
before the eleventh.13 Another syllabic genre was the brief responsory, which
consisted of a respond sung by a soloist and repeated by the choir, followed
by a solo verse, a choral repeat of the respond, a solo doxology, and a second
choral repeat of the respond. The simplest genres of the divine office were
those texts chanted to recitation tones: besides the psalms, these comprised
the readings, prayers, and versicles and responses (sung in dialogue by choir
and presider) that opened and closed each service.
The great responsories of matins, much lengthier and more ornate than
the brief responsories, employ a wide variety of melodic formulas.14 Great
responsories are proper chants; their texts are often related to the lessons
that precede them. The office of matins included three sets of chants orga-
nized in units called nocturns, each one comprised of antiphons and psalms
followed by lessons and responsories (nine in secular uses, twelve in monas-
tic use).15 The verses of great responsories were often formulaic tones (one
was associated with each mode), although newly composed verses are not
unusual, especially in the later repertory. The performance practice for great
responsories varied somewhat from place to place, but it essentially followed
the alternation of choir and soloist just described for the brief responsory.
The repeat of the respond was usually abbreviated to only its second half;
many manuscripts contain cues indicating where the repeat should begin.
According to the Benedictine Rule, the doxology should be sung only with
the last responsory of each nocturn, and in the Middle Ages the custom
was to perform only the first half of the doxology (the words Gloria patri
et filio et spiritui sancto).16 Example 1.1, a transcription of the final respon-
sory in the monastic office of St Benedict as found in an eleventh-century
antiphoner from the Parisian abbey of St-Maur-des-Fossés, demonstrates
the repetition of the second half of the respond and the performance of the
doxology. The verse of this responsory is newly composed, not one of the
traditional responsory verse tones.
Chant in the mass

Whereas the great responsories were the only musically elaborate element of
the divine office, the liturgy of the mass included several different complex
genres of plainsong (see Table 1.1).17 Mass began with the introit, a proper
chant composed of an antiphon with psalm sung by the choir during the
13 Plainsong
Example 1.1 Gloria Christe tuo tibi personat in benedicto, twelfth responsory for matins of St
Benedict in an eleventh-century antiphoner from St-Maur-des-Fossés (F-Pn fonds lat. 12044,
fol. 63r)
procession of the clergy into the church. The style of the introit was compa-
rable to office psalmody, but the tones used for the psalm verses in introits
were slightly more elaborate. The communion, also a proper chant, simi-
larly included a psalm verse chanted to a formulaic tone. The length of the
introit could vary according to the amount of ceremonial accompanying the
14 Susan Boynton
Example 1.1 (cont.)
entrance of the clergy; apparently its length would be extended by perform-

ing multiple verses of the psalm. On major feasts, tropes could introduce
the introit and alternate with its phrases (see Chapter 2).
The introit was followed by the Kyrie, an ordinary chant with an invari-
able Greek text (Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison, each performed
three times). Introduced into the Latin mass in the fifth century, the Kyrie
was employed as an invocation in many different liturgical contexts. It was
originally a congregational chant, but by the eighth century was sung by
the choir, as stated in the early-eighth-century description of the papal
mass known as Ordo Romanus I. Kyrie melodies seem to have originated
in the same period as this change of performance practice; they can be
fairly ornate, exhibiting a variety of patterns of repetition and contrast.18
Already in the earliest manuscripts containing notated Kyries, which were
copied in the tenth century, many compositions include Latin verses
15 Plainsong
Table 1.1 Outline of the mass in the

central Middle Ages
introit (proper)
Kyrie (ordinary)
Gloria (proper)
epistle (first scriptural reading)
gradual (proper)
alleluia (proper; replaced by tract in penitential seasons)
sequence (proper)
gospel (second scriptural reading)
Credo (ordinary; not sung at every mass)
offertory (proper)
preface (celebrant’s prayer)
Sanctus and Benedictus (ordinary)
canon of the Mass
Lord’s Prayer
versicle and response (Peace)
Agnus Dei (ordinary)
rite of peace
communion (proper)
post-communion (prayer)
Ite Missa Est (ordinary)
that seem to be original to the chants; recent research suggests that they
were not interpolated as tropes into pre-existing Kyrie melodies (see also
Chapter 2).19
The Kyrie was followed by the Gloria, which was introduced by Pope
Symmachus (498–514) as a congregational chant for Sundays and saints’
feasts, but eventually came to be performed by clergy. The repertory encom-
passes a range of styles from simple recitation to more ornate, through-
composed melodies. After the reading of the epistle came the gradual, a
responsorial chant performed by a soloist in alternation with the choir, like
the great responsory. Graduals, the oldest genre in the mass proper, take
their origin from the performance of a responsorial psalm in the first part
of the mass; in the core repertory of 105 graduals, all but eleven have texts
from the psalms. More than half the graduals in the Gregorian repertory
are based on two model melodies.
The next part of the mass was the alleluia, a responsorial proper chant
consisting of a melismatic vocalization on the word ‘Alleluia’ followed by
a verse (usually taken from the psalms); the lengthy melisma (the jubilus)
that concludes the initial Alleluia recurs at the conclusion of the verse. The
performance practice of the alleluia was not everywhere the same in the
Middle Ages, but generally outlined a three-part form. The first part (just
the Alleluia, or the Alleluia and jubilus) was sung by the cantor and repeated
by the choir, after which the cantor sang the verse, and finally the choir
repeated the opening Alleluia with the jubilus. Example 1.2, the Alleluia.
Ascendens Christus, illustrates the characteristic style and structure of this
16 Susan Boynton
Example 1.2 Alleluia. Ascendens Christus, in a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Parisian gradual

(F-Pn fonds lat. 1337, fol. 158v)
genre; the word ‘hominibus’ at the conclusion of the verse is sung to the
same music as the initial word ‘alleluya’. Much of the melody’s ornate circular
movement remains within the span of a fifth from D to A; in the verse, the
melisma on the penultimate syllable of ‘captivitatem’ explores the fourth
from A to D and repeats the pitch on A, both features characteristic of the
first mode. The alleluia was interpreted by medieval writers as angelic song,
an image explored in prosulae (see Chapter 2), sequences, and liturgical
commentary.
17 Plainsong
Because of its associations with rejoicing, the Alleluia was not performed
during penitential seasons such as Advent and Lent; it was replaced by the
tract, a lengthy proper chant performed by a soloist. Tracts constitute one
of the most formulaic genres, both in their overall structure and in their use
of individual melodic gestures. The construction of tracts is closely bound
to their modality; all tracts are either in mode 2 or mode 8, and those in
the same mode are so similar to one another that they can be described as
realizations of the same compositional template.20
The alleluia and the sequence (see Chapter 2) were followed by the
chanting of the gospel reading of the day, then by the Credo, an ordinary
chant with a small repertory of mostly syllabic melodies. The next proper
chant was the offertory, which like the gradual is a responsorial chant
with formulaic melodies set to texts mostly taken from the psalms. As it
accompanied the liturgical action of carrying gifts to the altar, it originally
included multiple verses, but over time the number of verses was reduced
to one or at most two. Unlike the verses of the introit, which are related to
office psalmody, the verses of offertories are ornate compositions.21
The Sanctus and Agnus Dei are chants of the ordinary that in the early
church are thought to have been performed by the congregation (in the
case of the Agnus Dei, along with the clergy); numerous melodies for
these chants are preserved beginning in the eleventh century. Many feature
repetitive phrases with melismas that are narrower in range than those
found in the mass propers. The communion, the final chant of the mass
proper, is generally less melismatic in style than the responsorial genres, and
bears some resemblance to the introit in its structure of antiphon with verse.
In addition to liturgical books, valuable information on plainsong can
be found in theological or homiletic writings, commentaries on the liturgy,
and prescriptive texts (such as monastic rules and ordinals). For instance,
the Benedictine Rule, written in the sixth century and diffused in much
of Europe beginning in the ninth and tenth, states unequivocally that no
activity in a monastery should ever take precedence over the divine office.22
The lengthy section on the performance of the office concludes with a
passage that indicates the theological significance of the liturgy: ‘therefore
we should consider how one should be in the sight of the divinity and his
angels, and let us stand to sing the psalms in such a way that our mind be
in concord with our voice’.23
The origins of Gregorian chant

Although the liturgy developed in response to the church calendar and the
annual cycles of feasts, liturgical assignments were formalized or codified
18 Susan Boynton
at different times. In the early Middle Ages certain elements (such as the
choice and number of verses in some responsorial chants) might be left to
the discretion of the soloist or choirmaster, which could account for some
of the differences between early manuscripts. The question of who com-
posed the early mass proper chants and determined their liturgical assign-
ments has no single answer. James McKinnon argues that the schola canto-
rum at Rome in the seventh century collectively composed the mass propers
in cycles by genre, while Peter Jeffery maintains that the early mass proper
chants instead cluster around liturgical occasion.24 New feasts introduced
in the seventh and eighth centuries employed chants that were borrowed
from already existing feasts, suggesting that a process of new chant com-
position had come to an end. In the Carolingian period a legend emerged
attributing to Pope Gregory I the formidable corpus that had come into
existence by that time, but there is no historical basis for applying the
name ‘Gregorian’ to a repertory that formed gradually, in the eighth and
ninth centuries. Beginning with Pépin’s consecration by Pope Stephen II
in 754, the political relationship between the Frankish kings and the Holy
See fostered the introduction of Roman chant in the Frankish kingdom.
This tendency became a systematic programme of liturgical reform under
Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. From a long-term process of assimila-
tion came a new, hybrid repertory which would more accurately be called
‘Romano-Frankish’, although the misnomer ‘Gregorian’ remains standard
(and is used here for that reason).
The earliest books of Gregorian chant represent the products of reception
and adaptation described in ninth- and tenth-century historical narratives
that recount (from both northern European and Italian points of view)
the Franks’ importation of chant from Rome.25 Even the earliest extant
manuscripts containing notated cycles of Gregorian chant for the proper of
the mass, which date from the tenth century, preserve a relatively uniform
melodic tradition; thereafter, chants tend to have similar contours in mass
books from different places. A quite different transmission pattern appears
in the manuscripts of the divine office, which attest to considerable variation
in the selection, ordering, assignments, and melodies of chants. Even in the
first notated office books, the repertory was much less stable than the mass
and more local in character.26
The coherence of the mass repertory witnessed by the earliest notated
sources is particularly remarkable given that most of the musical informa-
tion had to be preserved in the oral tradition. Singers had to learn from one
another rather than from books, for the early forms of neumatic notation
used at this time indicated general contour and phrasing, but not pitch
or intervallic content. Scholars have put forth various explanations for this
phenomenon. If the earliest extant notated manuscripts are chance survivals
19 Plainsong
of a longer manuscript tradition, they may represent vestiges of earlier writ-

ten exemplars that would have made it possible for the melodies to be widely
distributed in essentially the same form. Such melodic uniformity in earlier
manuscripts now lost would suggest that the melodies were precisely fixed
in singers’ memories for generations before they were written down. On
the other hand, the relationship between notation and performance may
have been more indirect; scribes copying chants could have relied primarily
on what they remembered aurally instead of mechanically reproducing the
neumes in the exemplar.27
Part of the mystery surrounding the origins of the Gregorian chant
resides in the difficulty of recovering what came before. The Gallican chant
practised in Gaul before the Carolingian importation of the Roman liturgy
seems to have been almost completely effaced by the Gregorian repertory.28
The earliest extant notated sources from Rome with mass and office chants
were produced in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, long after the transmis-
sion of Roman chant to the north. Many scholars believe that the Roman
chant repertory was preserved in the oral tradition until that time, but
we cannot be certain that the earliest Roman chant manuscripts preserve
what was sung in earlier centuries.29 The melodies in these ‘Old Roman’
manuscripts exhibit a recognizable relationship to the melodies transmitted
with the same texts and liturgical functions in manuscripts of Gregorian
chants. In many cases the deep structures of the Old Roman and Gregorian
versions are comparable, but the chants employ different melodic formulas
and ways of deploying them.30 Many Old Roman chant melodies are more
ornamental and repetitive than their Gregorian counterparts, as can be seen
from the comparison of a Gregorian melody with an Old Roman melody
for the first antiphon of lauds on Holy Saturday in Example 1.3. Many Old
Roman chants also exhibit an archaic tonal organization apparently predat-
ing the eight-mode system, which developed in eighth-century Jerusalem
and was received in the West in the ninth century.31
Other early Latin chant traditions differ notably from both the Roman
and the Gregorian chant repertories in genre, form and style. Most of these
regional traditions were largely supplanted by the Gregorian chant as a result
of reforms promoted by eleventh-century popes who sought to impose the
Roman rite throughout the Latin West. Practically the only corpus of Latin
chant to survive this period besides the Gregorian is the Ambrosian rite, the
ancient liturgy of the diocese of Milan named after Saint Ambrose (Bishop
of Milan from 374 to 397). The Old Hispanic chant, which originated in the
Visigothic period, was replaced in the Iberian peninsula by the Gregorian
chant beginning in the late eleventh century. At the time of the suppression
of the Old Spanish rite, almost none of the melodies were written down
in staff notation, so the adiastematic neumes in which they are recorded
20 Susan Boynton
Example 1.3 Comparison of the Gregorian and Old Roman melodies for the antiphon O mors ero
mors tua in F-Pn fonds lat. 12044, fol. 99r and I-RVat ASP B 79, fol. 102v
have not yet been deciphered (on the Iberian peninsula, see Chapter 9 by
Nicolas Bell).
The native south Italian repertory known as the Beneventan chant was
also suppressed, but some of it survives in manuscripts of Gregorian chant
copied in the region.32 One of the most widespread of these survivals is the
Beneventan version of the Exultet, a lengthy late-antique text performed
by the deacon to accompany the lighting of the paschal candle during the
Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday. The Beneventan Exultet had a distinctive text
and melody and was performed from a scroll; several illuminated examples
of such Exultet rolls have survived.33
In England, where the texts and chants brought from Rome in the
early Middle Ages blended with local repertories, the Norman Conquest
and the subsequent introduction of usages from France led to a radical
transformation of liturgy and chant not unlike what had taken place in
those parts of Europe where the Gregorian chant replaced earlier traditions.
Comparison of the few extant pre-Conquest liturgical manuscripts with
later books suggests that the Anglo-Saxon chant tradition did not entirely
disappear, but the melodies are difficult to recover because they are written
in unheighted staffless neumes. Syncretism in the post-Conquest period
fostered the development of local English cathedral repertories such as the
Salisbury rite, as well as particularly insular usages among the religious
orders.
Notation and performance

With the widespread reception and adaptation of the Gregorian chant
in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the melodies came to be written
down more frequently. The development of staff notation in this period
21 Plainsong
Figure 1.1 Aquitanian neumes in a late-eleventh-century antiphoner (collection of author): antiphons and psalm
incipits for the office of lauds on the Tuesday of Holy Week
enables us to transcribe chant melodies and to compare them with the

contours outlined less precisely by earlier unheighted staffless neumes.34
Not all staffless neumes were unheighted, however: in Aquitanian notation,
drypoint lines provided an axis around which pitches could be oriented
with great precision (see Figure 1.1).
In the 1020s or 1030s, the north Italian monk Guido of Arezzo devised
a system of staff notation with a red line indicating F and a yellow line
indicating C, the type seen in Figure 1.2. In the course of the eleventh cen-
tury, analogous systems using one or two lines were introduced in much of
western Europe. The wide variety of neumatic notations that had existed in
22 Susan Boynton
Figure 1.2 Central Italian neumes in a twelfth-century antiphoner (collection of author): responsories, antiphons
and psalm incipits for matins on the feast of St Martin
23 Plainsong
chant manuscripts gradually gave way, in many places, to a more uniform

type known as ‘square’ notation (based on solid black squares). Staff nota-
tion and square notation lack most of the nuances and idiosyncrasies that
are such a prominent feature of the earlier neumatic notations. Some of the
performance indications that gradually fell away include the significative
letters in tenth- and eleventh-century manuscripts, principally from the
areas that now comprise Germany and eastern France, but also Aquitaine,
Winchester and the Iberian peninsula. These letters signify directions for
pitch and rhythm, instructing performers to sing higher, lower, or at the
same pitch, to speed up or to slow down, and so on. Such information
would have been useful because the early neumes do not indicate precise
pitches, intervals or durations. Other features of early notation that all but
disappeared in the high Middle Ages were the distinctive neume forms
signalling ornaments or changes of vocal production. Their precise mean-
ings are not fully understood. Notational diversity was not lost altogether,
however. In some regions, particularly in Germanic areas, the Netherlands
and Bohemia, neumes were used well into the thirteenth century and later,
often written on staff lines. Even square notation can manifest regional
particularities.
Late chant composition

The performance and composition of chant continued throughout the
Middle Ages and beyond. Chant composition met a variety of needs, such
as providing music for the celebration of new feasts, or creating a repertory
of proper chants specifically tailored to a particular occasion. Although
some of the most prominent manifestations of this compositional activity
are tropes and sequences (see Chapter 2), the same historical context gave
rise to thousands of new chants for the mass and office. Late chant resembles
the earlier layers of Gregorian chant in many ways, but tends to use melodic
formulas and conventions even more consistently. In a few rare cases one
can study the work of individuals who created new services by composing
new chants and compiling existing ones.35
Following a trend initiated in the tenth century, many new office chants
had texts in verse (sometimes in quantitative metres); for a number of
saints, entirely new versified offices were composed.36 In late offices, the
antiphons and responsories were often arranged in modal order, so that
a chant in mode 1 would be followed by one in mode 2.37 The earliest
examples of such organization are the offices attributed to Bishop Stephen
of Liège (ruled 901–20).38 Modal ordering was not a universal feature of new
offices, but it was common enough to indicate that from the tenth century
24 Susan Boynton
onwards, composers of chant consciously deployed the eight modes as they

are described by theorists of the period, emphasizing the final pitch and the
species of tetrachord (fourth) and pentachord (fifth) that, in combination,
comprise the typical range of each mode. By the eleventh century, each
mode was associated with certain melodic gestures that pervade the corpus
of late chant. Both old and new office antiphons embody these features,
whereas office responsories present a wider range of possibilities. For the
verses of great responsories, composers employed the traditional melodic
formulas associated with the modes, adapted the existing tones for the
verses, or composed entirely new music for them. Each office presents its
own combination of tradition and innovation.39
With the spread of new religious orders across Europe came a heightened
production of offices celebrating their most important saints.40 To name
just a few, the cults of saints particularly venerated by the Franciscans,
Dominicans and Carmelites engendered works that led to the creation of
a new form of archetype: for instance, the office for Saint Francis of Assisi
provided a model for later offices of the Franciscan saints Clare, Louis
of Anjou and Elizabeth of Hungary. Contrafacts (settings of new texts to
existing melodies) reflect the composer’s coordination of the new melody
with the poetic structure of the original text, but in some cases the new
office entirely reworks the underlying textual and musical structure.41
Religious reformers also transformed entire chant repertories. In the
eleventh and twelfth centuries, monasteries reformed by the abbey of Cluny
sometimes adopted its chant repertory, in whole or in part.42 The Cister-
cian revision aimed to produce a more authentic version of the Gregorian
antiphoner.43 The Carmelites introduced new feasts particular to the cults
of their order.44 The Dominicans diffused exemplars from which to copy
liturgical books so as to ensure uniformity throughout the order.45 The
Franciscans shaped the late medieval liturgy of the Roman curia.46
Throughout the high and late Middle Ages, European ecclesiastical cen-
tres continually produced new chant books and new compositions. Brussels,
Florence and Toledo are but three of the major cities whose long chant tra-
ditions have been explored in recent years.47 In the fifteenth century, plain-
song remained the central component of religious services, even as vocal
polyphony flourished. The Hussite movement in Bohemia produced litur-
gical chants with Czech texts (both translations of Latin chants and new
vernacular compositions).48 Guillaume Du Fay, a composer best known
today for his polyphony, created a collection of chants for feasts of the
Virgin Mary that offers insight into a late medieval composer’s approach
to chant.49 The proliferation of devotional and liturgical performances at
different locations in a single church characterized the late Middle Ages,
25 Plainsong
when commemorations founded by individuals created numerous services

in addition to the principal ones at the high altar.50
The performance and composition of plainsong continued to flour-
ish in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, responding to
reforms and liturgical needs.51 Revised versions of plainsong can be heard
in a few churches today (albeit rarely since the Second Vatican Council),
but medieval chant now reaches listeners most often through concert per-
formances and recordings. The increasing availability of such resources will
enable the readers of this volume to explore the rich and varied legacy of
plainsong more easily than ever before.
2 Enriching the Gregorian heritage
michael m c grade
New music in Francia

In 843, Charlemagne’s descendants met at the city of Verdun and divided
the Carolingian empire into three kingdoms. By this time churches and
monasteries from Aquitania to Saxony were, for the most part, observing a
common liturgy based on Roman practices.1 The stability of this Gregorian
rite, its ability to survive the political division of the empire, rests on the
success of the educational programmes Charlemagne established in the
late eighth century. The Carolingian emphasis on literacy, musicianship
and the accurate reproduction of books all provided a solid foundation for
the new liturgy, and the ninth-century canons and monks who inherited
the newly forged rite developed a wide variety of tools – tonaries, theory
treatises, and musical notation itself – to preserve and pass down this
legacy.
The division of the Carolingian empire in 843 had important conse-
quences for the history of music. The Treaty of Verdun polarized the Euro-
pean continent, creating Eastern and Western realms divided roughly by
the Rhine river. The geographic division is reflected in the emergence and
development of two musical traditions. Whereas chants that entered the
liturgy before the early 840s appear in books across the European continent
with substantial fixity, melodies that were composed later, in the late ninth,
tenth, and eleventh centuries, tend to appear exclusively in sources either
east or west of the Rhine. After about 1100, the boundary between East and
West became more permeable, and the wide dissemination of chant once
again became common.2
The educational strategies the Carolingians developed to preserve the
Gregorian chant also offered a set of principles for the invention and nota-
tion of new works, stylistically distinct from the Gregorian repertory. Some
scholars refer to these newer compositions as ‘medieval’ or ‘Frankish’ chant.3
The two most important genres of Frankish chant emerged and flour-
ished late in the ninth century and early in the tenth: the trope and the
sequence.
Two monastic houses are particularly important to our understanding
of these new genres, the monastery of St Gall in the East Frankish kingdom,
and the monastery of St Martial in the heart of the Aquitaine region of
[26]
West Francia. Their libraries preserve the largest collections of early tropes
and sequences; their books are the foundation of our knowledge about this
music before 1100.4
Only two years after the meeting at Verdun, Charles the Bald, ruler of
the West Frankish kingdom, assembled an ecclesiastical synod at Meaux,
just outside of Paris. The delegates voiced concern over the deterioration
of church services, and they took steps to improve discipline and pro-
mote orthodox observances among the clergy. In one statute, the council
denounced the practice of adding new compositions and new words to the
Gregorian music:
. . . we decree that no member of the clergy [and] no monk may presume
to undertake, interpose, recite, murmur, or sing any compositions which
they call prosas, or any other creations [uel ullas fictiones], during the
angelic hymn, that is Gloria in excelsis deo, or during the sequentiae,
which are usually sung after the Alleluia. If one will have been made, throw
it out.5
For many singers, no doubt, the imperative to preserve the chant had
cultivated an impulse to enrich it. Here that enrichment seems confined
to the addition of new texts to melismatic passages, but the prohibition of
‘other creations’ suggests that adding words to melismas was not the only
outlet for creative singers. The council also documents the performance
of sequentiae, long melismatic passages added to the alleluia, but it is not
the earliest witness of that practice. Indeed, neither of these activities –
the addition of text or melismas – was new in 845. Both must have been
sufficiently common to warrant such condemnation.
Melismas
Evidence that singers were adding new music to Gregorian chant appears
in one of the earliest of all chant books – in fact, it is the first book to call
the newly collected mass propers ‘Gregorian’ – the unnotated gradual from
the abbey of Mont-Blandin near Ghent, copied around the year 800.6 Six
alleluias in this book are marked with a rubric that instructed performers to
add an extensive melisma, known as a sequentia, to the chant.7 The sequen-
tia replaced or extended the usual melisma, known as the jubilus, when
the Alleluia was repeated after the verse. A performance could follow this
scheme:
Alleluia. Alleluia + jubilus
psalm verse
Alleluia. Alleluia + sequentia
28 Michael McGrade
About a generation after the Mont-Blandin gradual was copied, Amalarius

of Metz, in his allegorical commentaries on the liturgy, described the singing
not only of sequentiae, but also of the ornate neuma triplex, a three-part
melisma appended to the last office responsory on the feasts of Christmas
and St John the Evangelist.8
Sequentiae and the neuma triplex were lengthy melodies, but more
modest melismatic additions can be found as well. For example, the introit
for the feast of St Gall, Sacerdotes tui domine, was drawn from the commune
sanctorum, a pool of generic chants that commemorated a saint according
to his or her classification as a confessor, martyr, virgin, bishop and so on.
The text of the introit, drawn from Psalm 132, is:
[Introit:] Sacerdotes tui domine, induant iustitiam, et sancti tui exsultent:

propter David servum tuum, non avertas faciem Christi tui. Alleluia, alleluia.
V[erse]: Memento domine David: et omnes mansuetudinis eius
Let your priests, O Lord, be clothed with justice, and let your faithful
rejoice; for your servant David’s sake do not turn away the face of your
anointed one. Alleluia, alleluia.
V: Remember, O Lord, David and all his mildness
The monks at the monastery of St Gall composed two sets of melismatic

additions for this chant. Like most musical embellishments of this kind,
the placement of the new melismas is identified in the sources only by cues
provided by the scribes, so in the manuscript St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 484,
we find melismas appended to the following words (Figure 2.1):9
Sacerd[otes] D[omi]ne
Iustitiam
Exultent
Tuum [fa]ciem
A comparison of these cues with the psalm text above shows that they
highlight breaks in the syntax of the text. Both sets of melismatic additions
in St Gall 484 use the same words as cues.
New texts
Adding a new melisma was just one way in which a singer could ornament
a chant. It was also common for singers to add words to lengthy, untexted
melodies. The earliest notated example of this practice appears in a book
from the abbey of St Emmeram in Regensburg. This book contains a reading
of the chant Alleluia. Christus resurgens in which a text beginning with the
words ‘Psalle modulamina’ has been added to the melismatic verse; such a
Figure 2.1 Melismatic additions to the introit Sacerdotes tui domine (CH-SGs 484, p. 186)
text is known as a prosula.10 The St Emmeram copy of the Psalle modulamina

may be the earliest surviving example of neumatic notation, dating perhaps
as far back as the third or fourth decade of the ninth century.11
Tropes
Like so many medieval terms, the word ‘trope’ has the irritating property
of meaning both less and more than modern scholars would like it to
mean, and our notions of what it should mean has led to confusion.12 In
modern scholarship, the word ‘trope’ frequently refers to three practices:
the addition of new music to a chant, the addition of text to a melisma,
and the addition of newly composed words and music to pre-existing
chant.13
30 Michael McGrade
When used as a generic category in the Middle Ages, the term had a
narrow scope: it referred to newly composed words and music in a small
number of specific liturgical contexts.14 The disadvantage of the modern
definition is its tendency to subsume a broad spectrum of musical activities
under a single rubric, thus encumbering our efforts to study those activities
sympathetically. Nevertheless, the modern use is convenient, entrenched,
and unlikely to change; thoughtful students of the period should avoid
confusing it with the more specific medieval meaning.
One body of music associated with the Kyrie eleison highlights this
terminological problem.15 Compositions often referred to in modern liter-
ature as ‘Kyrie tropes’ are not really tropes at all. Typically, any Kyrie chant
that includes more than the Greek words of the acclamation – ‘Kyrie eleison,
Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison’ – has been called a trope. But because there is
no evidence that the Latin texts were not part of the original composition,
it is more accurate to think of these compositions as Latin-texted Kyries. In
other words, there is no indication that Kyrie Cunctipotens genitor or Kyrie
Te Christe ever existed in an untexted (or ‘untroped’) form, and that gener-
ically their history is distinct from that of tropes in the specific, medieval
sense. These texted Kyries were almost certainly original compositions, not
melismatic chants with prosulae added later.
One further argument against thinking of Latin-texted Kyries as tropes
is the existence of true Kyrie tropes, which are newly composed phrases
of text and music that introduce the Kyrie chant and appear between its
acclamations.
We return to the introit Sacerdotes tui domine and the feast of St Gall for
a nice example of a trope in the narrow sense. It appears in the manuscript
St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 381, dating from the early to mid tenth century.16
In the transcription below, the boldfaced words belong to the introit, the
italiziced words and syllables, also part of the introit, mark the placement
of added melismas. The phrases written in plain text indicate the newly
composed tropes. As in St Gall 484, only cues for the introit are provided.
Hodie sanctissimi patroni nostri Galli anima choris supernis iuncta iubilat
quapropter et nos exultemus canentes.
Sacerdotes tui domine Qui es verus sacerdos et rex summus atque
immensus. Domine
Iustitiam Ut tibi placere possint sanctis meritis. Tiam
Exultent In exultatione sempiternae trinitatis. Tent
Tuum Que exultasti de pastore in regem Tuum
Memento. Eius Quique consueverat spiritu
Today the spirit of our most holy patron Gallus, joined to the choirs above,
shouts with joy, and for this reason we rejoice, singing:
Let your priests, O Lord, [you] who are the true priest and the highest,
fathomless king
Be clothed with justice, so that they might please you with holy actions
And let your saints rejoice, in praise of the everlasting trinity
For the sake of your servant David, who leapt from shepherd to king,
Do not turn away the face of your anointed one.
V: O Lord, remember David and all his meekness, and each person who
had become accustomed to the spirit
Each new line is itself a trope, sometimes called a trope verse or a trope
element. The introductory line and all of the interpolations constitute a set
of tropes.17 This particular set includes an element for the psalm verse, a
relatively uncommon feature.
Scribes notated the music for this set of tropes with staffless neumes. This
is the case for all of the early books from St Gall, so it is difficult to draw
any conclusions about the nature of the early trope melodies composed
there. The earliest St Gall manuscripts with diastematic notation – notation
that provides pitch information – date from the late twelfth century. The
melodies from West Frankish institutions are more accessible, and, unlike
many Gregorian melodies, they tend to be strongly rooted in the modal
system. The individual elements also tend to reflect a sensitivity to musical
phrasing to coordinate with the Gregorian phrases, sometimes through
unresolved cadences, sometimes not.18
Tropes were appealing because they made generic chants serve specific
purposes. The introit Sacerdotes tui domine was used for confessor-saints at
many religious houses. By adding a set of tropes to this chant, the monks
at the monastery of St Gall drew attention to his special status as patron of
their community. Because the introit was the chant that began the mass,
it was the best place to focus attention on the special relevance of a given
feast. It is not surprising, then, that of all types of trope (by any definition),
those for the introit are the most numerous.
Aquitanian versus
Some time in the eleventh century, tropes began to lose their appeal. The
trend is most clearly documented in the Aquitanian sources, where tropes
are recorded in smaller and smaller numbers through the eleventh century.19
They were replaced by a new type of song, notable for its poetic sensitivity
and grace, the versus. Versus (the word is both singular and plural) were
usually strophic, and their melodies bore a close syntactic relationship
with the verse forms they set. There was no standard form, so the versus
32 Michael McGrade
invited experimentation and novelty. This sense of innovation and play also
characterizes the polyphonic settings of these works.20
Versus commonly begin with a repeated note, syllabically setting the
opening words of the poem. Following this simple declamation, the tune
usually unfolds in a series of phrases that vary in length. The melodies move
within the confines of the various octave species and have a clear tonal focus.
Aquitanian composers paid increasing attention to the pitches on which
individual phrases came to rest. Short phrase units are often coordinated
with the sense of the text, and the ends of lines or other important syntactic
breaks are frequently punctuated with melismas, some extravagant in their
length.21
The versus had a counterpart in northern France in the conductus. While
many aspects of the two genres differ, they share important features, among
them a freedom of verse forms, the originality of the melodies, the delicate
coordination of text and music, and a magnetic appeal to polyphonists.
The early sequence: Notker’s Liber hymnorum

Interest in the versus had diminished by the end of the twelfth century,
and the conductus began to decline in the second quarter of the thirteenth.
The liturgical sequence, on the other hand, experienced a resurgence in the
twelfth century.
Sequences first appeared late in the ninth century. They were new chants
composed for specific feasts and they sound very different from the Gre-
gorian propers, Frankish ordinaries, and tropes of the period. They were
usually sung during the mass after the alleluia; occasionally they were melod-
ically related to the alleluia that preceded them. Sequences were composed
for many centuries, with new ones joining the liturgy until the middle of
the sixteenth century, when all but five were banned by the Council of Trent
(1546–65).
Sequences are characterized by a simple design principle. Lines of text
are composed in pairs. A melody is composed for the first member of the
pair and repeated for the second. Each new pair of lines receives a new
repeating melody, as follows:
Melody: AA BB CC etc.
Text: ab cd ef etc.
Sometimes a single line of text begins and ends the composition, and occa-
sionally an unmatched line will appear in the middle of a work, especially
in the early repertory, but the scheme above can be considered a model of
the form despite this variance.
The first document that refers to the liturgical sequence unambiguously

is the preface to the earliest known collection of these pieces, the Liber
hymnorum (Book of Hymns) by Notker of St Gall (ca840–912).22 The
Liber hymnorum was probably completed around 884. Notker begins his
preface with the complaint that the very long melodiae, melismas known
elsewhere as sequentiae, easily escaped his memory. But when he inspected
the contents of an antiphoner from the Abbey of Jumièges – the book was
carried to St Gall by a Norman monk fleeing the Vikings – he found a
solution to his mnemonic troubles. The antiphoner contained examples of
the liturgical alloy condemned by the Council of Meaux: the Jumiégeois
monks had added words to sequentiae.
Adding text to a sequentia does not make a sequence, but many of these
long melismas have internal phrases that repeat, and such a structure could
have suggested to Notker the double cursus that characterizes the sequence.
Notker himself tells us that the exempla he found in the antiphoner were
disappointing, but that they inspired him to compose his own works, which
he developed further with the advice of his teacher and abbot. A small
number of early sequences have a clear melodic relationship to an alleluia,
but such relationships are not an essential feature of the genre. Once he had
completed several sequences, Notker assembled them in his Liber hymnorum
and presented the collection to the Bishop of Vercelli.
A fragment of the original Liber hymnorum may survive in the monastery
of St Gall. Susan Rankin has persuasively shown that the manuscript St
Gall, Kantonsbibliothek (Vadiana) 317 is a kind of master copy from which
presentation copies of the Liber hymnorum were prepared.23 Nearly all
other copies of the Liber hymnorum appear about a century after Notker’s
death.
Early manuscripts: the two traditions

Notker’s Liber hymnorum formed the heart of the sequence repertory in the
East Frankish lands, but this was not the case in the West. In fact, the East and
West Frankish sequence repertories are almost completely exclusive. When
a melody appears both east and west of the Rhine, its texts are almost always
different. The separation of Eastern and Western sequences is reflected not
only in the content of the repertories, but also in the material record, in the
structure of the books.24
The notation of eastern books differs from that used by West Frankish
scribes in significant ways. Eastern scribes copied sequence texts in a way
that draws attention to the paired lines of the text. They began each new
line of verse at the left margin and highlighted the opening word with a
capital letter. The melodies were then notated as melismas in the margins.
34 Michael McGrade
In some later East Frankish books neumes were placed over the syllables of
text, but these supplemented the marginal notation; they did not replace it.
Each melody is also usually identified by a name. For example, the melody
for the sequence honouring St Gall, Dilecte deo Galle perenni, is Iustus ut
palma minor, perhaps reflecting the melodic incipit the sequence shared
with the alleluia that preceded it.
In the West, scribes did little to represent the structure of the text on
the page. Instead, the lines of the chant were laid out continuously, like
sentences in a paragraph, with the first word of each new versicle marked
with a capital letter. Sometimes neumes were placed above the text, but
West Frankish scribes never wrote melismas in the margins. Instead, they
often wrote out entire untexted sequence melodies in separate fascicles. The
beginning of an untexted sequence melody was usually indicated by the
word ‘Alleluia’ (or some abbreviation of it) written under the first musical
phrase. Subsequent phrases were sometimes introduced with the letter ‘a’,
and the ends of phrases were often marked with a letter or some other
sign. A rubric giving the opening words of the sequence often follows the
complete tune, but the melodic names found in the East Frankish books
are absent. Figures 2.2a and 2.2b show pages from East and West Frankish
books respectively.
Also marking the division between East and West Frankish traditions is
the relatively small body of partially texted sequences (the modern designa-
tion is misleading – they are not sequences, but rather partially texted
sequentiae). These works appear only in West Frankish books, chiefly
from England and France. Partially texted sequences begin like a typical
alleluia, but continue with extensive melismas, some of which are con-
structed to form a series of repeated melodic phrases. Selected phrases in the
melisma – most typically the fifth, eighth or ninth, and eleventh or thir-
teenth – are then provided with words.25
Finally, terminological differences separate the East and West Frankish
traditions. In the East, sequentia refers to the liturgical chant we now call
a sequence; the word prosa was not used in Germanic sources. In the
West, sequentia was either a textless melody, or a partially texted sequence,
while prosa was the term analogous to the modern sequence. Some writers
have argued that this difference in terminology may indicate differences in
performance practice and perhaps even musical conception.26
Notker’s Pentecost sequence

Notker’s Pentecost sequence Sancti spiritus assit nobis gratia is one of the
few East Frankish sequences to find a home in the West Frankish realm.
Figure 2.2(a) East Frankish notation of a sequence (CH-SGs 378, p. 223)
Ulrich von Zell, writing in the late eleventh century, noted that Eastern
and Western tastes differed, but that this one sequence appealed to musical
sensibilities on both sides of the Rhine:
. . . although not all the French care very much for the proses of the
Germans, nevertheless, the blessed father Odilo, being pressed and then
allying himself with our countrymen, maintained that this one only, Sancti
spiritus adsit gratia, might be sung on this day in our place [i.e., Cluny].27
The two opening versicles illustrate Notker’s style nicely (Example 2.1):28
1 Sancti spiritus adsit nobis gratia, May the grace of the Holy Spirit be with us,
2a Quae corda nostra sibi faciat and make our hearts its dwelling place,
habitaculum,
2b Expulsis inde cunctis vitiis having driven out all spiritual vices from
spiritalibus. them.29
36 Michael McGrade
Figure 2.2(b) West Frankish notation of a sequence (F-Pa 1169, fols. 40v–41r)
Notker’s melodies have direction, and his sequences reflect a sensitivity

to the overall shape of the piece. His melodies tend to lie within the ambitus
of the various octave species, with individual phrases and versicles moving
thoughtfully, often dramatically, within the constituent fourths and fifths of
each mode. The opening versicle, for example, establishes the fourth from
G to C, with a lower neighbour to the final, F. The A–G–F–G–G cadence, a
figure that punctuates each of the phrases, is also established in this opening
Example 2.1 Opening of Sancti Spiritus adsit nobis gratia (CH-SGs 383, p. 85)
phrase. The second versicle expands the tonal space to the fifth pitch above
the final. In the third phrase, the melody descends; now that the fifth
above the final has been established, the fourth below is explored here and
in the next versicle. By the end of the fourth versicle, the plagal form of
the G mode has been confirmed, and the fifth and sixth phrases confine
themselves, for the most part, to the fifth above the final.
The number of syllables changes from line to line in early sequences;
in Sancti spiritus assit nobis gratia the first versicle has twelve syllables,
the second, fifteen. Often the line lengths grow progressively longer until
they reach a point of climax. Consider, for example, the sixth and seventh
versicles (Example 2.2):
6a Ut videri supremus genitor possit That the Father on high may be seen
a nobis, by us,
6b Mundi cordis quem soli cernere Whom only the eyes of the pure heart
possunt oculi. may see.
7a Prophetas tu inspirasti, ut Thou didst inspire the prophets to
praeconia Christi praecinuissent proclaim their glorious foretellings of
inclita: Christ;
7b Apostolos confortasti, uti Thou didst strengthen the apostles to
tropheum Christi per totum convey Christ’s trophy throughout
mundi veherent. the world
In the seventh versicle, by far the longest thus far, the melody for the first
time traverses both the lower fourth and the upper fifth of the plagal mode
38 Michael McGrade
Example 2.2 Sixth and seventh versicles of Sancti Spiritus adsit nobis gratia (CH-SGs 383, pp. 86–7)
on G. The length of this versicle, combined with the greater range of the
melody, mark it as an important turning point, one that is supported by
the structure of the text.
The seventh versicle also shows how the lines of text tend to follow the
same syntactic plan, so caesurae and other breaks in the sense of the text
are coordinated with the shape of the melody; an example appears in lines
7a and 7b after ‘inspirasti’ and ‘confortasti.’ Note also the alignment of the
word ‘Christi’ in each line of the seventh versicle, as well as the words ‘possit’
and ‘possunt’ in the sixth versicle. In addition to these verbal patterns, the
texts are constructed so that word boundaries and vowel sounds are often
preserved from line to line.
Notker’s sequences have a declamatory freedom that sets them apart
from the liturgical poetry of the period. This is due in part to the variation
in line lengths, as well as the variety of phrasing within each individual
line. The lines themselves seem to reflect an awareness of their artfulness;
they are invigorated by the spirit of poetry, yet tempered by the decorum of
classical oratory. The melodies, with their calculated phrasing and attention
to a large-scale plan, also seem indebted to the rhetorical principles of
antiquity.
After 1050, as noted above, the imaginary boundary between East and
West became more permeable and the systems of writing down sequences
began to converge. In the East, the names of the melodies gradually dis-
appeared and the preferred method of notation placed neumes above the
individual syllables of text. In the West, sequence melodies were no longer
collected and notated without their texts. Furthermore, a small collection
of approximately a dozen new sequences, sometimes labelled ‘transitional’
works, began to appear throughout Europe. The patterns of dissemination
that governed the earlier East and West Frankish sequences did not apply to
these new compositions. They are characterized by more florid melodies and
the introduction of rhyme, metre, and other poetic devices into what was
formerly art prose. The link between text and melody also seems stronger
in the transitional sequence. When new texts were composed for these late-
eleventh- and early-twelfth-century sequence melodies, they often referred
to the original text, drawing attention to it by similar word choice and
syntax.30 These transitional works do not form a repertory; rather, they
were at first copied and preserved ad hoc in collections that retained a
strong Eastern or Western orientation; later, after 1050, the sources them-
selves became more cosmopolitan, reflecting the performance of Eastern
and Western compositions under one roof.31
Parisian sequences
The sequence underwent a significant change in the first quarter of the
twelfth century. The most obvious manifestation of this change was the
adoption of a strict poetic structure: the number of syllables, poetic metre,
and rhyme scheme became standardized. From the early twelfth century
onwards the typical sequence followed a verse form in which lines of text
were broken into 8 + 8 + 7 syllables. For example:
Templum cordis adornemus Let us adorn the temple of the heart

Novo corde renovemus Let us renew with new heart
Novum senis gaudium; The new joy of the old man:
Quod dum ulnis amplexatur, While he embraces it with his arms
Sic longevi recreatur Thus is fulfilled the long-standing desire
Longum desiderium. Of the aged man.32
As the form of the sequence verse changed, so too did the content. Twelfth-
century sequences tend to align themselves with the traditions of liturgical
commentary and exegesis rather than the conventions of hagiography and
hymnody that influenced earlier generations of the genre.33 The centre for
this shift was twelfth-century Paris, a city where theology, poetry and music
flourished with new vigour.
40 Michael McGrade
Twelfth-century sequences are more allegorical than those of the past,

no doubt a reflection of the influence of Saint Augustine, who, in his De
doctrina christiana, argued that sacred texts were to be read in multiple ways,
and that literal, historical truth was only one of several truths contained
in scripture. He pointed the way towards seeing the events of the Old
Testament as prefigurations of the events in the New.34 Augustine prompted
readers to ask what symbolic meaning a text held (the allegorical mode of
interpretation) and what lessons might be drawn from it (the tropological
mode). He offered a vision of reading and explication that the Parisian
students and masters took up with gusto.
The chief poet and musician associated with the new sequence was Adam
of St Victor (d. 1146). Adam was precentor at the cathedral of Notre Dame
in Paris by about 1107, and he advocated reforming the clergy according to
principles of religious living derived from the writings of Saint Augustine.35
He moved to the Abbey of St Victor in Paris around 1133, where he was
a colleague of the great theologian Hugh (ca1096–1141). Adam composed
texts and melodies for numerous sequences in the new style. More than 100
of the new sequences survive in Parisian books, with a core of approximately
40 shared by both Notre Dame and St Victor, but it was almost certainly
the canons at St Victor who led in the creation of these new works. The
exegetical teachings of Hugh are clear in the texts, as is a strong Augustinian
bias, both of which point to the abbey as the centre of composition.36
Later in the century, probably sometime between 1150 and 1175, the
canons at St Victor began to edit and rearrange the works of Adam. New
texts were composed, others were excised and replaced. The canons of St
Victor, having perhaps inherited the West Frankish tendency to associate
and preserve the relationship between specific feasts and specific sequence
melodies, began to construct an intricate genealogy of sequences by fitting
new texts to pre-existing sequences, a process known as contrafacting. Con-
trafacting differs from simple texting in that contrafacted words replace a
text already in place. The practice was far from new, but the Victorine canons
actuated its exegetical power like none before them. The new texts addressed
and developed complex theological themes, and the common ground occu-
pied by these texts was emphasized by the melodies they shared.37
The sequence for the ritual purification of Mary provides a fine example
of the Victorine sequence. The depth and intricacy of this work is too com-
plicated to explore here, but a few points will highlight some features of the
new style. The rhyming, poetic text immediately sets the work apart from
the compositions of Notker, his contemporaries, and his followers. Indi-
vidual melodic phrases are uniformly periodic, standing in sharp contrast
to the ebb and flow of line lengths and caesurae in the early sequence. The
orderly structure of the Victorine text is further emphasized by the trochaic
Example 2.3 Opening of Templum cordis adornemus (F-Pn fonds lat. 14817, fol. 60r).
metre, a feature that may have contributed to the development of rhythm

in twelfth-century Parisian polyphony.38
The texture of the Parisian sequence, the approach to text setting, also
differs from earlier works. Notker’s melodies are more regularly syllabic
than the Parisian compositions. The melody of the first versicle of Templum
cordis adornemus clearly shows this stylistic difference when compared to
the opening of Notker’s Pentecost sequence. Only one syllable in Notker’s
setting is supplied with more than one pitch, and that is the first syllable
of the composition. There are a few instances of two-notes-per-syllable
later in the work, but they are exceptional. The setting of Templum cordis
adornemus, on the other hand, does not strictly follow a one-note-per-
syllable rule, as the opening versicle shows (Example 2.3), and this melodic
richness is typical of the late style.
The melody of Templum cordis is shared by five other texts, all of which,
arguably, have a Marian theme. The model for this melody was the well-
known Marian hymn Ave maris stella, and this association would have given
the sequence an unmistakable Marian connotation, one that would have
been recognized by the singers of the day.39
Liturgical drama
Along with tropes and sequences, the oldest notated books also contain brief
musical dialogues that are the earliest surviving examples of an abundant,
diverse genre known as liturgical drama.40 In the earliest dialogues or plays,
phrases of direct speech were performed by two or more singers who rep-
resented the speakers in a biblical story. There was no effort to impersonate
42 Michael McGrade
a character in the modern sense; rather, these exchanges drew attention to

the rhetorical status of the text as speech. As Susan Rankin has pointed out,
these works were foils for celebrating the message of the Resurrection or
the Incarnation in the present.41
The earliest liturgical dialogue, the Quem queritis, recounted the New
Testament scene in which the three Marys met a (single) angel at Christ’s
tomb (Mark 16:1–7).42 In its most simple form it has only three lines:
[Angels’] Question: Whom do you seek in the tomb, devotees of Christ?

[Marys’] Answer: Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified, O creatures of
heaven.
[Angels]: He is not here; he has risen as he foretold. Go forth,
tell that he has risen from the tomb.43
The Quem queritis dialogue survives in a wide variety of forms. Nearly

all share these three lines, but the large number of antiphons, hymns and
other chants that were added to them suggest that the play was a favourite
vehicle for the creativity of medieval singers. Its wide dissemination and
preservation in both East and West Frankish books, along with the clearly
Frankish melodic style, point to a date of origin in the ninth century.44
Just as the complement of chants making up the Quem queritis dialogue
varied, likewise the liturgical position of the play changed from place to
place.45 In some locales Quem queritis served as a trope to the Easter introit
Resurrexi, in others it was incorporated into a procession before the Easter
mass. Most typically it was performed after the third responsory of the
matins service for Easter. It was in this liturgical position that the singers
elaborated and developed the dialogue to the greatest degree. Modern schol-
ars refer to these more complex versions of the dialogue as Visitatio sepulchri
plays.46
The earliest example of the Visitatio sepulchri is preserved in the first
source to provide information on its performance, the Regularis Concordia.
In this work, a handbook on monastic life copied around 970 by Bishop
Ethelwold of Winchester, singers are told when to dress for the play, where
to stand, how to behave (‘to move about as though they are seeking some-
thing’, velut erraneos ac aliquid quaerentes), and how to sing (‘with a sweet
voice’, dulcisone voce).47 Later plays also contain performance instructions of
this type.
Quem queritis served as a model for a Christmas play that first appears
in sources from the middle of the eleventh century. The play is a trope
in dialogue form for the introit Puer natus est. It borrows some of the
language of the Easter model and also replicates the dramatic situation: this
time shepherds are seeking the newborn Jesus in the manger. Similarly, the
more elaborate Visitatio sepulchri finds a counterpart in the Adoration of
the Magi, an expanded Christmas drama that was performed during the
matins service.
The late eleventh century marks the beginning of a new epoch in the
history of liturgical drama. New topics received dramatic treatment –
a wider range of biblical scenes as well as episodes from the lives of the
saints – and the preference for verse composition that we observed in the
late sequence and the versus began to express itself in the lines of liturgical
plays.
The ten works collected in the Fleury Playbook (Orléans, Bibliothèque
Municipale, Ms 201) provide an excellent example of the diversity found
in later liturgical plays. Bound as a group in a larger codex containing
sermons and other religious writings, the plays were probably copied in the
second half of the twelfth century. Four dramatize a series of miracles by
Saint Nicholas, five draw on scenes from the life of Jesus, and one takes the
conversion of Saint Paul as its subject. Some mix original melodies with
traditional antiphons and other liturgical songs, while others are newly
composed in their entirety.48
The Fleury plays possess a richness of dramatic representation that sets
them apart from the earlier dialogues. Works such as the Play of Herod, the
Play of the Innocents, and the Visitatio introduce a mild element of struggle
or conflict not otherwise encountered in medieval religious observances.49
These dramatic struggles are engendered in part by the depiction of emo-
tions such as the anger of Herod or the sorrow of Rachel. Although the
melodies attenuated anything we might call ‘personal expression’, the texts,
the performance rubrics and perhaps the singing itself nudged these plays
towards theatre.50 In fact, the twelfth-century writers Gerhoh of Reich-
ersberg and Herrad of Landsberg, both leaders of monastic communities,
identified and condemned a drift away from ritual propriety in liturgical
drama.51 Nowhere was the lapse into theatrical entertainment more evident
than in the Beauvais Play of Daniel.52 After The Play of Daniel, that is, after
the early thirteenth century, the composition of new Latin liturgical plays
declined steadily, and the tradition of religious drama found expression in
the vernacular mystery plays of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Performance
We have seen that liturgical plays were sometimes appointed with rubrics for
their performance, but how did canons and monks perform a sequence like
Templum cordis or a set of tropes like Hodie sanctissimi? Very few sources
from the ninth or tenth centuries can answer this question directly, but
later books known as ordinals provide detailed information about liturgical
44 Michael McGrade
observances from the twelfth century onwards. Ordinals vary from church
to church. They describe the correct execution of the various feasts of the
year. Most commonly they reminded the celebrant of the chants that were to
be sung and the personnel who were assigned to sing them. The description
of some rites remained stable for many generations, changing little from one
book to another copied many centuries later. Changes in the architecture of
a church, the accumulation of relics, and the adoption of new feasts, or the
wholesale reform of a liturgical tradition, often prompted the composition
of a new ordinal with new instructions.53 Within any given ordinal, the
instructions for the performance of a chant could vary from feast to feast.
An ordinal from the cathedral of Metz, copied in the late thirteenth
century, shows us how the performance of the sequence varied over the
course of the year. For the feast of the Ascension, we are told
This sequence is sung: Rex omnipotens . . . the first verse should be sung by
two canons in the middle of the choir, the second [verse] by the right part,
the third by the left, and in this way the others.54
In other instances, the cantor was given the option of choosing the chant.
At the second mass for the Holy Innocents, the ordo reads: ‘This sequence
is sung: Hac clara die or another which will please [the cantor].’55
An unusual set of instructions appears in the ordo for the mass com-
memorating the Invention of St Stephen (3 August), the patron saint of
Metz cathedral:
The aforementioned monks [. . .] should sing Alleluia Iudicant sancti. The

nuns should sing the words of the sequence, namely: Congaudent angelorum,
the canons, on the other hand, should sing the notes next to the words.56
Aside from the surprising participation of the nuns in this service, there is
no mention of alternatim performance here. Rather, the ordo seems to ask
for parallel performances of the chant, one with words and one without;
perhaps it dictates a performance of organum. Another possibility is the
alternation of texted and untexted phrases of the chant. Earlier in the same
service, a Latin-texted Kyrie was performed in the same way:
One of the cantors should take the little books which are called Tropier and
give them to the nuns for the singing of the Kyrie Fons or Cunctipotens or Te
Christe supplices exoramus. For the nuns should sing the words, the canons,
on the other hand, the notes next to the words.57
A more straightforward ordo for the feast of St Stephen (26 December)

lends support to the idea that one group sang the chant with text, while
another only a melisma. The ordo for mass on that day says simply: ‘Kyrie
eleison is sung alongside [cantatur iuxta] Kyrie fons bonitatis.’58 Like early
copies of West Frankish sequences, Latin-texted Kyries often appear in two

forms in the earliest manuscript sources: once in a melismatic version,
and once texted. This common notational ground may point to common
performance practices, and perhaps even a common conceptual foundation.
Information about performance can also be inferred from polyphonic
settings of chants. The Winchester tropers, for example, contain a large body
of polyphony from the late tenth and eleventh centuries. Polyphony was
only performed by skilled soloists, and in this collection we find polyphonic
settings of trope elements, as well as the soloists’ parts in Gregorian chant.
This distinction between music for soloists and music for the choir is
preserved in the ordo for Epiphany at Metz:
Once terce has been sung, all the bells are rung together at mass. Three or
four subdeacons standing in the middle of the choir begin: [the trope] Nos
respectu gratie and they sing the whole first verse. When the verse is finished,
the chorus begins [the introit antiphon] Ecce advenit Dominator Dominus,
after this [the subdeacons] sing another [trope] verse: Cuius stellam. The
chorus begins: et regnum in manu eius. [etc.]59
Descriptions of tropes in later ordinals are rare because they occupied a

very small place in the liturgy after about 1100, but this case agrees with
what we would expect based on the Winchester books.
Ordinals often dictate when bells are to be used during the ceremony,
as the excerpt from the Epiphany ordo shows. Bells were commonly tolled
during the sequence. In his Decretals, Lanfranc writes that ‘two large bells
are tolled during the sequence’; in the 1230s at Bury St Edmunds, ‘two large
bells [were] tolled in the choir during the sequence’; an early-fourteenth-
century ordo for Christmas from St Mary’s Abbey in York prescribed the
performance of the sequence Nato canunt ‘at which, as always when the
sequence is sung, two or three bells are rung’.60
The Council of Meaux, like so many reform efforts, did little to arrest the
blossoming musical creativity of medieval monks, canons and nuns. The
Carolingian campaign to standardize liturgical observances by improving
musicianship and literacy stimulated interest in musical expression gener-
ally. The inventiveness of the Carolingian musicians and their heirs found
utterance in a rich variety of new songs. The chants composed in East and
West Francia were, for many centuries, no less orthodox, no less a part of
the Latin liturgy and no less inspiring to later composers than the Gregorian
propers themselves.
3 Early polyphony to circa 1200
sarah fuller
Some surface aspects of musical art for the adornment of ecclesiastical songs have been outlined
here.1
Here begin mellifluous songs of organum upon the sweetest praises of heaven.2
But in whatever way it is done . . . in producing diaphony the precentor must harmoniously sing in
praise of the creator.3
As the above quotations suggest, early Western polyphony was broadly

viewed as a way of elaborating and adorning monophonic chant, was heard
as beautiful and sweet in sound, and was considered an appropriate means
of religious praise. The close connection with religious worship is not sur-
prising, given that the extant written record – both theoretical descriptions
and musical notations – of polyphony stems from literate ecclesiastical and
monastic spheres. But that record is decidedly incomplete and radically
discontinuous. This is because early polyphony was ‘produced’ or ‘made’,
not ‘composed’ in the present-day sense of ‘composition’: it was in the
first instance sounded, not notated. Polyphony arose and continued as a
performance practice, a way of elaborating a known monophonic melody
with a second line that was produced according to accepted conventions.4
Polyphonic singing enhanced worship through amplification of mono-
phonic song. The earliest treatise to describe the phenomenon, the Musica
Enchiriadis from circa 850, treats it as a familiar extempore practice, one
known under two names: diaphony and organum. These alternative terms
(the latter characterized as ‘customary’), refer to different core facets of
polyphony: diaphonia to the dual sounds produced between two voices, the
sounding-apart of the pair; organum to the perfect consonances or sympho-
niae (fourth, fifth, octave) that controlled the relationship between voices.5
Guido of Arezzo’s formulation in Chapter 18 of Micrologus (ca1030) was
widely read and often quoted or paraphrased by later theorists: ‘Diaphony
sounds as a disjunction of pitches [or lines] which we call organum since
these differentiated pitches/lines both sound separately in concord and
concord in their separate sounding.’6 Diaphony remained a two-part phe-
nomenon through the mid twelfth century, although in the most basic
types attested in the earliest treatises (and still practised into the fourteenth
century) either voice or both might be doubled at the octave.
[46]
From a present-day historical perspective, ‘early’ medieval polyphony

is generally understood to span a time period of roughly three centuries,
from the mid ninth century, when the first written descriptions of the phe-
nomenon appear, to around the mid twelfth century, when polyphonic
repertories preceding the advent of Parisian polyphony were notated.
Parisian polyphony (sometimes designated ‘Notre Dame’ polyphony, after
the famous cathedral) is considered a prominent articulation point in the
history of polyphony because of many factors: the magnitude of its notated
repertory, transmission of that music in multiple sources, an innovative
technology of rhythmic notation, its status as a foundation for later devel-
opments in polyphony (pieces for 3–4 voices, the thirteenth-century motet),
the extensive theoretical literature that accrued around it. This chapter deals
principally with what can be discerned about diaphony or organum up to
the advent of the Parisian repertory. Although ca1160 is a rough cut-off
point for this survey, basic techniques for generating polyphony engen-
dered in this ‘early’ period persisted for decades beyond the 1100s.
Broadly speaking, our knowledge of early polyphony stems from two
sorts of material traces: instructions in theoretical treatises and notations of
organum in musical neumes. The two are decidedly different in nature: the
former essentially didactic and verbal in expression, the latter ‘practical’ rep-
resentations of pieces in musical notation that directly evoke sound. Because
they are generally cast as basic training for novices or summary digests of
simple principles, the theoretical dicta must not be taken as assured guides to
the actual practices of skilled organum singers. Indeed comparison between
theorists’ precepts and collateral notated repertory invariably shows dis-
crepancies (a situation hardly unique to this material and time period).7
But because the notations transmitting the repertory are all indeterminate
to varying degrees, and because the active interpretative traditions that
informed those notations evaporated centuries ago, any modern recon-
structions of the music (in editions or in performances) require historical
grounding in theoretical precepts contemporary with the notations.8
Music historians generally parse pre-Parisian polyphony in three phases
(see Figure 3.1). The earliest is organum based on the concept of parallelism
with a pre-existent chant. This is attested by the oldest treatises of the ninth
into the eleventh century and is manifested in the Winchester organa of
ca1000. The middle phase, described by theorists towards the end of the
eleventh century, is a more freely associative organum in which the added
line is melodically independent from the principal melody. The final phase
is a florid organum characterized by decorative figures in the organal voice
and frequent contrary motion between the lines. The twelfth-century reper-
tories of Aquitanian and Compostelan polyphony exemplify this individual
and elaborate organum. But such ‘phases’ are not to be viewed as stages in
48 Sarah Fuller
Position of
voices Primary Intervals Rhythm Representative Sources
1 ov below pv Focus on 4th or 5th; octave ov observes rhythm of pv Musica Enchiriadis and related
doublings of ov or pv or both; treatises, Guido’s Micrologus,
2 types: 1) strictly parallel, 2) Winchester organum repertory
freely parallel with boundary
tones and unison
convergences (occursus).
2 ov above pv Mix of 4th, 5th, 8ve, u. ov observes rhythm of pv Ad organum faciendum and
related treatises, John’s Musica
3 ov above pv, Mix of 4th, 5th, 8ve, u; ov ov independent Aquitanian polyphony,
voice-crossings figural elaborations with rhythmically from pv Compostelan polyphony; late
diverse intervals phase 2 treatises and
interval-progression treatises
Figure 3.1 Cumulative phases of early organum production

(ov = organal voice; pv = principal voice; u = unison)
which one practice supplants the previous one; rather, each practice sim-
ply adds another strand to accrued possibilities. Earlier practices continue
actively alongside later ones, as we know from fourteenth-century theorists
who describe how to produce ‘simple’ parallel polyphony, and from late
medieval notations of polyphony in retrospective styles.9 This continued
vitality of early traditions for producing diaphony may be traced both to
regional habits and to the level of musical competency available in local
situations.10
The changing course of new protocols for realizing polyphony is more
apparent in the pedagogical treatises – of which there is a fairly steady (if
chronologically blurred) record – than in the substantial notated reperto-
ries where there is a considerable gap between the Winchester organa of
ca1000 and the emergence of Aquitanian polyphony around 1100. But the
treatises, limited as they are to giving compact directions for improvising
music in two parts, offer only partial guidance to actual practices and would
all have required considerable amplification by a seasoned singing master.
The Musica Enchiriadis author admits to providing only a surface view of
polyphonic adornment, while a later author, coping with a situation in
which the organal voice exercises considerable choice relative to the cantus,
simply acknowledges the inadequacy of written precepts: ‘All this is better
revealed through the practice of organum singers than through rules.’11
The repertories, along with sporadic notations of individual polyphonic
pieces, not only manifest creative musical facets that extend well beyond
didactic formulations, but also provide essential (if partial) insight into
ritual contexts for polyphony. Polyphonic examples in the earliest treatises,
such as the Musica Enchiriadis and Guido’s Micrologus, are largely isolated
phrases drawn from recitation tones and office antiphons – brief, elemen-
tary illustrations accessible to novice singers. In contrast, the Winchester
repertory presents a strikingly rich image of liturgical contexts for early

polyphony, including as it does organum for core chants of the mass and
offices (alleluias, proses, Kyries, responsories, etc.) collected in liturgically
ordered groups and preserved as complete pieces. This record of intense
polyphonic activity around 1000 at Winchester Cathedral constitutes our
best glimpse of the possible scope of organum singing in major European
churches and monasteries as the first millennium drew to a close.12 Treatises
within the second phase characteristically offer only capsule illustrations,
some on an alleluia incipit, but some abstract exempla with no liturgical
association. The twelfth-century Aquitanian polyphonic repertory, how-
ever, manifests a new forum for polyphonic production, one removed
from the formal liturgy, centred instead on rhymed, often strophic reli-
gious poetry or versus.13 The mixture of two-voice liturgical settings and
devotional versus in the coeval Compostelan repertory indicates that poly-
phonic adornment spanned a broad spectrum of worship and celebration
(formal and informal) at the Compostela shrine. Although limited in its
focus on veneration of a single saint, the Compostelan repertory evidences
a breadth of polyphonic activity congruent with that registered in the far
more extensive collections of Parisian organa and conductus.
Partial and incomplete though they are, the written traces of early
polyphonic practice constitute the foundation for any account of West-
ern polyphonic production from the ninth into the mid twelfth century
that tracks the striking changes in idiom that transpired over that time
period. The following account of key way stations, which follows a loosely
chronological path, should be read with due awareness of the condition of
polyphony as an extempore (and characteristically ephemeral) means of
sonic elaboration practised in ecclesiastical spheres and of the persistence
of the earliest protocols for generating organum alongside more complex
procedures.
The earliest layer of organum teaching extends from the Musica Enchiri-
adis (ca850) to Guido’s Micrologus (ca1030), and includes various affiliates
and adaptations (of indeterminate date) of these core texts. Although dif-
fering in specific formulations and explanations, the treatises largely concur
on general procedures.14 The singers start with a pre-existent chant (desig-
nated the principal voice) and supply to it a complementary organal voice.
This voice lies below the principal chant, relates to it through the perfect
consonances or symphoniae of fifth and fourth, and mainly matches it note
for note in rhythmic synchronization (see Examples 3.1a and 3.1b). Two
procedures are taught. In one, a strict organum, the second singer parallels
the principal voice consistently at the fifth below. In the other, a flexible
organum, he follows it loosely at the fourth below. The Musica Enchiriadis
theorist differentiates these two types of organum according to the primary
50 Sarah Fuller
Example 3.1a Musica Enchiriadis, Chapter 15, Sit gloria Domini, diaphony at the fifth with octave
doublings
Example 3.1b Guido of Arezzo, Micrologus, Chapter 19, Ipsi soli, flexible diaphony at the fourth
interval of coupling, fifth or fourth respectively, while Guido, in Micrologus,

distinguishes them as durus, or strict, and mollis, or flexible.15
Diaphony at the fifth is strictly parallel, as is evident in Example 3.1a
where the organal voice persistently shadows the principal chant at the fifth
below.16 Either voice (or both) may be doubled at the octave (above or
below) to amplify the aural effect.
Flexible organum at the fourth is more complex and entails more deci-
sions by the organum singer (Example 3.1b). Depending on factors of mode,
linear path, and register of the parent chant, the organal voice may parallel
the chant at the fourth, remain stationary on a lower boundary tone, or
join it in unison at a phrase ending, an action Guido calls occursus. Articu-
lating moments of occursus are determined by textual units in conjunction
with the chant’s phrasing. Guido’s presentation of the D-mode antiphon
Ipsi soli shows the organal voice observing a mandatory tritus boundary
within each phrase and varying its phrase endings according to context.17
For this melody, unison occursus is strategically located only at the ends of
the first and final phrases, with the last the sole close on the modal final. The
non-consonant seconds and thirds introduced by the boundary tone con-
vention, along with unison occursus, impart to flexible organum a sound
palette considerably more varied than that of the consistently parallel strict
organum.
Beyond technical aspects of how to produce appropriately consonant
organum, the early treatises provide some informative comments on general
performance aspects of early diaphony. Several mention doubling either
voice or both at the octave or double octave, and associate this with boys
and men singing together. That organum should be sung at a moderate
tempo and with due attentiveness is another recurring theme. One teacher
specifically remarks that this kind of music is so weighty and deliberate that
the usual rhythmic ratios of chant cannot be observed.18 The importance
of textual articulations, of musically observing units of text syntax (phrase,
clause, sentence), is often mentioned, especially in conjunction with flexible
organum and decisions about occursus. In addition to extolling diaphony
as an appropriate means of praising God, the theorists call attention to its
beauty of sound: ‘Truly, delivered with restrained care, which is most proper
to it, and attentive management of concords, the sweetness of the song will be
most beautiful.’19 This appreciation of beautiful sound is also manifested by
the scribe of the Winchester organa, who variously characterizes the organa
he copies as ‘melliflua’, ‘pulcherrima’, ‘iocunda’.20
The remarkable collection of Winchester organa, preserved uniquely in
the manuscript Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 473, manifests practices
much richer and more diverse than those promulgated in the elementary
teaching manuals. Although the organal voices are notated separately from
their companion chants, and in non-diastematic neumes, the nature of
this polyphony has been well established.21 In general, the organa manifest
traits characteristic of flexible diaphony at the fourth. The organal voice
mainly operates below the principal one, matches it rhythmically note for
note, and responds to it with a mix of parallel motion, sustained boundary
pitches, and unison convergence. But compared with the theoretical exposi-
tions, the Winchester pieces show more open choice of reiterated boundary
tones, more frequent occursus and provision of an extra tone or two in
the organal voice, freedom occasionally for the added line to rise above the
principal voice, and overall sensitivity to the text syntax and structure of a
complete chant.22 Marginal annotations in the manuscript not only point
toward actual performance of the repertory, but also indicate a willing-
ness to alter or vary passages in the organal voices originally notated. The
Alleluia. Ascendens Christus, one in a major cycle of 53 polyphonic alleluias,
clearly ranges beyond the usual short theoretical examples in complex-
ity and variety of organal voice movement (Example 3.2).23 The principal
voice, a second-mode melody, is narrow in range, circling within the fourth
d–g, with c as a frequent lower neighbour to the final, d. Only twice in
this excerpt does it rise to the fifth above the final, once at the beginning
52 Sarah Fuller
Example 3.2 Winchester organum, Alleluia. Ascendens Christus through first phrase of verse
(Principal voice, GB-Ob Bodley 775, fol. 79v; organal voice, GB-Ccc 473, fol. 167r)
of the jubilus and once at the suggestive words ‘in altum’ (on high). The
organal voice accordingly remains in a low register, often reciting on the
sub-final, c, or the final, d (notes 12–19, 38–44, 66–73). It joins the princi-
pal voice in unison at the end of basic text units and of the jubilus (notes
20, 52, 69, 73, 90) and also converges at numerous points within melismas
(e.g. notes 11, 28). Although the organum sometimes sounds at the fourth
(notably when the chant rises, notes 75–82), it liberally intermixes seconds,
thirds and unisons. Seconds are quite frequent, not only at occursus (notes
10–11, 31–35) but also elsewhere (notes 42–3, 54, 70). The overall sound
quality is hardly that of theoretically mandated symphonia of the fourth,
although more descents to the tetrachord zone below the final would have
increased the consonant sound quality.24 Sometimes the notation indicates
a momentary position above the chant (notes 29–30, 36), sometimes the
two voices sing in unison (notes 55–9, 86–90), and sometimes extra notes in
the organum enhance the effect of a convergence (notes 32–5, 44, 70–3). In
its liberal approach to flexible organum, this alleluia setting is representative
of the Winchester repertory as a whole, and hints at abundant creativity
in the actual practice of organum around 1000. The few extant notations
of early Continental polyphony manifest a similarly inventive approach to
producing flexible organum at the fourth.25
Guido’s elementary teaching about strict and flexible organum in the
Micrologus dates from around 1030. By the end of the eleventh century,
theorists are describing a very different sort of organum practice, such
that the Ad organum faciendum theorist prefaces his exposition of the new
way of generating organum with the remark that Guido’s teachings are
‘worthless’ and ‘scarcely to be esteemed’.26 The symphoniae remain central
to the concept of organum, but now fourths and fifths may be intermingled
and are joined by octaves and unisons not just as intervals of doubling and
occursus respectively, but as fully participating vertical sonorities. The older
notion of boundary tones has disappeared. Remarkably, the organal voice
has shifted its standard position from below the principal chant to above
it. In contrast to the first-phase teaching, which stipulates but one or two
appropriate organal responses to a given cantus, this second-phase pedagogy
provides for, even encourages, a multiplicity of possible organa against a
cantus. Ad organum faciendum organizes its teaching neatly in terms of
five modes or types of producing organum, and illustrates each with a
uniform cantus, the opening twelve-note phrase of the Alleluia. Justus ut
palma (Example 3.3a).27 Each type entails a different disposition of perfect
consonances and unisons within the phrase. For example, the first two types
feature different opening gambits, the first beginning conjunctly with the
first cantus note (here at the octave), the second beginning disjunctly (here
at the fourth) (Example 3.3a, I, II). The third type intermingles disjunct
intervals and unisons in its middle passages (Example 3.3a, III). In a fifth
category – one that bears important implications for the emergence of florid
organum – the organal voice sings multiple notes against a cantus tone, a
tactic here strategically located at phrase end (Example 3.3a, V). A longer
example, the beginning of this Alleluia’s verse, shows how the procedures
of the preceding exercises can be freely combined in a series of phrases
54 Sarah Fuller
Example 3.3a Ad organum faciendum, modes of organum I, II, III and V on incipit of Alleluia.
Justus ut palma
Example 3.3b Ad organum faciendum, beginning of verse, Alleluia. Justus ut palma
(Example 3.3b).28 The absence of boundary tones coupled with acceptance

of octave intervals above the cantus give this manner of producing organum
a more consistently consonant quality than that of earlier flexible organum
(compare Examples 3.3a, 3.3b with Example 3.2). In distinguishing among
inceptions, medial passages, and terminations (arrivals on unison or octave
termed copula by some teachers), the Ad organum faciendum pedagogue and
his associates foster in the novice singer functional awareness of constituent
phrase units within the music. The open choices for intervallic successions
and for ranging either above or below the given line afford the late-eleventh-
century organal singer considerable scope for individuality in responding
to a cantus.
The verse treatise that follows Ad organum faciendum in its princi-
pal source advances similar teaching but is more colloquial in expression
and more informative about cultural attitudes than its technically ori-
ented companion. Its characterizations of the relationship between the two
parts announce a new, dominant status for the organal voice. The opening
introduces a metaphor of friendship between the voices, figurative language

that may emanate from the notion of ‘affinity’ between the note pairings in
organum.29 But by the end of the treatise, the metaphor has shifted to serve
a vigorous assertion of the superiority of the organal voice. It is described
as running ‘like a very strong soldier, most gratifyingly’ and ‘breaking up
pitches like a prince’, a likely reference to florid elaboration in the organal
line, even though the proffered examples do not show this.30 More than Ad
organum faciendum, this verse treatise encourages and illustrates contrary
motion between the parts. Comments on sweetness of sound (lines 66, 85–
6, 138, 140) promote genuine aesthetic appreciation for organum and mesh
with similar comments from the first stage of organum theory.31 Other
brief treatises conventionally grouped with Ad organum faciendum extend
explicit recognition to thirds and even sixths as acceptable organal inter-
vals, and increasingly draw attention to contrary motion between the voices.
John’s treatise on Musica from around 1100 even goes so far as to advo-
cate contrary motion between cantus and organal voice as the ‘simplest’
procedure.32 John also encourages multi-note elaboration in the organal
part. Concerning a short example in which an organal part is paired strictly
note to note with a syllabic cantus, he remarks that the organal singer could
well ‘double or triple’ or otherwise competently accumulate notes in the
sparse line provided.33
A subsequent state of organum pedagogy (perhaps emergent around
the mid twelfth century) switches perspective radically to focus on stan-
dard binary interval progressions between organal voice and cantus.34 The
interval-progression treatises value octaves, fifths and unisons (fourths in
some strata) and feature exercises of the type, ‘If the organum is an octave
above the cantus and the cantus ascends a whole-step, let the organum
descend a third to be at the fifth.’ Such teaching in terms of discrete two-
note segments departs from the phrase-based approach of earlier organum
pedagogy, but still fits with extempore production of polyphony through
the act of singing. Under this training, singers practise and internalize in
ear and memory standard voice-leading moves that they can then string
together to produce appropriate organum rendered through approved per-
fect consonances above a cantus.35 Although contrary motion is the rule in
such treatises, some include formulas with similar or parallel motion, while
a very few describe a mode of production based on parallel fifths.36 But
the theoretical discussions are brief and abstract in nature; for a sense of
actual production and cutting-edge trends in polyphony during the twelfth
century, one must turn to notated music.
The Aquitanian repertory of polyphony manifests a full spectrum of
practices that are sporadically attested in the later ‘second phase’ theoretical
documents and are generally compatible with early interval-progression
56 Sarah Fuller
pedagogy. The designator ‘Aquitanian’ comes from the type of chant nota-
tion in which this repertory is preserved, a notation practised in the area
of southwestern France known as Aquitania in Carolingian times.37 This
polyphony, which seems to have flourished from around the 1090s into
the second half of the 1100s, contrasts sharply with that of Winchester, not
just in musical idiom but with respect to texts, religious functions, and
manuscript transmission. Rather than adhering to the formal liturgy, Aqui-
tanian polyphony comprises versus, some versus-like Benedicamus Domino
tropes, and a few liturgical proses – with versus the predominant genre.
Versus are settings of devotional poetry, poems that are newly created and
express contemporary religious sensibilities, particularly veneration of Jesus
and of Mary. Typical subjects celebrate the birth of Jesus, the motherhood
of Mary, the miracle of the Virgin Birth, the union of the divine and human
in the Incarnation. Such songs could be inserted into ceremonial offices, but
could also have been sung on more informal occasions.38 This polyphony
is preserved in nine small to medium-sized pamphlets (libelli) that trans-
mit both monophonic and polyphonic songs. Each source is an individual
collection with its own independent selection and ordering of pieces; from
among some seventy polyphonic settings, only four pieces appear in as many
as three sources, and only one appears in four sources.39 It is likely that indi-
vidual poet-singers, or their followers, copied these songs for personal use.
Important beyond the history of polyphony, the Aquitanian versus reper-
tory manifests a remarkable creative outpouring of devotional Latin song
by twelfth-century poets and singers in southwestern Europe.
The turn to newly created poetic texts means that the polyphonic Aqui-
tanian versus were not necessarily based on a pre-existent melody – indeed,
rarely is a monophonic ancestor documented for a polyphonic versus. Some
versus music may well have been conceived as polyphony from the start,
a conclusion fortified by extended melismas in which the two voices are
so intertwined as to be an inseparable pair. Such concurrent conception
would represent a facility of invention beyond that expressed in organum
pedagogy, which regularly postulates a given cantus, even if that is reduced
to a two-note element. The thirteen proses in the Aquitanian repertory are
based on pre-existent chants, as are a few combinations of a Benedicamus
versicle with a superimposed versus. To avoid the assumption of a given
cantus, I will here designate the voices as upper and lower, a reflection of
the manuscript notation and prevailing registral positions (although some
voice-crossing does occur).40
Like their monophonic siblings, polyphonic versus settings are shaped
on the one hand by poetic versification and syntax, on the other by melodic
norms, tonal centring, and matrices (horizontal and vertical) of perfect
consonances and unisons. Other musical resources coordinated with text
1a Per partum virginis/ dei et hominis/ sunt juncta federa.

1b Vita tribuitur/ culpa diluitur/ que clausit ethera.
2a Verbum, lumen dei patris/ sumpta carne alvo matris/ in hac die claruit.
2b Verus deus verus homo/ est de Jesse natus domo/ ut propheta docuit.
3a Sub carnis tegmine/ homo pro homine/ sol verus latuit.
3b Felix puerpera/ que nos et supera/ unire potuit.
4a Quam miranda quam laudanda/ quam ditanda celebranda/ dei est clemencia.
4b Qui pro nobis fit mortalis/ ante manens immortalis/ omni dignus gloria.
5 Immortalis/ fit mortalis/ sola tactus gratia.
1a Through a virgin’s childbirth, God and man are joined in alliance.

1b Life is granted, sin is dissolved that made heaven inaccessible.
2a The Word, the light of God the father, having taken on flesh in the womb of the mother, shines
forth in this day.
2b True God, true man is born of the house of Jesse, as the prophet declared.
3a Under a covering of flesh, a man for the sake of mankind, the true sun was hidden.
3b Happy the childbirth, that was able to unite us with the heavens.
4a How wonderful, how praiseworthy, how richly to be celebrated is God’s mercy.
4b He who became mortal for us, remaining immortal from before, is worthy of all glory.
5 The immortal one became mortal solely through grace.
Figure 3.2a Text and translation of Per partum virginis
Music Phrases Text Line Syllables/rhyme Accent
a 1a 6a 6a 6b dactylic
b 1b 6c 6c 6b
c 2a 8d 8d 7e trochaic
d 2b 8f 8f 7e
e 3a 6g 6g 6e dactylic
f 3b 6h 6h 6e
g 4a 8i 8i 7k trochaic
g 4b 8m 8m 7k
h 5 4m 4m 7k trochaic
Figure 3.2b Text structure and musical phrases in Per partum virginis
structure include texture and manner of text declamation.41 As can be

seen in Per partum virginis, versus poetry exhibits periodic regularities of
syllable count, rhyme and line groupings in either couplets or stanzas (see
Figures 3.2a and 3.2b). The sequence or prose texts also observe regular,
periodicity, the parallel couplets typical of the genre. The periodicities
of poetic structure constitute a framework respected and delineated by
the musicians, as can be seen in a representative polyphonic versus, Per
partum virginis.42 The poem celebrates the birth of Jesus, his mother Mary’s
virginal childbearing, and the positive consequences for humankind. It
is cast in couplets whose clear boundaries (outlined in Figure 3.2b) are
created through syllable count, rhyme, accent and syntax. Each line falls into
three segments, the first two sharing a common rhyme, the last rhyming
with its partner within the couplet. Odd- and even-numbered couplets are
differentiated by syllable count within the lines and by verse accent, with
couplets 1 and 3 dactylic, 2 and 4 and the single final line trochaic.
58 Sarah Fuller
Example 3.4a Aquitanian versus Per partum virginis, first couplet (GB-Lbl add. 36881, fol. 4r)
Example 3.4b Aquitanian versus Per partum virginis, last couplet and final verse (F-Pn fonds lat.
3549, fol. 151v)
The musical structure aligns with that of the poetry on many levels from
the principal sectional units to phrase and motivic elements (see Examples
3.4a and 3.4b and the left-hand column of Figure 3.2b).43 In this musical
setting, the couplets are through-composed except for the fourth (4ab)
where repeated music audibly underscores the verse pairing.44 Extended
terminal melismas with the voices yoked together articulate the ends of the
first two lines and the final line.45 Changes in texture demarcate sectional
units. Line 1a maintains a florid upper voice up to the terminal melisma,
while line 1b begins with the voices note against note, then intermixes
such synchrony with florid figures in the top part. The final couplet and
final line offer a sharp contrast to the opening in their very plain note-for-
note texture. The rhyme words internal to poetic lines also receive their
due. This is particularly clear in line 1a where a sweeping downward scale
figure (distinguished in scope from the other ornamental figures) associates
virginis with hominis. Such explicit association of internal rhymes does not
60 Sarah Fuller
continue in the rest of the setting, but the main rhymes are punctuated with
stable arrivals on perfect consonances and on the modal final or its close
associate.
Per partum virginis is tonally focused on g with the lower voice beginning
and ending on that pitch, and returning often to it at the end of text
segments. The first two lines are anchored on a g final that is supported in
the upper voice with the upper fifth and octave, and often reinforced by an
upper-voice descent to g when the lower one rises to the fifth or octave above.
At the most stable phrase endings – the end of the first couplet (ethera) and
the conclusion of the piece (gratia) – the voices unite on a unison g final.
Together the two voices present a unified tonal profile that mainly projects
a g–d1 –g1 matrix in coordination with the primary text units. The fourth
couplet (Example 3.4b) offers tonal contrast in its orientation towards the
fourth and fifth above the final, a shift that gives special impact to the
restoration of g centring in the final line.
In keeping with their tonal compatibility, the two lines are anchored,
both horizontally and vertically, on perfect consonances and unisons. A
background of fifths, octaves and unisons can easily be discerned behind
the elaborative figures in the upper voice, as, for instance, in the very first
text line, shown in a voice-leading reduction in Example 3.5a. Such a spare
background calls to mind John’s invitation to the organum singer (quoted
above) to proliferate notes within a foundational note-against-note context.
Less consonant, or even quite dissonant, intervals sometimes enhance the
motion towards a stable interval, as on the very first syllable (Per, from
fourth to fifth) or in line 1b with seconds on diluitur and que.
Starting with the earliest organum treatises and continuing through
John’s Musica and the interval-progression treatises, voice-leading stands
alongside intervallic proprieties as a primary pedagogic concern. Reflect-
ing an accumulation of possibilities, voice-leading in polyphonic Aqui-
tanian versus intermixes contrary, oblique and parallel motion, the latter
commonly involving parallel fifths that are sometimes overt, sometimes
covered by upper-voice figures.46 The voice notated in the upper position
generally sounds above the notated lower voice, but sometimes crosses
below, particularly when the lower voice rises in register.47 The most strik-
ing and characteristic voice-leading routines appear in the long terminal
melismas constructed in a mosaic fashion from figures that converge and
diverge in contrary motion. Verses 1a and 1b both end with melismas
built from two-voice figures that characteristically pivot on a unison b and
diverge out to the g–d1 fifth (see Example 3.4a). The very last melisma
of the versus has a more complex, tonally diverse structure that can be
parsed in a series of contrary motion elements: octave, fifth, fourth and
third converging into unisons, unisons expanding out to a fifth or fourth
Example 3.5a Consonance reduction, first phrase, Per partum virginis (see Example 3.4a)
Example 3.5b Consonance reduction, final melisma of Per partum virginis (see Example 3.4b)
Basic intervals are indicated below the staff. An underscore (5) indicates that the upper voice has
crossed below the lower one. The symbol ∗ marks a diminished fifth or augmented fourth that
might or might not have been adjusted. Lower-voice note count appears above the staff.
(see reduction, Example 3.5b).48 These figures decorate a dramatic scalar

arch in the lower voice that rises through the g octave and then descends
directly to the final. Such intertwining convergent/divergent figures, com-
mon in melismas of the polyphonic Aquitanian versus, appear to have been
standard routines, easily produced extempore, adaptable to texted phrases
as well.
The three notated versions of Per partum virginis – like notations of
other versus inscribed in more than one source – indicate some fluidity
in how singers might realize a song. Typical differences, seen in the two
versions of line 1a aligned in Example 3.6, are details of upper-voice figures
and scribal indications of vocal timbre and alignment between the parts.49
Variants in the upper-voice (the initial c1 –d1 gesture, the first and last
syllables of virginis) indicate flexibility in realizing elaborative figures. The
‘B’ scribe more often indicates special vocal production, such as liquescence
or extension of a pitch. Alignment between the parts is variable (and a
problematic issue). Whereas the ‘D’ scribe supplies many vertical strokes
to specify syllable coordination, the ‘B’ scribe scarcely indicates syllable
boundaries and is fairly cavalier about depicting vertical alignment through
62 Sarah Fuller
Example 3.6 First line, Per partum virginis, two versions (B = F-Pn fonds lat. 3549, fol. 150v;
D = GB-Lbl add. 36881, fol. 4r)
physical spacing. Still, ligature groupings and a few syllable strokes in ‘B’ do
point to some alignments divergent from ‘D’, as on hominis.50 Each notated
version, indeed, seems to represent a somewhat individual view of ‘how the
piece goes’ in keeping with a fluid, improvisational approach to producing
polyphony. Still there are passages involving uncharacteristic dissonances
in which one source attests a scribal mistake in another, as on et (no. 10
in Example 3.6), where the ‘D’ scribe apparently wrote the last note in the
upper-voice figure a step too high.
Another, less extensive, polyphonic repertory contemporary with the
later Aquitanian sources is contained in the Codex Calixtinus, a substan-
tial book dedicated to promulgation and celebration of the cult of Saint
James at the pilgrimage shrine in Santiago de Compostela.51 The collec-
tion of polyphony appears in a supplement positioned after the formal
five books of the Codex Calixtinus.52 Of the 20 pieces copied there, half
occur monophonically in Book I, which transmits special divine offices for
the saint’s feast. As already noted, Compostelan polyphony comprises both
settings of devotional poems, rubricated as ‘conductus’ or (as appropri-
ate) ‘Benedicamus’ in Book I, and liturgical chants: matins responsories, a
responsory prosa, mass gradual and alleluia, two troped Kyries and three
Benedicamus Domino versicles. A cultural context distinct from that of the
Aquitanian sources is manifested both in the formal presentation of the
polyphony within a carefully designed codex and in the combination of
fixed liturgical items and ad hoc devotional poems. Insofar as the Codex
Calixtinus has been associated with compilers in the region of Burgundy
and with Cluniac interests, its polyphonic component would seem to reflect
northern traditions.53
Like their Aquitanian counterparts, conductus/versus in the Compostela
repertory are songs on devotional poetic texts, but their consistent theme
is veneration of Saint James. Musically, they resemble their Aquitanian
cousins; indeed two of the polyphonic conductus are contrafacta of Aqui-
tanian versus.54 In both repertories, musical phrases and formal design
conform to poetic versification, the voices are tonally coordinated and
linked through perfect consonances and unisons, and texture varies from
single-note coupling of the voices to florid decoration in the upper voice.
One difference is a lack of extended note-against-note melismas except in
the two imports from Aquitania.
The liturgical polyphonic settings, all based on a pre-existent chant,
adopt florid textures with figures of three to nine notes in the upper voice
decorating perfect consonances above individual cantus tones. In contrast
with the conductus, there is little voice-crossing in these settings. The upper
voice tends to stay above the cantus, or to join it in unison when the cantus
rises or settles on the modal final.55 Although the able scribe provides
64 Sarah Fuller
division strokes to indicate segmental coincidence between the voices, the

chant neumes do not permit specification of pitch alignment within those
segments. The first segment of the responsory O adjutor, for example,
combines two two-note neumes in the cantus with six neumes in the upper
voice (see Example 3.7a). We do not know how much leeway twelfth-century
Compostelan singers would have had to combine the voices rhythmically
within a segment, but in any event the alignment (along with relative
temporal delivery) is now a matter of informed conjecture.56
The polyphonic settings of the responsories and the mass gradual and
alleluia involve only the soloist’s portions of the chant: the opening phrase of
the initial section and the major part of the verse. The remainder of the chant
is sung monophonically, as occurs in Parisian settings of responsorial chants.
A glance at two passages from a typical responsory, O adjutor (Examples
3.7a, 3.7b), shows the upper voice coupled with the D-mode chant through
transparent consonances of octave, fifth and unison. Some of these intervals
seem locked in place relative to pivotal cantus pitches: a primary octave
always surmounts the fourth and the step below the final (A and c), a
unison or (occasionally) upper fifth sounds with the fifth above the final
(a). In contrast, the d final offers more intervallic choices and is variously
paired with its octave, upper fifth, or unison.
The upper-voice melody proceeds conjunctly by step or third, with larger
intervals of fourth or fifth generally limited to occasions when the cantus
repeats a pitch. Its elaborative figures, varied in length and lineaments, dis-
play inventive ways of elaborating a vertical interval or moving through a
linear space. Immediate repetition of figures is rare (one occurs in the verse
on mari), and even separated recurrences are not conspicuous. A seven-
note figure in the third segment of the respond recurs a fifth higher at the
beginning of the verse (see brackets, Examples 3.7a, 3.7b). The elaborat-
ing voice moves through scalar space in varied ways. The motion from c1
down to d in the first segment is gapped. That in the third segment (on
adjutor) turns gracefully in its path, while the stepwise descent on subvenis
in the third segment of the verse is elegantly protracted through reiteration
of successive notes in a series of two-note neumes (clivis). This last figure
notationally and aurally resembles some figures in the Vatican Organum
Treatise, one of the few interval-progression manuals to transmit deco-
rated upper voices.57 Background voice-leading relative to the cantus is a
mixture of contrary and parallel motion, with the former predominating.
The second segment in the verse is essentially a series of parallel octaves
(g–f–e–d), but that parallelism is masked by ornamental figures in which
the upper voice approaches the octave from below as the cantus descends
by step. The voices typically reach unison convergences from different
directions.
Example 3.7a Codex Calixtinus, opening of matins responsory O adjutor (E-SC, fol. 217r/188r).
Plainchant continuation, fol. 110v.
Example 3.7b Codex Calixtinus, first part of verse, responsory O adjutor (E-SC, fols. 217v/188v)
Thus, although from a condensed and selective historical perspective

the significance of Aquitanian and Compostelan polyphony may seem to
reside in setting the stage for Parisian polyphony, the level of complexity
and musical invention manifested in these repertories, as in earlier ones,
represents a considerable artistic accomplishment in its own terms and
within indigenous local contexts.
That the above survey has concentrated on changes over approximately three
hundred years should not obscure the considerable consistencies that existed
within this span of Western polyphonic practice. By way of conclusion, these
basic consistencies are summarized below.
66 Sarah Fuller
r Beginning around the mid ninth century, church musicians cultivated

standard procedures for generating polyphony extemporaneously; the
practice of extemporization persisted even after notation of polyphony
became more usual.
r The scope and diversity of these generative procedures increased over
the course of the ninth to the twelfth century, although relatively simple
procedures, such as singing in parallel fifths, continued in currency into
the fourteenth century.
r The perfect consonances (fourth, fifth and octave) along with the unison
are fundamental to all early polyphonic practices, oral and written. They
anchor the conceptual relationship between the voices and ensure a sound
quality perceived as harmonious and beautiful.
r A combination of textual factors (syntactic units, versification in the case
of poetic texts) and musical units of the primary melody (whether pre-
existent or newly composed) guided organum production from its earliest
cultivation.
r Whereas at first the organal voice was regarded as subordinate ‘follower’
of the principal voice, in the more complex procedures emergent in the
late eleventh century the organal voice becomes the prominent line, the
focus of aural attention.
r As possibilities for the organal voice became more diverse, the teaching
became more generalized and abstract, and notated repertories (which
increased in number) became even more central as indicators of concrete
practices and applications in song and liturgy.
r In all practices (save for strictly parallel organum) occursus or copula –
the joining of the two voices on unison or octave – is a key means of
musical articulation and of securing closure.
4 The thirteenth century
mark everist
Scope and context

Garry Trudeau begins my favourite Doonesbury cartoon with three frames
each bearing a date: (1) a hooded figure tries to escape a stoning: ‘1205 –
A plague-stricken calligrapher is driven from Gunbad-I-Qabus’; (2) a men-
dicant fanatic prepares a burning at the stake: ‘1233 – A heretic perishes in
Castile’; (3) a severed head hangs by its hair from the branch of a tree: ‘1276 –
On the Malaysian archipelago, a gruesome trophy swings in a lagoon.’ The
fourth frame cuts to Trudeau’s ex-Hollywood starlet, Barbara Ann Boop-
stein, on a beach with a soda in her hand as she muses ‘Sometimes it seemed
the 13th century would never end!’1 To turn abruptly to the music of the
thirteenth century – although calligraphers and mendicant fanatics have
their place there – is to feel some sympathy with Boopsie’s ruminations.
Not only did the ‘long’ thirteenth century never quite seem to end, but
its beginnings were not quite obvious either. And although no one ever
seems to argue for a ‘short’ century, the claims for thinking about the music
of the thirteenth century from around 1170 up to ca1320 are strong. The
blurred distinction between versus and conductus is as much geographical
as chronological (between north and south as much as early and late twelfth
century), and the emergence of a consistent style of Parisian organa is usu-
ally assumed to fall somewhere in the last quarter of the twelfth century.
Yet these are the staple genres of the thirteenth century, with works copied
and recopied at least as late as 1300, and the motet – although probably
not surfacing before 1200 – retains its links with the thirteenth century well
into the fourteenth alongside works of what might be thought to represent
the avant-garde.
The scope of this chapter is largely limited to the genres of conduc-
tus, organum and motet. The chapter touches on vernacular monophony
(treated in Chapter 12) only tangentially, and it centres on the northern
French experience (those of other centres are discussed in chapters 6–
10). Although much of the context for organum, and a significant part of
the background of the motet, is liturgical, and much important liturgical
development took place in the thirteenth century, plainsong and liturgy
are explained elsewhere in this volume (chapters 1 and 11). And in its
focus on conductus, organum and motet, this chapter challenges one of the
[67]
68 Mark Everist
fundamental questions of medieval music: the problem of its context and

function. Up to around 1300, we have a fairly clear idea of the contexts for
the composition, cultivation and consumption of music that was written
down: plainsong and its offshoots can be locked into a broadly liturgi-
cal environment, and vernacular monophony into those of the aristocratic
courts. Even Aquitanian versus, although occasionally suggesting less for-
mal contexts, had a significant liturgical dimension. The massive growth
of the northern counterpart of versus – the conductus – exacerbated the
range of possible contexts for the genre. And although organum, as a result
of its origins and compositional dynamic, could never be shaken from its
liturgical context, the emergence of the motet poses problems of function –
who composed? who listened? and who appreciated? – at almost every stage
of the century.
Conductus
The most striking continuity between the Aquitanian and related repertories
and the Parisian music of the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries lies in the
versus and conductus.2 At some points, the two terms almost coexist, and if
they are thought to refer to monophonic or polyphonic settings of rhythmic
texts in musical styles that do not depend on the use of borrowed material,
this brings both categories into a very close alignment. Indeed, monophonic
conductus copied well into the thirteenth century could resemble versus of
a hundred years earlier.
The conductus is the only genre found consistently in all the major
manuscript sources of the thirteenth century, and it exists in great numbers.3
The largest collections are found in I-Fl Plut. 29.1 where 83 monophonic
conductus, 130 two-part, 59 three-part and 3 four-part conductus are
preserved.4 They constitute key parts of the organization of the volume,
with separate fascicles dedicated to each type and a separate fascicle given
over to 60 monophonic conductus in rondellus form.5 Parisian conduc-
tus appear to have been composed as early as 1160 and continued to be
copied throughout the thirteenth century. The latest datable event in the
text of a conductus is from the 1230s which might suggest a tailing-off in
composition towards the mid century;6 although conductus continued to
be copied in the second half of the century, however, sources from around
1300 subject the music to significant editorial change.
Conductus, like versus, are settings of Latin texts with an immense range
of subject matter: poems alluding to political events rub shoulders with
homiletic verse, and references to classical antiquity sit alongside settings
of liturgical texts.7 This wide range, while testifying to the far-reaching
Example 4.1 Two-part conductus sine caudis, Virtus moritur, 1–20. (I-Fl Plut. 29.1, fols. 322r–322v)
intellectual ambitions of their authors, creates significant difficulties in

assigning any function to the genre of the conductus. It seems reasonable to
assume that the range of textual reference implies a similar range of function,
from a substitute for the Benedicamus Domino or Sursum corda to largely
recreational contexts that would admit the satirical and the hortatory. There
is, furthermore, no apparent mapping of number of voices onto particular
types of text.8
Polyphonic conductus exist in one of two forms described by contem-
porary theory: cum and sine caudis.9 The presence or absence of such ‘tails’
(caudae) provides one of the clearest generic markers in the repertory. The
conductus sine caudis is the simpler of the two types, and consists of a
neumatic (note against note or neume against neume) setting of the poetic
text. The notation of this music cum littera (texted) is invariably unmea-
sured in the earliest sources, and its rhythm is the subject of debate, with
some advocating a metrical approach based on the framework of the rhyth-
mic modes, and others proffering non-metrical rhythms, as here. Virtus
moritur is a good example of a two-part conductus sine caudis (Example
4.1).10 Much of the piece is purely syllabic, with occasional moments where
a ligature of two notes sets the syllable (moritur and vitium), and there are
occasional instances where three notes (but always in ligature) set a single
syllable.11
Virtus moritur is a simple work, and rather rare in I-Fl Plut. 29.1. The
conductus cum caudis is a more common but more complex proposition.
Much of the setting of the poem is in the same cum littera style as the
conductus sine caudis just described, but the composition is embellished by
caudae; these are untexted (sine littera) melismas that take the note-against-
note melismas of Aquitanian versus and subject them to the discipline of the
rhythmic modes. Conductus cum caudis therefore play musica cum littera
and musica sine littera off against each other in the same composition.
The beginning of Luget Rachel iterum, in two parts (duplum and tenor),
demonstrates how the two discursive modes (musica cum and sine littera)
interact (Example 4.2).12
The work opens with a cauda in the first rhythmic mode that uses both
fractio (duplum 3 and 7; tenor 3) and reductio modi (tenor 1, 2, and 5–8).
70 Mark Everist
Example 4.2 Two-part conductus cum caudis, Luget Rachel iterum, 1–68 (I-Fl Plut. 29.1,
fols. 359v–360)
Example 4.3 Luget Rachel iterum. Text, translation and analysis

1. Luget Rachel iterum 7pp(a) Rachel weeps again
2. Cuius dampnat uterum 7pp(a) Whose womb is condemned
3. Filiorum orbitas 7pp(b) By the loss of her sons.
4. Lapso tabernaculo 7pp(c) The temple having fallen;
5. Quondam plena populo 7pp(c) Once full of people,
6. Sola sedet civitas 7pp(b) The city sits solitary.
7. Languent Syon filie 7pp(d) The daughters of Syon mourn
8. Cotidie 4pp(d) Daily,
9. Affligentes animam 7pp(e) Afflicting their spirits,
10. Cum non sit qui faciat 7pp(f) Because none will act
11. Nec veniat 4pp(f) Or come
12. Ad paschalem victimam 7pp(e) To the paschal victim.
The first three lines of the poem are then declaimed in a simple neumatic
style (although note the rhythmic complications in 28–31 that betray the
genre’s origins in Aquitanian versus), and are followed by another cauda
(32–9) that introduces the cum littera setting of lines 4–6 of the poem; this
closes with a third cauda (61–8). Example 4.2 gives slightly less than half
the work, but the structure of the entire composition can be seen in an
annotated edition and translation of the poetry (Example 4.3). The three
caudae begin the first and fourth lines with similar morphemes, luget and
lapso, and close the sixth (civitas) (the caudae are shown in italics in the
example); the example also shows how the seventh line begins with a cauda
and how the entire composition ends similarly.
Whatever disagreement there might be concerning the rhythm of the
cum littera sections of the conductus, there is no doubt that the caudae
(sine littera) are notated using the ligature patterns of the rhythmic modes
and are therefore measurable. With this in mind, it is striking that the first
three caudae of Luget Rachel iterum are all of exactly the same length (eight
perfections), and this is the case no matter how the notation is transcribed,
and no matter where one sets the boundaries of music cum and sine littera.
These three caudae of identical length stand in contrast to the two others, one
of six perfections (on Languent) and the other of no less than 26 perfections
(on victimam). At one level, the emphasis given these particular words –
‘weep’, ‘fall’, ‘city’, ‘mourn’ and ‘victim’ – picks out the key elements in a text
that exploits a wide range of biblical and patristic imagery and that may
relate to the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 (although the text is unlikely to predate
72 Mark Everist
that event, both the poetry and the music could have been composed later).
But at another, more purely musical, level, the particular compositional
organization of the caudae generates a set of symmetries in the first half of
the piece that are deliberately denied in the second.
Organum
Continuities in liturgical music with the previous generations are less
easy to identify. Parisian organum embodies the types of embellishment
of plainchant that are strikingly absent from the Aquitanian repertory.
However, to glance at the Compostelan chant settings is to witness some
strong continuities with the Parisian repertory in terms of liturgical type
selected for polyphonic treatment. Both concentrate on responsorial chants:
responsories, graduals, alleluias and Benedicamus Domino. The only type
found in Compostela and not in the Parisian repertory is the troped Kyrie.
This preference explodes into a two-part repertory (as preserved in its
most extensive source, I-Fl Plut. 29.1) of 34 items for the office (almost
all responsories), 10 Benedicamus Domino settings, and 59 mass items
(18 graduals; 41 alleluias).13 The repertory stands in a tradition of com-
position for the liturgical year that encompasses the Choralis Constantinus
and Bach’s Church Cantatas. In addition to this two-part music is a smaller
repertory of three- and four-part compositions (organa tripla and organa
quadrupla); of the latter, the graduals for Christmas and St Stephen, Viderunt
omnes and Sederunt principes, have achieved celebrity through modern
recording.14
The chronology of Parisian organum is problematic. If we can be rea-
sonably certain that the Compostelan repertory was complete by 1173, the
beginnings of the Parisian repertory are shrouded in mystery. The theo-
rist known as Anonymous IV, writing around a century after the event,
identified the four-part Viderunt omnes and Sederunt principes as works by
Perotinus Magnus, and pointed to a predecessor of Perotinus, Leoninus,
whom Anonymous IV credited with the creation of the ‘magnu[s] lib[er]
organi de gradali et antifonario pro servitio divino multiplicando’ (‘the
great book of organum from the gradual and antiphonary to elaborate
the divine service’). Perotinus was also credited with having ‘abbreviavit’
the Magnus liber organi (‘abbreviavit’ could have meant anything from
‘shortened’, to ‘edited’, or even just ‘written down’).15 Perotinus’s two four-
part organa were cited in Parisian episcopal edicts in 1198 and 1199 in a
context that meant that the works were known in the city at those dates.
While the documents provide a fixed chronological point, a blizzard of
scholarly debate has interpreted and reinterpreted their implications: either

the two organa quadrupla represented the final point of ‘development’ of
the work of both Leoninus and Perotinus (in which case the entire project
of Parisian organum was complete before the end of the twelfth century)
or there are identifiable aspects of the ‘Perotinian’ repertory that could not
have preceded the composition of the two datable works.16 Arguments on
both sides are fraught with teleological difficulties, and no clear answer
can be given for the opening and closing dates for the composition of
Parisian organum. The earliest manuscript of this repertory is D-W 628
which dates from no earlier than the 1230s, with other sources spanning
the next half-century.17 Attempts to delineate continuity and change in
musical practice in this repertory, and to identify how long a period of
time such a delineation covers, with the present state of knowledge, seem
problematic. It almost goes without saying that the music preserved in the
surviving sources, its notational style and what may be inferred from it
may bear little relation to what had been composed perhaps sixty years
previously.
In contrast to its chronology, the function of organa is clear: as par-
tial settings of plainsongs, Parisian organa simply replace those sections
of plainsong that they set. Settings survive for most of the major feasts
in the liturgical year. Annuale feasts were provided with organa for the
gradual and alleluia for the day itself and for the days of the octave (Christ-
mas, Easter, Pentecost and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary);
lesser feasts, of duplex rank, were provided with organa for the gradual
and alleluia of the feast day itself only (for example, St Stephen, St John
the Baptist and the Ascension); and semiduplex feasts were provided with
an alleluia only (Finding of the Holy Cross and St Michael, for example).
In addition to music directed towards one specific occasion, and partly to
provide compositions for some feasts of duplex and semiduplex rank, the
Magnus liber organi contains a substantial number of compositions for the
Common.18
Parisian organum is consistent in its selection of the solo sections of
plainsong for treatment in polyphony. In terms of a work, then, a Parisian
organum consists of sections newly composed by Leoninus, Perotinus or
their contemporaries, and of sections in plainsong filtered through twelfth-
century Parisian chant traditions. Example 4.4 gives the text of the entire
gradual for the mass at the feast of Sts Peter and Paul (29 June), ‘Constitues
eos V. Pro patribus’.19 This shows clearly how the division between the
sections of the chant for soloists and the rest of the choir (schola) results in
different structures for the respond (where only the first two words of the
74 Mark Everist
Example 4.4 Text of gradual Constitues eos. V. Pro patribus

Constitues eos principes super omnem terram memores erunt nominis tui domine.
V. Pro patribus tuis nati sunt tibi filii propterea populi confitebuntur tibi.
Constitues eos etc.
plainsong are set) and the verse (where all but the last two words are set);
plainsong is in roman type, polyphony in italics (Example 4.4).
Different balances between solo and choral portions of the chant result
in different structures in alleluias, responsories and Benedicamus Domino
settings.
Within the polyphonic sections of Parisian organum are two principal
stylistic divisions with a third subsidiary one. Terminological issues are
problematic here, but a distinction may be drawn between organum per se
and discantus. Both are visible in the verse of Constitues eos (Example 4.5).
Organum per se takes the notes of the chant and disposes them in long values
in the tenor, above which is composed a voice part that creates largely perfect
and imperfect consonances. The notation of both parts is unmeasured, and –
as in the case of the cum littera sections of conductus – there is significant
debate about the extent to which metre governs the rhythm of this music.20
Organum per se occupies 1–12, 19–29 and 62–5 of Example 4.5. These
sections, where musical imagination is given a rhythmically free rein, are
contrasted with sections in discantus known as clausulae. Here (30–61), the
notes of the tenor are organized rhythmically according to one of the rhyth-
mic modes (here mode 1), and may be repeated (as they are here; 45–61).
This gives a series of repeating patterns – ordines – for one or more cursus.21
The final note of the last ordo of the first cursus (45) is the first note of the
second cursus, so even though the ordines of the second cursus are the same
as the first, the musical results are different, with pitch and rhythm being
displaced so that what fell on a longa in the first cursus falls on a brevis in
the second, and vice versa. Above this tenor is composed a duplum that
in this case follows the same rhythmic mode. Phrases may overlap or may
cadence simultaneously, as is the case here. As in the case of organum per se,
cadences are planned around perfect and imperfect consonances. The verse
of Constitues eos also includes an instance of copula. Alongside organum per
se and discantus, copula is a third discursive mode in organum; it seeks to
impart the metre of discantus to the duplum only, and it may be identified
by the fact that the highly varied ligature patterns that characterize organum
per se in general give way to the patterns (here 3+2+2; 3+2+2) of modal
rhythm. Copulae will also exhibit periodic phraseology, usually antecedent–
consequent patterns, and also melodic sequence, as the copula in
Example 4.5 suggests (13–17).22
Example 4.5 Two-part organum, Constitues eos. V. Pro patribus, V. 1–65 (I-Fl Plut. 29.1,
fols. 121v–122r)
With an understanding of the various compositional discourses in play,

organa emerge as complex and unique structures that play off plainsong and
polyphony in ways that are entirely dictated by the liturgical structure of the
original plainsong, and that creatively juxtapose organum per se, discantus
76 Mark Everist
Example 4.5 (cont.)
and copula within the polyphonic sections. Constitues eos again shows how
this works. Example 4.4 shows how the polyphonic verse includes no less
than six clausulae, alternating with seven passages in organum per se. As
in the case of the musica sine littera in the conductus cum caudis, there is
clearly some sense of balance in the composition and distribution of the
clausulae: the second and fourth are of the same length, while the first is
twice the length of the second and fourth; by contrast, the third, fifth and
sixth are of eleven, ten and twelve perfections respectively.
A key feature of the repertory of organum duplum is the different selec-
tion of polyphonic material in different sources. In the case of Constitues eos,
the polyphonic material for the respond is largely the same in the two sources
(I-Fl Plut. 29.1 [also known as F], which forms the basis of examples 4.4
and 4.5, and D-W 1099 [also known as W2 ]) that preserve the piece. But
in the case of the verse, there are three sections that are entirely different,
and all three affect the clausulae on ‘patribus’, ‘nati’ and ‘filii’. In the case
of ‘nati’, the clausula is replaced in D-W 1099 by organum per se. Although
the first clausula (32 perfections in I-Fl Plut. 29.1) is replaced with one
of 28 perfections in D-W 1099, the clausula on ‘filii’ in both manuscripts
is of identical length, thus preserving the symmetry with the clausula on
‘tuis’.23
Three- and four-part organa adhere to most of the principles that
obtain for organa dupla with the key exception that the upper voices in
the sustained-tone sections are subject to modal rhythm and are notated in
modal notation. The aural difference is striking, especially in the four-part
works: in the sustained-tone style, three voices are in modal rhythm and
one not, but in discantus all four voices are in modal rhythm; the shift in
sonority is nothing like as great as from organum per se to discantus in two-
part works, and the change from one musical discourse to another is not
as sharply etched. Furthermore, the repertory of organa tripla and organa
quadrupla is much smaller, and the opportunities for swapping clausulae
around are that much more reduced.
Motet
The interchangeability of sections of organum, especially in the two-part
repertory, led to an autonomous existence for the clausula, and collections
of short fragments of discantus were features of some of the manuscripts
preserving the repertory as a whole. The clausula began to take on a life of
its own, a life that was responsible for the creation of the motet.24
The emergence of the motet, which has been dated anywhere between
1200 and 1220, problematizes the relationship between words, notes and
notation.25 Put very simply, the motet was created by adding words to a
free-standing clausula as examples 4.6a and 4.6b show.
Both the motet Immolata paschali victima / Latus and its source clausula
share a tenor that is identical in almost all respects.26 In addition, it is easy to
see how each of the notes of the ligatures in the clausula now carries a single
syllable of the motet’s text; this, however, does some violence to the melodic
integrity of the clausula’s duplum. Although the first two perfections text
78 Mark Everist
Example 4.6a Two-part clausula [Immo]latus est, 1–39 (I-Fl Plut. 29.1, fol. 158r)
Example 4.6b Two-part motet Immolata paschali victima / Latus, 1–39 (I-Fl Plut. 29.1,
fols. 411r–411v)
Example 4.7 Immolata paschali victima / Latus. Analysis of motetus text
Line Rhyme Phrase End

1. Immolata 4p a
2. Paschali victima 6pp a x
3. Immoletur anima; 7pp a
4. Sit azima, 4pp a
5. Sit expurgata, 5p a
6. Reparata 4p a
7. Post vetus zima 5p a x
8. Salus prima. 4p a x
9. Exit die tertia, 6pp a
10. Ecce, Ionas intima 8pp a
11. Ventris angustia. 6pp a x
12. Fera Ioseph pessima 7pp a x
13. Devorata gelima 7pp a
14. Adoratur fraterna; 7p a x
15. Post tres dies infima 7pp a x
16. Exit de cisterna. 6p a
17. Ignea 3pp a
18. Remota romphea 6pp a
19. Claustra siderea 6pp a x
20. Aperit parte latus 7p b
21. Perforatus, 4p b x
22. Ut fenestratus 5p b
23. Celo sit meatus. 6p b x
the clausula exactly, the third and fourth not only carry two syllables but
they also modify the clausula’s original rhythm. Similar modifications may
be found at perfections 31 and 35.
To a degree, the structure of the motet poem is determined by the phrase
lengths of the clausula, but there is significant licence: over the course of
two perfections, either two, three or four syllables may be deployed, and
several lines of poetry are set to a single musical phrase (Example 4.7).
The text exhibits a wide range of line lengths, ranging from three to eight
syllables, and there is no correlation between phrase ends and paroxytones
or proparoxytones; nor does there appear to be any logical relationship
80 Mark Everist
between musical phrase length and poetic line length. In short, there seems
to be a lack of interest in what are conventionally considered text–music
relations. What is, however, largely consistent is rhyme. A single rhyme
dominates most of the motet, and changes only for the last 4 lines of the
23-line lyric. This is a critical point in the poem and in the motet, since
the word that triggers the change of rhyme, ‘latus’ (the side [of Christ]),
assonates with the word of the plainsong from which the tenor is taken:
‘immolatus’.
Such correspondences suggest a relationship between the text of the
poem and its host plainsong. The plainsong from which the clausula is
ultimately taken is ‘Alleluia. V. Pascha nostrum immolatus est Christus’,
and this furnishes much of the text of the first few lines of the poem. Going
one step further to the rest of the Easter Day liturgy, from which Alleluia.
V. Pascha nostrum is taken, shows that ‘victima’ is the first word of the
sequence for the mass, Victimae paschali laudes, and that the references to
‘azima’ derive from the communion chant for the mass on Easter Day, Pascha
nostrum immolatus, which includes the line ‘itaque epulemur in azimis’. The
rest of the poem depends on Old Testament analogies – Jonah and the whale,
Joseph and the Fiery Furnace – that point to other incarcerations followed
by resurrections, which are then made to return to the side (‘latus’) of
Christ.27
The close relationships between the text of the motet, its host plainsong
and the background liturgy or the mass of Easter Day strongly suggest some
sort of liturgical or paraliturgical context for the motet. One possibility is
that the clausula should be texted when it forms part of a performance
of the entire organum in which it is found; in other words, motets found
in manuscript collections should be reinstated in their parent organa.28
While such a suggestion is entirely plausible, it does not account for motets
whose texts are polemical, hortatory or otherwise unrelated to the liturgy
in the way that Immolata paschali victima is. The problems of function are
here analogous to those of much of the conductus repertory, and may be
just as varied.29
The relationship between clausula and the early motet brought into play
two related phenomena: (1) the idea that musicians might compose multiple
works (clausulae or motets) for the same context and expect them to be
swapped around over time by those who sang them; and (2) the idea that
texts could be added to melismatic music. It was a small step to the further
practice that characterizes the motet in the thirteenth century: the addition
of new voice-parts – a triplum to a two-part work for example – and the
replacement of one text with another. Coupled to the possibility of using
vernacular texts, these ideas created a potential kaleidoscope of musical
and literary practices that were exploited with enthusiasm throughout the
thirteenth century and into the fourteenth. With the simple two-part motet
(motetus and tenor) being possibly the oldest product of these practices,
almost every combination of text and music was exploited during the course
of the thirteenth century: voice-parts could be piled up so that not only did
a triplum appear but so too could a quadruplum be added to a three-part
work (sometimes confusingly called a ‘double motet’) to create a motet in
four parts. French and Latin texts could coexist in the same work (known
as a ‘bilingual motet’).30
Simply describing the complexities of the relationships between surviv-
ing thirteenth-century motets is a serious barrier to understanding; trying
to explain how musicians acted as they reworked musical and poetic mate-
rial is even more challenging.31 A sense of how the repertory worked in the
second half of the thirteenth century may be gained from looking at a single
group of compositions that shares the same musical material:
a two-part motet Hec dies leticie / Hec dies32

a two-part motet Au commencement d’este / Hec dies (which shares the same
music)33
a three-part French motet Lonctens ai mi se m’entent / Au commencement d’este
/ Hec dies (lower two parts the same music as the first two works; triplum newly
added)34
a three-part Latin motet Salve, virgo Katherina / Sicut solis radium / Hec dies
(music the same as all three parts of the previous work to which new Latin texts
are added.35
There is no clausula on which this collection of works is based, and it might

be reasonably argued that the two-part Latin motet – with a motetus text
that cites the text of the plainsong and is therefore closely allied to a liturgical
context in the same way as Immolata paschali victima – is the first link in this
complex chain. But deciphering compositional priority beyond that point
becomes very difficult. From the sources in which they are found, it could
be argued that the two-part French motet is the second stage in the process –
a simple contrafactum of the Latin motet – and that the three-part ‘French
double motet’ arises out of adding a newly composed triplum and poem.
But the dates of the manuscripts for both compositions are not sufficiently
differentiated to be certain, and it is entirely possible that a musician
could have taken Hec dies leticie / Hec dies – added a triplum directly
and two new French texts, and that the two-part French motet is sim-
ply a reduction created by dropping the triplum and its text. What does
seem more likely is that the three-part Latin motet Salve, virgo Katherina /
Sicut solis radium / Hec dies is a further contrafactum of the French double
motet.36
82 Mark Everist
One way of making sense of the wide range of motet types found in
the thirteenth century is to look at the way in which thirteenth-century
musicians tried to organize their understanding: to look at the way in which
manuscripts were organized. The best-known source for the thirteenth-
century motet is the so-called Montpellier Codex, F-MOf H 196. In its
earliest form (it was added to at least twice later) from around 1270, it
divided its contents into four-part motets, three-part bilingual motets (texts
in Latin and French), three-part Latin motets, three-part French motets,
and two-part French motets. The critical principles of organization and
identification for whoever planned the structure of this book were the
number of voice parts and the language of the poetry.
For the repertory of French motets, in two and three parts, the position is
even more complex as they create intertextual links between the repertory
of secular monophonic song, medieval romance and other literature via
the sharing of refrains.37 A refrain is a short phrase of poetry that re-
appears in more than one literary or musical context; the intertextuality
may relate to the poetry or to the poetry and music together. A simple
example is the motet Amis, vostre demoree / Pro patribus, which is found in
the sixth fascicle of F-MOf H 196.38 The end of the motet shares its text and
music with a secular monophonic song and a treatise on love by Gerard of
Liège, the Quinque incitamenta ad deum amandum ardenter (examples 4.8a
and 4.8b).39
The song by Moniot d’Arras (fl. 1213–39) is a chanson à refrain, where
the refrain appears at the end of each stanza; apart from a few ornamental
melodic variants and some slight lexical changes the refrain is identical to
the end of the motetus of Amis, vostre demoree.40 The notation in the two
sources for the song, F-Pn Fr. 844 and 12615, is unmeasured, whereas –
as is always the case in F-MOf H 196 – the notation of the motet is mea-
sured, and this difference is retained in the example.41 Such simple cases
are outnumbered by far more complex intertextualities where more than
one refrain is in play in a single motet, where the refrain is broken up,
where the music of the refrain is retexted within the motet within which it is
found, etc.42
Throughout the creation of all these complex musical and literary net-
works, some things remained constant: plainsongs were still the source for
tenors, and – with the new notation that differentiated graphically between
longae and breves – modal rhythms could be expressed, and the system
largely continued to dictate the rhythmic structure of the music and the
declamation of the poetry. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, two
of these constants were subject to change. The first innovation was the
inclusion of vernacular songs as sources for tenors, and the second was a
key change to the rhythmic profile of the music. While French tenors form
Example 4.8a Two-part motet Amis vostre demoree / Pro patribus, 26–46 (F-MOf H. 196, fol. 249r)
Example 4.8b Monophonic song: Moniot d’Arras, Amours me fait renvoisier et chanter, refrain
(F-Pn fonds fr. 844, fol. 118v)
a small part of the overall repertory of motets, in the manuscripts in which

they are found they have a proportionally higher profile (seventh and eighth
fascicles of F-MOf H 196 and I-Tr vari 42).43 Secular songs have a much
higher incidence of repetition than plainsong, and in some cases composers
experimented with matching the repetitions in the upper voices with results
that – musically at least – came to look like the polyphonic songs that would
become so important in the fourteenth century.44
The second major change to the profile of the motet at the end of the thir-
teenth century was the end of the relationship between rhythmic structure
and declamation. Examples 4.7 and 4.8 show compositions where the decla-
mation of the text largely follows the rhythmic mode of the piece. Towards
1300, not only did the brevis – which up till now had never been divided into
84 Mark Everist
Example 4.9 Three-part motet Aucun ont trouvé chant par usage / Lonctans me sui tenu /
Annun[tiantes], 1–16 (F-MOf H. 196, fols. 273r–274r)
more than three semibreves – become divided into much larger numbers,
but syllables of the poetry were declaimed at a similar rate (Example 4.9).
The two lower parts of Aucun ont trouvé chant par usage / Lonctans me
sui tenu / Annun[tiantes] behave very much like any mid-thirteenth-century
motet, but the triplum exhibits divisions of the brevis into three semibreves
(which, although found in the motetus, never carry more than one syllable),
five, six and seven breves in the space of a dozen perfections.45 More than
anything, this particular change in the motet repertory marked an audible
change to the texture of the work, and a shift in aesthetic focus.46
If the function of non-liturgical Latin motets is unclear, the environment
in which motets with French texts were cultivated is even more opaque.
Two pieces of evidence may be brought to bear on the question. The the-
orist Johannes de Grocheo wrote enticingly about how the motet should
‘not . . . be propagated among the vulgar, since they do not understand its
subtlety nor do they delight in hearing it, but it should be performed for
the learned and those who seek after the subtleties of the arts. And it is
normally performed in their feasts for their beautification . . .’47 Johannes’s
comments are in the context of what he calls musica canonica, in other words
the music of clerics, and raise as many questions as they provide answers.
They do however clearly locate the motet within an educated domain in
which the motet’s complexity is valued as much as its sonority or style.
The second piece of evidence concerns the career paths of the singers at
Notre Dame and some of the criticisms levelled at them: many of the key
musicians at Notre Dame were forced to resign each year; they may or may
not have been re-employed. Moves from an ecclesiastical position to others
were therefore more than possible, and these might well have included more
courtly environments in which vernacular poetry was more the norm. The
collision, then, between musicians trained to sing and perhaps compose
(or at least modify) organa and clausulae and a vernacular culture may well
have triggered the earliest motets with French texts. Coupled to comments
such as those of Robert de Courson, who criticized those who employed the
magistri organici for their ‘scurrilous and effeminate things’, these observa-
tions might lead one to the same courts that gave room to trouvères and
their musicians in a search for the origins of the French motet.48
Towards the fourteenth century

Older histories of thirteenth-century music suggest that organum ceased
around 1220, conductus around 1240 and that the motet occupied most
of the rest of the century until it itself was supplanted by what used to
be called the isorhythmic motet around 1300. This seems far too simple
a view when the longevity of both organum and conductus is considered:
both genres seem to have coexisted with the motet – and were performed
throughout the century and beyond. But such coexistence came at a price.
The rhythmic and notational changes that were triggered by the changes in
motet composition in the middle of the century had an immense impact
on both organum and conductus. In both cases, it was the sections that
86 Mark Everist
were preserved in an unmeasured notation – organum per se and musica

cum littera respectively – that were subject to change. Theoretical writings
from the later thirteenth century try to explain organum and conductus in
terms not only of mensural notation but also of a sophisticated mensural
notation as found in such treatises as Ars cantus mensurabilis or the treatise
of Anonymous IV.49
Musical sources for both conductus and organum from around 1300
exhibit the same sorts of trends: recasting the notation of organum per se
and musica sine littera in mensural notation. There used to be a time when
scholars would extrapolate backwards from these sources to argue that
their notation represented the original rhythmic delivery of these sections,
but viewing these sources as products of changing views of notation and
rhythm – as part of the reception of organum and conductus – proba-
bly does greater justice to the complexity of thirteenth-century musical
history.50 The consequences were far-reaching for polyphonic music in
general: whereas both organum and conductus (especially the conductus
cum caudis) exploited contrasting musical discourses that were character-
ized by the relationship between words and notes and by their rhythmic
profile, the motet exploited a single musical discourse – preferring to exploit
the vertical complexity of polytextuality and multiple voices. Around 1300,
this difference was not quite entirely effaced but significantly weakened: in
organum, the difference between organum per se and discantus remained in
terms of the relationship between voices and in the conductus between syl-
labic and melismatic settings of the text. But the rhythmic differences that
underpinned these differences were completely eradicated in the sources
that were copied around 1300 and which presumably bear witness to a style
of performance then current.
5 The fourteenth century
elizabeth eva leach
Although a famous popular history book’s subtitle glossed the fourteenth

century as ‘calamitous’, a consideration of its music would probably see the
period as a triumph.1 In part this is because the chief technology that gives
us access to the past – writing – became more widely used for record keeping
by this time. In particular, the special kind of writing used to record musical
sounds – musical notation – reached a new level of prescription, describing
relative pitches and rhythms more fully than before. As the fourteenth
century paid more cultural attention to writing things down in the first
place, more music books survive from this period than from any earlier
centuries, and their contents seem tantalizingly decipherable.
The detailed social and political history of the fourteenth century is
complex and beyond the scope of this chapter. However, some of its aspects
will be mentioned here, not in order to give a comprehensive history, but
in order to suggest ways in which larger historical changes affected musical
culture.
The later fourteenth century saw a deep division of the Western Christian
church, a problem partly caused by the refusal of successive popes to reside
in Rome after the French pope Clement V moved the papal court to Avignon
(France) in 1309. The often lavish papal court was responsible for employing
a large number of expert singers, many of whom we know to have also
been composers because pieces by them survive.2 Avignon was especially
important as a centre for musical activity during the reign of the ‘humanist’
pope Clement VI (b.1291–2, elected 1342, d.1352), whose circle included
the music theorist and scientist Johannes de Muris, as well as the composer
Philippe de Vitry, whom several later writers saw as key in the practical
deployment of the new notational style of the Ars Nova within motets and
secular songs.3 Despite Avignon’s status as an ecclesiastical court, musical
activity there included the composition and performance not only of sacred
music, but also of secular songs and political motets. Vitry’s motet Petre
Clemens / Lugentium siccentur, for instance, was written for the visit to
Avignon in January 1343 of the Ambassadors of the Roman citizens, who
tried (unsuccessfully) to tempt the newly elected Clement VI back to Rome.4
The balades Courtois et sages (by Magister Egidius), Par les bons (by Philippus
de Caserta) and Inclite flos (by Matteus de Sante Johanne) were all written
[87] for the Avignon ‘anti-pope’ Clement VII (1378–94), whose election initiated
88 Elizabeth Eva Leach
the Western schism that dominated the church until its resolution at the
Council of Constance in 1417. In 1378 Gregory XI returned the papacy to
Rome, dying there shortly after his arrival. Under threat of violence from the
citizens of Rome, the cardinals – including the future anti-pope Clement VII
(Robert of Geneva) – elected the Italian archbishop Bartolomeo Prignano
of Bari as Pope Urban VI on 8 April 1378. Five months later, however, under
the pretext that election under such duress was invalid, another election saw
Robert himself elected, acknowledged by Aragon, Castile, Denmark, France,
Navarre, Norway, Portugal, Savoy, Scotland and some German states.5 The
Italians continued to support Urban VI; Clement VII returned his papal
court to Avignon. Two (and later three) popes then reigned simultaneously
until the church was reunified with the election of Martin V in 1417, who
finally and unequivocally returned the papacy to Rome.
The fourteenth century also saw much of the so-called Hundred Years
War (actually a series of conflicts lasting from roughly 1337 to 1453) between
England and France.6 Although war might be thought a negative influence
on culture, medieval warfare differed from modern warfare in scale and pro-
cess, allowing a far greater role for ceremonial, parleys and other forums. At
one point the French king and his entire court were in captivity in England,
where they engaged in courtly activities – hunting and performances of
poetry and music – similar to those they would have undertaken at home.
Music and musicians played important roles in international diplomacy
and propaganda.7
The schism and war were not the only factors that fed an ever-present
late-medieval eschatology – a preoccupation with the Last Things and the
Day of Judgement. A European population that since 1250 had expanded
to levels not seen again in some states until the middle of the nineteenth
century was struck first by a serious famine (1315–22) and then by epidemic
disease.8 The first large-scale occurrence of the so-called Black Death, which
contemporaries referred to as the ‘Great Mortality’, swept Europe between
1347 and 1350, killing an estimated one third of the population.9 On the
other hand the size of court retinues continued to rise during this period,
with noblemen and princes employing ever more functionaries.10 Such large
retinues could not be paid merely in kind (with food, lodging, clothes and so
on), but required monetary salaries and pensions, accounts of which were
more carefully kept than before (in turn necessitating the service of increased
numbers of literate clerks, who were often also chapel functionaries).11 The
increase in households and courts saw a concomitant increase in the number
of musicians, singers and scribes employed (not least in the capacity of
secretary, a post held by the poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut at the
court of Jean of Luxembourg, for example). As mentioned above, the rise in
the levels of record keeping also affected the amount of music written down.
The other cultural change that affected music in the fourteenth century
was bound up with music’s continued place within the basic university
training of the Middle Ages, the arts degree.12 Musica – a subject whose def-
inition encompassed far more than just sounding music in performance –
was one of the mathematical subjects of the quadrivium. The fourteenth
century witnessed a revolution in mathematical thinking which broadly
shifted from an arithmetical mathematics based on fixed points and which
sharply distinguished qualities from quantities, to a geometric mathematics
based on movement and allowing for the quantification of quality through
estimation and approximation.13 It seems likely that this had some impact
on the conceptual changes in the basis of musical notation, especially as
one of the chief music theorists, Johannes de Muris, also wrote on advanced
mathematics.14 Music also received a boost that connected university and
court in the shape of the translation of Aristotle’s Politics from its late-
thirteenth-century Latin version into French by Nicole Oresme.15 Book VIII
argues strongly for music’s propriety for noblemen not just as an abstract
intellectual discipline (as Boethius’s treatise implies) but as a leisured pur-
suit and appropriate for relaxation.
The fourteenth century is often discussed in terms of the rise of the
composer; it certainly is the case that we know the names of more composers
from this period than from previous centuries, and importantly we know
the names of composers of polyphonic music, in stark contrast to the
general situation with the polyphony of the thirteenth century. However,
the manuscripts of troubadour and trouvère song are often organized by
composer, a trait that can be seen as late as the retrospective anthology
of trecento song in the Squarcialupi Codex. And we know the names of
those who put together (componere) chant offices for local saints from as
early as the tenth century.16 It can be seen that musicology has tended to
make ‘composer’ stand for ‘composer of polyphony’ in a way that is one of
many aspects of medieval studies that say more about the preoccupations
of latter-day musicologists than about the Middle Ages.17
Motets
Certain forms in use in the thirteenth century continued to flourish in
the fourteenth. The motet in particular retained its importance, but where
formerly whole collections were dedicated to it, in the fourteenth cen-
tury motets tend instead to be copied within song collections, indicat-
ing their migration even further from the liturgical sphere. The formal
developments in motet composition in fourteenth-century France – the
main place where the form was cultivated – show a reduction from the
variety of types practised in the thirteenth century but a greater variety

within the remaining type than was explored hitherto.18 The tenor is a
numerical scheme underlying the whole piece and is rhythmically differ-
entiated from the much faster-moving top voices. The uppermost voice –
the triplum – moves fastest of all, the motetus a bit slower, and the rigidly
patterned tenor slowest of all. The tenor patterns of pitch (color) and rhythm
(talea) can be coterminous or can overlap.19 The new numerical possibili-
ties of the motet lent themselves to the exploration of numerical symbolism
and other inaudible but meaningful features.20 The large five-section motet
Rota versatilis, composed in England before 1320, has sections in the pro-
portions 12:8:4:9:6, which symbolize the fundamental musical proportions
commonly found in elementary music theory, where they are said to have
been discovered by Pythagoras.21
Whether or not the upper voices reflect the patterning of the tenor
varies. Scholars have traditionally seen a movement from having barely any
reflection of the tenor in the upper voices (as in most thirteenth-century
motets from the old corpus of Montpellier, for example), to what has been
termed ‘pan-isorhythm’, where the tenor’s repeating structure is reflected
in all the upper parts. Perhaps composers experienced an increased need to
articulate the motet’s structure in this readily audible way when its sheer
scale expanded to the grand proportions of the fourteenth century. The net
effect was that the motet became almost strophic in form.
The upper voices of the fourteenth-century motet began to adopt reg-
ular versification, in contrast to the more playful rhymes and metrical
schemes which typify the upper voices of earlier motets. The polytextual-
ity of the upper voices continued, and the possibility for intertextual play
between each upper voice and both with the tenor was expanded as com-
posers exercised a freer choice of tenor melismas, no longer restricting their
choice to those clausula-derived segments of chant that typically group
the thirteenth-century motet into tenor families. Machaut, for example,
chooses short emblematic words from chants that are not used as the basis
for motets at all in the thirteenth century.22 This freedom of authorial choice
probably reflects a complete disengagement of the performance situation
of motets from liturgical or para-liturgical use and their newer associa-
tion with courtly activities. However, this does not necessarily remove the
intertextual resonance of the liturgical situation ‘cued’ by the tenor; as with
thirteenth-century motets, those of the fourteenth century can be read
as exploring analogical overlap (and difference) between devotional prac-
tices of different kinds (sacred and courtly-secular).23 The situation with
English motets differs in this respect from the French repertory. Although
most of the 100 or so motets, mainly in three parts with two upper voices
texted in Latin, that survive from early-fourteenth-century England are
fragmentary, they not only show a far greater formal variety than the French
motets of the period but often have more explicitly devotional upper-voice
texts.24
Songs
Arguably the most important musical innovations of the fourteenth cen-
tury occurred in the field of secular song. The combination of polyphonic
musical textures with a number of refrain forms, known today as the formes
fixes, whose texts were predominantly high-style courtly poetry, at once
broke with the types of song current in the thirteenth century (in which
courtly refrain forms tended to be courtly-popular danced poems, high-
style poems tended to lack refrains, and neither were polyphonic) and set
a standard for the next century and a half.25 The overwhelming presence
attested by the sources is that of Guillaume de Machaut, a major French
poet for whom music-writing – especially as facilitated and made precise
by the new notation of the Ars Nova – was just a further element in the per-
formance of his poetry over which he could exert his considerable authorial
control.
Machaut’s thematization of himself as an author, as a controlling pres-
ence behind his book, in conjunction with his own training as a secretary
and his interest in making books, mean that the source situation for this
composer is strongly atypical. His works are preserved in no fewer than six
large manuscripts from the second half of the century, that are dedicated
entirely to them. A few of his musical works also crop up in other song-
books, and his lyrics and narrative poems also appear in other text-only
poetry sources. Nevertheless, the weight of authority that accrues to the six
so-called Machaut manuscripts is powerful: it enables us to trace a life and
works for this composer far more detailed than those of any of his contem-
poraries. By contrast, his equally famous colleague Philippe de Vitry – a
poet-composer perhaps better regarded by those contemporaries who rated
their own learning – has no such ‘collected works’ source. Vitry’s works are
transmitted in the way in which musical works of this period are generally
found: in collections of pieces by a number of different composers, often
anonymous, and without the extreme care in presentation that we find in
Machaut’s richly illuminated books. Although we have a number of motets
that can be linked with Vitry, unless they are contained in the interpolated
version of the poem Fauvel found in F-Pn fr. 146, his notated songs are lost.
We have only the word of the anonymous author of a poetry treatise dating
from 1405–32 that Vitry ‘invented’ the writing of balades, lais, and simple
rondeaux.26
Rondels to rondeaux
Of the formes fixes, the one that most clearly carries on a form present in
the thirteenth century is the rondeau. Musically, the rondeau is perhaps
the simplest of the fixed forms as it has two musical sections of roughly
equal length. These sections A and B are sung in the pattern AB aA ab
AB in which the upper-case letters represent the sections carrying the text
of the refrain, and lower-case letters represent new text each time they
occur. The first section of music (A and a) is thus heard five times, compared
to the three times that the second section of music (B and b) is heard. In
terms of the poetic form, the two musical sections can each carry one or
more lines of text, and it is not necessary for them each to carry the same
number of lines (even though they split the refrain text between them).
The simplest rondeau poem has one line per musical section giving a total
of eight lines: two refrain lines (one sung three times and one sung twice)
and three other lines (a single line that goes with the first refrain line and a
couplet). An eleven-line rondeau would have one line of poetry in the first
musical section and two in the second; a thirteen-line rondeau would have
two lines of poetry in the A section and one in the B section. A sixteen-line
rondeau would have two lines in each musical section and so on.
A poet would have to consider that the part of the refrain in the first
musical section would have to stand alone in between the two new text
segments that surround it in the middle of the piece; a composer would
have to ensure that the first musical section makes as much sense going
on to the second as it would going straight back to repeat the first section
again with new words. In addition, the poet can make links between the
musical sections in forms that have eleven, thirteen, sixteen or more lines
by interlacing rhymes so that the same rhyme types occur in both sections.
The balade–virelai matrix

The forms that have least to do with the preceding century and that go
on to dominate polyphonic song until the end of the fifteenth century
belong to what Christopher Page has termed ‘the balade–virelai matrix’.27
The similarity between these two song forms is evident also in their nomen-
clature. The word ‘balade’ refers to dancing, while the word ‘virelai’ suggests
the turning (in a circle) that accompanied such dances. Machaut tends to
call the virelai the ‘chanson baladée’ (danced song), and the equivalent form
with Italian text is the ‘ballata’. Texts of these two forms are mixed together
in the section of lyrics in GB-Ob Douce 308, which dates from the first
half of the fourteenth century.28 In both balade and virelai types there are a
pair of verses which take the same music – perhaps with its endings tonally
differentiated to give first an open and then a more closed feel; then there
is new text set to music different from that used for the verses, and finally
there is a refrain. In the virelai, the refrain (It. ‘ripresa’) is also performed
at the very opening as well, and the music of the latter part of the new
text – the ‘tierce’ or ‘volta’ – is the same as that of the refrain. In the balade
the form opens with the pair of verses sung to the same music (with open
and closed endings); the new section of text and music – the ‘oultrepasse’,
or B section – is different from that of the refrain. Subsequent stanzas in
both forms repeat the musical form from the first of the verses.
Virelai / ballata R Io Ic II ‘tierce’ / ‘volta’ (music of R) R
Balade - Io Ic II ‘oultrepasse’ R
In the first half of the fourteenth century the differentiation between these
two forms was widened by their musicalization. Most virelais in Machaut’s
output are monophonic and syllabic and thus could still be danced to, while
being sung by the dancers themselves. An illustration in a mid-century copy
of his Remede de Fortune, which exemplifies all the formes fixes within its
narrative, shows exactly this, and this is the only song type to accompany
group social activity in the story.29 Machaut’s balades are, with one late
exception, all polyphonic and increasingly move towards a standard three-
part texture with long melismatic passages. These are now stylized dance
songs, akin to the suites of Bach in being removed from actual dancing,
yet having assimilated dance forms, rhythms and gestures. Later, the virelai
too moved away from syllabic monophony and was regularly sung in three
parts; its popular-style dance elements were sometimes transmuted into
the singing of non-musical sounds: birdsong, drums, trumpets etc., found
more usually in hocket sections of the Italian caccia.30
The lai
The word ‘lai’ has a number of etymological resonances, most of which
link it to song. The Irish word loı̂d (or laı̂d), meaning ‘blackbird’s song’ has
been linked to a supposed Irish origin for the form, but whether this can
be linked with the musical lai that appeared in France around 1200 is not
certain. The lai can be narrative or lyric, and not everything that calls itself
a lai fits the non-strophic developmental form that usually characterizes
it. Conversely, lai-like features can be found in songs that are variously
called descort, leich, nota/notula, estampie, ductia, garip, sequence, prose,
conductus, or versus.31
Throughout the fourteenth century poetry remains an ‘art de bouche’
(oral practice); the human voice emits sounds on a seamless continuum
from speech to singing. It is likely that narrative lays, like the chansons de
geste, were intoned to a simple melodic formula. Like the refrain forms,
the lai saw a trend towards greater regularity in the fourteenth century.
Lais became longer; in the work of Machaut there is a standard pattern of
12 stanzas with the first and last having the same rhymes and the same
melody, usually transposed a fifth higher for the final stanza.32 Each stanza
has a so-called double versicle set-up, so that it divides into two equally
structured halves that can be sung to the same music used twice through. In
this it resembles the sequence, which seems to have had an influence on the
later fourteenth-century lai, rather than affecting its initial development –
the thirteenth-century lyric lai is fairly freely structured, often heterometric
(having lines of different lengths), and irregular in its rhyme schemes.33
Because they are not strophic, the lai and sequence are primarily musical
in their formal concept, as opposed to the metrical formal concept that
dominates the strophic formes fixes.34 Despite not being usually polyphonic
(although Machaut wrote some that could be performed canonically in
three parts), the lai is arguably a greater musical and poetic challenge to the
composer than the other forms.35
The madrigal
Despite the greater modern familiarity with the madrigal of the sixteenth
century, the first use of this term to denote a musico-poetic genre is by
Francesco da Barberino around 1313. In 1334 Antonio da Tempo lists
two types – with and without a ritornello. Although da Tempo mentions
monodic madrigals, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians esti-
mates that 90 per cent of the 190 surviving examples are for two voices (the
rest are for three).36 The earliest surviving examples, from northern Italy
and dating probably from the 1320s, appear in I-Rvat Rossi 215. Despite
both voices being texted in this source, the uppermost voice predominates,
often melismatically, while the lower voice moves slower, emphasizing con-
sonances. By the 1340s the madrigal had reached its final fourteenth-century
form, comprising two or three three-line stanzas (with the same rhyme pat-
tern but usually different rhyme types) set to the same music, followed by
a one- or two-line terminating ritornello, often in a different mensuration.
The individual heptasyllabic or hendecasyllabic lines are separated caden-
tially in the style found in the works of Magister Piero, Giovanni da Cascia
and Jacopo da Bologna (fl. 1340–60). Jacopo also offers the first three-voice
settings. The madrigal genre continued to be popular, especially in Florence,
until around 1415, although from the 1360s onwards it was rivalled by the
newly polyphonic ballata (see above). The final phase of the trecento madri-
gal saw a move away from the pastoral and courtly poetry that characterizes
its early-century incarnation and towards its use as a vehicle for authorial
presence in autobiographical pieces such as Landini’s Musica son, as well as
moralizing poetry and occasional or symbolic poems.
Liturgical music
The repertory of polyphonic French settings of texts from the ordinary
of the mass was very widely transmitted, with pieces existing in multi-
ple copies and a variety of different versions. The French mass style was
highly influential, for example, on mass settings by Italian composers,
although England was unique (as far as can be told by source survival)
in setting mass propers polyphonically. Of the repertory’s known com-
posers, at least five can be associated with the papal court at Avignon. This
perhaps explains the wide dissemination of the repertory, since Avignon was
a magnet for the most internationally mobile and influential people of the
period. In general, liturgical music is in three parts, although the number
of voices texted varies from piece to piece and, sometimes, from source to
source.37
Music for the mass had previously been copied in generic groups, keep-
ing items of the same kind together (Kyries, Glorias etc.). The earliest cyclic
groupings – where a set of the different items of the ordinary that would
be performed sequentially are placed together in the manuscript – occur
in the fourteenth century. The earliest example is the so-called Tournai
Mass, which sets the six ordinary texts of the mass: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo,
Sanctus, Agnus and Ite Missa Est. The polyphonic setting of the last of
these seems only to have been common in the fourteenth century; here it
is presented as a three-voice motet also known independently from other
fourteenth-century sources.38 This harks back to the earlier liturgical func-
tion of motets as a form of troping, a trait associated with the beginnings
of motet composition.39 One Credo setting appears as part of two different
cycles in manuscripts from Toulouse and Barcelona. In the Toulouse Mass
the Credo seems related to the Ite, and the Kyrie and Sanctus also seem to
form a pair (there is no Gloria). But in the Barcelona Mass the Credo does
not seem similar to any of the highly contrasted items: only the Kyrie and
Agnus might possibly be related.40 These cycles were scribal compilations
rather than compositionally intended cycles. This does not, however, inval-
idate their cyclicity – the manuscript layout suggests that they were used as
a cycle and would have been heard as a cycle even if they were not composed
as one. The expectation of unifying compositional cyclism is one that stems
from hindsight and in particular reflects the nineteenth-century musicol-
ogists’ desire to find a medieval parallel for the unified symphony, whose
movements were not only all the product of the same composer, but were
also thematically, motivically, and/or tonally linked.41 In this spirit much
has been made of the first complete single-author cycle of the mass ordinary
by Guillaume de Machaut, composed in the early 1360s for use in Marian
devotions at a side altar in his home cathedral of Reims.42 Although this
seems a further way in which Machaut stands out as a central figure in

fourteenth-century music history, it should be remembered that the ‘rise
of the cyclic Mass’ was not a foregone conclusion at this point in music
history.
Understanding the music of the fourteenth century

Studying the music of the fourteenth century still poses a number of key
questions concerning historical method. How fourteenth-century music is
studied is affected by how music is defined (its definition was somewhat
broader then than now), how the sources are interpreted, what other mate-
rials are thought to bear on their interpretation, and how they are deemed to
be relevant. There are inevitable limits in terms of what the predominantly
written, predominantly clerical sources for this period can and cannot tell
us. Depending on one’s scholarly perspective this limitation is either a great
frustration – how can we really know anything? – or a fantastic opportunity
to make creative interpretative readings that best fit with the available (par-
tial) evidence. We tend to ask questions of this music and the period that
its historical actors – the people who made and heard its music, or taught
and learned musica – did not need to ask. Their writings are unlikely to
answer such questions directly. Among these modern concerns three stand
out: the issue of the basic social context for music from this period, the
issues surrounding its performance, and the issue of how to construct a
chronology – a diachronic history – of music and musical culture across
this period.
Social context
For sacred music, the liturgy gives at least some indication of the context in
which it would have been performed. The mass is a particular kind of social
and religious ritual event, well understood even if we do not know for any
given piece the specifics for which particular service(s) in which particular
year(s) it was used. Sometimes the texts of other pieces, especially motets,
make political points that help connect them with particular occasions.
However, this connection usually gives only a date that they must be later
than (a terminus post quem), rather than actually offering a performance
situation; Margaret Bent has cautioned against ‘over-literal dating according
to . . . topical references’ of the political motets in the F-Pn fr. 146 version
of the Roman de Fauvel – musical pieces are not newspaper reports.43
Even when a specific event is being commemorated – the wedding of Jean
of Berry and Jeanne of Boulogne in balades by Trebor and Egidius,44 or
the installation of a specific bishop for Machaut’s motet Bone pastor / Bone
pastor / Bone pastor (M18) – a later adaptation or repetition of specially
written music is not inconceivable.45
For most of the song repertory, the problem of performance context
is particularly acute. Who wrote, performed and listened to late medieval
songs? The manuscript evidence is difficult to interpret: we often do not
know precisely when or where manuscripts were compiled, how long before
this the songs were written, how widely they circulated, who would have
had the competence to perform them, when they would be performed, how
often, who would listen, or what the listeners would make of them. Evidence
for all these questions has to be sought from within the songs, whose texts
are often highly stylized courtly love songs that seem opaquely general.
A little more information is available for the works of Machaut since his
narrative poems offer a first-person narrative persona (Guillaume) who
is the alter ego of the poet-composer. Suitable caution must be exercised,
however, because even when the songs purport to tell of the doings of
real historical figures these are not historical accounts but literary works;
nevertheless, they can point us to certain contexts. Machaut’s Remede de
Fortune, a long narrative poem with seven inserted musical items – one in
each of the formes fixes – gives some information about the ideal(ized) use
of this kind of musical poetry at court. The action is initiated when the
Lady discovers an unascribed written copy of Guillaume’s lai and asks him
to sing it to her. The poem laments the fact that its je loves a lady but cannot
tell her. When Guillaume has sung it to her, she asks if he knows who it is
by; he flees in terror from revealing that it is his own song. Rehabilitated
through more music and singing in a garden by the allegorical figure of
Lady Hope (Esperance), Guillaume returns to court fortified to withstand
the vagaries of unstable Fortune in love by remaining hopeful of gaining
the lady’s love. He provides social music for a court dance (the virelai Dame
en vous [V33], see above) and is able to reveal his love to the lady, although
there is no happy outcome. In effect, love of Hope (which is within the lover
and thus at his control) replaces love of the Lady (who is out of his control
and might cause him sorrow). This gives a clear path to happiness based on
an abstract spiritual quality, maintained within the loving subject. There is a
clear parallel between this kind of courtly love, sublimated as endless hope,
and the kind of hope that animates the Christian believer in the Middle
Ages. Hope of an eventual reward that might not be in this life can keep
one happy only if one loves the act of hoping rather than the presence of
the reward.
Machaut’s ostensibly secular courtly love motet texts can also be read
through the lens of this allegory by means of their sacred plainchant tenor
segments. It has even been argued that the ordered cycle of motets in the
manuscripts represents a step-by-step journey from unhappiness and sin
to union with the divine Beloved (Christ).46 This is parallel to the Remede’s
step-by-step journey, except that as in all the Machaut dits there is no
final union with the earthly beloved lady, perhaps underscoring the point
that although the feelings are meant to be of a similar strength in the
two journeys, the outcome of only the spiritual journey is secure. Trusting
in earthly happiness and earthly (i.e. sexual) love will not give the same
guaranteed result of having that love returned as spiritual devotion will give
to the surety of God’s love.47 Medieval courtiers took religion seriously, and
women among them in particular needed consolation for the frustrations
and perhaps boredom of court life by means of a form of entertainment that
would not jeopardize social values. Making love poetry into a sublimation
of natural sexual urges – shifting loving subjects into inaction, mental
self-absorption and analogical understanding of their feelings as misplaced
or displaced yearning for union with the divine – was an efficient and
convenient way of managing the inevitable human and sexual tensions that
would have arisen at court.48
When poetry was combined in performance with the sweet sounds of
polyphonic singing, its effectiveness increased even further according to the
new status of music as an Aristotelian ‘leisured pursuit’.49 Some of the pre-
cepts which apply to the music’s suitability as a form of virtuous princely
relaxation are already present in the work of Augustine and Isidore, but
after the translation of Aristotle’s ethical works in the later thirteenth cen-
tury, music-theoretical arguments fairly soon incorporated more strongly
worded justifications of music’s virtuous power.50 While Plato and Aristotle
exhibit remarkably similar views on the proper ends of music and its role
in education and politics, their main difference concerns their emphasis
on music’s pleasurable qualities.51 The consoling effect of poetry is height-
ened and increased through the newly legitimate pleasure of music. In the
long text of Gace de la Buigne’s mid-fourteenth-century poem Le roman
des Deduis, the character speaking in favour of falconry cites two Ars Nova
pieces – Vitry’s motet Douce playsance / Garison / Neuma and the chace Se
je chant by Denis le Grant – ostensibly to prove that a good falconer never
flies his birds in high wind or excessive heat. However, Gace’s poem is a
magnificent hybrid mirror-of-princes advice book, part a battle of the Vices
and Virtues drawing on Prudentius’ Psychomachia, part jugement debate
poem, both parts linked by the noble theme of hunting. When read as a
whole, Gace’s poem proposes musical poetry as a consoling antidote to the
ills that it might narrate – the heat of excessive amorous desire in Douce /
Garison / Neuma, or the indulgent time-wasting of a day’s hunting in Se je
chant.52
Performance issues
Just as we know relatively little about specifically where and when these
songs were performed, we know only small amounts about how these songs
were performed. For liturgical music the defined context gives slightly
clearer evidence suggesting all-vocal performance, perhaps accompanied
or alternatim with an organ; with songs, lack of information about perfor-
mance context connotes lack of information about performance practice.53
Much of the musicological discussion of medieval performance practice has
focused on the issue of performing forces, asking whether the top voice of a
song was accompanied by instruments or by other voices.54 This question
is perhaps unduly distracting, since more important issues concern aspects
of a piece to which we might in fact be able to get closer: the pronunciation
of the text, the correct understanding of its relative pitches and rhythms,
and a basic stylistic competence that enables us to make it clear where the
music drives forward and where it hangs back, where it fulfils expectations
and where it frustrates or surprises them. This would then go some way
to offering a route to make a modern performance that was closer in its
effects or representation (which can be analysed) rather than necessarily
closer in sound (which is unknowable).55 Our understanding of the rhyth-
mic notation of the fourteenth century is rather good, deriving from fairly
clear contemporary theoretical writings.56 The understanding of relative
pitch – there is no single absolute pitch standard for music at this period,
so the notational level only guides the general placement of the overall
ensemble within that particular group’s performable pitches – has been
more fraught, especially over the issue of accidental inflections and musica
ficta.57 The disagreements of scholars centre on whether sharpening the
pitch of one voice in certain situations is at the discretion of the performer
or was determined by the composer; whether the sonic product implied by
the notation was always the same or whether there was scope for variation
between different performances of the same piece; whether the practice is
confined to cadences in the modern sense (in which they close a phrase) or
in the medieval sense (of cadentia, a term which just describes a particular
succession of sonorities which can and do occur at the beginning, in the
middle and at the ends of phrases). From my own perspective, the cadential
progression – for which I prefer to use Sarah Fuller’s term ‘the directed pro-
gression’ because I do not see it reserved exclusively for closural syntax – is
a defining feature of fourteenth-century musical style.58 Neither before nor
after does it seem to be so pervasive in the musical texture. The marker of the
‘modern’ style of Guillaume Du Fay in the early fifteenth century seems to be
its more sparing use, and a greater reliance on extended phrases of ‘imper-
fect’ sonorities (sixths and thirds) in support of a less angular, even smooth,
melodic line.
Chronology
Arriving at any clear chronology for the works that have survived from the
fourteenth century is more than moderately difficult. Scholars have tended
to talk about an ‘Ars Nova’ (new art) succeeding the ‘Ars Antiqua’ (old art)
some time around 1320, being brought to maturity in the works of Philippe
de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut before being succeeded by a mannerist
‘Ars Subtilior’ (more subtle art) after the latter’s death in 1377.59 This in turn
supposedly gives way to the modern style of Du Fay and his contemporaries
in the early fifteenth century. These divisions wrest circular reasoning from
stylistic features in combination with evidence from notational change. Ars
Antiqua notation is that which is pre-minim and pre-duple time divisions.
The Ars Nova incorporates the invention of the minim (whose value was
previously expressed by a series of semibreves of which the minim really is
the semibrevis minima, but the value now has its own graphic indication in
the form of an upstem added to the notehead). The Ars Subtilior sees not
only the division of this minim value but also the deployment of ‘avant-
garde’ canonic techniques, proportional note values (4 against 3 and more),
texts that refer to their own musical performance, plus picture music such
as the circular maze within which is copied the famous anonymous balade
En la maison Dedalus.60 The situation in Italy is treated as if parallel, with a
pure period of Italian trecento notation being followed by a hybrid Italian–
French phrase before the mutual accommodation of Italian elements within
the ultimately triumphant French notation in the Ars Subtilior.
These tripartite schemes probably owe much to other similar ones
in music historiography, notably the three compositional periods of
Beethoven.61 Philippe de Vitry’s treatise Ars nova is, according to Sarah
Fuller, nothing more than a retrospective writing up of what was most
likely student lecture notes; certainly Vitry’s involvement is indirect in this
regard.62 The Ars Subtilior – a term coined in the twentieth century –
according to Elizabeth Randell Upton is the result of undue emphasis on
the relatively small number of pieces that make a deliberate essay into nota-
tional complexity;63 the term arguably says more about twentieth-century
modernism and the lure of the avant-garde than it does about the music to
which it refers. Nevertheless ‘subtlety’ is a term frequently used for music
from 1300 onwards as a guarded kind of praise – the refined thread of
a fabric, but perhaps for its detractors signalling unnecessarily recondite
and self-aggrandizing compositional practice. However, it seems likely that
this usage derives from a topos of ambivalence towards the subtlety of the
moderns conventional from at least the twelfth century.64
En la maison Dedalus (Figure 5.1) is copied in a single manuscript
now housed in the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library, University of
California, Berkeley.65 The other contents of this source are a music theory
Figure 5.1 Anon., En la maison Dedalus, from the Berkeley theory manuscript (US-BEm 744,
fol. 31v)
treatise completed in 1377, which covers modes, discant and mensuration,

speculative theory, and tuning of semitones (including advanced musica
ficta). The balade makes visual use of a circular maze that symbolizes the
‘house of Dedalus’, that is, the maze that Dedalus designed and built for
the Minotaur. The poem compares this to the path to the lady, who is
at the heart of a maze with no entry or exit. The musical staves form
the tracks of an 11-course labyrinth, which has been drawn with a pair of
compasses. The top voice negotiates its way through the maze by singing
the song; the two lower parts are notated as one part, sung in canon – the
contratenor chasing after the tenor through the maze. The pair of compasses
is to the architect of the maze what the composition of the canon is to the
composer – a ‘symbol of complex artistry, super-human craftsmanship’.
The path of the maze is difficult to follow yet ‘it cleverly leads both to the
centre and to a successful performance of the music’.66 Aside from the use
of the circular format, the other aspects of this song’s complexity can be
found already in the music of Machaut. His rondeau Ma fin (R14) also has a
canon, drawn attention to by the visual aspect of the notation (upside down
text), and its text voices the commands of the song telling the singer how
to sing it (something that En la maison does not do, but which is common
in several other so-called Ars Subtilior songs).67 Machaut also projects the
same kind of strong authorial persona, which claims his craft as his own
and as a feat of art. In fact En la maison cites from other balades by Machaut:
its line 1.5 is line 2.3 of his Nes qu’on porroit (B33), its line 1.2 is similar to
B33’s 2.1, and the refrain is very similar to that of Machaut’s poem without
music Trop de peinne (Lo164). The composer clearly knew Machaut’s piece
and perhaps elevates his own creativity by remaking something of Machaut,
the great Dedalus of book, song and music.
One of the biggest problems in the standard periodization of the four-
teenth century is that it depends on a teleological narrative not only of nota-
tion but also of style. Moreover, the relation between style and chronology is
circular. All written musical collections are by definition retrospective and
often transmit several decades of musical repertory. For the combination
of their pristine sources and sheer numbers, Machaut’s works provide a
particular point of reference, although the assumption that the ordering of
the manuscript represents chronology seems questionable given Machaut’s
interest in order for other, more aesthetic and semiotic purposes.68 The
style of other secular pieces has generally been assessed by comparison to
Machaut’s work, with songs of similar style dated to his lifetime. How-
ever, the criteria for stylistic features tend to be interdependent on the
notational features mentioned above, which does not allow for the nota-
tional updating of pieces (a feature that certainly occurred in the Italian
tradition), nor for the deliberate use of older styles. It imposes a nota-
tional teleology that certainly is hard to sustain outside the central French
tradition.69
The role of the poetry in dating is not particularly straightforward either.
Viewed as a whole, the tendency during the fourteenth century is towards
standardization, especially in the production of isometric balade stanzas.70
But as a trend, this feature is not precise enough to allow dating of individual
instances; there is also evidence that some poems considerably predate their
settings.71
Arguably the greatest chronological challenge that the fourteenth cen-
tury suffers is to be regarded as the last of the Middle Ages, rather than
an early Renaissance. Certain scholars have questioned this historiograph-
ical pigeonholing and its detrimental effect on attitudes. Vitry has been
praised for his humanism, his early reading of Dante and his friendship
with Petrarch.72 Machaut has been embraced as the first ‘writerly’ author
figure for musical culture, the first vernacular poète, and the first poet-
composer to have an elegy in words and polyphonic music composed for
his death.73 Christopher Page has laid out the innovations of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries to claim that it is ‘all Renaissance’ from 1200
onwards.74 Other musicologists have looked back to the earliest coverage
of the music of this period in standard textbooks to show that it is only a
historical accident that music textbooks picked a later date than compara-
ble disciplines.75 Certainly in terms of a concern with the human and with
classical antiquity, Vitry’s motet texts seem obvious candidates for an ear-
lier musical Renaissance, but the ‘medievalist’ interest in the eschatological,
the ethical, and the afterlife continued well into the fifteenth century and
beyond.
part two
Topography
6 England
peter m. lefferts
English musical life in the Middle Ages is often treated in standard text-
book surveys as peripheral to that of France and Italy. This approach has
several causes, but is rooted especially in musicology’s preoccupation over
the past 150 years of scholarship with medieval France. Noteworthy also
in this negligence is the pairing of France and Italy late in the era in the
emergence of polyphonic refrain songs as the chief new artefacts of secular
high music culture in the 1300s, an attractive trend with no contempo-
rary English-language counterpart. Musicology’s paradigmatic narrative of
English entrance onto the international stage, through its sacred polyphonic
music, once began the story only in the second quarter of the fifteenth cen-
tury.
What emerges, however, from more extended examination of medieval
musical life is that modern political, geographic, linguistic and cultural
boundaries are not relevant – for high culture, anyway – in the musi-
cal affairs of those parts of northwestern Europe we nowadays identify as
France and England. And until this essentially homogeneous Anglo-French
cultural sphere began to develop some marked regional differentiations
in the thirteenth century, the elite and hermetic worlds both of courtly
troubadour and trouvère song, and of the chant and polyphony of the
church, spanned the English Channel effortlessly. The English were not
latecomers to a game already being played elsewhere.1
Further, a burst of research after the Second World War has provided
specialists with a much different and expanded sense of the dimensions,
vigour and creativity of medieval English musical life in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries as it diverged from shared Anglo-French practice. This
discovery has been mirrored in recent decades by the extraordinary amount
of attention lavished on medieval English music in concerts and recordings
by leading ensembles of the Early Music movement in Europe and North
America.2
To gain a perspective on the English contribution to medieval music, it
will be helpful to refer to the standard threefold division of music and music
making that distinguishes between classical, popular and folk music realms.
This categorization is admittedly a very simple one, and it is a means of
isolating activities that can deeply interpenetrate one another. Nonetheless
[107] it is sturdy enough to be of value. For the nearest equivalent to classical
108 Peter M. Lefferts
music, we can ask where across the soundscape of medieval Europe there
was music that was elite, esoteric, demanding, rigorous and prestigious,
requiring not only skill to perform but training to create and an education
in taste to appreciate. This is music that was deliberately preserved over time
in memory and written record. One such body of music is the plainchant
and polyphony of the Western church. Another is secular art songs in Latin
and the vernacular, the music of learned clerics and aristocratic high culture.
Popular music is a repertory of more immediate appeal, accessible to
listeners across a wider range of social classes and available to hear in
less exclusive venues. An entertainment music subject to rapid turnover
and without the formation of any permanent written canon of favourites,
popular music of any age showcases the performer and is a performer’s
repertoire. This would have been the most common offering of medieval
minstrels, whether in residence in some nobleman’s court, working as the
local professional in a village or town, or belonging to the itinerant minstrel
population.
Folk or traditional music encompasses those songs and dance tunes
known by most members of a society. It is the communal repertory car-
ried in memory, preserved for generations, accessible to amateurs, and not
necessarily created or performed for profit – thus encompassing but by
no means limited to metrical charms and incantations, mothers’ lullabies,
children’s play songs, tunes that lightened the repetitive labour of farmers
and the marching of soldiers, and fiddle tunes that quickened the feet. Folk,
popular and classical music are not synonymous with lower-, middle- and
upper-class music, but while all classes had contact with folk and popu-
lar music, the music of the social and educational elite was not as readily
available to the lower orders of society.
Accepting the threefold division just outlined, one can move directly to
a major point: medieval English folk and popular music do not survive.
The ample testimony in documentary archives, in literature and in visual
imagery for this kind of music making is not balanced by extant lyrics and
melodies. The reason for such a regrettable loss is clear. Although surely
known to the literate classes of society, folk and popular music were not
preserved by or for that class; those individuals competent to notate such
texts and tunes were never given a mandate to do so. We can rail against the
literate snobs, but more is at work here that also needs to be acknowledged.
For one, literacy meant an education in Latin and an embedded set of
biases about what would or would not be committed to writing. Further,
from 1066 until the fifteenth century the English upper classes were French-
speakers by birth or necessity. Popular and folk musics of medieval England
were mainly the province of English speakers, creating a cultural divide not
often crossed. Folk musicians in an oral tradition, moreover, would not
109 England
have needed notation, and one can imagine that minstrels might even have
resisted it, as a threat to the trade secrets of their guild.
Finally, a broader perspective. In the twentieth century the West’s pop-
ular music, commercialized and commodified, became the world’s shared
music, but this was not always the case. The secular culture shared across
linguistic and geographic boundaries used to be high culture, while folk and
popular culture were at once less universal, more varied, less transportable.
In medieval England most folk and popular music, like dialect, diet, dress,
dance steps and recipes for ale, reflected local custom and taste. There was
no demand for it elsewhere, and no compelling need to write it down in
order to preserve it for others in the present, or for posterity.
The little scraps of medieval folk and popular music that come down to
us from the British Isles are to be found in various odd corners, and mainly
give us glimpses of texts, not tunes. Beginning in the thirteenth century,
for example, Franciscan sermons cite titles and quote lyric fragments and
refrains from the kinds of less-refined vernacular songs they assumed their
audiences would be familiar with. And a fourteenth-century English Bishop
of Ossory in Ireland, Richard Ledrede, wrote new sacred Latin texts to a large
number of vernacular songs in English and Anglo-Norman, identifying the
original tune with a text tag and preserving for us in the Latin, something like
a dinosaur’s footprint, the poetic form and stress patterns of the originals.
In addition, English motets of the later thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries, like their Continental counterparts, sometimes build up their
superstructure of new melodies and texts over a pre-existing foundational
melody – the tenor – that is a Middle English or Anglo-Norman song
instead of a plainchant fragment (Dou way Robin; Wynter; A definement
d’este lerray); some of these may be popular songs or folksongs. Quodlibets
that stitch together the musical street cries of London vendors survive from
the late sixteenth century, and comparable French street cries already are
found incorporated in late-thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Continental
polyphony, so it may be that the Elizabethan snatches can be fairly heard as
echoes from earlier English days.3
Another temptation is to hear in the tunefulness, tonal cogency, symme-
try and metrical bounce of thirteenth-century polyphonic songs in Middle
English and Latin such as Sumer is icumen in, Edi beo thu hevene quene,
and Angelus ad virginem the hallmarks of a British popular or folk style.
The temptation is equally strong to see otherwise hidden vernacular idioms
as the basis for the language of the few instrumental dances to have been
captured in notation.4 And it is hard to doubt that the foursquare fifteenth-
century partsong Tappster, drinker, fille another ale is meant to evoke a
hearty popular vein of tavern songs of which no authentic examples sur-
vive. Tuneful simplicity and harmonic directness remain attractive features
of the indigenous English partsongs of Cornysh and others up through the

early Tudor period.5
Of course, some of the literary monuments of high culture, from the
corpus of Old English poetry to the lengthy metrical romances in Anglo-
Norman and Middle English and the shorter Middle English ballads, have
their roots in an oral tradition of popular songs. Although now stripped of
melody and standing at some remove from performance as later finished
products of a bookish environment, they surely retain some of the flavour
of their lost lyrical predecessors. It is equally likely that some of the lower
registers of courtly art song, such as the pastourelle, deliberately invoke
the metrical and melodic idioms of popular and folk music, especially the
communal dance songs, the karoles. But it is beyond our present powers to
distinguish a music thought appropriate for playing at being shepherds and
shepherdesses from music truly of the rural peasantry.
Concerning the elite art music of Britain’s learned and noble classes, a
number of observations demand priority. Above all, this music was song,
primarily solo song, and often unaccompanied. And the rich and educated
were often themselves the wordsmiths and tunesmiths, while performers
were of the lower classes. Lyrical and narrative poetry comprise its texts, and
these texts most often survive in anthologies copied without any musical
notation. Thus they have become grist for the modern mill of literary
studies, with the presence of music underappreciated or forgotten. We need
to be reminded, for example, that while some genres of Old English poetry
may have been intended from the outset to be merely spoken out loud,
the central body of eulogistic and epic narratives known to us was to be
sung in public performance. Drawing models for narrative melody from
ethnomusicogical examples found outside Western Europe, as well as from
medieval examples from France, Germany and the Latin liturgy, modern
Early Music singers now offer large swatches of Beowulf to paying audiences,
trusting that the Old English text of this famous epic in its surviving form
is not too many steps removed from its sung version in an oral tradition.6
A second principal observation is that the texts of elite art songs varied
across a wide range of topics and registers of discourse. One might turn
elegant phrases in praise of some lady’s virtue while another lauded the joys
of clear, red wine or described the amorous advances of Robin upon Marion.
And some were surely intended exclusively for listening, while others were
participatory dance songs. Elite songs of low register are not folk or popular
music, however, although their texts and tunes may have been enriched
with the turns of phrase of more mundane genres, as surmised above.
The role of the performer can be informative in regard to song regis-
ters and song audiences.7 In Anglo-Saxon England, the gleoman was the
111 England
professional entertainer, paid for individual performances, who not only

sang but harped and piped, juggled, clowned and danced. The scop, on the
other hand, was a serious and respected individual attached to a court or
noble household who made and performed heroic, epic narrative poetry on
ceremonial occasions. After the Norman Conquest, a single term, ‘minstrel’,
dominates in British records, but the word clearly had a number of mean-
ings encompassing a variety of duties and spheres of activities. Royal or
noble minstrels attached to a court or household had very different duties
and occasions for performance than did town musicians, or those travelling
professionals perpetually on the go between courts, villages, festivals and
fairs. A minstrel who straddled both worlds, called to court one night and
playing in an alehouse the next, knew his role and repertory in both spheres.
A third principal observation about the elite secular song repertory
of medieval England is that it was polylingual. In Anglo-Saxon times that
meant Latin and Old English. After the Norman Conquest, that meant Latin,
Anglo-Norman French, and Middle English. The least important of these
for over three centuries – until the days of Chaucer and his contemporaries
and successors – were the art songs in English. (The ribbon for the least
appreciated and most seldom read of these lyrics nowadays would have to
go to Latin, of course.) The pattern for survival in the British Isles of later
medieval songs of high culture is the same whether they are in Latin, French
or English: there are major insular sources of lyrics, mostly copied without
music or any accommodation for musical notation, and a much smaller
number of sources with empty staves or notated melodies.
Latin lyrics, whether from the international tradition or local prod-
ucts composed in Anglo-Latin, and whether scribbled onto flyleaves or
copied into large anthologies, constitute an important and numerous body
of medieval British song texts. Their range of subject matter and tone is
impressive, from love poetry, humorous stories, and drinking songs to his-
torical narratives and sacred, devotional, philosophical and moral-satirical
topics. This was music for the study and recreation of Latinate clerics,
bureaucrats, and scholars and students.
Vernacular songs with musical notation are particularly scarce. From
before ca1400 there are merely some twenty-odd such songs extant in
English and and a similar number in Anglo-Norman. But well-known
anthology manuscripts assemble a very much greater number of lyrics and
narrative poems intended for singing. These songs, secular or religious,
vary widely in topic and tone. The most striking difference between the
corpus in each language is the absence of English courtly love lyrics until
the fifteenth century, while courtly love is a strong thematic presence in the
French songs.8
Forces on the Continent propelled the collection of troubadour and

trouvère songs into chansonniers in the second half of the thirteenth cen-
tury – only at the very end of that tradition and almost two centuries after its
beginnings. This anthologizing project, with its retrospective, preservation-
ist and monumentalizing overtones, is clearly reflected in major British text
collections of the same era. For those who coveted these books, whether as
prize trophies or as reading material, the song texts evidently were a much
higher priority than their tunes. Very few of the surviving Continental
anthologies contain music, a loss felt particularly acutely in the case of the
trouvère chanson, for which ten times as many lyrics survive as melodies.
From the British Isles, only one scrappy flyleaf of this era (Oxford, Bodleian
Library, Rawlinson G. 22), with all or part of two songs in Anglo-Norman
and one in Middle English, may have originated in a substantial secular
chansonnier that was notated with music. The loss of melodies that did not
make it from memory into written record must have been considerable. It
is not so clear that we have lost many songbooks copied for noble English
patrons.
The making of books of art songs needs to be understood as an enterprise
related to but not synonymous with the making of music by and for medieval
England’s secular high culture. And, as a corollary point, historians of
English culture cannot make do with only what was created on English soil or
what survives in codices of English manufacture. During the twelfth-century
reign of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine the English court was often on
the Continent for long periods, and the rich outpouring of literary products
for this court, including verse chronicles, epics, romances, lais, fables and
lyric poetry in French and Latin, was copied and appreciated across western
Europe. The domestic and dynastic struggles of the Plantagenets inspired
songs in Latin, Provençal, French and Italian. The son of Henry and Eleanor,
Richard I (‘the Lionheart’), was himself a poet-musician, writing in French;
two of his poems survive, one with music, in troubadour and trouvère
sources.
As late as the mid fourteenth century the court was still intensely fran-
cophile, most importantly through the circle of Continental artists and
men of letters around Philippa of Hainaut, queen of Edward III. No mon-
umental codices or collected works of individual composers survive from
this environment, perhaps because there was no one dominating musician
approaching the stature enjoyed by Machaut in France (and he himself
had to supervise several editions of his own collected works). But bits and
scraps of musical sources hint at a repertory of courtly polyphonic art song
in French, just as we would expect.
By the turn into the fifteenth century, courtly songs by English musicians,
surviving in insular and Continental sources in increasing numbers, show
113 England
them to be setting secular love lyrics in English and French in the fixed
forms of the rondeau, virelai and ballade, and then beginning to favour
rime royal. John Dunstable, John Bedingham, Robertus de Anglia, Robert
Morton and Walter Frye are representative composers of such songs. The
polyphonic English devotional carol in English and Latin is an important
indigenous product of the same era that did not circulate abroad. Not the
music of the noble courts but not the music of the people either, the carol
appears to have been a repertory primarily for recreational use at Christmas
and Eastertime in the world of the scholars, fellows and singing-men of
schools, colleges and major ecclesiastical choral establishments.9
It may strike some initially as odd that Christian service music counts as
high culture, since it is functional material not created or performed for
entertainment’s sake and was nominally available to be heard in church by
all classes of society. But important qualifiers need to be put upon the latter
points. Although functional, it is yet a complex, artful and esoteric body of
music, preserved in writing since the ninth century. And although in later
medieval England there were more than 10,000 parish churches and many
hundreds of major churches and religious houses, as well as eventually sev-
enteen cathedrals, only a fraction had the wealth and trained manpower to
support the full sung daily liturgy at regular intervals around the clock, and
to undertake the complexities of florid organum and mensural polyphony.
The endless cycle of the liturgy, moreover, was undertaken on behalf of
the populace, rather than for an attentive worshipping congregation. That
is, secure in the knowledge that they were being prayed for, the laity seldom
stepped into sacred precincts on a regular basis until the very end of our
era. And the physical enclosure of the choir, a later medieval development
creating a building within a building beyond the rood screen in the transept
or east end of the church, cut visitors off from the sight and sound of the high
mass and canonical offices. In this respect, the Early Music movement does
us a disservice by popularizing concerts and recordings of chant and church
polyphony in the resonant, bare stone caverns that surviving medieval
churches, especially the large abbeys and cathedrals, have become.
In overview, the history of the liturgy and music of the medieval Chris-
tian church in the British Isles is best grasped as a series of overlapping
waves of practices and influences.10 These begin with the separate intro-
duction of early Christianity by Celts and Romans in the second century.
About their services and music we know nothing, and the invasions of the
pagan Anglo-Saxons in the mid 400s, after the withdrawal of the Romans,
extinguished Romano-British Christianity. The church survived in Celtic
Britain, however, and missionaries from Gaul were found proselytizing
among the Anglo-Saxons when Pope Gregory sent Saint Augustine to Kent
in 597. Over the next century Roman customs were established and some
form of Roman chanting was disseminated throughout England, but it is
undoubtedly the case that local liturgy and chant dialects varied consid-
erably, drifting and evolving away from Rome during this era just as did
the Gallican rite in France, the Mozarabic rite in Iberia or the Milanese
(Ambrosian) rite in northern Italy. The process is entirely analogous to the
early development of Romance languages out of regional dialects of Latin.
Whatever the nature of early Anglo-Saxon liturgy and chanting, it was
virtually wiped out in the catastrophic waves of Danish invasion in the mid
800s. The revival of both the secular church and monastic communities ini-
tiated under King Alfred at the end of the ninth century, which culminated
with the efforts of church leaders such as Dunstan and Ethelwold a century
later, relied on northern French missionaries who brought in the customs
and music of the religious houses at Cluny, Fleury, Corbie and St Denis.
The liturgy they promulgated was mainly a modern Roman liturgy for its
day in respect to texts and customs, but the chant dialect in which it was
sung was not from the South. It had originated in the later 700s and early
800s in Carolingian Gaul, and its melodies were in the Romano-Frankish or
Romano-Gallican hybrid we call Gregorian chant. Thus later Anglo-Saxon
England became one of the first regions outside Gaul to adopt the melodic
corpus that would by the thirteenth century supplant local chant-families
all across Europe, eventually even displacing papal and local Roman urban
chant. Textual sources document the later Anglo-Saxon liturgy reasonably
well and reveal many small divergences in detail from Roman practices.
These older Gallicanisms and indigenous customs would have been sung to
older, local, non-Gregorian plainsong.
The core repertory of Gregorian chant comprised simple formulaic tones
for prayers and readings, and melodies for antiphonal and responsorial
psalmody. In addition to holdovers from older local practices, this body
of plainsong was enriched wherever it took hold by new local accretions,
which in time became a vast and diverse body of later medieval plainchant
for mass and office, including proses in the office and sequences at mass,
mass ordinary melodies, new hymns and hymn melodies, Marian and other
votive antiphons, processional antiphons, sung liturgical dramas, and much
more. English church musicians enthusiastically contributed to these and
other categories of later chant composition right up to the reign of Henry
VIII and the establishment of the Church of England.
In respect to later medieval chant, the word ‘trope’ is sometimes used
to identify all additions to the Gregorian nucleus. Trope has a narrower
meaning, however, when referring just to short musical-textual versicles
added later as introductions to lines of Gregorian chant and other pre-
existing plainsong. A large Anglo-Saxon repertory of these chant expansions
115 England
survives in manuscripts of the late tenth and eleventh centuries that were
copied at Winchester and Canterbury; the trope melodies cannot be read,
but their Latin texts show hallmarks of the Latinity of late Anglo-Saxon
authors, and a good number may be the work of one individual, Wulfstan
of Winchester.11
New saints and new feasts, whether of local or universal celebration, were
added prolifically to church calendars throughout the later Middle Ages.
These additions might be marked by as little as a single chanted item such
as a collect, antiphon, hymn or sequence, but many were provided with a
complete set of new texts and melodies for all the Proper chants for daily
offices and mass. This body of material could total fifty or more substantial
compositions. Anglo-Saxon poet-composers poured significant creativity
and energy into offices for local saints, including those for Alphege, Birinus,
Cuthbert, Edmund, Guthlac and Swithun.12
A different means of elaborating the Gregorian core that was instituted
or revived in the tenth-century English church was the singing of two-
part polyphony (called organum, pl. organa) by ornamenting a liturgical
plainsong with a note-against-note counterpoint. A large corpus of 173
organa survives from pre-Conquest Winchester and may also be primarily
the work of Wulfstan of Winchester. They constitute the only major body of
European polyphony to survive from before the mid twelfth century. Due
to difficulties interpreting the insular chant notation, transcription of this
music into modern notation is difficult, but it is not impossible, granting us
a modicum of insight into the versions of the underlying chants that were
used, and the procedures and aesthetics of making organa circa 1000.13
In the wake of the Conquest, Norman clerics took control of the English
church, overlaying Norman chants and melodic dialect (in effect just a
slightly different flavour of Gregorian) over earlier traditions and purging its
liturgy of unfamiliar saints and customs, a process resisted by English clergy
in some quarters for many years. Every religious community developed its
own distinctive rules for the conduct of its liturgical and non-liturgical
routines; these were known as its ‘use’. In England, post-Conquest changes
were consolidated into uses for the major secular cathedrals over the course
of the twelfth century. Of these, the use of Salisbury cathedral rose to pre-
eminence. It eventually displaced the local use at many other cathedrals,
was adopted in chantries, colleges and private chapels, and even spread
abroad into dioceses from Portugal to Scandinavia. The ritual and music
of Salisbury (or Sarum, an abbreviated nickname current since the Middle
Ages) were essentially Roman and Gregorian, with an admixture of local
elements. The ritual’s attractiveness and success were due not to its chant
versions per se, but rather to its perceived authority, splendour, elaboration,
comprehensiveness and full documentation.14
A softening of Norman attitudes eventually permitted the retention of

many Anglo-Saxon saints in British church calendars alongside Norman
and Angevin saints. The further admission of new local or universal saints,
and of feasts such as Corpus Christi, the Transfiguration and the Holy Name
of Jesus, continued right down to the very end of the Middle Ages. These
new feasts provided one of the most important impulses for new chant
composition (a phenomenon by no means limited to England) and stimu-
lated a creative musical outpouring that has not yet been fully appreciated,
much less catalogued or studied. The most important of the slew of new
British offices was the celebrated rhymed office for Thomas of Canterbury,
composed in the last quarter of the twelfth century by Abbot Benedict of
Peterborough. This office travelled over the whole of Continental Europe,
where it became the model for perhaps hundreds of later offices.
A number of religious ceremonies falling mainly outside the canonical
daily round of high mass and offices and in some cases performed outside
of the high choir, although not necessarily unique to late medieval England
were of particular importance there. They became the locus not only of ritual
elaboration but of the composition of new chants and the performance
of polyphony. Processions are one such class of ceremonies. On Sundays,
major feast days and other special occasions, processions wound a circuitous
route through the church, or out onto the grounds, or out into town to a
neighbouring church and back, and they generated a special repertory of
processional refrain hymns, antiphons and responsories. Another set of
ceremonies, for Holy Week and Easter, included not only major processions
but also the singing of the biblical Passion narratives during mass as the New
Testament gospel on Palm Sunday and Good Friday. Missals of the Salisbury
Use carefully indicate a dramatic approach and separation of character
roles for the reading of the Passion texts, and polyphonic English passions
are the earliest in a prominent and long-standing European tradition. In
many locales, moreover, there was the performance of two fully sung Latin
liturgical dramas – the Visitatio sepulchri at the end of matins early on Easter
Sunday morning and the Officium peregrinorum at vespers that evening.
Music was also a significant element in the primarily spoken Middle English
vernacular dramas of Eastertide and Corpus Christi.15
A final set of additional devotions – commemorations and votive ser-
vices, memorials and votive antiphons – rose to be of the greatest musical
importance. By the late Middle Ages they could overshadow or even replace
most of the standard daily ritual and music in institutions committed to
the fullest expression of the liturgy.16 Memorials were short services said
in the morning after lauds or in the evening after vespers in honour of a
saint or other particular occasions. A memorial consisted simply of one
principal musical item – an antiphon – plus a versicle, response and collect;
117 England
a number of such memorials might be said in a row. A votive antiphon

could be sung by itself, usually in the evening after compline outside the
high choir at a side altar. The most popular votive antiphons were Marian,
and by the mid thirteenth century the post-compline antiphon had been
absorbed into a full-fledged Marian memorial often referred to as the Salve
service, after the Marian votive antiphon Salve regina. The Salve service was
incorporated in the customs of many new secular choral foundations of
the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and was frequently required by
the legislation of the most elaborately endowed private chantries, while its
polyphonic Marian antiphon became one of the grandest musical forms of
late medieval England.
Commemorations were complete sets of office hours and in some cases
a full mass, too, that were said weekly in choir on a specified day for the
Virgin Mary or Holy Cross or some particular saint (such as the patron
saint of the church), replacing the ordinary daily round of services and
transposable to another day if in conflict with a significant feast. By the
fifteenth century some churches had a commemoration for every day of
the week. By long and universal custom, Saturday was Mary’s special day,
and her weekly commemoration was thus observed vastly more often than
any of her feasts. It was enriched in English service books by a great deal of
supplementary or alternative plainsong, including many new sequences for
example, and also attracted polyphony.
Instead of replacing the daily liturgy, as in the case of commemorations,
the services called votive masses and offices were additions to it. The Little
Hours of the Virgin, for example, came to be sung after each of the regular
hours (and provided the nucleus of texts found in the medieval Book of
Hours). Eventually of even greater importance for music and ceremony was
the daily votive Marian mass (the Lady Mass), usually celebrated outside
of choir as a morning mass for devout layfolk around the time of prime.
This service was nearly universal in major English ecclesiastical institutions
by the early thirteenth century. Not only did it attract a great deal of
new plainsong (including tropes, and series of alternative melodies for the
Sequence, Offertory, and Sanctus), but it was for Lady Mass that most or all
of the surviving insular polyphonic settings of the mass ordinary from circa
1200 to 1400 (and a large proportion of the settings composed afterwards)
were written. It is likely the case, moreover, that the fourteenth-century
French adoption of the custom of setting mass ordinary texts polyphonically
for votive Marian masses (as in the Missa Tournai and the Mass of Machaut)
is modelled on English practice.
Two late medieval developments eventually brought the liturgy back
to the eyes and ears of the laity. One was the cult of the Virgin Mary, as
expressed in the services described above. From the mid twelfth century
onwards Mary not only inspired new services, new chants, and polyphony,
but also new architectural spaces in which to house those services, which
were often deliberately made accessible to lay audiences. England led the
way in these regards. The daily morning Lady Mass and evening Salve ser-
vice, performed outside of choir, usually in a purpose-built hall extending
off the church called the Lady Chapel, became the most important occa-
sions for regular attendance at church by the lay public, especially devout
women.
The other development increasing lay exposure to the liturgy and to
complex polyphony was the rise of new choral musical establishments
outside of churches and monasteries.17 Their model in Britain was the
Royal Household Chapel, an itinerant body always in attendance on the
king, which spawned a vogue of personal chapels for the great magnates
of the land in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Similar choirs, but of
fixed abode, were founded by aristocratic patronage in chantry chapels, in
larger metropolitan churches and in the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge,
especially during the fifteenth century. Their services, inside or outside of
choir, would have had a small but select and appreciative audience. Again,
polyphonic Marian antiphons and mass ordinary settings were a staple
for these new professional choirs on those private and public occasions
requiring their most ostentatious efforts.
The uniformity of the Anglo-French high culture of sophisticated church
music began to erode in the thirteenth century with the emergence of a clear
differentiation in genres, musical style and notation on opposite sides of
the Channel, primarily in polyphony. This drift apart is mirrored as well in
politics, and in a variety of trends such as in the shift of the Anglo-Norman
dialect away from mainland French, in features of Gothic cathedral archi-
tecture, and in various specialized intellectual disciplines at the universities.
In terms of musical style the trend towards a distinctive insular musical
dialect in church polyphony can probably best be explained as a concentra-
tion upon certain elements already present in the international repertory
of polyphonic conductus and organum of the later twelfth and early thir-
teenth centuries. It may well be (and it is certainly an attractive hypothesis)
that these new preferences derive from an awareness by elite English church
musicians of the language of the popular and traditional music of the British
Isles, and their growing desire to play up these indigenous features in more
sophisticated music.
This new polyphonic dialect was distinguished by a preference for imper-
fect consonances (thirds, sixths and tenths) as harmonies, for voice-leading
in parallel counterpoint, for trochaic rhythms in ternary metres, for chordal
textures and homogeneity of rhythmic activity, for smoothly stepwise
melodies projecting a strong sense of tonality, and for balanced, four-square
119 England
melodic phrases. By the late thirteenth century an English motet or con-

ductus sounded different and behaved palpably differently from its French
counterpart. Another marked feature of the emerging English idiom was
a fascination with constructivist devices involving repetition and exchange
of music. In simplest form this could be no more than a rota or round, a
perpetual canon at the unison, of which the Sumer canon (Sumer is icu-
men in, ca1250) is the most famous example. Voice exchange proceeds in
a series of modules within which a foundational voice (the tenor) states
and repeats a melody, over which two upper parts sing, and then exchange
and sing again, two harmonious counterpointing lines. In a rondellus all
three voices participate in the exchange, so that in the module each con-
trapuntal unit must be stated three times (with swapping of parts) before
moving on to fresh material. Modules of voice exchange and rondellus can
be found in conductus, in motets and in troped chant settings, which are
the three most important compositional genres of late-thirteenth-century
English polyphony; modules of voice exchange and rondellus also stand on
their own in independent compositions that are kin to both conductus and
motet.18
The notation of polyphonic music evolved across the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries towards a fully mensural system with fixed rhythmic
values for each note shape and the means to represent a variety of time
signatures. An aspect of the differentiation of practice between England and
the Continent was the development of an idiosyncratic English Mensural
Notation in the thirteenth century and of several families of notation that
accommodated different means and rationales for the multiplication and
subdivisions of the brevis in the first half of the fourteenth century, in
parallel with developments in France and Italy. English theorists engaged
with their Continental counterparts as early as the 1310s in the development
of what is called Ars Nova notation, particularly via gradus theory, and
made interesting proposals for the notation and cancellation of chromatic
alterations. Not only was their work cited by French and Italian theorists,
but entire theory treatises (in Latin) by Englishmen circulated abroad, and
English theorists travelled abroad to teach and to copy important treatises
up to the late fifteenth century.19
Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English sacred polyphonic genres
included the motet, votive antiphon, cantilena with hymn or sequence-
style text, and settings of mass ordinary texts.20 The motet eventually shook
free of the constructivist devices described above, but its composers con-
tinued to explore a number of indigenous motet types until deep in the
fourteenth century. Their growing fascination with the numerical disposi-
tion of phrase structures and the proportioning of section lengths may have
had a direct influence on the nascent continental isorhythmic motet in the
1310s and 1320s. English isorhythmic motets flourished into the mid 1400s
in the hands of composers including Dunstaple, Forest and Benet.
The other sacred genres at first shared two compositional approaches:
‘cantilena-style’ free composition in two to four voices, and English discant,
a three-voice technique of adding two counterpointing lines to a chant. Then
composers began to develop approaches for mass ordinary settings that
borrowed from contemporaneous techniques for motets and polyphonic
secular songs to create more elaborate works. Large-scale mass ordinary
settings, whether freely composed or based on a cantus firmus, began to
be written in pairs and longer cycles in the early decades of the fifteenth
century, resulting in the five-movement English mass in three and then in
four voices, with its movements linked by common musical material, most
especially by the same tenor cantus firmus.
English cyclic masses, isorhythmic motets, and large-scale antiphons –
the polyphonic repertory of its most elite and up-to-date chapels and
churches – came to be enormously popular and influential in mainland
Europe by 1450. This music was enjoyed, and exerted great influence, in
that similarly small, elite world of Continental listeners capable of appreci-
ating its beauty and of Continental choirs equipped to tackle its complexity.
7 Italy to 1300
marco gozzi
We still know very little about medieval music in Italy: our knowledge
of the repertory performed at that time is based on a very small number
of surviving sources. Only a minuscule part of the repertory of Chris-
tian liturgical chant is documented, and, even then, only partially; there
are no in-depth studies about the pieces collected in more recent codices
and early printed editions; and the greatest part of music, of so-called
‘popular’ song and the global ‘sound landscape’, is beyond investigation.
We also know very little about the nature of the creation and transmis-
sion of the main kinds of musical practice in the Middle Ages, that is,
about the mainly oral tradition of songs, performance practices (both vocal
and instrumental) and the occasional recourse to writing (which is a very
unusual event in a culture based on memory on account of the scarcity of
books).
What follows must, therefore, be read with the awareness that it is a
series of necessarily fragmentary observations, which should be considered
within a very rich and complex cultural and social frame, furthermore, a
frame which does not have, and may never have, well-defined boundaries.
Too many cultural connections escape us, too many songs have disap-
peared forever, and too many musical details of the few sources that do
survive are irremediably lost (the kinds of temperament used, the differ-
ent kinds of pronunciation of Latin and of the vernaculars, the different
kinds of vocal technique, the extempore inventions of added voices, the
embellishments used by singers, the role of instruments, and so on). Mod-
ern readers will not, therefore, satisfy their curiosity to know, for example,
what Dante’s mother sang to make her son fall asleep or what exactly was
played and sung for the dancing at Castel del Monte, in 1249, during the
wedding of Violante, natural daughter of Federico II, to Riccardo, count of
Caserta.
Liturgical chant
The main institution responsible for the preservation and diffusion of Chris-
tian liturgical chant in Europe was the school. In monastic and cathedral
[121] schools chant was a fundamental ingredient in the education of boys.
122 Marco Gozzi
Medieval schools had very different methods from today’s, in terms of

both curricula and the methods of study, which were mainly mnemonic.1
School was largely responsible for the way learned people in the Middle
Ages experienced knowledge and books. It was in school that students
came into contact with liturgical chant not only, and not mainly, as a
musical experience, but as a cultural and spiritual experience, in a unity of
knowledge and personal feeling unknown to the modern student. Through
hymns and sequences, for example, children learned Latin, prosody and
theological reflection; they also learned to appreciate poetry, learning by
heart (with the help of fine melodies) a great number of poetic texts in
Latin, some at a very high level.
Furthermore, the curricula of monastic and cathedral schools in Italy
reveal an extraordinary homogeneity with those of schools all over Europe,
so that an Italian teacher could teach in England or in Spain without much,
if any, difficulty. This kind of formation thus created a supra-national
cultural and spiritual community, as well as a shared knowledge that allowed
frequent and fruitful exchanges.
The second element which should be observed is the great mobility of
the clergy during the Middle Ages: secular clergy, but above all friars and
monks, moved very frequently and without being overly concerned about
the huge distances involved. This phenomenon created unexpected but deep
links between distant parts of Christian Europe, even in the liturgical and
musical fields.
The essential features of the history and of the repertory of Chris-
tian liturgical chant were thus shared all over Europe and are outlined in
chapters 1 and 2 in this volume. To investigate the local peculiarities of
liturgical music, one resorts to the study of non-musical manuscripts,
such as the ordinals2 and rituals, both of which still lack sufficient atten-
tion from modern editors and analysts. Indeed the evaluation of editions
of liturgical books must not be neglected: missals, breviaries, graduals,
antiphonaries, psalteries, processionals, ceremonials, rituals, pontificals,
officia for Holy Week, even though belonging sometimes to the sixteenth
century, may transmit very old chants (or only texts of chants) and ritual
traditions.
Two important aspects in relation to plainchant are documented by
Italian manuscripts and editions: simple polyphony and cantus fractus.
Italian ordinals have plenty of references to the practice of simple polyphony,
that is, to the way of singing, extempore, a vox organalis as an addition to the
traditional Gregorian melody (vox principalis), usually note against note.
Only recently has this practice, which scholars first called ‘cantus planus
binatim’ and then ‘primitive polyphony’, been the object of some attention;
it is now called ‘simple polyphony’.
123 Italy to 1300
Let us consider, for example, this short extract, from the Liber Ordinarius
of the cathedral of Pistoia, datable to the end of the thirteenth or the first
years of the fourteenth century (Pistoia, Biblioteca dell’Archivio Capitolare,
C. 102, fol. 66r), in which the concept of accompanying another voice to
form an organum, that is, to sing in simple polyphony, is expressed by the
verb succinere, which recurs very often.
De Nativitate beate virginis Marie . . . In Vesperis . . . Regali ex progenie, cuius

responsorii principium succinitur sed non repetitur a choro; versus et Ora
pro nobis sancta Dei genitrix succinitur; antiphona ad Magnificat Celeste
beneficium, que prius canitur et post succinitur, et Benedicamus succinitur.
Et attende quod hec festivitas sollempniter celebratur, nam Venite succinitur,
et antiphone in quolibet nocturno ante psalmos cantantur et post
succinitur; similiter versus et versiculi et antiphone ad Ben. et ad Magn. et
Benedicamus succinitur. In Missa Kyrie, Sanctus et Agnus Dei succinitur.3
On the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary . . . at vespers . . . Regali ex

progenie, the beginning of the responsory is sung in simple polyphony and is
not repeated by the chorus; the versicle and Ora pro nobis sancta Dei genitrix
are sung in simple polyphony; the antiphon to the Magnificat Celeste
beneficium first is sung and is then accompanied by another voice, and the
Benedicamus is also sung in simple polyphony. Be sure that the festivity is
solemnly celebrated, that the Venite is sung in simple polyphony and the
antiphons for each nocturne are sung before the psalms and in the
repetition are accompanied; in the same way the verses, versicles, the
antiphons to the Benedictus and the Magnificat and the Benedicamus
Domino are sung in simple polyphony. In the Mass, the Kyrie, Sanctus and
Agnus are sung in simple polyphony.
References to the practice of accompanying the main voice with one or

more voices added extempore are, however, found already in two missals
from the end of the tenth century (or the beginning of the eleventh) in
central Italy, now in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana: Vat. lat. 4770 and
Barb. lat. 560. In the latter (fol. 66r), the rubrics regarding the last reading
(Prophetia) of the Easter vigil mass are as follows:4
Lectio libri Danihelis prophetae . . . in medio ignis dixerunt, hic muta

sonum in cantico Benedictus es Domine . . . per orbem terrarum, et incipit
legere in sono priore: Et non cessabant qui inmiserant eos . . . nec quicquam
molestie intulit. Hic canere incipit clerus cum organis: Tunc hi tres ex uno
ore laudabant . . . superexaltate eum in saecula, et respondent omnes in
choro: Amen.
‘Reading of the book of the prophet Daniel . . . in the midst of fire they said’
[Daniel 3:1–25] – here the melody of the chant changes – ‘Blessed be thou,
Lord . . . for all the earth’ [Daniel 3:26–45], and the main melody begins:
124 Marco Gozzi
Example 7.1 First part of Angelorum glorie / Pacem bonis (Benedicamus trope) (I-AO 13,
fol. 85r)
‘And those who threw them inside did not stop . . . and the fire did not harm
them’ [Daniel 3:46–50]. Here the clergy start singing in simple polyphony:
‘Then those three started to praise in one voice . . . exalt him for ever’
[Daniel 3:51–75], and everyone answers in chorus ‘Amen.’
Certainly this phenomenon of amplification of the Christian chant is very

old, considering that already in the seventh century Roman ordines mention
the ‘paraphonistae’, that is, those who sing the second voice.5
Usually the vox organalis is not written down: only in very few codices,
often with a didactic use, do examples emerge which may explain the style
of this practice.6 One of these is the trope to the Benedicamus Angelorum
glorie, which is found in the Aosta Codex, fol. 85r. Example 7.1 shows the
first verse.
This is a version of the widespread trope Verbum Patris (known also
with other texts, like Stella fulget etc.), which is found in numerous
manuscript and printed sources, almost always with one voice, indicated as
vox principalis in the example. The technique used here for the polyphonic
amplification is shown and described in many medieval music treatises:
the ninth-century manual Musica Enchiriadis; Guido d’Arezzo’s Micro-
logus (ca.1030); the Ad organum faciendum (second half of the eleventh
century); the De musica cum tonario by Johannes Affligemensis (thir-
teenth century); the treatise known as ‘anonymous of San Marziale’ or
‘anonymous De La Fage’, maybe from the twelfth century but transmitted
by fourteenth-century Italian and Spanish manuscripts; the Expositiones
125 Italy to 1300
tractatus . . . magistri Johannes de Mauris by Prosdocimo de Beldemandis

(who uses the phrase cantus planus binatim to describe the phenomenon);
Franchino Gaffurio’s Practica musice; and Johannes Tinctoris’s Liber de arte
contrapuncti.
Besides ordinals, cantatorı́a and other theoretical sources, the practice of
singing super librum (also called biscantare or discantare, organizare, tenere
organum, secundare, succinere) is documented by chronicles and literary
sources. One short example is taken from the Cronica of Salimbene of
Parma; written in the 1280s, it refers to events of the previous fifty years, and
gives an idea of the diffusion of the phenomenon in Italy. Salimbene writes:
Frater Henricus Pisanus . . . de resurrectione Domini fecit sequentiam,

litteram et cantum, scilicet Natus, passus Dominus resurrexit hodie.
Secundum vero cantum, qui ibi est, id est contracantum, fecit frater Vita ex
Ordine fratrum Minorum de civitate Lucensi, melior cantor de mundo
tempore suo in utroque cantu, scilicet firmo et fracto . . . Hic fecit illam
sequentiam: Ave, mundi spes, Maria, litteram et cantum. Hic fecit multas
cantilenas de cantu melodiato sive fracto, in quibus clerici seculares maxime
delectantur. Hic fuit meus magister in cantu in civitate sua Lucensi eo anno
quo sol ita horribiliter obscuratus fuit, MCCXXXIX.7
Brother Enrico Pisano . . . composed text and music of a sequence for the
Resurrection of the Lord, that is Natus, passus, Dominus resurrexit hodie. The
second voice, that is the contracantum, was composed by brother Vita of the
Franciscans in Lucca, the best cantor in the world in his time in chants both
liturgical and measured . . . He [brother Vita] composed text and music of
the sequence Ave, mundi spes, Maria. He composed many measured chants,
with which many secular priests find delight. He was my singing teacher in
his city, Lucca, during the year of the terrible solar eclipse, 1239.
Salimbene speaks very often of the ‘second voice’ (or contracantum) to be

added to the newly composed sequences. Thus, the sequence, even as early
as the beginning of the thirteenth century, knew a widespread polyphonic
practice, but no manuscript contains, for example, the sequence Ave mundi
spes Maria (mentioned in the above quotation) for two voices or written
with mensural notation, whereas the monodic version is quite widespread.
Even though the ordinals of Padua, Siena, Lucca, Pistoia and Florence
document a diffuse practice of simple polyphony, which does not leave any
celebration in these cathedrals without amplification through the addition
of a second voice, notated examples of this genre, present in the surviving
Italian manuscripts, are few: they are mostly the Benedicamus Domino
(often with tropes) and sections of the Ordinarium Missae (mostly Kyrie,
Sanctus and Agnus); sections of the Proprium Missae are rare. F. Alberto
Gallo has made a pioneering list of Italian manuscripts which transmit
simple polyphony.8
126 Marco Gozzi
The second important aspect to stress in the tradition of Christian

liturgical chant in Italy is the plentiful presence of examples of compositions
written with rhythmic-proportional notation, that is, examples of cantus
fractus.
Early on in its history Gregorian chant was performed with proportional
values, above all in relation to metric texts (hymns and sequences), but in
the first years of the fourteenth century a new kind of repertory appears
in southern France. It spreads very quickly all over Italy and Europe: in
this period, there are Credo movements with mensural notation, the most
important of which are the so-called Credo Cardinalis and the Credo
Regis or Apostolorum. The former is rather well known and its melody
still appears as Credo IV (but without the original mensural notation) in
modern chant books; the latter is less well known but nevertheless worthy
of attention.
The so-called Credo Regis, often referred to as the Credo Apostolorum,
is made up exclusively of breves and semibreves;9 of this Credo we even
know the author: the King of Sicily, Robert of Anjou (b. 1278, d. Naples,
1343).
The identification with Robert of Anjou is supported by the appellation
Regis found in various codices, from the rubric of an Italian manuscript
of the sixteenth century now in Cleveland (Museum of Art, 21140) which
says: ‘Patrem cum suo cantu ordinatum per regem Robertum’ (fol. 78r)
and from another rubric found in Parma, Abbazia of San Giovanni Evan-
gelista MS F (fol. 437v),10 which for the same Credo gives the author as
‘Regis Siciliae’. Above all, however, this attribution is supported by the Ser-
mone de fortitudine by Gabio de’ Zamorei, Petrarch’s friend, who states that
King Robert composed a new melody.11 For five years (1319–24), Robert
of Anjou lived in Avignon, and it is likely that it was during these years
that he composed the Credo, perhaps in competition with the cardinal who
invented the melody of the so-called Credo Cardinalis. Around 1324, then,
the Apostolic Constitution Docta sanctorum and Robert of Anjou’s Credo
were both written in Avignon. It is possible that the fortune of the Credo
Apostolorum (and of its more famous counterpart, the Credo Cardinalis)
is linked to the Constitution, which inveighs against compositions ‘in semi-
breves and minims’ or that use hocket (it also criticizes the addition of
florid discantus and the use of vernacular texts in simple polyphony). It is
clear therefore that the Constitution supported and launched this new and
simple style (which was nevertheless in line with tradition), and allowed for
its quick diffusion, in Italy and beyond. However, the Constitution would
not have had any impact if, around the court at Avignon and around Robert
of Anjou, there had not been numbers of musicians, composers and singers,
who would go on to spread this new Credo around Europe. It ought to be
127 Italy to 1300
Example 7.2 First part of Credo Regis (cantus fractus) by Robert of Anjou (I-PAac F-09,
fols. 140v–148)
remembered that the Neapolitan court of King Robert was an extraordi-

narily fertile place for music production and consumption, both secular
and sacred, and that Marchetto da Padova dedicated his Pomerium to King
Robert.
Many Italian codices contain King Robert’s Credo, among them more
than twenty fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts.12 But what
matters is that the same Credo is handed down in versions for two voices,
and thus testifies to the widespread practice of simple polyphony, in the
following codices: Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. Lat. 657,
fols. 419v–423; Parma, Duomo, Archivio Capitolare con Archivio della
Fabbriceria F-09, fols. 140v–148; and Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apos-
tolica Vaticana, Ottoboniano Latino 1969.13 Music example 7.2 shows
the beginning of one of these polyphonic realizations, from the Parma
codex.
The vox principalis, composed by King Robert, uses only breves and
semibreves (crotchets and quavers in the transcription) and is in the high
128 Marco Gozzi
register. The vox organalis is in the same range as the principalis, it moves
homophonically and does not show any contrapuntal refinement: many
notes are in unison, at cadential points there are only unisons, fifths and
octaves; the voices move mostly in contrary motion, with a few short pas-
sages in thirds.
In many Italian churches the series of choir books, still preserved, were
renewed in the fifteenth and first years of the sixteenth century. These
sets contain antiphonaries and graduals (with appendices of kyriales and
prosers), sometimes psalters; the main preserved series (many relating to
cathedrals, or collegiate or important convents and monasteries) are listed
in the Iter liturgicum Italicum by Giacomo Baroffio and can be dated to
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It must be stressed that these books
were used, in the majority of cases, for more than four centuries. Almost
all of them were corrected after the promulgation of the Breviary and of
the Missal of Pius V (respectively in 1568 and 1570), with the addition
of minor variations introduced by the new official version of the post-
conciliar books.14 To these series also belonged the prosers (or sequen-
tiaries), mostly lost because their use was abandoned after 1570. In many
cases during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, new choir books
were copied containing offices and masses of recently canonized saints, and
kyriales, almost always containing masses in cantus fractus. But it is impor-
tant to highlight that the value of the single music reading transmitted
by the books is relative: the practice does not faithfully follow the written
sign.15
The Credo Cardinalis, the Credo Apostolorum of Robert of Anjou and
the later Credo Angelorum in cantus fractus are clearly found in these
books; also, the Vatican Credo I – perhaps the only intonation used before
the fourteenth century – is often found written in mensural notation. For a
picture of liturgical chant on a local scale (comparable, in many aspects, to
that of many other Italian cities), see Frank D’Accone’s study of Siena, The
Civic Muse.16
The Italian lauda

The work of the troubadours and trouvères arrived very early in Italy;
French poetry for music was present in Italian courts in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, and the whole of Italian poetic production derived
forms, vocabulary, themes, general lines (and presumably musical style too,
when sung) from French lyric poetry. Certainly, melodies for love songs
and ballatas were composed in Italy, even though only three fragmentary
sources with notation of thirteenth-century Italian songs survive. A very
129 Italy to 1300
common practice (not only in Italy) was that of the contrafactum, that is,
the adaptation of a new text to a pre-existing melody not only in secular
genres (as in Dante’s ballata Per una ghirlandetta) but also in the sacred and
devotional (Salimbene of Parma, for example, remembers that Brother
Enrico Pisano composed the hymn beginning ‘Christe Deus / Christe
meus / Christe rex et Domine’ using the music of a popular song with
the words ‘E s’ tu no cure de me / e’ no curarò de te . . . ’).
The new Franciscan spirituality revalued natural beauty and embraced
the simplicity of the poor; it expressed itself in vernacular religious chant.
The manifesto of this new approach to the world, which involved music with
a by no means secondary role, is Saint Francis’s Cantico delle creature, in
vernacular Umbrian, composed around 1225 and transmitted by the codex
Assisi, Biblioteca Comunale, MS 338, but with the space for the music
left blank. The renewal of Christian life, as lived and preached not only
by Franciscan friars but also by other mendicant orders (particularly the
Dominicans and the Servants of Mary), promoted the formation in many
Italian cities of lay confraternities devoted to prayer, song and mutual help,
which drew up well-laid-out Statutes and Rules from the thirteenth century
on. Some of these confraternities dedicated themselves to singing laude
during their meetings and are thus called societies of Laudesi. The laude
were strophic and devotional compositions in Italian. Other confraternities
which emerged with the Laudesi were those of the Disciplinati, Battuti
or Flagellanti; these, too, were lay groups, which met periodically to pray,
to sing and to carry out the disciplina, that is, the mortification of the
body by self-flagellation. The movement (and therefore even the singing)
of the Disciplinati was the result of premises different from those of the
Laudesi: punishment, mortification, penance and fear of the end of the
world were the themes preached by Rainerio Fasani of Perugia, founder
of the movement around 1260. Their repertory of laude had as its almost
exclusive subject the Passion of Christ, and the intonations were formulaic,
similar to the psalm tones: the laude were sung using one of only two
melodic schemes – the ‘Easter’ Scheme and that ‘of the Passion’; these are
very different from the schemes used by the Laudesi, which are pleasant,
singable and varied.
Many manuscripts contain texts (almost two hundred) of the plenti-
ful production of monodic laude, which the Laudesi practised between
the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries; however, only two documents
(and a few other fragments) preserve musical notation: (1) the Cortona
manuscript Biblioteca Comunale e dell’Accademia Etrusca 91 and (2) the
Florence codex Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Banco Rari 18 (formerly
Magliabechi II.1.122). The oldest and best-known manuscript anthology is
the Cortona Laudario, made up of 171 parchment sheets, of a smaller size
130 Marco Gozzi
(23×17 cm) than the Florence document. It was written towards the end
of the thirteenth-century and belonged to the confraternity of Santa Maria
della Laude, active in the church of San Francesco in Cortona; it contains
forty-six laude with music. The laude have various topics: sixteen have texts
in praise of the Virgin, and there are also laude for various liturgical cel-
ebrations (of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Saint Francis, Saint Antony
of Padua, Saint Mary Magdalene, Saint Michael, Saint John the Baptist
and Saint John the Evangelist). The texts of four laude are signed, in the
last strophe, by Garzo (whom some identify, but without valid arguments,
with Ser Garzo of the Incisa di Valdarno, a notary and great-grandfather of
Petrarch); it is not clear furthermore whether Garzo is also the author of
the melodies – it is more likely that he is only the writer of the texts.
The other important collection of laude, preserved at the Biblioteca
Nazionale Centrale of Florence, is Banco Rari 18, made up of 153 large
parchment sheets, 40×28 cm, richly ornate); it was written in the first
half of the fourteenth century for the confraternity of Santa Maria, which
had its centre at the Augustinian house of Santo Spirito in Florence (the
identification has been possible as a result of study of the decorated letters),
and preserves eighty-eight laude with music, eighteen of which can also be
found in the Cortona Laudario. Comparison of the two codices reveals many
variants; the Florentine codex, in particular, is richer in embellishments.
The notation in both sources is square with tetragramma and clefs, very
similar to the contemporary notation of plainchant. Only the first strophe
of each lauda is written below the musical notation.
When the lauda was born in the thirteenth century, the Latin liturgy had
been resounding for more than a millennium, more recently through the use
of Gregorian chant and, in the most important churches, even in polyphonic
settings. There had been expressions of deep religiosity in the troubadour
canso and in the Galician-Portuguese cantiga, but this new and peculiar
form of sacred and extra-liturgical song was born and spread in Italy, with
a text in vernacular Italian and modelled on the form of the ballata. The
form preferred by the anonymous thirteenth-century rhymesters for their
laude-ballatas was the so-called zagialesca structure, from zagial, an Arabic
metric form, which some consider the origin of the romance, made up of
a ripresa of two lines (the ritornello) and a few strophes of four lines (the
most usual rhyme scheme is: xx, aaax, bbbx, etc.). In fact it is not necessary
to invoke the Arabic-Andalusian zagial, given that this strophic scheme is
already found in Middle Latin works, such as the very common sequence
Verbum bonum et suave.
The lines of the laude usually have eight syllables with frequent varia-
tion in number of syllables. The kind of lines and the strophic structure
131 Italy to 1300
Example 7.3 Refrain and three stanzas of the lauda Venite a laudare (I-CT 91, fol. 1r)
also suggest a premeditated choice of register and language: not a courtly and
formal language, with erudite, literary and rhetorical versification (which
usually uses the hendecasyllable and the form of the canzone), but a pas-
sionate and simple prayer sung to Christ, the Virgin Mary and the saints
with the familiarity and the confidence of those who live the experience of
faith through prayer. But where is the matrix of these melodies? There is
no doubt that the ancient Gregorian repertory was the model, particularly
in the use of modal scales (the eight ecclesiastical modes or tones) and
of a few recurrent melodic formulas (for example, the typical first-mode
intonation with which Lauda novella begins and other formulas derived
from the psalm modes); it is also evident that the forms closest to the
lauda in terms of their compositional ideas are the monodies with metric
text, that is hymns and sequences and, in the secular field, the songs of the
troubadours and trouvères. The lauda that opens the Cortona Manuscript
(Example 7.3) reveals in the ritornello the meaning of the entire repertory
to which it belongs: ‘Venite a laudare, per amore cantare l’amorosa Vergene
Maria’ (‘Come to praise, to sing for love the loving Virgin Mary’). The
words ‘praise’ and ‘sing’ only make sense with ‘for love’: one does not sing
in desperation, and one does not sing for oneself; rather, the invitation
‘to sing for love’ and praise the Virgin is extended to all people of good
will.
The melodic arch which accompanies the ritornello of this lauda has
its climax exactly on the tonic syllable of the word ‘amore’; the music–
text relationship we find here is rare in the intonations of other laude: the
modern desire to express the affects of the text through music is foreign
to the medieval aesthetic, and even when we find, as in this case, an exact
132 Marco Gozzi
correspondence between word and melody, it may be a mere coincidence

and not a purposefully created effect. What the composer looked for in
setting these texts to music was merely a beautiful and simple musical phrase
which could adapt flexibly to the verse, exactly as happened and was still
happening in the composition of hymns and sequences using Latin metric
text. The melody could thus sometimes be extended and sung ‘cantabile’ (as
in Venite a laudare or in Altissima luce) and sometimes in a recitative-like
manner (as in Madonna Santa Maria and in the strophe of De la crudel
morte di Cristo), but it was always in the service of the transparency of the
text, which is sometimes very long: laude with more than twenty strophes
are not uncommon; Venite a laudare, for example, has fifteen strophes. The
melody without accompaniment, without doubling instruments, does not
disturb the prayer; on the contrary it amplifies it, it complies with it, it
makes it the experience of the whole human being. The melodic beauty
ennobles the word, takes it away from everyday experience, makes it truer
and less intellectual; even today, after seven centuries, this simple beauty
enchants.
When studying Venite a laudare (Example 7.3) another aspect of the
intonation of the lauda becomes clear: the ritornello proceeds syllabically
(one note for each syllable) in a restricted vocal range and with simple
melodic intervals better suited to non-professional singers; the strophe, on
the other hand, being reserved for the soloist, shows a wider vocal range and
the use of the high register (in other laude, it is possible to find a virtuosic
melodic line, rich in melismas and embellishment). See the energetic and
joyous attack of the strophe on the words ‘Maria, gloriosa, biata’, which
are given at a higher pitch than in the ritornello: the same effect is found
in other laude, such as Altissima luce, O Maria d’omelia, Regina sovrana,
Ave vergene gaudente and O divina virgo flore. The change of register is
deliberately created to catch the attention of the audience: there is a time to
sing together and there is a time to listen, so that the experience of prayer
through beauty is complete and varied and involves participation. There is
no risk of making the singing an exhibition for its own sake, or a distraction,
because the soloist is the one who can communicate better than others,
who can pray better; someone who sings like a member of the congregation
would not be capable: the medieval man still lives as a reality the unifying
power of shared listening, of shared wonder, of shared emotion of a depth
that words cannot reach. Beauty, to be expressed fully, needs competence
and professionalism; a noble expression, worthy of prayer through singing,
escapes banality and improvisation: it needs work and study. The soloist
takes upon himself this most important task: to sing for and with others, to
give voice to the splendour of beauty in the name of everyone, then to join
once more with the community in the ripresa.
133 Italy to 1300
The kind of musical notation used in the two surviving laudarios does
not give any indication about the rhythm of these melodies, as is the case
with many other monodic compositions from the eleventh to the fifteenth
century. Scholars and performers have so far proposed various hypotheses,
without formulating a definitive and universally accepted solution.17 The
main problem concerns the most florid laude, which have several notes for
each syllable. For example, in the Cortona Laudario there are five notes
for each syllable in Ave donna santissima, Ave dei genitrix and Ave vergene
gaudente; there are six per syllable in Cristo è nato, which is an exuberant
lauda in many other aspects as well, but the melodies in the Florence
laudario are embellished even more, with up to ten notes per syllable. So
far as the music proceeds syllabically, as in the two laude Altissima luce and
Regina sovrana (the latter is sung on a melody derived from the former),
almost all hypothetical rhythmic reconstructions concur and lead to a rather
convincing result, but in the laude with long embellishments the differences
between performances following different kinds of rhythmic interpretation
are more notable.
Furthermore, it should be observed that the Cortona codex has a sub-
stantial number of notational mistakes (whole phrases transposed a third,
missing or wrong clefs, wrong notes, and so on) and may therefore have
acted more as a marker of prestige, indicating the opulence of the confra-
ternity, than as a document for reading, given that the choristers would
have known the laude by heart. It is thus absolutely necessary that today’s
performer turns to a good critical edition that rectifies the mistakes and
allows a correct alignment of the syllables in the strophes after the first.
Liuzzi’s pioneering edition, published in 1935, though still a rich source of
valuable intuitions, cannot be used for a correct execution of the melodies,
and subsequent editions (Ernetti, Terni, Lucchi) still contain many short-
comings. The most recent edition of the laudario, edited by Martin Dürrer,
dates back to 1996, but even if this is more accurate, it still does not solve all
the problems, and it includes transcriptions only of the first strophe of each
lauda.
The istampita
In the seventh and eighth fascicles (from fols. 55v to 63v) of the Florentine
codex London, British Library, Additional 29987, there are fifteen monodic
instrumental compositions, called istampite, which represent the most
important extant source of medieval instrumental music. The Italian term
istampita is synonymous with the French estampie and the Provençal
estampida, whose oldest example is represented by the troubadour canso
134 Marco Gozzi
Kalenda maya (ca1200). The text of this canso, by Raimbaut de Vaqueiras,

is adapted to the pre-existing melody of an estampida that the troubadour
may have heard performed by two jesters. The compositions in GB-Lbl
add. 29987 can be divided into two groups: the first comprises eight long
istampite, each with its own title: Gaetta, Cominciamento di gioia, Isabella,
Tre fontane, Belica, Parlamento, In pro and Principio di virtù. The second
group comprises seven short pieces, often with names of fast dances: four
bear the title Saltarello and one Trotto. The other two compositions, in
binary form, are titled Lamento di Tristano and La manfredina; they are
very similar from the melodic and rhythmic points of view: both are fol-
lowed by their own rotta, that is, by the variation of the first part. The same
binary structure (with a trotto instead of the rotta) is found in a composition
titled Danza amorosa in a Florentine fragment (Florence, Archivio di Stato,
Notarile Antecosimiano, n. 17879), copied by a notary a few years before
the London codex was written.18
The names of the istampite might suggest a relation with the Neapolitan
court of Robert of Anjou (Gaeta is a city near Naples and La manfredina
might allude to King Manfred of Sicily). The rhythmic character also betrays
a possible dating to the first half of the fourteenth century, and this suggests
that the istampite may have been originally written using an older notational
system: that described by Marchetto da Padova in the Pomerium (ca1320).19
The istampite may have arrived in Florence during the reign of Robert of
Anjou himself (1313–22) or that of his son (1325–7). From the formal point
of view, the istampite are structured in four or five parts, called puncta; each
punctum is repeated twice with a different conclusion (x and x : aperto and
chiuso), as in the modern prima and seconda volta. The conclusion of the
first punctum is usually used in the remaining puncta (except for in the
istampite Parlamento and In pro):
Gaeta ax ax / bx bx / b x b x / cx cx

Cominciamento di gioia abx abx / cbx cbx / dbx dbx / efx efx / gfx gfx
Isabella abx abx / cx cx / dbx dbx / ex ex
Tre fontane abcx abcx / dbcx dbcx / ecx ecx / fx fx
Belica abx abx / cx cx / dx dx / efbx efbx / gfbx gfbx
Parlamento abx abx / cx cx / dbx dbx / ey ey / gy gy
In pro ax ax / bx bx / cx cx / dy dy / ey ey
Principio di virtù abx abx / cbx cbx / dbx dbx / ex ex
In the scheme, the formal divide between puncta is distinguished by a

forward slash (/). Usually the first three parts of each piece present both
rhythmic and melodic similarities and repetitions, whereas the fourth and
the fifth, though similar to each other, are different from the first three.
135 Italy to 1300
The other seven pieces are shorter, all notated in folios 62 and 63 of
GB-Lbl add. 29987; they do not show any separation between the third and
fourth puncta:
Salterello ax ax / bx bx / cx cx / dx dx
Trotto ax ax / bx bx / cx cx / dax dax / eax eax
Salterello ax ax / bx bx / cx cx / dcx dcx
Salterello ax ax / bx bx / cx cx / dx dx
Lamento di Tristano ax ax / [b]y [b]y / cx cx
La rotta ax ax / by by / cy cy
La manfredina ax ax / by bx / cz cx
La rotta ax ax / by bx / cz cx
Salterello abx abx / bx bx / cbx cbx / dcbx dcbx / edcbx edcbx
/ fedcbx fedcbx
In all fifteen compositions the melody is highly embellished and there are
short recurrent motives, which are varied and developed very often in
progression. There are frequent changes of metre, from binary to ternary.
Johannes de Grocheo’s description of the stantipes and ductia forms in
his treatise of 1275 coincides with the examples from the London codex.
Grocheo states that the stantipes has six or seven puncta, whereas the ductia
has only three or four. Another peculiarity of the ductia, according to
Grocheo, would be the ‘recta percussio’; this expression probably refers to
the metric-structural regularity of the puncta and of the ductia as opposed
to the greater variety of the stantipes: this would make the ductia better
suited to dancing.
8 The trecento
marco gozzi
The Italian peninsula in the fourteenth century was divided into a great
number of communes, republics (the most important being the Most
Serene Republic of Venice) and signorie (the Savoia in Piedmont, Scaligeri
in Verona, Visconti in Milan, Carraresi in Padua, Malaspina in Lunigiana,
Pepoli in Bologna, Gonzaga in Mantua, Este in Ferrara, Manfredi in Faenza,
Malatesta in Rimini and Pesaro, Da Polenta in Ravenna, Montefeltro in
Urbino, and so on). Every state of some importance had a rich cultural life
in which the production and consumption of music played a primary role.
Italian cities were very open at first to Provençal and then to French
influence, not only in the Marca Trevigiana (Veneto), in Lombardy (the
then name for the western part of north Italy), and in Romagna, but even
in the kingdom of Sicily (since the time of Frederick II and then with
the Angevin line of Charles I, Charles II, Robert and Joan I). During the
time the Holy See was transferred to Avignon (1309–77), exchanges between
Rome and France were inevitable. This strong permeability between cultures
reveals how Italy was not provincial but an environment open to receive
the best European artists of the time. This also partly explains, on the one
hand, the lack of surviving musical output in vernacular Italian and, on the
other, the reason why numerous codices in Italy contain Provençal songs
(two thirds of surviving Provençal song books were written in the Veneto
during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries).
As far as fourteenth-century musical culture is concerned, individual
Italian states have not yet been studied in depth; nevertheless the very rich
experience of seven cities is evident, cities where both a significant sacred (of
which little is preserved) and secular polyphonic practice (called the Italian
Ars Nova) developed: Padua, Verona, Bologna, Milan, Florence, Rome and
Naples.
Padua
Courtly poetry for music had a long tradition in the Veneto: from the
thirteenth century an intensive production in Provençal developed in a
few cities. It is likely that in Padua, at the beginning of the fourteenth
[136] century, a typical Italian tradition of mensural polyphonic music started,
137 The trecento
both practical and theoretical. Padua had various links with French cultural
milieux, not only through the court but also through the university, which
was attended by many students from the other side of the Alps.
The most prominent figure from Padua in the first half of the fourteenth
century was the composer and theorist Marchetto da Padova, who was active
as a singing teacher in the cathedral of Padua at least between 1305 and 1308.
Between 1309 and 1318 he wrote the Lucidarium in arte musicae planae, a
treatise about church singing started in Cesena and completed in Verona.
Between 1321 and 1326, whilst at the court of Rinaldo de Cintis in Cesena,
he wrote the Pomerium in arte musicae mensuratae, dedicated to the king
of Sicily Robert of Anjou. In the Pomerium Marchetto describes an Italian
notational system, reserved for motets, and which showed many original
characteristics, but which shared many features with the French system and
the auctoritas of Franco of Cologne. The two-voice verses Quare sic aspicitis,
Quis est iste and Iste formosus of the Paduan Office for the Ascension (found
in the Processional C 56 of the Biblioteca Capitolare of Padua, fols. 50r–
51v) are attributed to Marchetto, as well as three motets: the three-voice
Ave regina coelorum / Mater innocencie (which was probably written for the
inauguration of the Scrovegni Chapel with the Giotto frescos on 25 March
1305 and in which the duplum has the name of the author as an acrostic:
Marcum Paduanum); the four-voice Ave corpus sanctum gloriosi Stefani /
Adolescens protomartir Domini (evidently written for Venice between 1329
and 1338, since it contains references to the doge Francesco Dandolo); and
the three-voice Cetus inseraphici / Cetus apostolici (which appears in the
same fragment as Ave corpus).
Theoretical discussion of music was conducted at the University of
Padua, and the work of Marchetto greatly influenced subsequent theorists;
in particular, the mathematician and astronomer from Padua Prosdocimo
de Beldemandis (ca1380–1428), teacher at the University of Padua, expressly
cites Marchetto’s Pomerium in one of his eight surviving music treatises,
the Tractatus practice cantus mensurabilis ad modum Italicorum (‘Treatise
on the practice of mensural singing according to the Italian method’; first
version 1412, second version circa 1427) in an attempt to demonstrate the
superiority of Italian over French theory; he states that ‘Italici’ extol the ars
gallica as more beautiful, more perfect and more subtle, whereas it is, in his
opinion, inferior.
The names of two great composers are also linked to Padua: Bartolino
da Padova and Johannes Ciconia.
Bartolino was active in the last quarter of the fourteenth century and
was a Carmelite monk. He may perhaps be identified with one of the
two monks called Bartholomeus in the Carmelite monastery of Padua in
1376 and 1380. The texts of many of his compositions inform us that he
138 Marco Gozzi
was connected to the Paduan court of Francesco Carrara il Vecchio (1355–

88). The ballata La sacrosanta carità d’amore has a text by Giovanni Dondi
dall’Orologio, medical doctor, philosopher, astronomer and man of letters,
who was born in Chioggia in 1330 and was active in Padua until 1383. After
Gian Galeazzo Visconti defeated Francesco il Vecchio in 1388, Francesco
Novello fled to Florence. It is likely that Bartolino went to Florence with him,
together with other exiles from Padua. The texts of Bartolino’s compositions
La douce cere, La fiera testa and L’aurate chiome are directed against the
politics of the Visconti, in perfect agreement with the Florentine attitude
of the time. Bartolino also set to music the ballata Ama chi t’ama, with
a text by Sercambi, who was also a strong opponent to the Visconti. It is
not known whether Bartolino survived the catastrophe of the Carraresi:
Francesco Novello conquered Padua again in 1404, but he was imprisoned
and killed by Venetians in 1406.
After Landini and Niccolò da Perugia, Bartolino is the fourteenth-
century Italian author of whom we have the greatest number of surviv-
ing compositions: eleven madrigals and twenty-seven ballatas (all found in
the Squarcialupi Codex except for the ballata Serva ciascuno, found in the
Mancini Codex of Lucca).
Johannes Ciconia, a native of Liège, is documented as custos (officer) and
cantor in the cathedral of Padua from 1401 until his death in 1412. Ciconia
(the illegitimate son of a canon of Liège Cathedral and born around 1370)
came to Italy around 1390 as clericus cappellae and domesticus continuus
commensalis of Cardinal Philippe d’Alençon (titular of the Roman basilica
of Santa Maria in Trastevere). He was thus the first of a long series of
important Flemish composers who undertook the journey to, and found
success in, Italy. Before his arrival in Padua, it is likely that he worked in
the chapel of Boniface IX, together with Antonio Zacara da Teramo; it is
also possible that he was active in the court of Gian Galeazzo Visconti in
Pavia. Of Ciconia the following compositions survive: six glorias and four
credos for three or four parts, thirteen motets (two for two voices, six for
three and five for four voices), four madrigals (three for two voices, one
for three voices), eleven ballatas (five for two voices), two virelais and two
canons for three voices with texts in French. At least ten of the motets
contain references to famous people: members of the Carrara family, the
Paduan Francesco Zabarella, the bishop Pietro Filargo (who became pope
with the name of Alexander V), the doge Michele Steno, and the bishops of
Padua Albano Michiel and Pietro Marcello. Ciconia was also the author of
a theoretical treatise entitled Nova musica.
Among the other musicians active in Padua at the end of the fourteenth
and during the first years of the fifteenth century the names of Gratioso
da Padova and the copyist Rolando from Casale stand out. Rolando, a
139 The trecento
Benedictine monk from Santa Giustina, copied many books of polyphony,

of which there are several surviving fragments. These musical fragments,
together with Ciconia’s output, attest to a lively polyphonic practice between
1390 and 1420 in the cathedral of Padua and in the local abbey of Santa
Giustina.
The so-called Codex Mancini (Lucca, Archivio di Stato 184 and Perugia,
Biblioteca Comunale Augusta 3065), is very likely a codex from Padua,
copied around 1395, with successive additions made in Florence (ca1405)
and in Lucca (ca1420–30).
Verona and Milan

In the Veronese court of the brothers Mastino II and Alberto della Scala
between 1329 and 1351, Giovanni da Cascia, Jacopo da Bologna and possibly
Magister Piero were all active: they are the earliest authors of madrigals for
two voices and of caccias in vulgar Italian. They wrote together a madrigal
cycle about a woman called Anna (possibly Anna della Scala, daughter of
Federico), in which a tree (the perlaro) and a river are mentioned: A l’ombra
d’un perlaro and Sopra un fiume regale by Piero, Appress’un fiume chiaro
and O perlaro gentil by Giovanni, O dolce appress’un bel perlaro and Un
bel perlaro vive sulla riva by Jacopo all belong to this cycle. These same
composers also composed madrigals and caccias in honour of the Visconti;
the caccia Con brachi assai, composed both by Giovanni and Piero, mentions
the river Adda, in Lombardy, which runs through the Viscontis’ land; the dog
Varino, present in this caccia, is also mentioned in the caccia Per sparverare
by Jacopo. It is certain that the two families, the Scaligeri and the Visconti,
had good relations, as in 1350, Beatrice della Scala, daughter of Mastino
II, married Bernabò Visconti (it is possible that Jacopo’s madrigal Fenice fu
celebrates precisely this event).
Piero’s madrigal Ogni diletto e ogni bel piacere was very probably written
in honour of Bernabò Visconti: the first line of the ritornello, ‘Soffrir pur
voglio ancora’, is the translation of Bernabò’s French motto, ‘Sofri m’estuet’.
Jacopo was already active at the Visconti court in 1346, as two madrigals
testify: O in Italia felice Liguria (which praises the birth, in that year, of
Luchino Visconti’s twins Giovanni and Luchino Novello) and Lo lume
vostro (with the acrostic Luchinus, datable to 1341 according to Corsi).
The main codices copied in the Veneto are the so-called Rossi Codex
(seven bifolia in Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rossi 215, and two
bifolia in Ostiglia, Opera Pia Greggiati, Biblioteca, rari 35) and the codex
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. fr. 6771 (Codex Reina).
The former is datable to around 1370 and is, therefore, the oldest surviving
140 Marco Gozzi
evidence of Italian polyphony, together with the Mischiati Fragment in the

state archive in Reggio Emilia; the latter was copied in the first decade of
the fifteenth century.
The caccia Or qua compagni of the Rossi Codex, the three caccias of the
Mischiati Fragment and the compositions in the tenth fascicle of the codex
Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Panciatichiano 26 (from fol. 91 to
fol. 100, copied from an old northern exemplar) together form a group of
pieces from the Visconti milieu.
Florence
Around 1350 the polyphonic practice of northern courts was flourising, and
particularly so in Florence. The most important Florentine composers, all
clerics, were Bartolo (author of a Credo for two voices much appreciated by
the parishioners of Santa Reparata), Gherardello (between 1345 and 1352
chaplain of Santa Reparata, at that time the cathedral of Florence, then, until
his death – in 1363 – prior of San Remigio) and Lorenzo da Firenze (canon
of San Lorenzo at least from 1348 until his death around 1372). Of the
output of Gherardello and Lorenzo there remain a few sections of the mass
ordinary, besides ten monodic ballatas, which must be considered examples
of those ‘canzonette’ that Giovanni Boccaccio makes the protagonists of The
Decameron sing and play. Of both composers, we also have ten madrigals
and a caccia each.
The vicissitudes of Italian-language polyphony in Florence were closely
linked to the activities of Franco Sacchetti (1332–1400), a poet and short-
story writer as well as a businessman and prominent character in Florentine
political life. Sacchetti edited a collection of his own rhymes (ballatas, madri-
gals, caccias and canzonettas), which he arranged chronologically from circa
1354 and in which, beside each text, he indicated the musician who set it
to music. The list of the composers contains the names of all the major
composers active in Florence at that time: Lorenzo, Gherardello, Giacomo
(brother of Gherardello), Niccolò da Perugia (with twelve compositions),
Donato da Cascia, Giovanni da Gualdo, Guglielmo of France and Francesco
Landini. There is also the name of Ottolino da Brescia, of whom there are
no surviving musical compositions, and only four sonnets exchanged with
Sacchetti.
Niccolò da Perugia was the son of the Proposto (provost) of Perugia;
as a priest, Niccolò was a guest in 1362 in the monastery of Santa Trinità
together with his elder colleague Gherardello. It is possible that Niccolò was
in touch with his contemporary Bartolino da Padua, since both set to music
the madrigal La fiera testa, whose text mentions with dislike the coat of
141 The trecento
arms and the motto of the Visconti. It is not unlikely that this madrigal was
composed around 1400, when hostilities between Florence and Milan were
in full swing, during which the Visconti governed Perugia for a short time.
There are forty-one remaining compositions by Niccolò: sixteen madrigals,
four caccias, and twenty-one ballatas. Niccolò, together with Landini, was
among the first composers who cultivated the genre of the polyphonic
ballata.
The most important Italian composer in the fourteenth century was cer-
tainly Francesco Landini, indicated in the Squarcialupi Codex, as Franciscus
cecus orghanista de Florentia (‘the blind organist of Florence’) because he
had lost his sight as a consequence of smallpox when he was a child. Landini
was born around 1330 and many biographical details come from an entire
chapter dedicated to him in the Liber de origine civitatis Florentie et eiusdem
famosis civibus by Filippo Villani (written after 1381, while Francesco was
still alive). He was a virtuoso on various instruments besides the organ and
the organetto; he sang, recited and wrote poems. He was also a tuner
and builder of organs and other instruments: according to Villani he
invented a bowed instrument called serena serenarum (‘the sirene par excel-
lence’). The chronicle of Villani and the Dante commentary of Cristoforo
Landino remind us of Francesco’s philosophical, ethic and astrological inter-
ests: a follower of William of Occam’s nominalist philosophy, he wrote a
long poem in praise of Occamist philosophy; with this work, and the verses
In contumelia Florentinae juventutis effeminatae, Landini participated in
the philosophical, political and religious debates of his time. It is thus very
likely that he wrote many of the texts he set to music. It is also possible
that Landini sojourned for some time in north Italy before 1370; in support
of this hypothesis there are not only the style and the text of some of his
madrigals, such as Non a Narcisso, but also the text of a motet written for
the doge Andrea Contarini (1368–82) of which only one voice survives, and
in which the author describes himself as ‘Franciscus peregre canens’. The
text of his madrigal Una colomba candida e gentile most likely refers to the
wedding between Gian Galeazzo and Caterina Visconti and can be dated
to 1380. The isorhythmic madrigal Sı̀ dolce non sonò was maybe written by
Landini in 1361 on the death of Philippe de Vitry.
Landini was organist at the monastery of Santa Trinità in 1361 and
chaplain, from 1365 until his death in 1397, in the church of San Lorenzo in
Florence, the same church where Lorenzo da Firenze (Lorenzo Masini) was
canon. A reference letter for Landini written by the chancellor and humanist
Coluccio Salutati, dated 10 September 1375 and addressed to the bishop
of the city, informs us of the good relationship between Landini and the
municipal authorities. From the 1370s Francesco was in close contact with
the composers Paolo Tenorista and Andrea dei Servi (Andreas de Florentia).
142 Marco Gozzi
In 1379 he was called to the Santissima Annunziata to build the new organ
and in the same year he was paid by Andrea ‘pro quinque motectis’. In 1387
he took part in the design of the new organ of the Florentine cathedral.
A posthumous but vivid representation of Landini’s role in the Florentine
society of 1389 is offered in Il Paradiso degli Alberti, written by Giovanni
Gherardi from Prato in the early fifteenth century. The composer is here
represented as a skilful singer and performer on the portative organ, who
also takes part in erudite conversations and philosophical and political
discussions. Francesco died in Florence on 2 September 1397: two days later
he was buried in the basilica of San Lorenzo. His tombstone, discovered in
Prato during the twentieth century and now once again in the Florentine
church (in the second chapel on the right), shows the blind composer with
his portative organ, in a setting similar to that in the portrait from the
Squarcialupi Codex.
At least 154 compositions can be attributed to Landini: 140 ballatas (91
for two voices and 49 for three), 9 madrigals for two voices and 2 madrigals
for three voices, 1 virelai (Adiu, adiu), 1 madrigal in canon (Deh dimmi tu)
and 1 caccia (Cosı̀ pensoso).
A contemporary of Landini, Andrea is described as an organist – Magister
Frater Andreas Horganista de Florentia – in the Squarcialupi Codex. In the
London Codex he is called ‘Frate Andrea de’ Servi’, which allows us to
identify him with one Andrea di Giovanni, who entered the order of Servants
of Mary in 1375. From 1380 to 1397 he was, with some interruptions, prior
of the Florentine monastery of the Santissima Annunziata. In 1393 he was
prior in Pistoia and from 1407 to 1410 he was provincial father of the
Tuscan Serviti. He was Camerlengo, or Chamberlain, of the commune of
Florence several times. Andrea was in close contact with Francesco Landini
and worked with him on the construction of the organs of the Santissima
Annunziata in 1379 and of the cathedral in 1387. Some of the texts of
his ballatas contain quotations of the same female senhal (dedication: to
Sandra and Cosa) which can also be found in Landini’s and Paolo’s ballatas.
This coincidence suggests that the three of them circulated within the same
Florentine milieu. (Note that our Andrea should not be confused with
Andrea Stefani.) Andrea died in 1415, and of his output we are left with
thirty surviving ballatas (eighteen for two voices and twelve for three voices),
of which twenty-nine are to be found in Squarcialupi, plus one ballade in
French (Dame sans per), in the codex of Modena, of uncertain attribution.
His works had little resonance outside Florence, because of their traditional
character.
In Florence there were also Egidio and Guglielmo, two French friars and
contemporaries of Landini. Sacchetti put at the head of his madrigal La
neve e ’l ghiaccio (dated 1365), sung by Guglielmo, the information that
143 The trecento
Guglielmo was ‘frater romitanus’ (a brother, that is, of the hermitic order of
Saint Augustine) and ‘Pariginus’ (of Paris); the information is completed by
a rubric of the London Codex (at fol. 46v, where there is the same madrigal),
which calls the composer ‘Frate Guglielmo di Santo Spirito’, thus revealing
him as an Augustinian belonging to the Florentine monastery of Santo
Spirito.
The Modena Codex attributes to ‘Magister Egidius’ the ballatas Franchois
sunt nobles and Curtois et sages, the latter composed in honour of the
antipope Clement VII (r. 1378–94), as the acrostic indicates. Besides the
madrigal for two voices La neve e ’l ghiaccio, the Squarcialupi Codex contains
five ballatas for two voices by Egidio and Guglielmo.
Abbot Paolo da Firenze (Paolo Tenorista) was a well-known and influ-
ential figure. His biography is particularly well documented, thanks to the
various ecclesiastical offices he held. He was probably born in Florence
around 1355 and became a Benedictine monk around 1380. The first doc-
umentary evidence relating to him concerns his election in 1401 as abbot
of the monastery of San Martino al Pino in the diocese of Arezzo; Paolo
held this office till 1428. In 1409 he attended the Council of Pisa, where
he presumably came into contact with the musicians of the chapels of the
schismatic popes Gregory XII and Alexander V. According to a hypothesis
of Nádas, Paolo wrote the madrigal Girand’un bel falcon to express the Flo-
rentine aversion to Gregory XII. The only composition of Paolo that can be
dated with certainty is the madrigal Godi Firenze, written to celebrate the
Florentine victory over Pisa in 1406.
The numerous compositions by Paolo, contained in the Italian Codex
568 in the National Library of Paris, belonged to the Capponi family and
suggest a possible relationship between Paolo and that wealthy family. Con-
sidering the personal contact of Paolo with the Florentine monastery of
Santa Maria degli Angeli, a renowned school of illuminators, it is possible
that Paolo had a decisive role in the writing out of the Squarcialupi Codex.
Paolo was also one of the counsellors of the Florentine bishops and ruled
the church of the hospital of Orbatello in Florence from 1417 to his death
(soon after September 1426). Paolo was one of the most prolific composers
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Of his works there remain thirteen
madrigals, more than forty ballatas and two liturgical compositions. Paolo
followed Landini’s style, developing it according to his own refined and
sometimes sophisticated taste: it is a serious loss that the pages reserved for
him in the Squarcialupi Codex were never used to copy his music.
The name of Giovanni Mazzuoli (Johannes horghanista de Florentia,
‘Gian Toscano’) appears in the last section of the Squarcialupi Codex but,
as with Paolo, none of his music is to be found there. The reason for the
defective copying of his compositions is probably the fact that at the time
144 Marco Gozzi
of the compilation of the codex Giovanni was still alive. He was born in
Florence around 1360 and died there in May 1426. He was organist of
Orsanmichele in 1376 and again from 1379 to 1412; furthermore he was
organist of Santa Felicità from 1385 to 1390, as well as of the cathedral,
most likely from 1391 until his death. He was possibly Francesco Landini’s
pupil and friend, then teacher of the very young Antonio Squarcialupi.
The compositions of the Italian Ars Nova have been transmitted mostly
through great anthologies copied in Florence; the oldest codex is the Flo-
rence manuscript, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Panciatichiano 26, copied
around 1390 (with additions made until 1450) by very competent scribes.
Slightly later is the London codex British Library, Additional 29987, which
is the last part of a bigger collection: the first section of 97 folios, most
likely written in Padua and presumably containing very recent sacred and
secular music, was detached and is now lost. The second section, the only
one surviving, is almost entirely the work of an amateur Florentine scribe;
it contains a mixed secular repertory – partly copied from Paduan sources,
partly recovered in Florence – and it was altered soon after copying with the
addition of rests, stems and other features, which makes the pieces impos-
sible to perform. The two most important collections (with clear cross-
references in their contents) are the Paris codex Bibliothèque nationale de
France, fonds italien 568 (Pit), copied around 1410, and the very beautiful
Squarcialupi Codex, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Palatino 87,
copied between 1410 and 1415 in the Florentine scriptorium of Santa Maria
degli Angeli, which contains 352 compositions, of which 150 are unica. It is
divided into sections, each dedicated to a single composer and introduced
by a splendid illuminated page with a portrait of the musicians; the com-
posers are arranged in chronological order: Giovanni da Cascia, Jacopo da
Bologna, Gherardello da Firenze, Vincenzo da Rimini, Lorenzo da Firenze
(Lorenzo Masini), Paolo da Firenze, Donato da Cascia, Niccolò son of the
Proposto of Perugia, Bartolino da Padova, Francesco Landini, Egidio and
Guglielmo of France, Antonio Zacara da Teramo, and Andreas de Florentia
(Andrea dei Servi) from Florence.
In 1982 Frank D’Accone found a previously lost Florentine manuscript
containing polyphonic music from the first years of the fifteenth century,
whose 111 sheets of parchment had been completely erased and reused in
1504 as a revenue register of the Chapter of the church of San Lorenzo; this
is the Florence palimpsest codex, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Archivio
Capitolare di San Lorenzo 2211, first copied around 1420 by the same scribe
who added a Gloria and a Credo among the final leaves of the codex, which
is now in London. The original manuscript is very difficult to read, but
from what one can see with the help of ultraviolet photographs, it is divided
into sections dedicated to the composers following criteria similar to the
145 The trecento
Squarcialupi Codex (Giovanni’s madrigals have the same order in I-Fl 2211
as in the Squarcialupi Codex); the compositions in the sections dedicated
to Giovanni Mazzuoli (gatherings 9 and 10), to his son Piero (organist
in San Lorenzo from 1403 to 1415, gathering 17) and to Ugolino from
Orvieto (booklet 18) are unica. The codex also contains French chansons
by Machaut, Grimace and Senleches (gathering 15), a booklet of caccias
(gathering 16) and one of motets (gathering 19, the last one).
Rome and Naples

John Nádas and Giuliano di Bacco have shed light on the importance of
Rome, a place of cross-fertilization between different cultures as the centre
of the Holy See, in the creation and spreading of the ‘international style’
that distinguished much music from the end of the fourteenth century
onwards.
Italian musicians and those who, attracted by new possibilities, moved to
Rome had the opportunity to get in touch with the ultramontane tradition
of Avignon: it was certainly during the first years of the schism (1370–80),
for example, that the composer Antonio Zacara da Teramo came to know
and developed the practice, derived from the French tradition, of intoning
the Gloria and Credo polyphonically. Furthermore, the influence of their
Italian sojourn on the musicians who went back with Clement VII, and who
very likely took something of Italian styles and techniques back to France,
must be thoroughly reconsidered.
The creation and the development of the Italian papal chapel in Rome
from 1376 onwards sees a preponderance of foreign singers, arriving in Italy
at different times; this phase ends with the papacy of Urban VI (1378–89).
From 1390 to 1409, there is an increase in the importance of Italian singers,
coming from the areas to the south and east of Rome.
Among the composers who worked in Rome for a long time one must
cite at least Antonius Berardi from Teramo, called Antonio Zacara, who is
mentioned as a famous singer, copyist and illuminator in a Roman docu-
ment dated January 1390 and described as scriptor litterarum apostolicarum
(copyist of the Pope’s letters) in the Holy See from 1389 to 1407. Johannes
Ciconia was also active in Rome in the same years as Zacara, and many
Italian and foreign musicians were active in the sumptuous chapels of the
bishops living in Rome.
A few fragments of late-fourteenth-century polyphony (Foligno, Grotta-
ferrata, Cortona, the Egidi fragment and Warsaw 378) have been related to
the Roman milieu in the first decades of the Great Schism by John Nádas
and Giuliano di Bacco.
146 Marco Gozzi
The Naples of Charles II (1285–1309) and above all Robert of Anjou

(1309–43) paid special attention to liturgical music (both monodic and
polyphonic) as well as celebrative and refined courtly polyphony, cultivated
in the Angevin court. Robert himself composed a Credo in cantus fractus
(very common in liturgical manuscripts), and the Pomerium by Marchetto
da Padova is dedicated to him. Nothing of the chansons and motets com-
posed for Anjou survives, but the interest in music of both Charles and
Robert is attested to by their patronage of singers and composers.
During the long reign of Queen Joan of Anjou (1343–81) Naples also
enjoyed a rich cultural life, in which music, including polyphony, had a
primary role, but this particular aspect of fourteenth-century Neapolitan
history still needs to be studied.
A group of singers of the courts of Alexander V and John XXII (1410–
15), itinerant between Rome, Florence, Bologna and Constance, loved to test
themselves with refined notational and rhythmic complexities, which were
intended to compete with French mannerism in a supreme test of technical
mastery. Bartolomeo from Bologna, Corrado from Pistoia, Matteo from
Perugia and Antonio Zacara from Teramo contributed to this repertory
which, made up of ballades on French texts and motets, is also called Ars
Subtilior. But the oldest representative of this trend was Filippotto from
Caserta, followed by Antonello Marot, also from Caserta; both of them had
contact with the Angevins of Naples, but they were active in other places too,
maybe in northern Italy. With reference to this, one should remember that
three popes during the last part of the fourteenth century and the first years
of the fifteenth were from Naples: Urban VI (Bartolomeo Prignani, 1378–
89), Boniface IX (Pietro Tomacelli, 1389–1404) and John XXII (Baldassarre
Cossa, 1410–15).
Two codices, compiled by Italian scribes in the second decade of the
fifteenth century, contain Ars Subtilior repertory: the manuscript Modena,
Biblioteca Estense, α.M.5.24 (with one hundred pieces, above all ballades,
virelais, rondeaux and sections of the mass ordinary) and the Turin Codex,
Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, T. III. 2 (a fragment of 15 folios with 16
sections of the ordinary, twenty Italian and French secular pieces and two
motets).
The madrigal
The madrigal, mostly for two voices, is the musical-poetic form most used
by the first masters of the Italian Ars Nova. The term madrigale has an
uncertain etymology; it is thought that it might derive from matricale (‘writ-
ten in the mother tongue’) or from mandria (‘herd’: a mandriale would,
147 The trecento
therefore, be a shepherd’s song). There are also other less likely hypothe-
ses: materialis from materia, that is, ‘material’ as opposed to spiritual or
in the sense of ‘without art’; matricale from amatricius (‘love poetry’), and
so on.
In any case, the madrigal has a specific poetic form: it has two (rarely
three) terzine (that is, stanzas with three hendecasyllables each), followed
by a final distich (two lines) with rhymes in pairs, called a ritornello,
always in hendecasyllables. The rhyme scheme can vary; these are Petrarch’s
schemes:
ABC ABC DD (Nova angeletta)

ABA BCB CC (Non al so amante)
ABB ACC CDD (Or vedi, Amor)
ABA CBC DE DE (Perch’al viso, with double ritornello).
The most common scheme in manuscripts with notation is ABB CDD

EE. As regards content, the madrigals collected in music codices are courtly
love lyrics (not popular) – idyllic or pastoral compositions. They often cite
symbolic animals (lamb, leopard, snake, falcon, eagle, phoenix, turtledove
etc.) which mostly have a metaphorical and heraldic meaning (they refer
to personages or city people). Moralistic, political (celebratory) or didac-
tic themes are not excluded. It is a poetry rich in convention (the same
themes and situations recur several times), in symbolism (the use of alle-
gory, metaphor, heraldic symbolism, senhal etc.) and in artifice (acrostics,
rhyming answers etc.). The final distich, which shows a similarity to the
caccia, expresses the gist, the ‘moral’ or a poignant commentary on the
situation described in the three-line verses.
Formally the musical setting follows closely the poetic form: every three-
line verse receives the same music (section A), whereas the ritornello has a
different melody (section B), treated as a separate section (and often with a
mensuration different from the preceding three-line section). It should be
noted that the ritornello is not a refrain, that is, it is never repeated; the name
possibly derives from the more archaic form, which required the repetition
of the ritornello after every three-line verse. In brief: a normal eight-line
madrigal (3+3+2) has the structure AAB, whereas an eleven-line madrigal
(3+3+3+2) has the structure AAAB. The form of the madrigal is mainly
practised by the early composers of the Italian Ars Nova (Piero, Jacopo da
Bologna, Giovanni da Cascia, Gherardello, Lorenzo and Vincenzo), whereas
in the second half of the fourteenth century (from circa 1370 onwards) the
form was progressively abandoned in favour of the ballata: Landini (who
died in 1397), for instance, left only 12 madrigals but 140 ballatas.
The musical style of the madrigal shows several constants: the tenor has
relatively long values, the higher part (or parts) is embellished with typical
148 Marco Gozzi
Ars Nova decoration; one scholar has defined it as ‘embellished conductus

style’, in contrast to the polyrhythmic style of contemporary French secular
music (Machaut). The same madrigal often appears in different manuscripts
with different embellishments in the discantus, maybe proof of a widespread
improvisatory practice.
Both voices often have the text in the codices, suggesting a purely vocal
performance, but even when the tenor does not show the text, a vocal per-
formance is perfectly legitimate; we also have proofs of solely instrumental
performances of madrigals in the form of intavolatura for keyboard nota-
tion. The madrigals for three voices, which are the exception, very often
have particular features: canonic writing in the higher voices or different
texts for all the three voices (as in Landini’s Musica son).
As an example of a classical madrigal I have chosen Petrarch’s Non al
so amante (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, LII), set to music by Jacopo da
Bologna.
This is the text (derived from the version in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale
de France, fonds italien 568), with a translation and the rhyme scheme.
Non al so amante più Diana Diana was no more

piacque A pleasing to her lover
quando per tal ventura tutta nuda B when by chance all naked
la vide in mezo delle gelid’acque A he saw her in the midst of the cold
waters
ch’a me la pasturella alpestra e than was the cruel mountain
cruda B shepherdess to me,
fissa a bagnare un legiadretto intent on dipping in the water a
velo C pretty veil
che ’l sole all’aura el vago capel which hides her lovely hair from
chiuda. B sun and wind
Tal che mi fece quando egli arde ’l So that she made me, when the
cielo C sun burns the sky,
tutto tremar d’un amoroso gelo. C tremble with an icy love.
As we can see, the meaning of the text does not find closure at the end
of the first three-line verse, but carries over into the second; this is one of
the reasons why the ritornello must not be repeated after every three-line
verse, but sung only at the end. In the first terzina there is a reference to
Actaeon, the mythological character instructed by the centaur Chiron, who
while hunting saw Diana and her companions bathing naked in a little lake;
the goddesses, angered, transformed him into a deer and made his own
dogs devour him.
The poet sees his lover (Laura), called ‘pasturella alpestra e cruda’ (rustic
and cruel shepherdess: it is the only occurrence of the term pastorella in
Petrarch’s poetry; the humble and rural representation is certainly a homage
149 The trecento
to the madrigal genre, which, according to the theorists, must deal with
rural people and things – ‘de villanellis’), washing a handkerchief (velo)
and compares this encounter, to stress the intensity of his love, to that of
Actaeon who, by chance, had seen his lover Diana naked while she was
bathing in the lake. In the ritornello (‘Tal che mi fece quando egli arde ’il
cielo / tutto tremar d’un amoroso gelo’) he describes his condition at that
sight: the burning sun notwithstanding, he trembles ‘d’un amoroso gelo’.
Example 8.1 allows us to observe the musical style of the madrigal.
Almost every one of the hundred and fifty or so madrigals transmitted by
the Italian Ars Nova manuscripts and fragments has a textual and musi-
cal structure similar to that of Non al so amante, revealing a rather rigid
canonization of the form.
As far as the macrostructure of the madrigal Non al so amante is con-
cerned, there is total respect, in the music, for the ends of individual lines,
as happens in almost all surviving fourteenth-century madrigals. At the
end of every hendecasyllable there is a closing cadence, even when there is
an enjambment (see the words piacque, nuda, acque, cielo, gelo in the tran-
scription); however, when there is an enjambment, the tenor continues the
discourse with a linking phrase (see particularly bars 12 and 23–4), creating
musical continuity between lines, which, in turn, reflects the continuity of
sense. The stereotyped segmentation of each line, which can be observed
in many madrigals of the first Ars Nova masters (the same happens in the
ballades), is as follows: the first syllable is set to a melisma which ends on
the following syllable.
The caccia
This is perhaps the most typical musical-poetic form of the Italian Ars Nova
repertory. There are almost thirty examples with music. The text usually
presents animated hunting and fishing scenes, or conjures up images of
lively markets. The texts have plenty of first-person dialogue, often very
agitated (imitating dogs’ barks, vendors’ calls etc.). There is no fixed metrical
scheme; lines of five and seven syllables alternate with hendecasyllables and
are variously rhymed.
The musical texture is for three voices, with the two higher voices in strict
canonic imitation: the second voice begins six or more breves after the first
voice. The two chasing voices are supported by a tenor with long values,
almost always without text (but not necessarily destined to be performed
instrumentally), which takes no part in the imitation. The short ritornello
section, which can also have the two higher voices in canon, follows the
rather extended first section.
150 Marco Gozzi
Example 8.1 Jacopo da Bologna, Non al so amante (F-Pn fonds italien 568,
fols. 4v–5r)
This kind of writing – for three parts with two in canon – has great
historic importance because it is the first appearance of a style with a
sustaining low part.
Sometimes it can happen that a madrigal with a realistic text is set to
music in the form of a caccia. There is an analogous and contemporary
151 The trecento
Example 8.1 (cont.)
form with a French text: the chace (four examples are contained in the Ivrea
Codex; there are other examples by Machaut).
The term ‘caccia’ refers both to the prevailing argument of the text and
to the fugue-like procedure in the higher voices, which chase and follow one
another: it should be remembered that the term ‘caccia’ in the fourteenth
century indicates the chase of the enemy or the escape from the enemy, as
in Dante’s use of it in the Inferno (XIII, 33) and the Purgatorio (VI, 15 and
XIII, 119). Even in Il Fiore (a collection of late-thirteenth-century sonnets,
152 Marco Gozzi
sometimes attributed to Dante) the phrase ‘to put to caccia’ means ‘to put
to flight’, ‘to drive away’ (XIII, 13; LXX, 7; XCIII, 11).
Example 8.2 shows the beginning of a typical Ars Nova caccia, from the
Mischiati Fragment in the Reggio Emilia state archive, a bifolio dated circa
1370 and copied in the Po area. This is the text of the caccia:
Nella foresta al cervo caciatore In the forest the hunter of the deer
‘Qua, qua, Lion! Qua, qua, Dragon!’ ‘Here, here, Lion! Here, here, Dragon’
chiamava. called.
‘Te, te, te’, ‘Te, te, te’,
dintorno al riço i cani pur baiava: around the hedgehog the dogs were
barking:
‘Bauff, bauff, bauff ’. ‘Bauff, bauff, bauff ’.
‘Al riço, al riço francho!’, ‘To the hedgehog, to the hedgehog,
free!’,
quando lo vide: ‘Al riço, al riço when he saw it: ‘To the hedgehog, to
stancho.’ the tired hedgehog.’
Dicean ‘Da, da, da, da’ ‘Da, da, da, da’, said
li chan rendendo baglio. the dogs making a blunder.
El riço vigoroso in ogni taglio The hedgehog vigorous in every hedge
rimase senza innoia e senza tedio. was cool and calm and totally
unbothered.
The fact that the rhyme of the last line is unrelated to what precedes it
may indicate that the text we have is the first verse of a caccia that origi-
nally had two verses, like Segugi a corta (which, by the way, has the same
rhyme scheme, but whose last line is a seven-syllable line and not a hen-
decasyllable) and as Corsi hypothesized about Giovanni’s caccia Per larghi
prati.
The text depicts a scene in which the protagonists are hunting dogs
which, during a deer beat, are distracted by an encounter with a little
hedgehog (riço or riccio) and stop to bark at it. Rebuked and spurred on
by the hunter to continue their chase, they start running again and the
hedgehog remains unhurt. It is likely that the text hides a war metaphor
and that the hedgehog represents the emblem of a city or of a family: a
condottiere (that is, a mercenary leader) with expansionist designs (Luchino
Visconti?) disregards the conquest of a certain place in order to lead a much
more important military campaign elsewhere.
The hedgehog mentioned in the caccia Nella foresta could be an allusion
to the coat of arms of the Bertacchi, lords of the Rocca Alberti of Garfagnana,
a few kilometres from Camporgiano. The Florentine Republic expropriated
the Rocca Alberti castle together with other villages and little castles when
its armies invaded the upper valley of the Serchio; yet the castle was not
touched thanks to the immediate signing of the Treaty of Pietrasanta on
153 The trecento
Example 8.2 Nella foresta (caccia) (I-REas Mischiati Fragment, fol. Av)
154 Marco Gozzi
Example 8.2 (cont.)
15 May 1346, which brought peace between the Republic of Florence,

Luchino and Galeazzo Visconti on the one hand and the Republic of Pisa on
the other. If the identification suggested above is correct, the composition
of the caccia would date back to around 1346.
The agitated shouts in the caccia Nella foresta create a dense web of
textual cross-references with other known caccias:
r ‘Da, da’ appears in the caccia for the Visconti family Con bracchi assai,
set to music in competition by Giovanni from Florence and by Magister
Piero.
r ‘Te, te’ occurs in Jacopo’s Per sparverare, also written for the Visconti
(given the presence of the dog Varin), and in Gherardello’s Tosto che
l’alba.
r ‘Bauff, bauff’, ‘Da, da’ and the dog Dragon appear in the caccia Segugi a
corta.
r ‘Bauff, bauff’, ‘Te, te’ and the dog Dragon feature in the caccia in the
accompanying page of the Mischiati Fragment (Mirando i pesci).
There is no ritornello in the text, but the musical setting reserves the typical
treatment of the ritornello for the last line (with a change of divisio and
reduction to two voices), as in the caccia Segugi a corta.
The ballata
The ballata is the main musical-poetic form of the Italian Ars Nova; it does
not have anything in common with the French ballade, rather it is like the
virelai. From the point of view of text, the ballata consists of a ritornello,
called ripresa (R), and normally three strophes (S) which alternate with the
ritornello: R S1 R S2 R S3 R. It is possible to use the abbreviated form –
without repetition of the ripresa – R S1 S2 S3 R. The strophe consists of
two piedi – feet – (or mutazioni), with the same rhyme scheme, and a
volta, which has the same metric structure as the ripresa. The feet form the
fronte of the verse, the volta is also called sirma. Sometimes the ripresa and
155 The trecento
each foot are formed of two lines, sometimes the ripresa consists of three
lines and the foot of two. The lines are usually hendecasyllables, or seven-
syllable lines, or a mixture of seven-syllable lines and hendecasyllables. The
following are a few examples of the rhyme schemes used in the ballatas
found in music codices; the feet are divided by the comma and between
fronte and sirma there is a semicolon:
XX AB, AB; BX (the most common scheme)

XYY ABC, ABC; CYY
XyX AB, AB; ByX
XYY AB, AB; BCY
XyY AbC, AbC; XyY
XyyX AB, AB; BCcX
xYxY AB, AB; bXbX
XyyX AB, AB; BccX
X AB, AB; X
The ballata is the favourite metre of the Stil novo poets and is extensively
used by Petrarch. A ballata with more than a verse is called ‘ballata vestita’
(dressed ballata) or ‘ballata replicata’ (replicated ballata). When the ballata
has a ripresa with more than four lines, it is called ‘grande’ (great); if the
ripresa has three lines, it is called ‘mezzana’ (medium); it is called ‘minore’
(minor) if it has two lines, ‘piccola’ (small) if it has just one hendecasyllable
for the ripresa, ‘minima’ (minimum/smallest) with a seven-syllable line,
and ‘stravagante’ (extravagant) with a ripresa of more than four lines. The
ballata usually treats of love, very often with moralizing turns; sometimes
it is sententious or imploring.
The music is composed only for the ripresa and the first foot; it is then
repeated for the remaining lines in this way:
RIPRESA: A; PIEDI: B B; VOLTA: A; RIPRESA: A, etc.
In modern transcriptions there results the form A BBA, written usually

with two sections (A and B) repeated. In the original source only the ripresa
and the first foot are written below the notes; the text of the second foot
and of the volta are usually written one after the other at the end of the
discantus. Unlike in the virelai, the ballata very rarely presents ouvert and
clos endings.
Because of its name, which derives from the verb ballare (to dance), it
is thought that the ballata was a song accompanying a dance. The chore-
ographic figurations associated with the ballata, sung by the dancers who
held each other by the hand, were these: before opening the dance there was
an invitation to the youngsters to dance; later, as suggested by Sacchetti’s’
poem Cosı̀ m’aiuti Dio, the invitation became a simple request, to a young
man or girl, to lead the song and the dance. The ripresa, sung by the soloist,
156 Marco Gozzi
was immediately repeated by the chorus; then there followed the verse for
solo voice. With perfect correspondence to the poetic-musical structure,
the dancers performed a full turn to the right during the ripresa; a half turn
to the left and a half turn to the right respectively, corresponding with the
first and the second foot; and again a full turn, but this time to the left,
during the volta, so that at the end of the verses all the dancers were in the
opening position to repeat the turn of the dance from left to right.
Other evidence about ways of performing the ballata is provided by
Giovanni del Virgilio, a teacher of rhetoric in Bologna and a friend of
Dante, who gives the following description in his Ekloge diaffonus (ca1316):
after the short opening of a few lines, sung by a cantor and repeated by
the chorus (the ‘ripresa’ or ‘recantus’), a group of girls and boys sings the
verse with the two feet and the volta; so far no one moves, but the dance
of the antistrophe and of the successive verses starts immediately, until the
ripresa, sung together by the cantor and the dancers, marks the conclusion.
Singing the ripresa and the first verse without choreography allowed the
dancers to ‘count’ the number of steps necessary for the dance, paying great
attention to the music; a similar experience is maybe what Dante describes
in Paradiso, X, 79:
Donne mi parver non da ballo sciolte, Women seemed to me not freed from
dance
ma che s’arrestin tacite, ascoltando but they stopped in silence, listening
fin che le nove note hanno ricolte. until they picked up the new notes.
The poetic structure of the ballata can be also found in the lauda. As
for the ensemble, there have been transmitted to us fourteenth-century
ballatas for one, two and three voices. We know ninety-one examples for
two voices by Landini and forty-nine for three voices; many of them have
one strophe. Of the vast production of monophonic fourteenth-century
ballatas, only sixteen pieces and one fragment survive: five anonymous
ballatas in the Rossi Codex; eleven ballatas in the Squarcialupi Codex (five
by Gherardello, five by Lorenzo Masini, and one by Niccolò da Perugia); and
the ripresa and the beginning of the feet of Da la somma beltà in the Mischiati
Fragment.
Example 8.3 shows one of these monophonic ballatas: I’ vo’ bene a chi
vol bene a me with a text by the poet Niccolò Soldanieri. The Squarcialupi
Codex contains only the ripresa and the feet of the first verse. The text in the
transcriptions is integrated with the versions found in non-music codices,
which report this work by Soldanieri.
The transcription in 6/4 underlines the typical metric structure of the
monodic ballata, which in the majority of cases is based on the division
duodenaria. The twelve eighth-notes, which add up to a brevis in this Italian
157 The trecento
Example 8.3 Gherardello da Firenze, I’ vo’ bene (I-Fl Palatino 87, fol. 29r)
mensura (4+4+4), can be divided in 3/4 plus 6/8 (see, for example, bars
3, 6, 7 and 8 of the ripresa in I’ vo’ bene), creating a rhythmic pattern well
known to composers and singers. The notation of the Squarcialupi Codex
simplifies the original rhythmic patterning (and makes things easier for the
singer); thus, the ballata is written using the senaria perfecta, whose brevis is
half the duodenaria; for this reason all modern editors transcribe the ballata
in 3/4.
Motets and sacred polyphonic music

Polyphonic pieces with Latin texts (some celebratory, others written for
liturgical use) composed for Italian courts and churches in the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries have not yet been thoroughly studied
by musicologists. Over the past few years numerous fourteenth-century
Italian fragments have been discovered, which considerably enrich our
knowledge of this repertory – even though we still await a more complete
picture of the size and scope of the phenomenon.1
158 Marco Gozzi
Certainly the French motet is better known and more studied than the
Italian, and it is also older and more widespread: many Italian sources
contain motets of French origin and it should not be forgotten that the
author of the greatest number of Italian celebratory motets (mostly for
Paduan bishops or events in the Veneto) is Johannes Ciconia, a composer
of Belgian origin.
Among the first Italian examples to consider are the already-mentioned
motets of Marchetto da Padova: Ave regina celorum – Mater innocen-
cie (1305), Ave corpus sanctum (ca1335), and Cetus inseraphici – Cetus
apostolici.
Two motets by Jacopo da Bologna: Lux purpurata radiis and Laudibus
dignis merito laudari are dedicated to Luchino Visconti (and can be dated,
therefore, between 1339 and 1349); in both motets the text of the triplum
has the name Luchinus as an acrostic.
We do not know how much of the polyphonic mensural repertory
in the liturgy was practised in thirteenth-century Italy: the impression
is that mensural polyphony in the Franconian style was not widespread
and that, on the contrary, the practice of simple polyphony was very
common.
The first clear proofs of compositions for the mass ordinary in Italy begin
to appear in the fourteenth century: for example, at the end of a manuscript
of Tuscan origin – Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds italien 568
(Pit) – there is a cycle of the ordinary (with the Benedicamus but without
the Kyrie), quite likely assembled by the copyist from the work of several
famous Florentine authors:2
Pit, fols. 131v–133, Gloria by Gherardello of Florence

Pit, fols. 133v–136, Credo by Bartolo of Florence
Pit, fols. 136v–137, Sanctus by Lorenzo of Florence
Pit, fol. 137v, Agnus Dei by Gherardello of Florence
Pit, fol. 138r, Benedicamus Domino by Paolo of Florence
Von Fischer has pointed out the great stylistic differences between these
five pieces:3 first, Bartolo’s Credo has an archaic construction, with the two
voices in the same range, frequently crossing, and moving mostly in con-
trary motion; it shows frequent changes of mensura. Second, Gherardello’s
Gloria and Agnus are stylistically similar, formally speaking, to the madri-
gal; and, third, Lorenzo’s Sanctus sets a traditional tenor part against a very
florid and sometimes heterophonic superius, but the composition does not
have the experimentalism of his secular works. The only piece composed
on a liturgical cantus firmus (and with equal values in the tenor)4 is the
Benedicamus by Abbot Paolo of Florence.
159 The trecento
Table 8.1 Surviving polyphonic settings of mass movements by four Italian composers
Composer Gloria Credo
Zacara da Teramo 6 Glorias: ‘Micinella’, ‘Rosetta’, ‘Fior gentil’, 6 Credos: ‘Cursor’, ‘Scabioso’, ‘Deus
‘Gloria laus’, ‘Ad ogne vento’, ‘Anglicana’ (all deorum’, ‘Du vilage’ and two untitled
in I-Bc Q15), plus two of uncertain (five in I-Bc Q15)
attribution
Johannes Ciconia 7 Glorias: ‘Suscipe trinitatis’ plus three more 4 Credos (three in I-Bc Q15)
(in I-Bc Q15) [untitled]{without
appellative}, a fragmentary intonation and
two with the Marian trope ‘Spiritus et alme’
Antonio da Cividale 3 Glorias (in I-Bc Q15, BU2216 and I-CFm 79) 1 Credo in I-Bc Q15
Matteo da Perugia 7 Glorias (all in Modena, Bibl. Estense, 2 Credos in I-MOe α.M.5.24
α.M.5.24)
In the surviving Italian codices the most commonly found sections of

fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century polyphonic ordinaries are Glorias
and Credos (more than fifty examples of the former and almost forty of the
latter); there are also seventeen examples of the Sanctus, seven Kyries and
only five Agnus Deis.
The relatively plentiful production in this field of four composers active
in Italy in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries – Zacara from
Teramo, Ciconia from Liège, Antonio from Cividale, and Matteo from
Perugia – reveals only settings of Glorias and Credos. Table 8.1 sum-
marizes the data about the surviving production of these movements of
the mass.
Since the four authors worked in different places it is evident that the Gloria
and the Credo (probably for solemn masses) received privileged treatment.
There was already a stable tradition of mensural polyphonic performance
of the Credo (cantus fractus secundatus), whereas the Gloria needed new
solemn settings in more places. However, the polyphonic and mensural
setting of the Gloria and Credo had already come into use, and to replace it
with compositions for three or four voices of higher artistic quality appeared
in line with the liturgical tradition; furthermore, this replacement was not
perceived as an extreme novelty or as a break with tradition. The polyphonic
settings for the Kyrie, Sanctus and Agnus remained rarer and were reserved
for specific festivities. These settings too, particularly if provided with tropes,
came to resemble very closely the texts of the Gloria and Credo, and therefore
were accepted without problems.
In the setting by Zacara there are the first examples of the ‘parody’
technique, which consists in the use of polyphonic material from pre-
existing compositions; thus – for instance – the Gloria ‘Rosetta’ is based on
the ballata Rosetta che non cambi mai colore by the same author. We have to
160 Marco Gozzi
wait until the beginning of the sixteenth century for this practice of using
pre-existing compositions to be applied to whole mass cycles.
Certainly the liturgical repertory of Italian polyphony still needs much
research in order to clarify the performance contexts of the surviving music,
including the role of the organ and of Gregorian chant in solemn liturgical
celebrations.
9 The Iberian peninsula
nicolas bell
As with so many other aspects of Hispanic culture in the early Middle

Ages, the musical life of the Iberian peninsula was distinct from that of
other parts of Europe for many centuries. Though Christianity reached
the peninsula as early as the third century, most of the country came
under Muslim rule in 711, to be reconquered by Christians in a series
of campaigns through the Middle Ages. Not only did this bring Arabic
music into Europe, but the Muslims were also uniquely tolerant of the Jews,
allowing a Judaeo-Spanish musical tradition to flourish, which has had wide
influence elsewhere in later centuries. Until the eleventh century, the church
in the Spanish kingdoms remained independent from the Roman rite and
employed a separate liturgical structure, with its own musical tradition.
The later Middle Ages saw much greater assimilation of musical traditions
from the rest of Europe, but the peninsula also developed its own discrete
musical genres, particularly in secular music making.
Isidore of Seville and Old Spanish chant

Though some evidence survives for music and dance from the Stone Age
onwards,1 it will be as well to begin this survey after the Visigoths had
established a kingdom centred on Toledo and extending across almost the
whole of modern-day Spain, Portugal and the south of France, by the end of
the sixth century. Isidore, Archbishop of Seville (ca559–636), is a figure of
major importance in all branches of learning. He compiled an encyclopae-
dia, the Etymologiarum sive originum libri xx, which enjoyed an extraordi-
nary Europe-wide influence throughout the Middle Ages, surviving today
in more than a thousand manuscripts.2 The Etymologiae are largely a syn-
thesis of the writings of various classical authors, and Isidore’s definition
of music as a discipline concerned with numbers as sounds directly follows
Cassiodorus. As well as defining music as a subject of study within the
Quadrivium, Isidore provides much information here and in his practical
text on the liturgy, De ecclesiasticis officiis, on the role of music in the divine
office.3
Isidore played an important part in the fourth council of Toledo in
[161] 633, one of the canons arising from which prescribed a single order of
162 Nicolas Bell
prayer and singing (‘orandi atque psallendi’) to be kept through all of Spain
and Gaul (Gaul here meaning the Roman province centred on Narbonne).
Neither his own writings nor the decrees of the fourth council suggest that
Isidore himself was directly involved in the composition of the chants for
the newly reformed liturgy, but his writings enhance our understanding of
the surviving liturgical books, all of which date from later centuries. Isidore
and others do, though, mention various composers of chant, including
his brother Leander, whom he succeeded as Bishop of Seville and who
‘composed many works of sweet sound’.
The liturgy of the Spanish church is often misleadingly referred to as
the ‘Mozarabic rite’, since it is known today from books used by Christians
living under Moorish rule, the Mozarabs (from the Arabic ‘making oneself
an Arab’). The more general term ‘Old Spanish’ or ‘Hispanic’ is nowadays
preferred, since it is clear that the liturgy was well established before the
Muslim invasion in 711, at least from the fourth council of Toledo and
probably in some form long before this. It was also used for some time
in parts of the Christian north of Spain that never came under Muslim
rule, and other parts that returned to Christian rule in intervening years.
The rite did not go unchallenged within Christian territories, however: in
parts of Catalonia the Roman rite was preferred from a very early date, and a
growing desire for liturgical uniformity (and imposition of papal authority)
through the tenth and eleventh centuries led eventually to the suppression
of the Old Spanish rite in favour of the Roman throughout reconquered
Spain in the treaty of Burgos in 1080.4 Meanwhile the Portuguese territories
had used the Roman rite from as early as the sixth century, and the Old
Spanish rite was employed for only a somewhat briefer period than in the
northern Spanish kingdoms.5
Only one liturgical book, an orationale written in Tarragona, survives
from as early as the time of the Muslim occupation.6 This does not include
any musical notation, but the chant texts it records concur with later sources,
confirming that the liturgical prescriptions were broadly fixed by this time.
Notation is preserved in more than twenty complete manuscripts of the Old
Spanish rite, mainly from the tenth and eleventh centuries, and a further
twenty or so fragments.7 This is a large number when compared with other
chant traditions from this time, but because of their early date, almost all
of the manuscripts are written in a notation that is not decipherable. The
suppression of the rite unfortunately occurred just before pitch-specific
notation was becoming common elsewhere. The notation bears some rela-
tion to other neumatic systems, but is in many respects quite different, the
extravagantly florid style of some complex neumes being unlike any other
traditions in western Europe. It may be divided into two broad categories:
about one third of the surviving manuscripts employ an oblique, almost
horizontal ductus, associated with manuscripts from the school of Toledo,

and the remainder use the ‘northern’ notation especially associated with
León and the Rioja, which has a more vertical aspect.8
It is a particular shame that no manuscripts survive from the southern
half of the country, since those parts which remained under Muslim rule
into the fifteenth century might well have continued to use the Old Spanish
chant late enough to have notated it on a staff. As it is, we are fortunate
that in a single tenth-century manuscript from the monastery of San Millán
de la Cogolla (Rioja), the Old Spanish notation of eighteen chants for the
Office of the Dead was erased in the eleventh century, to be replaced by
heightened – and therefore decipherable – Aquitanian neumes.9 Similarly,
three antiphons for the washing of feet on Maundy Thursday were replaced
with Aquitanian notation in MS 4 of San Domingo at Silos, a monastery
from where many other important liturgical manuscripts also survive. This
may leave us with only twenty-one decipherable melodies out of a complete
repertory of many thousands, but scholars have extrapolated from this
slender evidence to reveal many general similarities with other Western
chant traditions.10
The manuscripts preserve a large repertory of antiphons for the mass
and office, which Isidore tells us were sung by two choirs alternating, as
in the Gregorian tradition. There is no evidence of a structured system
of eight modes, but certain formulas are found regularly in particular
contexts, which again shows a certain degree of resemblance to other
Western chant traditions. The responsory chants are closer in form and
structure to their Frankish equivalents, but show a considerable degree of
variation in their psalm-tones between sources from the different regions.
The various chants for the mass use a separate terminology from their
counterparts in other rites, but have broadly similar functions in the
service.
The gradual suppression of the Spanish rite in favour of the Roman
was generally brought about through new liturgical books using Aqui-
tanian notation, though a few examples survive from the time of transition
of manuscripts of the new rite using the old notation.11 The extent to
which Spanish plainchant demonstrated uniformity across the country and
remained true to its Roman sources in succeeding centuries is not a subject
that has yet received much attention. There were certainly national and local
characteristics in particular liturgical forms, some of which are likely to be
a legacy from the old rite. For example, though the majority of hymn texts
found in the Spanish kingdoms were widely disseminated in other coun-
tries, almost two thirds of the melodies are not generally known outside the
peninsula. Many of these are likely to be native compositions, and some are
probably remnants of the Old Spanish rite.12
164 Nicolas Bell
New musical forms in the church

It seems improbable that tropes or sequences were ever employed in the
Old Spanish liturgy.13 There are references to prosaria, a term often used
to describe books containing both tropes and proses, in various Catalan
documents listing the books required for the Roman liturgy from as early as
the mid tenth century, but the earliest trope manuscript to survive from the
Iberian peninsula dates from no earlier than the late eleventh century. MS
105 in the Cathedral Archive of Vic (north of Barcelona) contains tropes for
the ordinary of the mass, as well as several introit tropes and a large number
of sequences.14 Only around a dozen such manuscripts survive in all from
the Iberian peninsula through to the fifteenth century, but it seems likely
that the practice of troping was far more widespread than the surviving
sources might lead us to believe.15 In later sources, a far greater number of
ordinary tropes are found than of proper, and while the repertory used in
Vic appears to have been compiled locally, sources from elsewhere are often
derived directly from Aquitanian practice.
A similar pattern of dissemination may be assumed in the case of litur-
gical drama. A later portion of the same manuscript in Vic, dating from the
early twelfth century, includes a play of the three Marys, and similar plays
are known from elsewhere in Catalonia from a relatively early date.16 It is
clear that while Catalonia was one of the great centres of creativity in the
practice of liturgical drama, these forms of liturgical expression were much
less widespread elsewhere in the peninsula. Brief versions of the Visitatio
sepulchri are found in two eleventh-century manuscripts from the abbey
of Silos written in Mozarabic script and notation yet forming part of the
Roman rite, but other examples from outside Catalonia are few and far
between. It seems that their place was taken by a complementary tradi-
tion of vernacular drama on ecclesiastical subjects, beginning in the late
twelfth century with the Auto de los Reyes Magos, which cannot properly
be considered as liturgical drama and for which music does not generally
survive.
In Catalonia in the later Middle Ages several dramatic innovations took
place in the context of the liturgy. A customary or consueta from Girona,
dated 1360, describes eight different representational ceremonies, including
a particularly sophisticated Visitatio sepulchri, the first of three plays to take
place at Easter. Though the texts used at Girona do not for the most part
survive, this book provides much useful information as to how the plays
were enacted. Among the Christmastide representations was one on the
martyrdom of Saint Stephen, a theme which appears to have been a Catalan
speciality and which extended in Barcelona to a realistic stoning of the pro-
tomartyr with imitation stones.17 In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin came to be celebrated in ever more
elaborate processions, often including dramatic elements sometimes in the
vernacular. The most famous of these, the Mystery of Elx (or Elche), is an
extended drama in Catalan which is still performed each year. Though the
present format and music largely derive from the seventeenth century, it
represents a continuous tradition from the end of the Middle Ages.
Another ceremony that sometimes took on a dramatic form in the
Spanish church is associated with matins on Christmas morning. The song
of the Sibyl, prophesying the Second Coming at the Day of Judgement, has
its origins in the first years of Christianity and began to be used in a liturgical
context in the twelfth century, as the sixth or ninth lesson of matins for the
Nativity, in certain monasteries as well as a few cathedrals. This practice
was especially common in the Spanish territories, though examples are also
found in France and Italy. The foreboding refrain, ‘Iudicii signum: tellus
sudore madescet’ (‘Sign of Judgement: the earth will grow wet with sweat’),
is sung in alternation with a series of verses. In some churches the prophecy
would be sung by a boy dressed up as the Erythraean pythoness. Some of the
Spanish sources from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries give the words in
Catalan or Spanish instead of Latin, thereby making this remarkable chant
even more direct and immediate to its audience.18
Just as tropes and sequences were unknown in the Old Spanish rite, let
alone such dramatic ceremonies as the Sibylline prophecy, so it seems that
the practice of polyphony was unknown to the Visigoths and Mozarabs.
At the very least we can say that no notated examples survive, nor is there
any testimony to the practice in documentary sources. The sparse material
that has survived postdates the imposition of the Roman rite by some
considerable time, and much of it shows the strong influence of French
polyphonic styles.
The earliest significant manuscript in this context was probably made
in France, possibly around Vézelay, in the mid twelfth century. It is a
compilation of historical, hagiographical and liturgical material connected
with Saint James, and was used at his shrine at Santiago de Compostela.19
At the end of the book are found 21 polyphonic pieces, a mixture of mass
chants, responsories, Benedicamus settings and conductus, all in two parts
except for one in three parts. Very unusually for this period, the pieces
are fictitiously ascribed to various named individuals, all of them French
and including several bishops. Even if the manuscript was not created in
Spain, its presence at Santiago from such an early date provides important
evidence of the practice of polyphony in the Iberian peninsula in the twelfth
century.
Our knowledge of polyphony in the Iberian peninsula in the following
century derives largely from a diverse range of fragmentary sources from
166 Nicolas Bell
various monastic and secular institutions spread throughout Catalonia and

Castile,20 but in addition to these we are fortunate that two of the principal
sources of polyphony prior to the Ars Nova are of Iberian provenance. The
origins of the first, the Madrid Codex, are unclear. It was kept in Toledo
Cathedral until being transferred in 1869 to the Biblioteca Nacional in
Madrid, where it now has the number 20486, but there is no evidence
to connect it directly with Toledo before the seventeenth century. It was
probably written in northern Spain around 1260, and comprises some 61
conductus and 35 motets, as well as a few other polyphonic compositions,
notably including texted and untexted versions of the famous quadrupla
attributed to Perotinus, Viderunt omnes and Sederunt principes (some parts
of which are now missing).21 Many of the compositions in the Madrid
Codex are also known from Parisian sources, but there are a good number
of pieces unique to this manuscript, several of which may reasonably be
assumed to be native Iberian compositions.
The second major source of polyphony is the Las Huelgas codex, which
is still housed in the Cistercian convent for which it was written towards
the end of the first quarter of the fourteenth century, the Monasterio de
Santa Marı́a la Real de Las Huelgas, outside Burgos.22 The manuscript is
chiefly the work of a single scribe, and presents a substantial repertory
of 48 organa (including several ordinary tropes in two or three parts), 31
sequences (eleven of them polyphonic), 58 motets and 29 conductus, to
which another nineteen pieces in various genres have been added by eleven
later hands.
The singing of polyphony, let alone tropes and sequences, was strictly
forbidden by the Cistercian order, but Las Huelgas was in many respects
an exceptional convent. It was founded in 1187 by Alfonso VIII and his
queen, Eleanor of England, as both a monastic house for noblewomen and
a royal mausoleum. It is very likely that this book, which brings together
music written throughout the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries,
from France and elsewhere in Europe as well as a large number of Spanish
compositions, was intended as a complete repertory of the music required
at the convent outside that of the regular liturgical books. It is not certain
that the nuns themselves sang the music: the foundation had a large retinue
of chaplains who may well have formed a choir.
Unlike several of the major sources of organa and motets from other
countries, the Las Huelgas codex is not a beautiful manuscript; it is written
on parchment of poor quality and the pages are often heavily and inelegantly
corrected. This makes it all the more interesting, as it was clearly intended as
a practical manuscript, representing the music exactly as it was performed.
The notation appears clumsy and unsystematic when compared with other
manuscripts, but in fact shows considerable subtlety and nuance in matters
of performance, particularly of rhythm. The repertory of pieces unique to

this codex, at least some of which we may assume were specially composed
at or for the convent, includes some attractive sequences in honour of the
Blessed Virgin, and four planctus or songs of mourning for deceased kings
and an abbess which show particular melodic extravagance.
As in the thirteenth century, so in the fourteenth various fragments
give testimony to the widespread practice of Ars Nova polyphony in the
Iberian peninsula, albeit on a less sophisticated scale than is found in other
countries. The most famous source from this period is the so-called Llibre
Vermell (‘red book’), which was compiled in the last years of the fourteenth
century as a collection of materials relating to the pilgrimage site of the
shrine of the Black Madonna at the abbey of Montserrat in Catalonia,
where the manuscript remains to this day. As well as accounts of miracles,
homilies and many other miscellaneous texts, seven folios are devoted to
ten pieces of music.23 An annotation makes it clear that these were written
not for use in the liturgy but for pilgrims to sing for their own amusement
and edification during the night vigil and in the courtyard by day. Four
of the pieces are monophonic, two in two parts and four in three parts;
eight are in Latin and two in Catalan. All but the last are songs in honour
of the Virgin; three are simple canons, and another three are in virelai
form.
The Llibre Vermell is an exceptional survival of a fairly simple type of
songwriting from the end of the fourteenth century. Evidence for the creative
development of liturgical polyphony in the Iberian peninsula in the follow-
ing century is relatively limited. Simple polyphony is found on occasion in
books of predominantly monophonic chant, very probably reflecting a more
widespread tradition of improvised polyphony, but surviving polyphonic
choirbooks do not demonstrate the degree of contrapuntal sophistication
found in the Low Countries and elsewhere at the time. Studies of the rich
archives of the Catalano-Aragonese court have shown that music had an
important place in the life of the court, both inside and outside the royal
chapel, and other archives are now being mined for similar information.24
However, it was not until after the marriage of Isabella of Castile to Ferdi-
nand of Aragón in 1469, and the subsequent union of the two kingdoms,
that we may observe a conscious attempt to bring the latest polyphonic
styles from central Europe into the peninsula. At first this was effected
more by importing music than by commissioning new works from native
composers. An unnumbered manuscript in Segovia Cathedral written in
1495–7 combines many works of such northern composers as Obrecht
and Josquin with much simpler native Spanish compositions by Juan de
Anchieta and others.25 But in the early years of the sixteenth century fully
fledged northern-style counterpoint came to be done with confidence in the
168 Nicolas Bell
peninsula, and such composers as Peñalosa and Morales may be ranked with
the most sophisticated and talented of their contemporaries elsewhere.26
Music outside the church

As with liturgical polyphony, our knowledge of secular music in the
Iberian peninsula in the Middle Ages depends on a very small number
of manuscripts all of which are of immense importance in an international
context. A tenth-century manuscript known as the Azagra Codex contains
versus some of which are supplied with simple neumes.27 In subsequent
centuries we know that there was a tradition of professional musicians
in courtly and perhaps also more lowly circles, but only very few musi-
cal fragments survive as testament to this tradition: it was not until the
fifteenth century that romances (or ballads) and the increasingly popular
genre of the villancico came to be written down.28 A small bifolio now in
New York is the sole musical source for six love songs, or cantigas de amigo,
by a minstrel named Martin Codax, dating from the second half of the
thirteenth century.29 The stories told in the songs are set in Vigo, on the
border of Spain and Portugal, and the texts are written in Galician Por-
tuguese. A comparable manuscript fragment was recently discovered with
the music of seven Galician love songs by the Portuguese king Dom Dinis
(1261–1325).30
Among these piecemeal testaments to a widespread tradition of vernacu-
lar monophonic song, pride of place goes to the most famous medieval secu-
lar song repertory to survive from any country, the Cantigas de Santa Marı́a
of Alfonso X of Castile and León (1221–84), known as Alfonso el Sabio,
Alfonso the Wise. Some 420 cantigas survive in four luxurious manuscripts,
principal among them codex b.I.2 in the library of El Escorial.31 The lan-
guage is again Galician Portuguese, and most of the cantigas tell stories of
miracles effected by the Blessed Virgin; every tenth song is a cantiga de loor
in praise of the Virgin. Whether the king actually composed any of the canti-
gas himself is open to question: illuminations in the Escorial manuscript
show him overseeing its production, and in some of the cantigas the king
speaks in the first person, but it is more likely that his responsibility took
the form of closely involved patronage.
The context in which this large repertory came into being has been hotly
contested. No immediate precursors survive in written form, and it has been
suggested that the melodies, which are notated rhythmically, may derive
from Spanish folksongs, from the music of French or Spanish troubadours,
or even from an Arabic song tradition.32 Most of the cantigas are in the
form of the virelai (ABCCABAB). Only a single melodic line is written, but
the manuscripts are richly illuminated with pictures of musicians playing
very accurate depictions of various instruments, most probably implying

that they should be sung to the accompaniment of one or more instrument,
and maybe also with dancers. Many modern reconstructions of medieval
instruments have been made on the basis of the illustrations in codex
b.I.2. The repertory as a whole is a remarkable survival and has spawned a
considerable diversity of modern realizations.
Muslim and Jewish musical life

The Muslim invasion of 711 was driven by a fundamental difference in
religion, and yet it seems that Christians living in the Moorish territories
(known as al-Andalus) were not severely persecuted. The church naturally
lost its administrative authority, many people were converted to Islam and
the majority assumed the language and dress of Muslims by becoming
Mozarabs, but Christian worship was not proscribed; even some monaster-
ies were allowed to continue to operate. Likewise, if to a lesser extent, the
Christian reconquest in subsequent centuries left room for a considerable
degree of acculturation between Christian, Muslim and Jew.
No musical manuscripts survive from Muslim Spain, but we know a
good deal about music making at court and elsewhere in Moorish society
from literary and other documentary sources.33 The Arab influx brought
many new instruments to the peninsula. Several of these, such as the ‘ūd
(lute), rabāb (rebec) and naqqāra (nakers), subsequently enjoyed wider
influence throughout Europe. The exceptional skills of Moorish craftsmen
were used to full advantage after the reconquest by the Christian rulers;
Moorish instrument-makers, as well as players and dancers, enjoyed high
status in courtly circles. The cultural achievements of the Muslims were
cherished, not spurned.
In the ninth century, a great number of classical Greek texts were trans-
lated into Arabic. This gave birth to an Arabic tradition of speculative
writing on music which reached a level of great sophistication in its inter-
pretation of the nature of harmony, melody and rhythm, providing an
interesting counterpart to the more theologically charged discussions in the
Latin West.34 One of the greatest cultural influences from the Arab world on
the reconquered territories came in the twelfth century, when many scien-
tific and philosophical works were translated from Arabic into Latin. These
included many musical writings, but also Greek texts which had until then
remained unknown to Latin-speaking scholars.35 Though the Andalusian
frontier provided a conduit for the dissemination of these newly available
sources throughout Europe, surprisingly little survives in the way of Latin
music theory written in the peninsula before the fifteenth century.36 There
170 Nicolas Bell
is nevertheless enough evidence to suggest that the study of music held

a position within the Spanish scholastic tradition comparable with other
countries, and the university of Salamanca was the first to have a chair of
music, established in 1254 by Alfonso el Sabio.
Like the Muslims, the Jews were finally expelled from the Spanish king-
doms in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella’s newly combined forces con-
quered Granada and ended the Muslim rule that had been in place there
since 711. In the preceding centuries, the Jews of Spain (known as Sephardi
from a Hebrew word interpreted as meaning ‘Spain’) had actively partici-
pated in the musical culture of the peninsula, both Christian and Muslim,
incorporating elements of the villancico and other secular genres into their
own music making.
Though no medieval sources of Jewish music survive from Spain or
Portugal (from where the Jews were similarly expelled in 1497), the Jews’
musical traditions were maintained in exile, in particular by the Sephardi
who settled in North Africa and parts of the Ottoman Empire. Much specu-
lative work has been done to evaluate the extent to which later sources from
other countries retain vestiges of Iberian musical practices.37 The influ-
ence of the Castilian ballad, a secular genre that flourished in the fifteenth
century, persists to the present day, and though textual similarities with
medieval Iberian sources can be shown to exist, it is impossible to say with
any conviction that the melodies known from later sources bear any rela-
tion to those that may have been sung across the peninsula in the fifteenth
century or earlier.38 Formal vestiges of certain of the Galician cantigas may
likewise be found in the texts of some later, post-exile Jewish songs. The close
ties between Arabic and Jewish culture brought about new styles of Hebrew
verse founded on Arabic models, as well as a developed understanding of
the theory of music in Hebrew treatises, again inspired by Arabic rather
than Latin sources.
The tremendous diversity to be found in the musical life of the Iberian
peninsula in the Middle Ages has perhaps been unduly neglected in the
standard histories, which have often seen Spain as a peripheral concern in
the context of the wider story of music making in Europe. While it is true
that many aspects of the peninsula’s musical practices had few ramifications
beyond its borders, the numerous innovations and idiosyncrasies that char-
acterize its history are increasingly coming to be understood as an integral
part of European cultural history. Spain and Portugal are both countries
where important new sources continue to be discovered, and the process of
reassessment will continue in years to come.
10 Music east of the Rhine
robert curry
National historians of East Central Europe look back to the Middle Ages
and early Renaissance as the glory days of their respective countries: to
Bohemia-Moravia in the mid fourteenth century under Charles I/IV, King
and Emperor; to Hungary in the later fifteenth century under Mátyás
Corvinus; and to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the sixteenth
century under the Jagiellonian kings and their Hungarian-born successor,
Stefan Batory. By 1518, the year in which Zygmunt Stary (Sigismund I)
married Bona Sforza (Poland’s metaphorical embrace of the Renaissance)
the vast Jagiełło realm extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea (see
Figure 10.1).1 East Central Europe, the commonly accepted designation
for these countries east of the Rhine, conveys no necessary implication of
shared cultural identity, although, as we shall see, the musical traditions of
medieval Poland, Bohemia-Moravia and Hungary were as interrelated as
their aristocratic families. Indeed, for much of the time from 1300 until well
into the sixteenth century, two of these countries, and on one occasion all
three of them, were ruled by the same monarch.2
Powerful though these medieval states once were, their contribution is
often treated as peripheral to the broader narrative of European cultural
history. This is particularly so in the case of music historiography, which
gives short shrift to music east of the Rhine. Factors contributing to this
state of affairs are the relatively small amount and inaccessibility of much of
the source material, the lack of a synoptic coverage in a western European
language, and a teleological view of music history that privileges polyphonic
repertoires over monophonic. True, East Central Europe has contributed
no big books of florid organum, libri motetorum in vernacular languages, or
collections of polyphonic chansons. On the other hand, there is abundant
evidence of the lively cultivation of late chant genres – sequences, rhymed
offices and hymns – and of vernacular adaptation and reworking of Ars
Antiqua-type polyphony into distinctive (perhaps hybrid) forms, the most
distinctive of which is the cantio.3
[171]
172 Robert Curry
Figure 10.1 States of East Central Europe, ca1480 (adapted from Paul R. Magocsi, Historical Atlas
of Eastern Europe [Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1993], p. 32)
Plainchant
The earliest liturgical music heard in East Central Europe was Byzantine
chant sung in Old Slavonic. Having the Greek liturgy translated into the
vernacular language undoubtedly contributed to the success of Saints Cyril

and Methodius (863–85) in spreading Orthodox Christianity.4 The ascen-
dancy of the Latin rite over the Orthodox dates from the conversion of
the kings of Poland and Hungary, Mieszko I (966) and István I (1000),
and the establishment soon thereafter of archbishoprics in Gniezno (1000),
Esztergom (1001) and Kalocsa (1006). A bishopric had existed in Prague
since 973, papal approval having been contingent on its adherence to the
Latin rite. With the hardening of relations between the Eastern and West-
ern churches that culminated in the Great Schism (1054), the successors of
Charlemagne emulated their forebear by employing the liturgy of Rome, in
the language of the Roman church, as a powerful tool for furthering their
interests in antemurale christianitatis, the territories beyond the Empire’s
eastern border. Centuries after its introduction into East Central Europe,
the Latin rite, unlike Orthodox Christianity, remained closely associated
with German-speaking clergy. This not always happy state of affairs was
exacerbated by the arrival of the Cistercians in the mid twelfth century.
Orthodox Christianity nonetheless maintained a presence in the region,
most obviously in sacral art and architecture. Charles I of Bohemia rein-
troduced the Slavonic rite as a way of asserting cultural identity, importing
Benedictine monks from Croatia to the Emmaus monastery near Prague.
In 1385 and 1390, monks from this house established two new Slavonic-rite
monasteries in Poland, at Oleśnica and Cracow where the rite continued
in use up to the fifteenth century. And in April 1440, following the Roman
Catholic victory at the Council of Florence, Isidore, Metropolitan of Kiev
and All Russia, was invited by Bishop Oleśnicki to celebrate a solemn Ortho-
dox liturgy in Cracow cathedral. Despite the longevity of the legacy of Cyril
and Methodius, however, musical evidence of the Slavonic rite is very scanty.
One famous remnant is the Old Slavonic litany invocation used in Bohemia,
‘Hospodine, pomiluj ny’ (‘Lord, have mercy on us’).5
The wealth of late medieval chant sources in East Central Europe has sus-
tained the research of some outstanding scholars, notwithstanding the insti-
tutionalized impediments of the Communist period after the Second World
War, which restricted publication of translations and facsimile editions.6
While quality facsimiles of chant manuscripts are few, digitization of a
number of important collections is now well under way.7
The earliest extant Latin service books, imports from Cologne,
Salzburg and Bavaria, date from the late eleventh and early twelfth cen-
turies: the Tyniec Sacramentary (Poland), Codex Albensis (Hungary) and
the Bratislava Breviary fragment (Slovakia). They are notated in non-
diastematic German neumes and mostly preserve south German musical
practice. Over time, certain regional melodic variants and, occasionally,
174 Robert Curry
the notational characteristics associated with diocesan centres, started to

infiltrate the distinctive plainchant traditions of the monastic and men-
dicant orders. Cantus fractus, for example, the notational permutations
indicating rhythmicization of the chant, can be found in both diocesan
and monastic service books.8 Prevalent throughout the region is the so-
called German chant dialect, a melodic inflection that broadens intervals
of a second into a minor third, giving the melody a pentatonic flavour –
‘a byproduct quite possibly of ears and throats accustomed to an anhemi-
tonic, that is, semitoneless, folk idiom’.9 Generally speaking, the dialect is
transmitted in service books notated in Gothic neumes but mix-ups occa-
sionally occur even in Franciscan and Dominican books that use square
notation exclusively (Jerzy Morawski attributes these notational ‘mishaps’
to the clergy’s ignorance of the local language).10
As in western Europe, devotions to the Virgin Mary and the cult of
saints stimulated composition of new chants. Widely venerated throughout
East Central Europe were Vojtěch (Adalbert) and Elizabeth of Thuringia.
The latter was an inspiration for women, especially Franciscan Tertiaries
and Beguines, while Adalbert, Bishop of Prague and patron of the Polish
archdiocese of Gnezno, was literally fought over by the Poles and Czechs.11
Equal to Adalbert, in terms of the number of compositions inspired by
her cult, is Jadwiga (Hedwig), the saintly queen closely associated with
Silesia and the Cistercian Order.12 László [Ladislaus] and István [Stephen]
were popular in Hungary, the latter’s office being adapted in part from
Adalbert’s.13 Stephen’s office, in turn, was a source for the office of Stanislaus,
the Cracow bishop who met the same fate as Thomas of Canterbury, and
with whose office Stanislaus’s has textual though not musical connections.14
Ludmila, Procopius and Václav (Wenceslas) were favourites in Bohemia
and Moravia, where the hymn Svatý Václave became identified with the
coronation of Czech kings.
In his studies of the offices of these last-named Czech saints, Dominique
Patier identified musico-poetic attributes which he believes are character-
istic of a Bohemian school of chant composition, namely, a pentatonicism
similar to that in Hungarian melodies, a tendency to word painting, and dis-
junct melodic movement that can include leaps of a seventh or an octave.15
A key figure in this school, the composer of offices for Saint Wenceslas
and Saint Ludmila, is Domaslav, a Dominican who lived at the turn of the
thirteenth century.16 The characteristics identified by Patier can be seen
in the music of the Prague rite as transmitted in the set of books that
were commissioned by Arnestus of Pardubice (1297?–1364) on the occa-
sion of Prague’s being raised to the status of archbishopric. Many of the
chants in these codices, the tropes to the readings especially, are strikingly
original compositions.17 Another Archbishop of Prague, Jan of Jenštejn
(1348–1400), was a noted composer of hymns and cantiones. The Office

of the Visitation of the Virgin, which he introduced into the Prague calen-
dar in 1386 and may himself have composed, combines biblical prose with
rhymed poetic texts set in sequential modal order.
Hungary’s liturgical tradition was ‘of a synthetic nature’. Dobszay’s stud-
ies have identified Norman and north Italian influences in combination with
south German models that preserve a pentatonic dialect. Throughout the
country the Esztergom rite was all-pervasive. The traditions of this archdio-
cese, the first in East Central Europe to have its books in diastematic nota-
tion (Messine neumes), were propagated and entrenched by the schooling
system and became the norm, the mos patriae, throughout Hungary.18 The
contentious question of whether chant in Hungary possessed attributes that
might be regarded as constituting a ‘national’ character has been taken up by
Janka Szendrei. Her research into the melodic behaviour of rhymed offices
for local saints, for example, reveals that notwithstanding the often high
degree of borrowing and reworking of pre-existing chants, these melodies
evince within the prevailing mos patriae both period style and distinctive
individual invention.19
By far the greatest variety and largest number of plainchant sources in
East Central Europe are to be found in Poland. Attracting the lion’s share
of research are the hymn and sequence repertories. The latter genre can
be divided into three groups: Benedictine-diocesan, Norbertine-Victorine,
and Dominican.20 Sequences in Cistercian sources, a considerable number
of which are transmitted without music, fall into the first group; they were
taken up progressively from diocesan use in the latter part of the twelfth
century as the Cistercian Order started to relax its strict adherence to the
1147 liturgical reform. Original local compositions are most prevalent in
the third, Dominican group. Vincent of Kielce (1200–62), the best-known
Dominican poet-composer, is author of two Vitae of Saint Stanislaus, the
sequences Laeta mundus and Jesu Christe rex superne, and the hymn Gaude
mater polonia.
The Polish sequence and hymn repertories are differentiated not just
formally but also modally: modes 1 and 2 for sequences, 7 for hymns. There
are no sequences in modes 7 and 8, and the few score in deuterus and tritus
modes can be put down, according to Jerzy Pikulik, to the pervasiveness of
the ‘German’ chant dialect.21 Antoni Reginek’s analyses of hymns associated
with the greater Cracow diocese reveal not only the dominance of mode 7
but also the rarity of plagal forms generally and the complete absence of
tritus mode. In the hymn repertory, the high degree of concordance between
Cracow and northern Hungarian sources around Bratislava testifies to the
close political and ecclesiastical connections that existed between these
centres in the fifteenth century.22
176 Robert Curry
Polyphony
In liturgical books throughout East Central Europe one finds exam-
ples of simple polyphony of the type studied in German sources by
Geering and Göllner.23 Seen against the mainstream repertories that
define late medieval and Renaissance polyphony, this method of adorn-
ing the plainchant appears stylistically ‘retrospective’ or ‘archaic’. As
descriptors of polyphonic repertories in East Central Europe these terms
are unhelpful for, while stylistic tendencies may well have been gener-
ally conservative, polyphonic practices did not simply replicate ossified
imported models. Simpler forms of polyphonic writing, deriving per-
haps from western European Ars Antiqua practices, enjoyed much greater
longevity here than elsewhere in Europe. They gave rise to repertories
that find no real match with contemporaneous polyphony in western
Europe.24
That some connection might have existed between the sorts of
polyphony found in East Central Europe and the western European Ars
Antiqua and Ars Nova repertories has long fascinated scholars. Fuelling
the speculation is some tantalizing but circumstantial evidence: a frag-
ment of a motet by Philippe de Vitry found in Wrocław,25 references by
Guillaume de Machaut to his travelling from Prague to Cracow through
various towns in Bohemia and Silesia,26 a number of Ars Nova treatises
found in Bohemia and Poland,27 and fragments of the Magnus liber and
˛ 28 This last find is the one that has proved most
related motets in Stary Sacz.
intriguing.
Binding strips recovered from a thirteenth-century gradual in St Kinga’s
Poor Clare monastery (founded in 1280) reveal parts of three office organa
and snippets of twenty-one Latin two-part motets (Figure 10.2). The frag-
ments were cut from a Parisian manuscript (ca1248), its most unusual
feature being a mise-en-page for motets which encapsulates the tenors in
red circles positioned in the outside margins. Speculation that there might
have been some local compositional engagement with the Parisian Ars Anti-
qua received a measure of support with the recent discovery at St Kinga’s of
an inexpertly copied new melodic version of Philip the Chancellor’s well-
known sequence Ave gloriosa. This new version can be combined with the
standard melody as a vox secunda to produce a two-part organal setting of
Philip’s sequence.29
Also found in St Kinga’s is a four-voice cantio, Omnia beneficia, dat-
ing from the fourteenth century. Its first-person confessional tone is
characteristic of much of the religious verse associated with the mendicant
orders. The Observant Franciscans in particular were adept at contrafacting
popular tunes and adapting well-known chant melodies to better spread
Figure 10.2 Reconstituted fragments containing part of two Magnus Liber office organa (end of
Dum complerentur. V. Repleti sunt and beginning of Inter natos. V. Fuit homo) recovered from the
binding of a Franciscan gradual at St Kinga’s Poor Clare monastery (PL-STk 2)
the Word. The many collections of popular devotional texts (pia dictamina,
Leichs and cantiones) found in Poland and Bohemia attest to the creative
energies stirred by devotio moderna.30
Cantio
The term cantio covers a wide variety of non-liturgical religious songs,
mostly strophic and often with refrain, that are found as inserts in ser-
vice books or gathered together with liturgical items in cantionalia. As
applied to East Central European sources the term is something of a
178 Robert Curry
catch-all for a range of highly variegated repertories. The topic awaits sys-
tematic study. It would appear that early cantiones originated as tropes
attached to the Benedicamus Domino and Deo gratias, as interpolations
into sequences, and as melodies to accompany religious processions. The
major centre of cultivation was Bohemia under the Luxembourgs, Charles
(1346–78) and Wenceslas (1378–1419). The wide dissemination of can-
tiones reworked and translated into the region’s vernacular languages sug-
gests that Prague university and the international milieu associated with
it might have been a primary centre, if not the the locus, of composi-
tional activity. Similar, conductus-like two-part pieces are found in a source
associated with the university milieu in Cracow.31 Černý sees cantio as
a genre embracing a wide range of song styles from simple Stimmtausch
works (quasi-improvised songs with alternating monophonic/polyphonic
sections), to through-composed two-voice compositions akin to conductus
in the way they alternate homorhythmic syllabically texted sections (such
as cum littera conductus) with melismatic sections (such as sine littera
conductus).32
The grandest cantio collection is, somewhat unusually, associated with
a monastic establishment, the Cistercian community at Vyššı́ Brod. Unlike
western European Cistercian books, the Vyšebrodský Sbornı́k (1410) uses
both Latin and vernacular, employs both chant and mensural notation,
and it includes, as do most cantionalia, both monophonic and polyphonic
items.33 Monophonic cantiones are not necessarily the polyphonic ver-
sion stripped of one voice; rather, they often appear to be a composite of
both parts of the polyphonic version. It is a characteristic of the cantio
genre that the process of tranmission admits of a high degree of textual
and musical reworking. Ave yerarchia is a case in point: it appears first
as a trope to the Salve regina in the Vyšebrodský Sbornı́k; it became a
favourite with the Utraquists as Jesus Christus nostra salus; it appears in
the Środa Ślaska
˛ Śpiewnik (Neumarkt Cantionale, 1474/84) as Ave Mor-
gensterne, and it turned into the Lutheran hymn Gottes Sohn ist kommen.34
And to these versions can be added yet another, its Hungarian-language
version Idvözlégy Istennek szent anyja, which is found in the Nádor Codex
(1508).
If the conductus-like cantio in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was,
as Černý believes, an adaptation of the Ars Antiqua genre into a vehicle for
popular religious expression, then the Bohemian polytextual motet, which
also remained current well into the fifteenth century and is transmitted in
many of the same sources as are cantiones, might be considered the preferred
vehicle for more learned display. Tenor repetition is a feature of these almost
exclusively Latin-texted motets but it never develops to the level of structural
complexity found in French isorhythmic motets. The harmonic vocabulary

of many of the polytextual motets differs little from that of the conductus-
type cantiones, although the later motets do start to employ thirds and
sixths. Both these genres were cultivated by Petrus Wilhelmi de Grudencz
(Piotr z Grudziadza,
˛ ca1400–ca1480), one of a handful of fifteenth-century
composers from East Central Europe whose reputations extended beyond
the region.35
Petrus de Grudencz
Although Petrus’s works appear in thirty-eight sources (mostly Bohemian),
few facts are known of his career.36 Educated at the Jagiellonian University
(receiving an MA in 1430), he held the position of cappelanus in Frederick
Ill’s Imperial chapel through the 1450s during which time, in 1452, he made
a trip to Rome. His score or so of authenticated works, almost exclusively
cantiones (15) and motets/rotuli (7), are transmitted in various states of
reworking and contrafacta in sources as late as the mid sixteenth century.
Stylistically, his cantiones and motets keep company with the Bohemian
polyphony discussed above, showing few traces of Burgundian influence,
notwithstanding his connection with the Imperial chapel and his visit to
Rome. In a Bohemia where musical life had been much debilitated by
the religious turmoil of the Hussite wars (1419–34), Petrus’s works, the
cantiones in particular, found favour as quasi-liturgical church music that
was sung by schoolboys, there being no money in Catholic and Utraquist
churches to maintain professional choirs. Later in the century, the cantio
repertory, and Petrus’s pieces especially, was taken up by literary confrater-
nities that thrived well into the seventeenth century.37
If one can speak of the aesthetics of a religious movement, Hussitism
was undoubtedly a conservative force, but it was probably not the ‘historical
catastrophe’, at least not for music, that the Czech historian Zdeněk Nejedlý
would have us believe.38 The exodus of religious orders from Bohemia and
of foreign teachers from the Charles University when it fell under Utraquist
control no doubt diminished the vigour of intellectual life, but the move-
ment did enrich the repertory of popular religious song and promote con-
gregational singing in the vernacular. The Bible in Czech had been available
since before the turn of the century and the Bethlehem Chapel, from its
inception (1393), had promoted Czech over Latin as a liturgical language.
Translating the plainchant into Czech was a logical next step; the result
was the Hymnbook of Jistebnice (1420). In addition to liturgical chant, it
contains scores of Latin and Czech songs dealing with contemporary events:
180 Robert Curry
Ó svolánie konstanské (‘O Council of Constance’), Povstaň, povstaň, veliké

město Pražské (‘Arise, Great City of Prague’), and the famous battle song,
Ktož jsú božı́ bojovnı́ci (‘You Who Are God’s Warriors’).39
Polyphonic sources
Hungary is the least fortunate of the East Central European countries in
terms of lost sources of medieval polyphony. The court of Mátyás Corvinus
(1458–90) and Beatrice of Aragón was a byword for Medicean splendour,
and nowhere better exemplified this opulence than the Italianate royal
chapel. Under the direction of Johannes de Stokem, a Fleming, its musical
achievements were esteemed by the Vatican legate Bishop Bartolomeo de
Maraschi as superior even to the papal choir itself.40 Unfortunately, almost
nothing has come down to us in the way of music associated with Corvinus’s
court.41 After 150 years of Turkish occupation, the Reformation, and the
dissolution of monasteries under Emperor Joseph II, what little remains
can be comprehensively surveyed in a short article.42 It was a probably
therefore a kind blow of Fate that Corvinus never lived to take possession
of the splendid codex he commissioned for his wife; otherwise the Mellon
Chansonnier, too, might have been lost to posterity like the rest of his library
treasures.43
The most significant polyphonic source so far recovered are the frag-
ments from the Dominican monastery in Košice, in northeastern Slovakia.44
They date from around 1465. These pastedowns have yielded cantiones,
twelve sacred and secular, mostly three-part compositions of both local
and external provenance, and Frye’s Missa Ave regina celorum. The closest
repertorial links are with Bohemian-Silesian sources and with the Głogów
Songbook, in particular.45
From the Silesian town of Żagań in the western part of Corvinus’s
domain,46 the region formerly controlled by Bohemia, come the part-
books known as the Glogauer Liederbuch. The Augustinian canons of
Żagań, thanks perhaps to their Leipzig-educated prior, Martin Rinken-
berg, seem to have enjoyed a remarkably wide range of musical styles.
This collection of 292 sacred and secular works, mostly three-part, com-
prises 165 cantus firmus Latin pieces, 65 German songs, and untexted
contrafacta, plus a section of standard liturgical works (antiphons, respon-
sories and hymns) which appears at the beginning of the collection. Almost
all the Latin works are of local origin; among the untexted items and con-
trafacta we find pieces by composers of the Ockeghem generation: Busnois
(4 works), Caron (3), Hayne van Ghizeghem (2) and Tinctoris (2). The
concordance patterns of this international section of the songbook strongly
favour Italian sources: Florence, Ferrara and especially Naples. After Corv-
inus’s marriage in 1476 to the daughter of the Aragonese king of Naples,
his court came ever more under the influence of Neapolitan tastes in music
and the arts. Żagań’s musical connections with Italy probably ran through
Buda.47
The Strahov Codex takes us from the German-speaking parts of Silesia
that were in sympathy with the Utraquist Hussites to the Catholic cathedral
in Olomouc, the former capital of Moravia.48 The book, its format that
of a Liederbuch or chansonnier, contains some 291 items, the majority of
which are three-part works combining liturgical and non-liturgical music:
works for the church (mass ordinary, office hymns, Magnificat) and for the
archbishop’s court (German songs and a chanson). A high proportion of the
pieces are of local origin, unconnected with outside repertories but, as with
the Głogów Songbook, there are also a number of works by leading early-
fifteenth-century composers: Du Fay (two, possibly five works), Walter Frye
(3) and Tinctoris (5).
The Codex Speciálnı́k gives a glimpse into the musical fare of the
Utraquist Literary Confraternity in Prague.49 It is primarily but not exclu-
sively a book of sacred music, ‘Speciál–’ because it is not a traditional service
book. First come the proper and ordinary of the Mass (without Agnus Dei
which had no place in the Utraquist liturgy), then motets and songs. The
repertory, monophonic and polyphonic, includes music from the 1300s to
the most up-to-date compositions of the Josquin generation. For the earlier
repertory it uses older notation (chant and black mensural) and for the
more recent works, white mensural. Into the former category, notated in
black, fall the fourteen pieces by Petrus de Grudencz; in the latter, notated in
white, come works by his contemporaries, Frye, Bedyngton, Plummer and
Barbigant, then composers of the following generation, Busnois, Morton,
Tinctoris, and finally the most recent masters, Agricola (4 works), Josquin
(4), Isaac (2) and Brumel’s Missa Ut re mi fa sol la. This last work is probably
the most recent inclusion; it, too, reflects Utraquist liturgy: the Agnus Dei is
left untexted.50 The codex reveals the confraternity’s remarkable catholic-
ity of taste and high level of musical cultivation. Compositions by local
composers (10 by Johannes Touront) take their place with Burgundian and
Netherlandish works, some of them being the earliest known transmission
of that piece. This evenhandedness was carried over into the mode of pro-
duction, it would seem, for no less than twenty-seven scribes had a hand in
its copying.
The aforementioned sources – the Strahov and Speciálnı́k codices, the
Głogów Songbook, and the Košice fragments – were practical collections,
the repertory therein reflecting the needs and customs of the group or
institution that compiled them.51 They transmit a variety of genres, employ
182 Robert Curry
a variety of notational styles, and were periodically updated with new

works. Unlike many of the western European mensural codices of this
period that were commissioned as luxury objects for presentation, these
manuscripts were in the nature of libri usuales, compilations produced
by those who would use them. Notwithstanding ‘international’ influences
evident in some of the updates, these sources, all dating from the last
quarter of the fifteenth century, attest to the longevity of local, generally
conservative compositional traditions. In Bohemia and neighbouring
Utraquist enclaves, musical conservatism was a byproduct of the religious–
nationalist upheavals that were sparked by the martyrdom of Jan Hus at
the Council of Constance (1414–17). But this great international forum
that lasted for almost three years also afforded musicians east of the Rhine
opportunities to hear advanced musical fare from elsewhere in Europe.
About the career of Mikołaj Radomski (Nicholas of Radom) we know
almost nothing. His musical style, however, is readily identifiable as main-
stream Italianate fifteenth century.52 The majority of his pieces, twelve in
toto, are three-part Latin liturgical works, mostly paired mass movements.
Only one of his compositions can be securely dated, the ballata contrafact
Hystorigraphi aciem; this celebratory chanson-motet was composed to com-
memorate the birth of Prince Kazimierz Jagiełło in 1426. Radomski’s most
striking piece is his Magnificat. In technique and style, verses alternating
fauxbourdon and chanson format, this work is, as Strohm puts it, indistin-
guishable from Grossin or Du Fay.53
Omitted from this brief coverage of the major sources of fifteenth-
century mensural music in East Central Europe are details of repertorial
links with regional neighbours, for example, Codex Engelberg 314 and
the Trent codices. In a musical sense East Central Europe was part of a
larger cultural formation that encompassed the area east of the Rhine and
north of the Alps. The foregoing roll call of composers and enumeration
of the variegated contents of half a dozen sources cannot mask the great
lacunae in musical records from this period, but it does suggest, nevertheless,
that across the great expanse of Europe, the realm over which Zygmunt
Stary and Bona Sforza presided, there existed in certain cities and regional
centres a level of musical cultivation that both esteemed local traditions and
appreciated the most advanced musical fare from countries far to the west
and south.
part three
Themes, topics and trajectories

11 Music and liturgy
sam barrett
One of the earliest surviving accounts of Christian liturgy is a report of

Sunday Eucharist written at Rome around AD 150 by Justin Martyr:1
And on the day named for the sun there is an assembly in one place for all
who live in the towns and in the country; and the memoirs of the Apostles
and the writings of the Prophets are read as long as time permits. Then
when the reader has finished, he who presides speaks, giving admonishment
and exhortation to imitate those noble deeds. Then we all stand together
and offer prayers. And when, as we said above, we are finished with the
prayers, bread is brought, and wine and water, and he who presides likewise
offers prayers and thanksgiving, according to his ability, and the people give
their assent by exclaiming Amen. And there takes place the distribution to
each and partaking of that over which thanksgiving has been said, and it is
brought to those not present by the deacon.
A description of a solemn mass as celebrated at Rome some six centuries

later runs to several thousand words. The account of the introit, cited here
in abbreviated form, is in itself longer than the entirety of Justin Martyr’s
earlier description.2
Then [the choir] rises up and passes in order before the altar, and the two
rows arrange themselves in this manner: the men-singers on either side
without the doors [of the presbytery], and the children on each side within.
Immediately the precentor begins the anthem for the entry: and when the
deacons hear his voice, they at once go to the pontiff in the sacristy. Then the
pontiff, rising, gives his right hand to the archdeacon, and his left to the
second [deacon], or whoever may be appointed: who, after kissing his
hands, walk with him as his supporters . . . After this the pontiff passes on,
but before he comes to the choir the bearers of the candlesticks divide, four
going to the right and three to the left; and the pontiff passes between them
to the upper part of the choir, and bows his head to the altar . . . Then
turning towards the precentor, he signs to him to sing, Glory be to the Father,
and to the Son etc.; and the precentor bows to the pontiff, and begins it . . .
The differences between the two accounts are striking. Justin Martyr gives
no explicit indication that music was used as part of the Eucharist, whereas
in the later account a separate body of singers is assigned a distinct role
[185] within an elaborate ceremony. There is also a marked difference between
186 Sam Barrett
Table 11.1 A comparison of the mass as described by

Justin Martyr and in Ordo Romanus I
Justin Martyr caAD 150 Ordo Romanus I ca700
Introit chant
Kyrie eleison
Gloria in excelsis
Greeting
Collect
Readings Epistle
Gradual chant
Alleluia
Gospel
Homily
Prayers Prayers
Kiss of greeting
Presentation of gifts Presentation of gifts, with
Offertory chant
Prayer over gifts
Eucharistic prayers Eucharistic prayers,
including: Sanctus
Kiss of Peace
Agnus Dei
Communion Communion, with chant
Postcommunion collect
Dismissal
an apparent fluidity – according to Justin, readings last ‘as long as time

permits’ – and the detailed prescriptions for all aspects of ceremonial con-
duct in the later document. It is tempting on the basis of such reports to pro-
pose a history of music and liturgy that passed from simplicity to complexity,
from fluidity to fixity. The problem with such a linear approach is that the
surviving documents from this era present a partial and highly inflected pic-
ture of liturgical practice.3 Justin Martyr’s description, for example, occurs
within the context of a letter to the Emperor Antoninus Pius in defence
of Christianity; the absence of reference to ceremony and vagueness over
certain details can be read as much as an attempt to present Christian wor-
ship as both sober and reasonable as a summary of the celebration of the
Eucharist at that time. There must also remain doubts as to whether Justin
Martyr is describing the Eucharist as practised at a specific institution, a
standardized pattern abstracted from Roman practice, or a generic outline
of Christian custom.
For all their differences, the points of agreement between these two
Roman witnesses to the celebration of the Eucharist before the mid eighth
century may be taken as a starting point for understanding the ways in
which a shared framework was realized under differing conditions.4 As can
be seen from Table 11.1, what is common to the two reports is a basic
pattern of readings followed by prayer from the part of the service that has
come to be known as the fore-mass or Liturgy of the Word, that is, up to but
not including the presentation of gifts. From the Liturgy of the Eucharist,
the elements of presentation, Eucharistic prayer, and communion are
shared.5
There would appear to be little continuity between the two reports con-
cerning music, but when Justin Martyr’s account is read alongside other
extracts referring to music in the Eucharist during the early centuries of
Christianity then a more varied picture emerges. For what may be detected
in broad terms is a shift in kind from music as an optional amplifica-
tion of the word to music as a constituent element of a discrete liturgical
act. The difference may be illustrated with respect to the gradual. Clear
evidence for a psalm routinely sung in the fore-mass as a discrete litur-
gical event dates only from the later fourth century; before this time, it
is more than likely that one of the readings in the fore-mass could be a
psalm that was on occasion intoned in a more or less lyrical manner.6 A
comparable shift can be traced in the expansion at points of liturgical
action without words, that is, at the entrance, the presentation of gifts and
the distribution of communion. Before the later fourth century, it seems
that services began rather abruptly (Justin Martyr, for example, makes
no mention of any items of greeting), there is equally hardly any evi-
dence for singing during the presentation of gifts, and only sporadic and
late evidence for singing during communion. Yet from this time onwards,
Eucharistic celebration was expanded at these points by similar means, the
addition of a chant followed by a prayer, resulting in discrete liturgical items
with music as a key component, namely introit, offertory and communion
chants.7
Several factors in the rise of the formalized expansions including music
may be highlighted here.8 With the Emperor Constantine’s legalization of
Christianity in 313, imperial financial support enabled a significant expan-
sion in the building of public spaces for Christian devotion. Christians
adopted a basilican style for their new buildings, which in practice meant
the erection of large buildings resembling assembly halls, with a long cen-
tral nave ending in an apse and with side aisles.9 The size of such buildings
enabled the increasing numbers of those attending worship to be accom-
modated, while the long naves made provision for the expanding sequence
of events at the beginning of the service. Processions between buildings,
making use of the public spaces within the city, became increasingly popu-
lar after Constantine’s edict; in the course of time, the Kyrie, which had been
used as a litany accompanying processions between churches, was added
to the opening rites within the church, while the Gloria was first added on
solemn occasions presided over by the bishop.
188 Sam Barrett
A second important factor in the formalized expansion of liturgical

action was an enthusiasm for psalm singing that peaked in the late fourth
century.10 The psalms, which were extensively quoted by church fathers of
the time, seem to have solved two related problems that faced the early
church. Amid the general movement to larger-scale worship and more
formalized patterns of ecclesiastical life, the psalms provided an inspired
language that retained a personal, expressive appeal through their frequent
invocation of first-person experience. Equally, at a time of controversy over
core elements of Christian doctrine, and most especially over the nature of
the Trinity, the psalms provided canonically approved texts for singing, in
direct contrast to the hymns used as vehicles for spreading the ideas of hereti-
cal movements. An important consequence of this preference for psalmody
was an adoption of the formal possibilities inherent in psalmody, whether
direct (singing verses straight through), responsorial (in which a soloist sang
the verses and the congregation responded with a refrain usually drawn from
the psalm), or antiphonal. In the early centuries of Christianity, the congre-
grational refrain of responsorial psalmody was divided between two choirs,
who responded alternately to soloists singing the psalm verses. Through
most of the Middle Ages, however, psalm verses were sung antiphonally
with successive psalm verses sung by two choirs positioned opposite each
other.11
A third important factor in the expansion of formalized worship was
the transition from lector to schola chant.12 In the early church, psalms
were led by lectors, who were adolescent or even younger boys of varied
musical training. The relatively low status of these lectors is mirrored by the
fact that the choice of psalms for particular days, aside from the recurrence
of specific and obvious correlations, appears to have been determined on
a largely ad hoc basis before at least the later fifth century. By contrast,
the development of scholae to perform the psalms appears to have been
related to the development of cycles of sung texts assigned to specific feasts.
The Roman schola cantorum, for example, appears to have been founded
towards the end of the seventh century, and it is from the same century that
there is evidence for a fixing of sung texts across the liturgical year.13 As for
the composition of the Roman schola, the later document quoted above
mentions four chief cantors and a further body of male singers and boys.
It would seem no coincidence that the same document records a fully
elaborated version of solemn mass as found throughout the Middle Ages;
in other words, a complex liturgy and the institutional means to perform
and sustain it appear to have gone hand in hand.14
∗∗∗
And he directed that same clergy, abundantly instructed in divine law and in
Roman chant, to follow the custom and ritual order of the Roman church,
which up to that time had scarcely been done in the church at Metz.15
So wrote Paul the Deacon in the first half of the 780s about the achievements
of Chrodegang (Bishop of Metz, 742–66), but what are we to make of this
reported transfer of music and liturgy from Rome to the heartlands of
the Carolingian kingdoms north of the Alps? The underlying motivations,
means and relative success of this cultural transfer have repeatedly been
questioned, and will no doubt continue to fascinate historians of music, if
only because the gap of almost a century before the earliest surviving sub-
stantial notated chant sources allows ample room for informed speculation.
Paul the Deacon’s account nevertheless directs us to the nub of the matter: a
Frankish clergy instructed in Roman chant (cantilena romana) was directed
to observe the custom (mos) and ritual order (ordo) of the Church of Rome.
In other words, a Roman way of doing liturgy including music was to
be imitated, a manner of celebration for which cantilena romana was not
simply central but, as implied by Paul the Deacon’s phrasing, a prerequisite.
Several documents shed light on the attempt by both Chrodegang and
his successor to introduce a Roman form of music and liturgy, from which
it would appear that the formation of a schola cantorum, an ordered clerical
lifestyle, Roman architectural features and an imitation of the Roman use of
ritual space were all intrinsic to the process of imitation.16 By the mid ninth
century, a pattern of worship for the mass through the year, revised from
Roman models, is recorded in a sacramentary belonging to Charlemagne’s
son, Drogo (Bishop of Metz, 823–55).17 Sacramentaries, or books recording
the prayers used by the celebrant in the mass, are of crucial importance:
containing the prayers used by the highest-ranking individual at the most
important service, they were taken by the Carolingians as the book that
provided the outline for the liturgical year. Drogo’s Sacramentary is some-
thing of a special case in so far as it is a collection reserved for ceremonies
presided over by the bishop; in containing texts only for the main feasts, it
provides an ideal introduction to the framework of the liturgical year as it
had developed by the mid ninth century (Table 11.2).
The annual cycle recorded in Drogo’s Sacramentary represents not only
the outcome of centuries of development, but also the outline of the pattern
that was to endure through the Middle Ages and beyond. The liturgical
year it records is formed out of two main overlapping cycles celebrating
events in the life of Christ (the Temporale or Temporal cycle) and Saints
(the Sanctorale or Sanctoral cycle). The two main poles of the Tempo-
rale are the feasts of Christmas and Easter. By the fourth century, Easter
190 Sam Barrett
Table 11.2 The annual cycle of feasts in Drogo’s Sacramentary
Date Festal observance Roman stations
25 Dec. Christmas
Mass in the night St Mary
Mass at dawn St Anastasia
Mass in the day St Peter
26 Dec. St Stephen
27 Dec. St John the Evangelist
28 Dec. Holy Innocents
1 Jan. Octave of Christmas St Mary
6 Jan. Epiphany St Peter
20 Jan. St Sebastian
2 Feb. Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary St Mary
Septuagesima St Lawrence outside the walls
Quadragesima St John in the Lateran
Palm Sunday St John
Maundy Thursday
Good Friday
Holy Saturday
Easter St Peter
Octave of Easter
Feria II St Peter
Feria III St Paul
Feria IV St Lawrence
Feria V Holy Apostles
Feria VI St Mary
Sabbato St John
First Sunday after Easter
1 May Philip and James Apostles
Ascension
Pentecost St Peter
Octave of Pentecost
Feria II [St Peter] in chains
Feria III St Anastasia
Feria IV St Mary
Feria VI Holy Apostles
Sabbato
24 June St John the Baptist
29 June SS Peter and Paul
30 July St Paul
10 August St Lawrence
15 August Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
16 August St Arnulf
8 Sep. Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary
9 Sep. St Gorgonius
14 Sep. Exaltation of the Cross
(3 May) Finding of the Cross
29 Sep. Dedication of the Basilica of the Holy
Archangel Michael
1 Oct. St Remigius
11 Nov. St Martin
22 Nov. St Caecilia
23 Nov. St Clement
30 Nov. St Andrew
Note: Since the annual cycle, rather than every service celebrated, is of interest here, vigils (services held the
on the eve of a feast) have not been included as a matter of course. Modern English equivalents for certain
feasts have been adopted. The feast of the Finding of the Cross is listed immediately after the Exaltation,
but is assigned its date in the Roman calendar of 3 May.
was routinely celebrated on a Sunday with a following fifty-day festal sea-

son, in which the fiftieth day was associated with the gift of the Spirit
(Pentecost) and the fortieth day with Ascension.18 The celebration of Christ-
mas on 25 December was also established by the fourth century, but only in
Rome and North Africa; Christmas was celebrated elsewhere on 6 January.
The differing emphasis given to Christmas in these celebrations came to
be reconciled as complementary celebrations of the nativity (25 December,
Christmas) and the manifestation of Christ (6 January, Epiphany). Prepara-
tory periods to the main feasts of Christmas and Easter are also first attested
as widespread phenomena in the fourth century, with the emergence of
both a Lenten forty-day fast and a short period of fasting before Christ-
mas known as Advent, which seems to have been developed into a more
extended observance sometime during the seventh century. By the mid
ninth century, octaves of individual feasts were also celebrated, thus either
the week of the feast was celebrated (for example the Easter octave, whose
eight days continue through to the following Sunday), or the eighth day of
a feast was celebrated in its own right (for example the octave of Christmas
on New Year’s Day, which was only later established in Rome as the Feast of
the Circumcision). Specific days within the week were specified by a mainly
numerical system: feria II (Monday, the second day of the week) through to
feria VI (Friday), followed by sabbato (Saturday).
The commemoration of individual saints both on the anniversary of the
date of their death and at the place of their burial dates back to the mid
second century, but such celebrations were necessarily local and, given that
under Roman law it was illegal to open graves in order to transfer relics, the
spread of cults was inevitably slow. By the time of Drogo’s Sacramentary,
however, a fully developed Sanctorale was in place, celebrating saints of
local importance (e.g. Saint Arnulf of Metz, supposed ancestor of the Car-
olingians), as well as saints of regional significance (such as Saint Remigius,
so-called Apostle of the Franks) alongside widely recognized saints (e.g.
Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr). Material collected together in
Drogo’s Sacramentary immediately after the Sanctorale represents a further
important category of liturgical material, that of the Common. In this sec-
tion, which is not listed in Table 11.2, were copied prayers for services of
dedication and for groups of similar feasts that share texts; thus the com-
memoration of individual apostles, virgins and martyrs would draw upon
general texts for this category of saints in the absence of any specifically
composed texts. One final category of information requires explanation,
namely the churches listed in association with each feast. A similar listing
of churches, otherwise known as stational indications, is also found in the
earliest unnotated antiphoners (chant books) dating from ca800 onwards.
These refer not to local churches but to churches in Rome and, as is evident
192 Sam Barrett
from a comparable list that survives for Metz from the late eighth cen-
tury, the system of celebrating the Eucharist under the bishop at different
churches within Rome was translated into a parallel system within Frankish
towns and abbeys, with major feasts of the Temporale celebrated in the
main churches, and feasts celebrating saints in lesser churches.19
The liturgical cycle represented in Drogo’s Sacramentary reflects not only
Roman practice, but adaptation to Carolingian tastes. In specific terms, the
model for this book is the Gregorian Sacramentary as requested by Charle-
magne from Pope Hadrian (772–95), which was then revised according to
the standards of classical Latin that were taken as normative in the Car-
olingian renaissance and to which were added texts for specific occasions
and other liturgical formulas omitted from the Sacramentary in a supple-
ment prepared by Benedict of Aniane (d. 821).20 In more general terms,
Drogo’s book provides an early example of the accommodation between an
imported Roman rite and its local implementation that remained a feature
of liturgical practice through the Middle Ages. By the late ninth century,
the Roman rite had spread across the Carolingian kingdoms, with other
rites and their associated chant traditions used outside of this axis: chiefly,
the Visigothic rite in what is now central and northern Spain and Portugal,
the Ambrosian rite at Milan, the Beneventan rite from the region of Ben-
evento in southern Italy, and the Byzantine rite in areas that once formed
the eastern Roman Empire. By the end of the Middle Ages, the Roman rite
had become so widespread in the Latin West that only the Visigothic rite as
followed in Toledo and the Ambrosian rite used in Milan remained.
In contrast to the mass, the divine office was rooted in the passing hours
of the day, marking out the cycle from darkness to light and back again.
Since the medieval history of the office is far more complex than that of
the mass, only the most general observations will be made here.21 Crucial
for understanding the later development of the office is the fact that, by the
fourth century, two separate traditions of daily prayer can be identified in the
West: ‘cathedral’ practice, the normal practice of local Christian churches,
and ‘monastic’ practice, as observed both by individual ascetics and by
monks in urban monastic centres.22 The ‘cathedral’ office consisted of daily
morning and evening worship and was characterized by a selective use of
psalms and hymns; the nucleus of morning prayer, for example, was the
Laudate psalms (nos. 148–50), which led to the name lauds for this service.
In addition, a variety of occasional vigils were followed within this tradition.
An alternative model of daily prayer was followed in many urban monastic
communities, where a fivefold pattern of daily prayer corresponding to
the principal divisions of the day in the Roman Empire was the normal
pattern, thus morning, third hour, sixth hour, ninth hour and evening.
Night prayer was also observed. This ‘monastic’ practice drew on both the
selective approach to psalmody of the ‘cathedral’ office and the more or

less continuous recitation of psalms practised in desert monasticism. Saint
Benedict (ca480–550) was not the first to combine these two traditions, but
it was his achievement to draw them together in a way that was not only
manageable but also lightened previously sober Roman practices through
the introduction of hymns.
The pattern of the daily office outlined in Benedict’s Rule was initially
only one among many patterns encoded in monastic rules, but by virtue of
its promotion under the Carolingians it achieved widespread (if not uni-
form) adoption in the West by the ninth century. For all its combination of
traditions, Benedict’s pattern nevertheless remained a monastic use distinct
from what was known from the twelfth century onwards as ‘secular’ use,
that is, the liturgical pattern followed by clergy not bound by vows to a
religious order, such as those serving in collegiate and parish churches. The
main difference between the two traditions was that monastic use was more
elaborate, especially in the nocturns of Vigils (see below). Both uses never-
theless had their roots in Roman monastic practice and were treated as part
of the Roman rite which spread rapidly from the ninth century onwards.
Any attempt to provide a summary of the structure of the office is
complicated by the fact that variation was intrinsic to its design. The pattern
of worship changed in response not only to the nature of the institution
(monastic or secular), but also to the natural cycle with its changing hours
of daylight and seasons, and to the many-layered liturgical cycle with its
observation of ferial (daily) and festal worship, itself divided into Temporale
and Sanctorale, proper and common. When extensive local variation and
development over time is added to this mixture, the only way to proceed
is to provide a summary based on a single document. Although lacking
certain indications and in all probability a combination of varied sources,
one of the earliest full accounts of the structure of the office is provided
by Amalarius of Metz (ca775–ca850).23 His outline (given in Table 11.3)
combines features from the Rule of Benedict with the Roman (secular) rite,
and remained at the core of the pattern of daily offices up to the reforms of
the twentieth century.
Certain aspects of Table 11.3 require further elucidation. A versicle is
a short dialogue between the minister and those present; antiphons and
responsories consist of short texts taken, at least in the Roman tradition,
from scripture, sung (respectively) either in conjunction with a psalm or
canticle, or after readings. The Gloria patri is a Trinitarian doxology (Glory
be to the Father) customarily sung at the end of psalms and canticles,
and the preces are a sequence of prayers later fixed as comprising a lesser
litany or Kyrie, the Lord’s Prayer, and versicles and responses. Although
not always mentioned by Amalarius, each office apart from Vigils ended
with a collect or prayer (variable or fixed) and a blessing (Benedicamus
Table 11.3 An outline of the offices on Sunday according to Amalarius of Metz (ca775–ca850)
Vigils or Matins
First Nocturn Second Nocturn Third Nocturn Lauds Prime Terce, Sext, None Vespers Compline
Opening (Weekdays: opening Opening Opening versicle Opening Opening

versicle versicle) versicle versicle versicle
followed by
Gloria patri
Psalm 94 with 12 psalms 3 psalms with 3 psalms with 4 psalms with Psalm 53 and Three sections of 5 psalms with 4 psalms
invitatory without antiphons alleluias antiphons, Hymn of two sections of Psalm 118 antiphons without
antiphon antiphons, Three Boys (Canticle Psalm 118 without antiphon
grouped by 4s, of Daniel) with without antiphons
with Gloria Laudate antiphon, antiphons
patri after each and 3 Laudate psalms
group (148–50)
Versicle Versicle Versicle
3 lessons, each 3 lessons, each 3 lessons, each Lesson Lesson, followed Lesson
preceded by a preceded by a preceded by a by a short
blessing and blessing and blessing and responsory with
followed by a followed by a followed by a Gloria patri
responsory responsory responsory
Versicle Versicle with Versicle with Versicle Versicle
preces preces
Canticle (Benedictus) Canticle Canticle
with antiphon (Magnificat) (Nunc
with antiphon dimittis)
Domino). It should also be noted that later developments standardized a

difference between monastic nocturns (on Sundays, three nocturns with
twelve lessons and responds, with Old Testament canticles replacing psalms
in the third nocturn) and secular nocturns (on Sundays, three nocturns
with nine lessons and responds), as well as replacing the last response in the
final nocturn by a Te Deum.
Leaving to one side the many daily variations on this pattern, what may
be appreciated by reading across the columns in Table 11.3 is that the offices
observed a basic structure of interspersed singing and reading, concluded by
prayers, that is, in the most general of terms, the same elements of worship
as seen in the fore-mass. As for the realization of this pattern of worship
on any given day, Vigils was held during the night and was followed almost
immediately by lauds, which took place at dawn; prime, terce, sext and
nones (the Little Hours) took place at the first, third, sixth and ninth hours
of the day respectively; vespers was held at dusk and Compline took place
before retiring to bed. The distribution of psalms should also be noted:
psalms 1 to 108 were assigned to Vigils, while psalms 109 to 150 were
reserved for vespers. The complete Psalter could thus be recited through
the week at these two services; those psalms with fixed assignments to lauds
and the Little Hours were excluded from this cycle.
To appreciate quite how varied the realization of this framework might
be, it is worth recalling Amalarius’s own trials in trying to bring order
to the traditions of chanting the office.24 A vivid picture of prevailing
diversity is painted by his report of a journey to Rome in 831 to compare
the antiphoner in use at Metz to the Roman Antiphoner. In Rome, Amalarius
was referred to Corbie, to where, several years previously, the antiphoner
of Pope Hadrian I was sent as a present for Abbot Wala (the cousin of
Charlemagne). Amalarius returned to Corbie, where he compared the two
antiphoners and was surprised to find that the two repertories differed
in construction, texts, and in the number and order of antiphons and
responds. Faced with such diversity, he adopted the approach of a compiler,
indicating more recent Roman additions by R, whereas those introduced by
Chrodegang to Metz he indicated by M; he also indicated numerous personal
options by the letters IC. For all that Amalarius represents an early stage in
the history of the office, the difference between two traditions supposedly
directly linked and the provision of a number of texts for individuals to
choose between remained a feature of the office throughout the Middle
Ages.
While the basic structures of worship used throughout the Middle Ages
were in place by the end of the ninth century, the subsequent history of
medieval music and liturgy was characterized in the most general terms by
196 Sam Barrett
expansion, most notably in the proper. This was achieved in part through
an exponential increase in the number of feasts, especially those commem-
orating individual saints, to the extent that by the end of the Middle Ages
few days in the whole year were without a festal observance in the Roman
Missal. New departures of particular interest in this expansion included the
elaboration of offices with newly composed texts and music both for indi-
vidual saints and for particular feasts.25 Expansion in music for the mass
occurred primarily through accretions to existing liturgical items, princi-
pally by means of the introduction of tropes and sequences. The addition
alongside chant of what were often poetic sung texts, but could also be solely
musical interpolations, took place soon after the introduction of Roman
chant into the Carolingian kingdoms; indeed, given reported difficulties in
learning Roman chant, it is quite possible that these so-called accretions
were introduced alongside the formalization of the repertory through the
ninth century. While even a short introduction to tropes and sequences lies
beyond the scope of this survey, what may be said is that the texts served
in general to expound the significance of the feast being celebrated.26 Many
tropes, for example, begin with the word ‘Hodie’ (‘Today’), before making
explicit the themes of the day that had often remained implicit in the base
chant texts.27
Although it is possible to identify an overall tendency to prolixity, the
development was by no means linear or uniform, as may be illustrated by two
examples from the era of monastic reform, the tenth and eleventh centuries.
The Benedictine monastery at Cluny, which lies near Mâcon in Burgundy,
was founded near the beginning of the tenth century: while operating
independently of any external control, it developed a rich pattern of life
and worship, the grandeur of which was symbolized by the abbey church
itself, which remained the largest church building in Western Christendom
until the sixteenth century. As for its liturgy, the abbey of Cluny and the
international network of houses that shared its customs were famed by the
eleventh century for a seemingly ceaseless liturgical round, yet the repertory
of sung items at Cluny appears to have been conservative for it appears
that tropes were scarcely used and that texted sequences were sung only
on the highest feasts.28 Liturgical expansion was realized instead through
intercessions offered for specific intentions, whether commemorations of
the dead, or the recitation of additional psalms (psalmi familiares) at each of
the canonical hours for patrons, benefactors and friends, or the requirement
for each monk to celebrate mass daily.
A broadly contemporary movement stemming from Gorze was charac-
terized by a full use of tropes and sequences.29 The abbey of Gorze, which
lies some nine miles to the southwest of Metz, had been founded by Bishop
Chrodegang as a Benedictine house and was revived by Adalbero (Bishop of
Metz, 929–62) with the intent to reclaim the former glory of Metz through
a return to strict adherence to the Benedictine Rule and a renewed intent

to spread Messine chant. This reform proved so successful that the cus-
toms of Gorze spread throughout monastic houses in Lotharingia and the
Eastern kingdoms ruled by the Ottonians. A certain degree of uniformity
between houses associated with Gorze was ensured by the fact that it was
the abbot (who was appointed from outside the community and remained
in touch with the major centres of reform), rather than the cantor, who
decided which chants were to be sung. Even so, there is little evidence to
suggest a centrally coordinated reform of liturgy and chant within any of
the monastic reform movements associated with individual houses in the
tenth and eleventh centuries.
While musical and liturgical exchange during the tenth and eleventh
centuries appears to have occurred largely through individual networks of
association, overall development was shaped by a shared concern to seek
renewal through a return to the Benedictine Rule, albeit as filtered through
the Carolingians, under whose influence manual labour was replaced by
increasingly elaborate communal worship. The Cistercian movement of
the twelfth century stands out in sharp relief against this background,
for the monks who settled at Cı̂teaux (near Dijon) in the closing years
of the eleventh century sought a return to the letter of the earlier Benedict’s
Rule and thus to a pattern of worship free of the accretions of intervening
centuries. Unlike earlier reform movements, there was at the same time a
centrally coordinated attempt to revise the melodic repertory by returning to
supposedly authentic musical sources, which in practice meant an attempt
to reform chant on the basis of a gradual and antiphoner from Metz (whose
legend of exemplary Roman practice endured) and a hymnal from Milan
(the seat of the father of Latin hymnody, Saint Ambrose).30 The results,
however, were soon found to be unsatisfactory, in no small part because of
the inadequate state of the sources used, prompting a second reform in the
mid twelfth century based on a different model of authority. In this instance,
the emphasis was placed not so much on authentic texts as on an intent
to apply a priori rules in the reform of chant, namely that authentic and
plagal modes should be kept separate, chants should not exceed a ten-note
range, B flats were to be avoided in notation, and melismas should be cut
down. Despite the apparent severity, it should be remembered not only that
Cistercian chant reforms were not applied systematically, but also that the
overall aim of Cistercian reform was to promote a simple and sober manner
of worship that would encourage both unity and inner devotion.
A growing emphasis on individuals and inner experience can be detected
in other movements with their roots in earlier medieval practices that
achieved widespread prominence by the twelfth century. The shift can be
traced most clearly with respect to the celebration of the mass and can
be divided into two related tendencies. The period from the ninth to the
198 Sam Barrett
twelfth century saw a rapid expansion in ‘private masses’, in which ceremo-

nial splendour was reduced to a minimum (although it would still seem
extensive to many modern observers): these masses, which made little or
no use of music, were held by smaller groups in addition to the main com-
munity celebration as an act of intercession (often for the departed, or as
part of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary).31 In apparent opposition to
this movement, there was a parallel tendency to expansion in all aspects of
ritual gesture, including genuflexion, kissing the altar, kissing the Gospel,
signing the cross and beating the breast. What these two tendencies shared
was a growing conception of the mass as an act of piety offered by the priest
on behalf of the assembled people, a notion expressed in the increasingly
common practice of the priest celebrating facing East and himself reciting
all parts of the mass, even when these were duly executed by the proper min-
isters or the choir. At the same time, physical separation increased between
on the one hand the priest and attendant ministers, whose observances
mainly took place around the altar in the sanctuary, and on the other hand
the people, gathered in the nave, and separated not only by the chancel, in
which were seated the choir, but increasingly by choir screens. The main
participation open to the laity in such circumstances was through interior
devotion, a state of affairs which goes some way towards explaining the
growth in popular and affective practices centred on Mary and Jesus from
the eleventh century onwards.32
A parallel emphasis on both specialized roles for select individuals within
worship and an inner devotion that was the counterpart of an ever more
elaborate ritual spectacle can be traced in the rapid expansion of polyphony
in the liturgy up to the thirteenth century. Polyphony had been cultivated
within worship for many centuries previously: indeed, any attempt to speak
of an introduction of polyphony into the liturgy has to be tempered by the
fact the earliest witnesses to polyphony are of the same date as the earliest
notated repertories of monophony, namely the late ninth century. With
that said, the polyphony recorded at this date is not a codified liturgical
repertory, but examples of performance practice in treatises of music the-
ory. Indeed, there has to be caution in treating these examples as polyphony
and drawing a straight line between them and the repertories of the later
Middle Ages, for what is recorded in these ninth- and tenth-century trea-
tises is a method for amplifying a single line. As for the liturgical role of
polyphony, it is hard to extract a picture of wider practice from the selection
of office antiphons, psalm tones and a portion of the Te Deum contained in
the earliest theory treatise to include polyphonic examples.33 In one sense,
however, the paradigmatic appearance of polyphony in the earliest treatises
is significant in itself, for all the indications are that an earlier multiplicity
of performance options only gradually crystallized into discrete items. One
of the key features in this development was the elaboration and increased
density of compositional rules such as can be seen in the eleventh-century

repertories of polyphony from Winchester and Chartres. While both these
centres are cathedrals, it should be remembered that polyphony was also
sponsored by monasteries: Winchester itself was staffed by Benedictine
monks under an abbot-bishop; polyphony was also practised at the sub-
stantial Benedictine monasteries of Fleury (reformed via Cluny) and St
Maur-des-Fossés in Paris. Rather than being characterized by any divide by
personnel or institutional type, polyphonic experimentation, formalization
and latterly codification took place at larger institutions associated with the
new currents of learning fostered especially in northern France during the
eleventh century.
When considered as an element of liturgy, it is the ceremonial grandeur
of polyphony that is most impressive. The execution of polyphony by
soloists wearing silk copes on major feasts of the liturgical year at Notre
Dame in Paris sits easily alongside the use of extra candles, incense and the
richest vestments and vessels on such occasions. The element of outward
display was further heightened by the use of polyphony originally associated
with other liturgical functions (such as alleluias and responsories) in
processions. Turning to stylistic developments customarily associated with
the twelfth century, the consistent placing of the polyphonic voice above the
base chant might also be considered a feature of increased outward display,
the prominence of the new line a far cry from monastic prohibition against
self-promotion and placing chants too high in the voice. In a related vein,
the twelfth century also saw the development of techniques of extension and
elaboration in the form both of polyphonic pieces with a highly melismatic
voice above a slower-moving plainchant (organum purum) and composi-
tions with up to four separate voices, thus announcing a decisive break with
the previous insistence on music as a projection of the text akin to reading.
At the same time, innovation was announced in polyphonic repertories by
an increasingly self-confident distancing from liturgically assigned material,
whether in the use of non-liturgical tenors in the Aquitanian repertory or
in the increased expansion around the edges of the liturgy in the Parisian
repertory in the form of the conductus. As for its underlying motivation, the
development of polyphony has frequently been linked to Gothic splendour
and a new-found urban self-confidence. Less often mentioned is the extent
to which polyphony also served the immediate needs of the church, for
liturgical polyphony soon centred on those parts of the chant repertory
traditionally reserved for more elaborate singing by soloists (chiefly the
verses of graduals, alleluias and responsories), thereby continuing, while
also renewing, the functions already established in monophony. Viewed
from a different perspective, polyphony served to foster the growing
interest in inward and affective devotion, especially among the increasingly
distinct and numerous crowd whose place it was to listen. The justification
200 Sam Barrett
provided for such a new departure was an equally new-found emphasis on

the pastoral role of the church, for polyphony was concentrated on those
services to which the people of Paris had access and may be interpreted as ‘a
conscious attempt by the canons to demonstrate their superior abilities, or
those of their subordinates, and to heighten the spirituality of the common
folk’.34
The polyphonic repertory developed at Paris rapidly spread across Europe

and remained the most elaborate liturgical music in circulation until the
development of the Ars Nova in the early fourteenth century, yet during the
same period it was Rome that led developments in liturgy. Symptomatic
in this regard is the attitude taken by the new preaching orders in seeking
to adopt new liturgies. A century after the Cistercians, the Dominicans
turned to Metz in search of an authentic and standardized liturgy; they
soon realized, however, that despite the continuance of legends, Metz no
longer maintained an authoritative practice. The Dominicans therefore
elected to follow Cistercian chant as codified in a master-exemplar of music
and liturgy compiled around the mid thirteenth century. At about the same
time, the Franciscans turned to a new source of authority in matters of
chant and liturgy, namely the revised versions of the Breviary and Missal
as drawn up at the papal court or curia in a series of revisions beginning
with Pope Innocent III (1198–1216).35 The return to music and liturgy as
practised in Rome by the Franciscans was undoubtedly in part a matter
of political expediency, but more fundamentally reflected a renewal of the
political authority of the papacy.
The basis of the Roman rite adopted by the Franciscans was the so-called
Romano-German Pontifical, a heterogeneous collection of liturgical rites
which first appeared in Germany in the late tenth century. Following the
coronation in Rome of Otto I as Holy Roman Emperor in 962, the liturgy
associated with the Romano-German Pontifical became rapidly established
at Rome: in a related process, the chant tradition as developed by the Franks
also began to return to Rome, eventually replacing the local tradition now
known as Old Roman chant. An attempt to revise and reclaim this received
liturgy and music as distinctively Roman received significant impetus under
Gregory VII (1073–85), who in attempting to reassert papal authority over
territorial rulers claimed that the period of Germanic domination of the
church had come to an end. While his desire to restore a pristine Roman
liturgy proved idealistic, Gregory’s efforts led to a curtailment of other
rites, most notably the Visigothic. At the same time, Gregory’s insistence
on the authority of the priesthood above all laity (including rulers) served
to further the developing divide between the clergy, who administered
sacraments, and the laity, who were reduced to the role of observers.
The final stage in the spread of Roman liturgy occurred with the adoption
of the practices of the curia by the Franciscans. Since the mendicant friars
and the clerks of the papal court were both mainly concerned with affairs in
the world, what was required was a liturgy that could be performed with the
minimum of elaboration, and, crucially for the Franciscans, one that could
be reduced into practical and portable collections. The eventual result was
the codification of shortened forms of services in the form of a uniform
Breviary (for the office) and Missal (for the mass) as regulated by the Ordinal
of the Papal Court (ca1213–1216).36 Again, however, it must be noted
that at the same time as movement was taking place towards uniformity,
there was an increase in popular devotions, especially those sponsored
by the Franciscans, whether the Stations of the Cross in Holy Week, or
the singing of simple religious songs in the vernacular (laude spirituali or
carols).
Although no major liturgical reforms followed from the thirteenth cen-
tury until the Council of Trent, two developments should not go unmen-
tioned. First, the later Middle Ages saw a spread to the laity of forms of
worship developed in monasteries; thus Books of Hours transferred both
corporate hours and additional devotions, such as to the Virgin Mary or
to the dead, into the sphere of private piety. Second, in the closing years
of the thirteenth century a new pontifical was assembled in Avignon by
perhaps the most famous liturgical commentator of the later Middle Ages,
Bishop William Durandus. This compilation, which represented the clearest
arrangements of materials to date, eventually superseded even the Pontifical
of the Roman curia to become the model that was used until the Second
Vatican Council. However, as Durandus noted in his commentary on the
divine office, liturgical diversity persisted despite the spread of a uniform
Breviary and full Missal of the Roman rite:37
The reader should not be disturbed if he reads about things in this work
which he has not found to be observed in his own particular church, or if he
does not find something that is observed there. For we shall not proceed to
discuss the peculiar observances of any particular place but the rites that are
common and more usual, since we have labored to set forth a universal
teaching and not one of particular bearing, nor would it be possible for us to
examine thoroughly the peculiar observances of all places.
A striking example of the variety that could occur within the Roman rite
is provided by Salisbury (Sarum) Use, not only because the various local
uses that constitute Salisbury Use were in themselves highly varied, but
also because the ceremonial elaboration within Salisbury Use stands in
contrast to the pruning that took place in the Roman rite as observed in
the papal chapel in the Lateran.38 Sarum Use, namely the version of the
202 Sam Barrett
Roman rite associated with Salisbury, the earliest surviving documents for
which date from the thirteenth century, gradually spread through England,
Wales and Ireland so that by the Reformation only the local uses of Bangor,
Hereford, Lincoln and York remained. A comparison of the Roman rite
of the papal court, as filtered through the order and ceremonial prepared
for the Franciscan order in around 1250, with a summary of Salisbury Use
highlights several points of difference (Table 11.4).39 Most notable is the
greater use of processions in Salisbury Use, especially before High Mass
on Sundays, although it should be recognized that processions were only
infrequent in the papal court and places that adopted its use. The grander
use of space in Salisbury Use is also apparent in the restriction of the
celebration of mass in the papal court to the area around the altar, whereas
Salisbury Use raises up certain activities to the height provided by the choir
screen. A further difference is the amount of censing of the altar, which in
Salisbury Use took place even during lessons at Matins. A final distinction
which cannot be appreciated from the tabular comparison is the number
of ministers involved: Salisbury Use could feature as many as seven deacons
and subdeacons, two thurifers, and two to four priests in copes acting as
cantors; the custom of the papal court as codified in Franciscan documents
specifies for solemn mass on Sundays only a single priest, deacon, subdeacon
and acolyte.
∗∗∗
For things should not be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake
of good things. Therefore select from each of the Churches whatever things
are devout, religious, and right; and when you have bound them, as it were,
into a Sheaf, let the minds of the English grow accustomed to it.40
These words, attributed to Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) in response

to a question from Saint Augustine of Canterbury about the justification
for variant local customs, may be taken as a spur for bringing together
the strands addressed in this chapter. The importance of the first millen-
nium for establishing the structures that lie at the basis of the medieval
liturgy has been stressed, as well as the way in which diverse practices were
gradually aligned. Similarly, the importance of Rome as a centre for dis-
seminating a model of practice, yet nevertheless one that not only arose
from varied practices, but also allowed different expressions of an estab-
lished framework, has also been emphasized. The extent to which liturgy
was shaped by the identity of individual places (Rome, Metz, Paris), as well
as the way in which local places were articulated through a liturgical map-
ping out of space and formalization of communities, has also been touched
upon.
Table 11.4 An outline of solemn mass on Sundays in the Roman rite as celebrated at the
papal chapel and in Salisbury Use
Papal chapel, ca1250 Salisbury Use ca1400
Prayers – said privately by the Aspersion – and blessing of the altar accompanied by sung antiphon and
celebrant in front of the altar. followed by aspersion of ministers.
Introit Procession – antiphon or responsory sung as the procession leaves through
the north door of the choir and circles the presbytery – the celebrant
sprinkles water on altars on the way. Procession continues down the
south aisle and returns past the font to the choir screen. Verses sung by
soloists at the rood step, followed by bidding prayers. Procession
continues into the choir with another antiphon or responsory.
Celebrant ends the procession with a versicle at the choir step, before
proceeding to the canon’s cemetery to sprinkle water and pray for the
dead.
Kyrie Kyrie – sung by choir, recited by celebrant.
Gloria in excelsis Gloria in excelsis – intoned by celebrant, sung by choir.
Collect Collect – intoned by celebrant.
Epistle – intoned by subdeacon before Epistle – intoned by subdeacon from lectern on pulpit.
the step in front of the altar.
Gradual – (sung by choir and) read Gradual – sung by soloists from lectern on pulpit.
through in their seats by ministers.
(Alleluia) Alleluia – sung by soloists in copes, during which, the deacon censes the
altar and the procession for the gospel moves to the choir screen.
(Sequence) Sequence – sung alternatim by choir.
Gospel – intoned by deacon, with Gospel – intoned by deacon at lectern on the choir screen facing north.
subdeacon and acolyte with thurible
in attendance.
Creed – intoned, but only used on Creed – intoned by celebrant.
occasion.
Offertory – during which, preparation Offertory – sung by choir, during which, procession of bread and wine,
of the table; blessing of incense; censing of bread and wine, censing of celebrant, ministers and choir,
censing of cup and altar; censing of and censing of altar.
priest, deacon, subdeacon and choir.
(Secret offertory prayer) Secret – said privately by celebrant, last phrase sung.
Eucharistic prayer – including Sanctus Eucharistic prayer – including Sanctus and Benedictus sung by choir and
and Benedictus. said privately at altar. Bells rung to signal blessing and elevation of host.
Lord’s prayer Lord’s prayer
Peace Peace
Agnus Dei – after which, kiss of peace Agnus Dei – sung by choir, during which, kiss of peace passed from
passed from priest, to deacon, to celebrant to deacon to subdeacon to choir.
subdeacon, to acolyte, and to choir.
Communion – taken by priest (with Communion – taken by celebrant, with communion chant sung by choir.
communion chant sung by choir).
Postcommunion collect Postcommunion collect – intoned by celebrant.
Dismissal Dismissal – sung by deacon, response by choir.
Blessing – followed by return to vestry. Recessional – ministers leave, including celebrant, reciting first 14 verses of
St John’s Gospel.
Told in this way, the story is one of growth and circumscribed diversifica-
tion, but a less positive evaluation of the spread of practices across the Latin
West could also be told. A narrative based on the rise of a coherent histori-
cal, cultural and geographic Latin West overlooks not only the practices of
different faiths within this domain, but the parallels and exchanges between
Eastern and Western practices. While the comparative lack of sources makes
it difficult to address Jewish and Islamic worship,41 increasing awareness of
204 Sam Barrett
the fundamental discontinuities between even the Latin liturgical sources

that survive, as well as increasing suspicion of their witness to current
practice, is prompting renewed interest in the stories that have been told
about them.42
A more general reflection on Gregory’s words could begin from his use
of the word ‘things’ to refer to the contents of liturgical exchange. On the
one hand, the transfer of material goods is intrinsic to the history of music
and liturgy, whether in the form of the paraphernalia needed for worship
(fine vestments, vessels, candles, incense, books etc.), or the ongoing supply
of wealth needed to maintain institutions (including, centrally, choirs). On
the other hand, the terminology is indicative of the fact that, for all that
has been said about the relation of music and liturgy up to this point, no
single word for ‘liturgy’ and no clearly separable word for ‘music’ was in
use in the Middle Ages.43 The customary liturgical distinction between rite
(texts or things uttered) and ceremonial (actions or things done) highlights
instead the way in which an attempt has been made here to address music as
an aspect of ceremonial. In considering music in the liturgy as ceremonial
agenda or things done, the extraordinary power that it wielded over both
the self and others is finally brought into consideration. It is precisely this
power that caused the earlier Saint Augustine to hesitate before, in a move
indicative of the widespread acceptance that music was later to find in
Christian worship, sanctioning its use as divine enchantment:44
I vacillate between the peril of pleasure and the value of the experience, and
I am led more – while advocating no irrevocable position – to endorse the
custom of singing in church so that by the pleasure of hearing the weaker
soul might be elevated to an attitude of devotion.
12 Vernacular poetry and music
ardis butterfield
Prima la musica, poi le parole: this assertion, the title of an opera by Antonio
Salieri, wittily alludes to the conundrum faced by any poetic and musical
collaboration. In the story of the opera the music is already written and the
harassed poet is told he must write the verse to fit the music in just four
days. It is not important, according to the musician, for the music to convey
the meaning of the words. But of course this is a joke that works by inverting
the usual expectations of any text–music relationship, especially in opera.
One of the primary aims of this chapter will be to assess the character of
this relationship in its earliest formation in the medieval period. Poetry and
music come together in vernacular song to create some of the most subtly
exquisite survivals of medieval music. The art of the troubadours in the
twelfth century, closely followed by that of the trouvères in the thirteenth,
persists in our time as one of the most vividly enduring images, not only of
the medieval singer, but also of song tout court, and of the Middle Ages in
general.
Yet many questions remain about the character of this art. It seems not
only paramount but impossible to decide which comes first, the poetry or
the music. In communicating so strongly across the centuries, medieval
song teases us with the question of what it is communicating and whether
what we hear or perform as we re-create it bears any relation to what
was heard or performed in the Middle Ages. This matters for several rea-
sons. Many editors and performers since the nineteenth century have based
their reconstructions of medieval songs on the assumption that the words
drive the melody, especially with regard to rhythm.1 More recently, oth-
ers have argued that this assumption undervalues the importance of the
music (Aubrey, 244) and that ‘music’s elements follow rules of their own,
regardless of which poetic elements are present’ (Aubrey, 253). That this
debate exists shows how little modern agreement there is about what con-
stitutes the ‘poetic’ or the ‘musical’ in the period. It also shows that it
is a vital and continuing point of inquiry for any attempt to understand
the nature of medieval song. Whether the words or the music have pri-
macy turns out to have powerful consequences for the way we interpret the
songs, how we understand them to have been composed, and what their
larger function and significance was for medieval poet-composers and their
[205] audiences.
206 Ardis Butterfield
The chapter will begin by describing this seminal stage, the age of the
troubadours, in the composition of song and trace its origins, character,
function and generic variety. It will then give an account of the multiple
ways in which the relationship between poetry and music fundamentally
changed throughout the thirteenth century and into the fourteenth, most
significantly in the development of new genres and new ways of perceiving
genre; in the polyphonic motet; and in song’s relationship with narrative.
The concluding sections will turn to wider questions about the figure of
the poet and of the composer and how ideas about poetry and music were
articulated, practised and debated.
Vernacular song
Origins
The idea of an origin for vernacular song has haunted many scholars.
It remains elusive partly because of the conundrum I have just outlined.
The very first example of vernacular song, by definition, is rather like
the very first word: we are never going to know when it was uttered and
its utterance would have long preceded any thought of writing it down.
But in mentioning writing, we have to distinguish the writing down of the
words from the writing down of the melody. With just one exception – a
song with an Occitan text of around 1100 from St Martial de Limoges –
the melodies of vernacular song do not survive in written form until the
thirteenth century.2 Moreover, even when we reach the thirteenth century,
only some of the surviving copies of vernacular songs contain music. Of the
forty manuscripts (including fragments) of twelfth- and thirteenth-century
Occitan literature, ranging from epic and didactic works to over 2,500 lyrics,
just two contain music.3 There are two more that date from the fourteenth
century. Immediately, then, we are presented with a view of song that – on
the face of it – is highly prejudiced towards the words.
For some scholars, these survival patterns are proof that troubadour
songs were appreciated in the thirteenth century for their words rather than
for their melodies. Others are quick to point out that the relative paucity of
music tells us more about the shortage of skills for copying music (as true
in the modern period as it was in the medieval) than about the allegedly
‘literary’ character of the songs. But the argument goes deeper than this. For
instance, there is much debate about whether troubadour song was meant
to be written down. Since the written versions that we have date from 100
to 150 years after the songs were composed, how can we be sure that they
give us an accurate impression of the songs as they were first composed and
performed? It seems quite likely that, in a situation rather like the game of
consequences, what survives in writing has travelled a long way from its oral
genesis. There are several important issues here: one is that the oral version
of a song is always going to be different from its written version. This is true
even when the act of writing is contemporary with the performance, and
the differences are naturally exacerbated when the act of writing postdates
the performance by more than a century. It follows that the act of writing
down a song probably bears more relation to the act of writing down a
play or a piece of poetry than to the activities of singing or speaking. It
is the activity of writing itself, in other words, that helps to make a work
‘literary’. A second issue concerns the passage of time. It is crucial to bear in
mind when we seek to interpret troubadour song that our knowledge of it is
shaped by thirteenth- and fourteenth-century writers.4 We cannot find its
origins because it is always already distanced from its own time by having
been modernized as well as turned into writing.
Social and literary functions

The functions of the earliest surviving vernacular songs can only be appre-
ciated by knowing something of the social and historical context of their
poet-composers. Some 460 troubadours, including a few women known
as the trobairitz, are known by name over the period from around 1100 to
1300: they lived and worked across a large area of what is now southern
France, at first only in Poitiers, Ventadorn and Narbonne, and then more
widely into the Auvergne, Limousin, Aquitaine, Gascony and Languedoc
and eastwards into Provence. Some were based in the northern Italian courts
of Lombardy and Piedmont, and in Catalonia. This very substantial poetic
and musical movement ebbed and flowed in successive generations: the
first includes Guillaume IX, Duke of Aquitaine (1071–1126), Jaufre Rudel
( . . . 1125–48 . . . ), and Marcabru ( . . . 1130–49 . . . ), followed by Bernart de
Ventadorn ( . . . 1147–70 . . . ) and Peire d’ Alvernhe ( . . . 1149–68). Bernart
and Peire are also often viewed as part of the central ‘classical’ generation,
with such other figures as Raimbaut d’Aurenga ( . . . 1147–73), Bertran de
Born ( . . . 1159–95, d. 1215), and Giraut de Bornelh ( . . . 1162–1199 . . . ).
The later, third and fourth generations, include troubadours who worked
into the second half of the thirteenth century alongside their northern
French counterparts, the trouvères. Perhaps the most well known of these is
the so-called last troubadour, Guiraut Riquier ( . . . 1250–92), whose musi-
cal output – unsurprisingly considering his dates – survives more fully than
any other troubadour (48 melodies out of 87 poems). Otherwise, music
survives far more patchily: 42 of these 460 authors have songs attributed
to them with music, and for most of them just one or a small handful of
songs in their total surviving output has music.5 A single song by a female
composer, the ‘Comtessa’ de Dia (second half of the twelfth century(?)6
survives with music.7
Our knowledge of the social standing of the troubadours is largely pro-

vided by short prose mini-biographies and commentaries called vidas and
razos that accompany the songs in several of the manuscripts. A kind of
marketing device to advertise and sell the songs and their authors, these
are colourfully written with an air of dubious authority. Nonetheless, some
of their information seems plausible enough and can sometimes be cor-
roborated or supplemented by documentary records or references in the
songs themselves. Many of the troubadours starting with Guillaume, at
once ninth Duke of Aquitaine and seventh Count of Poitou, belonged
to the nobility: many were minor nobles and younger sons of aristocrat
families. Richard I (the Lionheart), eldest son of Guillaume IX’s grand-
daughter Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II of England, is the famous
example of a king turned poet and composer. Others, however, were of
humble or middling origins: several rose to fame from being mere joglars
or jobbing professional instrumentalists and singers, such as Cercamon
and Albertet; others again were from urban or mercantile backgrounds,
such as Aimeric de Peguilhan, said to have been the son of a draper; many
more are likely to have been clerics who had abandoned their training or
livings.
The evidence of such high status for certain troubadours has helped
shape the (largely correct) impression we have of a type of music that
belonged in exclusive circles. Yet it is an interesting feature of the vidas that
they often like to create an image for a troubadour of a self-made man
pulling himself up out of obscurity.8 Social mobility was clearly important:
many of the song texts develop a pose of detachment, of the clever, mocking
outsider to love, which may well have reflected a genuine experience of social
exclusion. This needs to be borne in mind when the function of the songs
is considered, because it shows that the picture of the songs as being part
of a high courtly ethos has more than one dimension. Courtliness, perhaps
the key defining term with which to understand troubadour song, may be
described as a complex relationship between social, cultural and aesthetic
aspiration on the part both of lords and the members of their households.9
The image of courtliness, in short, was as important as the social reality, and
the social reality itself was not so much indulgently self-enclosed as loose,
itinerant and profoundly involved with war (frictions between Angevin
rulers and the French royalty, the Crusades), trade (burgeoning urban and
maritime economies) and religion (the Albigensian heresy). The words and
melodies of troubadour song help to define a discourse of courtliness by
satirizing it as well as promoting it, by wild exaggeration as well as piercing
social comment, by invention as well as description. At the same time, the
very fact that many lords were themselves keen to compose indicates that
vernacular song was more than a matter of courtly entertainment. It was an
aspect of living the courtly life, or at least of ventriloquizing its most potent
characteristics.
If there is a single overarching theme that defines courtliness in vernac-
ular song, it is fin’ amors or, as Gaston Paris termed it in 1884, ‘amour cour-
tois’ (courtly love).10 This difficult, richly contentious notion of refined,
rarefied, extreme love is the air which many genres of troubadour song
breathe. Recent research has greatly deepened and enlarged our knowledge
of how love and its associated themes in song, such as adultery, secrecy
(celar), the imagined power of the lady (domna), the role of the lauzengier
(slanderer) or gilos (the jealous ones) relate to the changing social and
ecclesiastical representations of love and marriage in the medieval period.
It has become possible to see that some of the contradictions in fin’ amors
are part of a wider exploration of cultural fault lines in the portrayal of
women as both passive and active in love, as silent and yet dominating, as
objects of both worship (pretz, valor, onor) and derision. Some of the spe-
cific functions of troubadour song thus include the creation of a discourse
about women’s conflicted roles in an aristocratic household alongside an
explicitly male-voiced expression of frustrated desire. Less abstractly, per-
haps, the large amount of surviving debate poetry indicates that song was a
means of establishing a public forum for brilliantly fast-moving exchanges
between lords and the shifting group of people in attendance on them,
a platform for public argument about the qualities and values of courtly
life.
Genres
Scholars have found many ways of discussing and defining genre in ver-
nacular song. It is often difficult to know whether it is form, genre or style
that is under consideration. For an older generation including Friedrich
Gennrich and Hans Spanke, followed more recently by Pierre Bec, form
was a key perspective, yet subsequent work influenced by literary consider-
ations, by John Stevens and Christopher Page, for example, has preferred a
broader notion of genre that includes social context and style. Where form
is emphasized, monophonic song can be divided up into different structural
types: the laisse, the refrain-song, the sequence and the strophic song. This
offers an illuminating sense of the fundamental technical choices made by
composers, but it provides no means of linking these choices of poetic and
melodic arrangement to theme or content, tone, diction and choice of pitch
range, register and, more broadly, social meaning. Stevens and Page develop
ways of approaching the songs particularly through style, higher and lower,
but also through matters of performance (rhythm and the use of instru-
ments) and social history (Parisian music theorists and practitioners, and
Cistercian anxieties about dance-song). Perhaps the most interesting newer
work by such scholars as Margaret Switten and Elizabeth Aubrey has gone
on to ponder how far the music and the texts correspond generically. The
widespread use of contrafacta in early vernacular song means that there is
no intrinsic connection between a melody and its textual partner, and pro-
vokes questions about the kinds of generic expectation carried by melodies,
and whether they overlapped with, were independent of, or, conversely,
were determined by the texts.
Here there remains a marked gulf between the thinking on genre carried
out by literary scholars and that by musicologists. Whereas much research
has gone into the literary and social contexts for the texts, in which schol-
ars have developed approaches from psychoanalysis, intertextuality, gender
studies, and ecclesiastical and economic history, the melodies have received
less attention. In part, this is perhaps because it has seemed hard to talk
about the melodies without the words, and harder still to comment on both
together. As Switten has rightly remarked, we have yet to find a critical and
scholarly language to talk of the relations between music and words. These
relationships ‘do not constitute a discipline with a distinguishing ideology
and approaches sanctified by use. There is even no satisfactory terminol-
ogy to speak of both [disciplines] at once.’11 More positively, the lack of a
hallowed critical language indicates how far the scope for further research
into vernacular poetry and music extends, and its consequent potential as
an innovative field of enquiry.
The pre-eminent genre of medieval vernacular song was the strophic
troubadour canso, a term used after the 1150s (the earlier, more general
term was vers) to refer to songs on love.12 Cansos explore the topic of fin’
amors in all its variety and complexity, through an equally rich and varied
use of versification. The canso had a kind of counter-genre in the sirventes,
a satirical and moralizing type of poem that became more widespread,
and acquired this generic title, at a similar date. It was characterized by
often being attached to a borrowed canso melody, as, for example, Bertran
de Born’s Un sirventes on motz no falh which, as he points out, uses a
melody by Giraut de Bornelh. Other genres include the tenso, partimen,
joc-partit or debate songs; pastorela, a song that narrates an encounter
between a knight and a peasant girl; dansa, a song based on a dance;
descort, a ‘discordant’ song in which the stanzas (unusually) vary in rhyme,
metre, and sometimes language; enueg, a canso listing unpleasant subjects;
planh: a lament on the death of a king or other dignitary; gap, a boasting
poem.
In mentioning dance, it is worth remarking that there also existed a lively
unwritten dance-song tradition. Textual sources from the twelfth century
onwards ranging from chronicles, romances and sermons to town records
contain many references (some sternly condemnatory) to round dances
and processional dancing that clearly involved a lead singer and some kind
of chorus response.13 A vivid illustration in the Oxford Chansonnier, MS
Douce 308, placed at the head of the section of balletes shows two figures
dancing with linked hands in front of a pipe and tabor player. This kind
of evidence hints at the much larger world of performance and improvised
music that surrounded the relatively meagre written remains that we now
possess both of texts and of melodies. Many texts refer, often obliquely,
to dance movements, yet cannot be tied to particular surviving tunes, and
indeed the song copied next to the picture just described seems to have
no particular connection to dance in its text, nor does this chansonnier
contain music. As with instrumental music more generally, it is important
to be aware that the written sources represent only a fraction of what was
played and composed throughout the medieval period.
Moving back from genre to form, we find in troubadour song perhaps
the most artful exploitation of sound patterns in any short genre, modern or
medieval. Metre (number of syllables per line) and rhyme are used through
the careful placing of words to partner pitch, intervallic relationships,
motifs, incipits and cadences in the melody. The fundamental structural
unit is the strophe, organized in its most general outline for words and music
in the form AAB. Within this outline, each song, of five, six or seven stanzas
(coblas) with one or more shorter envoys (pendant stanzas) or tornadas, is
crafted to contain sequences of repetition and variation in both words and
melody of often dazzling virtuosity. Remarkably, very few songs have the
same pattern: over half the poems with extant melodies have a unique rhyme
and verse structure.14 In one of the earliest and most influential analyses
of troubadour song, De vulgari eloquentia (ca 1303–5), Dante describes the
two-part structure of the canso strophe as the frons and the cauda, each frons
usually divided into two pedes (singular pes). The distribution of rhymes
across the frons and cauda falls into several common patterns: the same
rhyme sounds in each strophe (coblas unissonans) but with different rhyme
words; coblas doblas and coblas ternas where the rhyme sound changes every
two or three stanzas; coblas capfinidas where the first line of a stanza repeats a
word from the last line of the previous stanza; and coblas retrogradas where
the rhyme sounds are reordered in a different sequence from stanza to
stanza.
When we turn to the music, the language of description immediately
becomes less straightforward. It is not so easy to plot patterns of repetition
in melodies as it is in texts, or at least the patterns are more open to diverse
forms of analysis. Scholars who have worked closely with troubadour texts
and music together (Stevens, Switten and Aubrey) have drawn attention
to the way that verbal rhyme and musical repetition, while they may be
subtly juxtaposed, rarely simply coincide. Their relationship is poised and
Example 12.1 Can vei la lauzeta (‘When I see the lark’) by Bernart de Ventadorn (Hendrik van der
Werf and Gerald A. Bond, eds., The Extant Troubadour Melodies: Transcriptions and Essays for
Performers and Scholars [Rochester, NY: authors, 1984], pp. 62–71)
balanced, intimate yet also independent. Nonetheless, as remarked above,

the practice of contrafacta puts a brake on attempts to see a song as neces-
sarily an organic text–music whole. Where individual texts are copied with
more than one melody we cannot be sure in any single manuscript version
that the same person composed the text and the music, and therefore that
there is a single intentio governing the operation of words and melody. Or
again, a poet-composer may have been more gifted as a musician than as
a poet, or vice versa: the vida of Jaufre Rudel somewhat waspishly com-
plains that ‘he composed many songs about [his lady] with good tunes and
poor words’. A melody by Guiraut de Bornelh reused by Peire Cardenal
(Aubrey, 153) suggests further creative possibilities in showing how some
troubadours deliberately reworked material.
The celebrated canso Can vei la lauzeta (‘When I see the lark’) by
Bernart de Ventadorn well illustrates the interpretative challenges posed by
troubadour song (Example 12.1). The challenges arise in the first instance
out of the text but then need to be considered alongside the music. The
melody of this canso is more widely transmitted than any other troubadour
melody and with fewer differences between versions, but this relative sta-
bility in musical terms is not matched by the words. As is fairly common
among the troubadour repertory as a whole, the seven stanzas plus envoy
are arranged in more than one order in the various manuscript copies. For
an older generation of text editors, it was a matter of selecting the ‘best’
order and printing that once, thus creating a fixed song of which three
stanzas are given below:
Can vei la lauzeta mover

de joi sas alas contral rai,
que s’oblid’e.s laissa chazer
per la doussor c’al cor li vai,
ai! tan grans enveya m’en ve
de cui qu’eu veya jauzion,
meravilhas ai, car desse
lo cor de dezirer no.m fon.
Ai, las! tan cuidava saber

d’amor, e tan petit en sai!
car eu d’amar no.m posc tener
celeis don ja pro non aurai.
tout m’a mo cor, e tout m’a me,
e se mezeis e tot lo mon;
e can se.m tolc, no.m laisset re
mas dezirer e cor volon.
Anc non agui de me poder

ni no fui meus de l’or’en sai
que.m laisset en sos olhs vezer
en un miralh que mout me plai.
miralhs, pus me mirei en te,
m’an mort li sospir de preon,
c’aissi.m perdei com perdet se
lo bels Narcisus en la fon.
When I see the young lark moving its wings for joy in the ray of the sun so
that it forgets itself and lets itself fall for the sweetness that goes to its heart,
alas! such great envy comes to me of anyone whom I may see rejoicing, I
wonder that forthwith my heart does not melt with desire.
Alas! so much did I think that I knew about love, and so little do I know,
for I cannot abstain from loving her from whom I shall never have reward.
She has stolen my heart from me and has stolen myself from me and herself
and the whole world. And when she stole herself from me she left me
nothing except desire and a heart filled with longing.
Never did I have control over myself, nor was I my own master from that
moment when she let me look into her eyes, into a mirror that pleases me
greatly. Mirror, since I beheld myself in you, my deep sighs have slain me, for
so did I lose myself as fair Narcissus lost himself in the fountain.15
More recent approaches to text editing, by contrast, have encouraged schol-
ars to consider the different text orders as potentially interesting in their
own right.16 Rather than seek a single definitive version of ‘the’ song, we
are now invited to think of Can vei la lauzeta as having several possible real-
izations, perhaps indicative of its being reworked for different audiences
and occasions. Thus in one stanza order shared by five manuscripts, two
of the stanzas, including the one on Narcissus, come later and two others
are shifted earlier.17 The result in this case is the stark difference between
a speaker/singer who is despairing but ultimately reconciled to the nature
of love, and one that a recent scholar has called ‘an angry and recalcitrant
woman-hater’.18
What then of the music? In general terms, the strophic melody is charac-
teristic of Bernart’s restrained, mellifluous style, moving largely in adjacent
steps, with short ornamental passages not so much interrupting as easing
the beautifully composed flow of sound. This quiet control in the music is
balanced by a similarly restricted palette of rhymes and rhythmic patterns:
8 syllables per line, 8 lines per stanza and only 4 rhyme sounds (although
again this varies slightly across the manuscripts). Just one abrupt descent of
a whole fifth occurs in the whole melody at the end of the fifth line. Is there
a connection here with the text? For instance, it is tempting to argue that
this feature, coming just after the mid-point of the strophe, has a structural
parity with the singer’s declaration in stanza 5 just after the mid-point of the
song that he will renounce his destructive lady and leave her forever.19 But
in another version of the song this stanza occurs not fifth but seventh, being
the last before the envoy. Clearly the same argument could not be made
with the text–music relationship in this version. In part this is a matter of
reading each version responsively and individually. But it also speaks more
widely of the need for a critical approach to the mutual support of words
and music in troubadour song that can take account in some way of the
structural asymmetry of a linear text aligned with a strophic melody. It must
also take account of the distance as well as the intimacy of text and music
in any one song.
The sheer variety of musical devices and compositional features makes
it hard to generalize about the music of the troubadours. Yet the attempts
by scholars such as Aubrey and Switten to discuss the style and musical
language of individual composers have made important steps towards our
reaching a sense of the expectations that circulated about song on the part
both of the composers themselves and of their audiences.
The changing contexts of song: grand chant, motet and

narrative
If genre is a multivalent concept for the twelfth century, then it has even
greater flexibility and inventiveness in the thirteenth. It is worth recall-
ing that the very first written record of a troubadour song, Jaufre Rudel’s
Lanquan li jorn son lonc en may (‘In May when the days are long’), occurs in
an early-thirteenth-century romance by Jean Renart known as Le Roman de
la Rose. Romance is a key resource for vernacular song: Renart’s Le Roman
de la Rose alone contains the first surviving examples and extracts from a
range of genres – the chanson de toile, rondet de carole, and the indepen-
dent refrain – and two further genres – the chanson d’éloge and tornoi de
dames – which are unique to the work.20 Altogether some seventy narra-
tives cite song from the early thirteenth century to the early fifteenth, in
several hundred manuscripts. Music is provided in just under a quarter
of these copies.21 If the genre of romance seems an unusual place to start
in describing vernacular song then this is an accident of modern schol-
arly emphases. Recognizing the importance of narrative as a context for
the writing down of song throughout the thirteenth century helps us to
grasp how broadly song participated in, and contributed to, the increas-
ingly sophisticated explorations of vernacular literacy through the medium
of the book.
The trouvère chanson, traditionally seen as the northern cousin of the
canso, is equally traditionally described as a kind of appendage to its south-
ern predecessor. It undoubtedly shares much common ground, especially in
its treatment of love. However, placing it here in a separate section from the
troubadours is a way of emphasizing that in several ways the account needs
to be reversed. The trouvères invented the troubadours rather than merely
followed after them. Moreover, the work they performed on song was part
of a much wider cultural movement that included new prominence given
to the vernacular in France through increasingly centralized legal practice,
a rapid rise in the production of vernacular books, the growing interna-
tional importance of the university in Paris, extensive urban expansion and
a marked increase in ecclesiastical and monastic institutional activity. In
musical terms, there were far-reaching changes in notational practice and
an extraordinary proliferation of compositional techniques in which musi-
cal material from liturgical sources was juxtaposed with, cut through and
transformed by the increasingly widely transmitted secular monophony of
both troubadours and trouvères. It was the trouvères who effected these
changes, partly by the very process of writing down the songs of their pre-
decessors, and partly by creating many new directions for the relationship
between text and music.
In broad terms, the genres practised by the trouvères were similar:

the principal kind, comparable to the canso, is the chanson d’amour or
grand chant courtois (‘grant chant’ is a resonant classifying term used
in the late thirteenth-century chansonnier Oxford, Bodleian Library MS
Douce 308).22 Trouvères such as the great Châtelain de Couci (d. 1203)
or Gace Brulé (ca1160–after 1213) built on the success of the troubadours
by creating through the grand chant a powerfully pervasive courtly dis-
course of text and melody that dominated the thirteenth century and
the two centuries following. Yet alongside these heights of refined expres-
sion, trouvère writing is distinctively characterized by a fascination with
‘lower-style’ genres. Apparently humble genres such as the rondet de carole
(later rondeau), chanson de toile, chanson de femme, chanson de mal mariée,
rotrouenge and sotte chanson are newly recorded from the thirteenth cen-
tury, and crossover genres taken over from the troubadours such as the
pastourelle or the jeu-parti are greatly expanded. Interspersed among, and
to a large extent at the basis of, many of these types is the refrain, a brief
formulaic tag of verse and (in many cases) melody cited in thousands of
permutations.23
The trouvères, in short, were not exclusively interested in creating single
poetic–musical artefacts of superlative craft. They were also drawn towards
breaking down that creative product into its constituent elements. This can
be illustrated by two contrasting pieces. One is a song by the Châtelain de
Couci often performed and recorded for modern listeners, the first stanza
of which is given in Example 12.2. This song through its music and its words
distils all the courtliness one could hope to find in a medieval love song:
a limpid spring setting impelling the lover to sing of his intense desire yet
also of his pain as he is forced to leave his lady to go ‘outremer’ or beyond
the sea. The haunting melody follows a classic AAB schema, rising in the B
section to the highest pitch of the song rapidly followed by the lowest, yet
with an unbroken, flowing continuity of melody.24 At the opposite end of
the spectrum of medieval song comes this second example, a short, techni-
cally simple exclamation: Jolietement m’en vois; jolietement (‘Happily I go;
happily’).25 This little phrase has an almost cheekily insignificant character
when set beside the long, exquisitely expository eroticism of Li noveaus
tanz. It implies accompanying movement, and for an older generation of
scholars was a surviving trace of a world of lost popular dance. Yet what
happens to this phrase is revealing of the many changes in focus that take
place in the treatment of song during the thirteenth century. We find it
cited in four different pieces: a song text in the motets and rondeaux section
of the unnotated chansonnier Douce 308; in the tournament romance Le
Tournoi de Chauvency, also copied in Douce 308; at the end of a stanza in a
short strophic narrative, La Chastelaine de Saint Gille, again without music;
Example 12.2 Li noveaus tanz et mai et violette (‘The new season, May, the violet’) by the Châtelain
de Couci, (F-Pn fonds fr. 12615, fol. 155r)
and finally in a notated polyphonic motet (Mo 260) copied into the seventh
fascicle of a huge motet compilation, the Montpellier Codex.26 In each of
these contexts it has a different form: in Douce 308 it is split in two around a
single-stanza text, with ‘Jolietement m’en vois’ at the start and ‘jolietement’
at the end. La Chastelaine de Saint Gille simply quotes it ‘in full’ at the
end of the stanza. In the Montpellier motet, by contrast, it is the refrain
of a rondeau which has itself become the tenor of the three-voice motet
(Example 12.3).
These three views of this song take us into a seemingly very different
compositional world from Li noveaus tanz. From song as a highly wrought
self-contained structure, designed to evoke a specific and thoroughly imag-
ined emotional landscape in which the act of singing such a song is self-
consciously a part, we have moved to a much more fragmentary, protean
notion of song as a brief yet key motif, able to move readily between genres
and function as a complex organizing tool in the creation of the rhyth-
mic and motivic patterns of a polyphonic motet. Rondeau-motets are a
relatively small subgenre of the motet, yet they illustrate a much broader
general preoccupation with juxtaposing distinct and sometimes seemingly
Example 12.3 Jolietement m’en vois; jolietement (‘Happily I go; happily’) (The Montpellier Codex,
ed. Hans Tischler, trans. Susan Stakel and Joel C. Relihan, 4 vols., Recent Researches in the Music of
the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance 2–8 [Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1978–85]; hereafter Mo;
Mo 260, vol. III, pp. 78–9)
incompatible registers, styles and genres. Modern distinctions between song

and narrative, strophic and non-strophic, and sacred and secular often do
not seem adequate ways of describing the pleasure in dissonance and hybrid-
ity so evident in thirteenth-century song composition. ‘Song’ is overturned
in these explorations and reinvented as a set of smaller elements, ready to be
recombined, grafted, strung in sequence cento-style or layered polytextually
and polymusically in ways that often seem more interested in disruption
than in communication.
A motet that seems to make lack of communication a central theme
of its comic textual and musical manipulations occurs within a cluster of
Robin and Marion motets from fascicle 7 of the Montpellier Codex. These
motets draw on texts taken from the pastourelle genre in which the feelings
felt by an attractive shepherdess for her sturdy but not over-bright peasant
lover are threatened by an adventuring chevalier. En mai, quant rosier sont
flouri / L’autre jour, par un matin / Hé, resvelle toi [Robin] (‘In May with
rose bushes blooming / The other day, in morningtide / Hey, wake up
Robin’), Mo 269, is unusual in bringing together three texts of this type,
not just in the upper two voices but in the tenor as well (Examples 12.4a,
12.4b). For instead of the more usual Latin chant extract, the tenor is here a
refrain:
Example 12.4a and 12.4b En mai, quant rosier sont flouri / L’autre jour, par un matin / Hé, resvelle
toi [Robin] (‘In May with rose bushes blooming / The other day, in morningtide / Hey, wake up
Robin’) (Mo 269, vol. III, pp. 93–5)
Hé, resvelle toi [Robin],

Car on enmaine Marot,
Car on enmaine Marot.
[Hey, wake up Robin, for someone is taking Marot away, for someone is taking
Marot away!]
Like several of the other Robin and Marion motets, Mo 269 has a link with
the Arras poet and composer, Adam de la Halle: in this case the refrain also
occurs with both text and music in Adam’s Le jeu de Robin et de Marion.
It is worth looking more closely at the context of this refrain in Adam’s
Le jeu de Robin et de Marion because it provides insight into the cleverly
allusive practices of the motet’s composer, who may even have been Adam
himself. First, we may appreciate the comic timing of the juxtaposition of
the two main texts. The triplum (the second texted upper voice above the
tenor), given like nearly all pastourelle narratives from the perspective of
the chevalier, recounts that Marion is sitting near a wood lamenting that
Robin has abandoned her for Margot, ‘la fille Tierri’ (Tierri’s daughter).
But as soon as her lament is uttered, Robin, who has overheard it, comes
running up and takes her away to play. In a neat reversal, the motetus
(the first texted upper voice above the tenor) has the chevalier see Robin
sighing for Marion, who then, having likewise overheard him, runs up
quickly and assures him that he has ‘conquered’ her love. Musically, the two
texts interwine to play off each character’s self-enclosed (and, as we learn
retrospectively, misguided) misery, most comically when first Marion and
then Robin sings ‘Aymi!’ The composer places the identical words ‘et disoit:
“Aymi”’ in direct succession across the two parts, so that just as Marion
is complaining in the triplum that ‘Robin, mise m’avés en oubli’ (Robin,
you have forgotten me), Robin is simultaneously exclaiming ‘Aymi! Quant
vendra la bele au cuer joli?’ (Alas, when will she come, the fair one with the
gay heart), each cry reinforced sonically by the chiming ‘i’ rhymes. At their
most self-enclosed, in short, the composer brings the two characters into
tight musical and verbal congruence.
The refrain adds a further comic layer, indeed layers, to the situation
being played out in the upper voices. Hé, resvelle toi Robin! / car on enmaine
Marot is sung in Adam’s Le jeu de Robin et Marion by Robin’s cousin Gautier
whose warning that the chevalier has carried Marion off comes somewhat
gratuitously since poor Robin has just been thoroughly beaten up in his
attempt to stop this from happening. Adam presents Robin throughout as
bested not only by the chevalier but also by Marion, who briskly rescues
herself straight afterwards. So it is appropriate that the tenor of the motet
should keep reiterating that Robin should wake up. But the refrain has
a further, darker context in another pastourelle text ‘Hier main quant je
chevauchoie’ (‘Yesterday morning when I was riding’) (attributed to Huitace

de Fontaine).27 In this song, Marion is alone and in a remote place – ‘pres
de bois et loing de gent’ (near a wood and far from any people; line 4). She
anxiously sings ‘Dex, trop demeure; quant vendra? / loing est, entroubliee
m’a’ (‘God he is too long; when will he return? He is far away, I am anxious’;
lines 9–10). But Robin is asleep, and does not awake even when Marion
screams as loudly as she can: Hé! resveille toi, Robin! / car on en maine
Marot. He only appears in the final strophe after she has been raped by
the chevalier. If the composer of Mo 269 had this pastourelle in mind then
the repetitions of Hé, resvelle toi Robin! would have a redoubled intensity,
mocking Robin for his somnolent failure to break out of his textual trap.
In this artful piece, the composer seems to use the overlapping motet voice
structure to draw attention to the verbal miscomprehension it promotes:
the characters overhear each other singing within each text, yet caught in
simultaneously uttered voice parts they can neither understand what each
other is expressing nor communicate with each other. It is in spite of their
efforts rather than because of them that the motet ends happily, with a
song of triumph (‘Robins, conquis avés l’amour de mi’ [‘Robin, you have
conquered my love’]) and a silvan frolic (‘au bois sont alé pour deporter’
[‘they went off to the woods to play’]).
These contexts for song, motet and narrative were of crucial importance
to the fundamental changes that occurred as the thirteenth century moved
into the fourteenth. The high point of monophonic song in the art of the
troubadours and trouvères passed, and polyphony assumed in vernacular
song composition the kind of importance it already had in sacred con-
texts. At the same time, the relatively lowly genres associated with dance,
rondeau, ballade and virelai, by a mysterious alchemy became elite courtly
fare. Two factors may be singled out here, both of which are central to
modern scholarly questions about these changes: rhythm and textuality.
The celebrated Roman de Fauvel manuscript, F-Pn fonds fr. 146, exempli-
fies both. It contains a unique 1316–18 revision of this satiric narrative,
in which 169 pieces of music were interpolated.28 No other medieval nar-
rative contains such a remarkable number and range of musical pieces.
They are of particular interest to music historians for being a mélange of
disparate genres, some newly recorded, others known from older sources
and traditions but recorded here with updated notation in the newer style,
old genres reworked into unusual forms, old texts given a new language
or context. The manuscript provides substantial evidence of change, yet in
terms that are hard to understand without a much more detailed context
than we possess from other surviving sources. The challenge for current
scholars is to bring together detailed work on such evidence that does exist,
principally the notated and unnotated motets and other song forms from
the Montpellier Codex and the Douce 308 chansonnier, together with the
work of such turn-of-the-century authors of song and narrative as Adam de
la Halle, Jehan de Lescurel, Nicole de Margival and Watriquet de Couvin.29
In all these sources questions of rhythm and textuality are at once
intensely problematic and intertwined. It is one thing to recognize that
a sea-change occurs in high-style song, from the largely unmeasured nota-
tion of a chanson courtoise to an intricately measured polyphonic ballade
by Guillaume de Machaut, but another to track the practical, creative and
cultural reasons for this change. Scholars have drawn attention to several
factors: the importance of urbanization, of increasing literacy and awareness
of the creative potential of writing for musical transmission and composi-
tion, the new first-person love narrative, and the rise of the puys or cultural
societies in northern French-speaking towns which encouraged competi-
tive song production in a spirit of bourgeois social solidarity. One of the
most unexpected symbols, perhaps causes of change in the character of
song is the refrain, an example of which would be set as the basis for an
annual compositional lyric challenge for members of puys. On the edges of
strophes, creating changes of rhythmic mode in motets, marking divisions
in a narrative, refrains are a connecting thread between genres, styles and
registers. They liaise between orality and literacy, and between the languages
of music and poetry.
By being so pervasive, refrains are part of the very fabric of thirteenth-
century textuality. The key generating elements of works from so many
different genres, they are the core materials of courtly discourse. Tracing
the course of refrain citation across different generic contexts is like seeing
the raw material of courtly speech and song being shaped, divided, com-
bined, amplified and structured before one’s eyes. Refrains are the ultimate
examples of literate songs: their citation makes a song part of a larger textual
whole, just as it also makes a text confront or absorb song.30
Poets and composers

Voice and authority
That the new love narratives of the early fourteenth century, such as Nicole
de Margival’s Dit de la panthère d’amours and Jehan Acart de Hesdin’s La
Prise amoureuse, are the first surviving locations for the new formes fixes
is worth further comment. It alerts us to the importance of narrative as a
means of framing song throughout the later Middle Ages. In this final section
I want briefly to outline some of the ways in which the relationship between
words and music in medieval vernacular song was influenced by narrative
practices. One of the earliest trouvères, Chrétien de Troyes, who was a master
of Arthurian narrative as well as a composer of chansons, reminds us that

the two genres were closely connected and, indeed, that narrative was the
earliest source in the early thirteenth century for both secular and sacred
vernacular song: in the Roman de la Rose by Jean Renart and the Miracles de
Nostre Dame of Gautier de Coinci. By being set into narrative, song gained
a certain visibility and distinctiveness: the practice stimulated and was no
doubt itself provoked by a desire to promote authorship. Perhaps the most
explicit example of authorial promotion is the Roman du castelain de Couci
by Jakemès (ca1300) in which the Châtelain de Couci’s songs are woven
into a biographical romance that tells the story of the love affair allegedly
expressed in the songs.
In these decades at the end of the thirteenth century and into the four-
teenth, song authorship gradually became once more a matter of self-
proclaimed courtly and aesthetic status as it had been for the troubadours.
But where trouvère poet-composers tended to look back or sideways for
models of vernacular authorship, the early-fourteenth-century love poets
put forward their own compositions and their material representation of
them in specially produced books as evidence of an authoritative approach
to the art of love. To cite a song in a larger narrative frame is to assign
it a voice, and many subtleties are available to the composer of a song
who wishes to appropriate another’s poetic voice in the service of his own
authorial identity.
Citation
Citation was a key technique in the development of new approaches to song
and authorial power. We can see this in a key transitional composer, Adam
de la Halle. Associated primarily with Arras, but also with Paris and Naples,
Adam’s surviving works exhibit great versatility: he wrote grands chants,
motets, polyphonic rondeaux, jeux-partis, two dramatic jeux – Le Jeu de
Robin et Marion and Le Jeu de la Feuillée (a third is attributed to him, Le
Jeu du Pelerin, that may have been posthumous) – an incomplete chanson
de geste in laisses – Le Roi du Sicile – and a strophic congé. All of these
compositions except the last two survive with music; in the case of the jeux,
both for the refrains and for the dramatic songs. Adam’s work is marked by
widespread citation, not only of well-known refrain material but also of his
own texts and melodies, including his own reworkings of refrain material.
Motet 279 from the Montpellier Codex, for example, contains refrains from
his polyphonic rondeaux (Dieus, coument porroie [‘God, how could I’], vdB,
refr.496, and De ma dame vient [‘From my lady comes’], vdB, refr.477), as
well as one that is sung in Le Jeu de la Feuillée.31 This master of citation
became noted as a figure of authority: his chansons are cited with respect
by the narrator of Nicole de Margival’s Dit de la panthère. It was a short
step from here to the work of Guillaume de Machaut in which the practice
of auto-citation received eloquent expression, most notably in his sequence
of set-piece songs in the Remede de Fortune and in Le Voir Dit. Adam is
evidence of the public importance attached to citation in the period, and
also of the continuities of practice across the border of the centuries. New
research into the nature and uses of citation from the thirteenth to the
fifteenth centuries is already producing a substantial body of information
about the intensive cross-referencing of poetic and melodic phrases among
song composers throughout that period.32
Music and literature

It is often remarked that the arts of music and poetry start to diverge in the
late fourteenth century. It cannot be denied that after Machaut, perhaps
the last great trouvère, no single author appears to have a comparable
control over music and text together. And even Machaut has a bulkier
poetic than musical output. But what continues into the fifteenth century
is an increasing interest in the textuality of music as well as the musicality
of the text. The production of commentaries and handbooks on the art
of song from Eustache Deschamps’s L’Art de Dictier (1392) to the Arts de
seconde rhétorique (fifteenth century) testifies to a desire to give song an
ever greater specificity of textual control. Books of music paradoxically give
music more transmissive freedom than ever: through being written down
and in due course printed a song can be known, remembered and reworked
across a wider audience rather than being confined to a relatively narrow
life as a performance. The transformation of the scribe into the poet, and of
poetry into literature, gave music yet more reason to find rhetorical heights
in the art of song.
13 Latin poetry and music
leofranc holford-strevens
The Latin poetry set to music during the Middle Ages and discussed in
this chapter may be divided into two main types, metra, based on syllabic
quantity, and rhythmi (in the Middle Ages often spelt rithmi or the like),
based on accent and syllable count, but from the fourteenth century often
on the latter alone.1 Not regarded are psalms and other texts of like form
such as the Te Deum, based on paired phrases of parallel or quasi-parallel
but unregulated structure.
The term ‘verse’ will be used throughout as a synonym of ‘line’, not of
‘stanza’, though ‘verse-form’ will be used to accommodate both the measures
of single verses and their combinations into stanzas as a single concept. To
avoid confusion, only quantitative measures will be called ‘metres’.
It is on verse-forms that primary emphasis will be laid, the better to
assist study of the relation, or lack of relation, between words and music.
Some literary criticism will be offered, principally of motet texts, since these
have been neglected by students of literature and only of late considered
by musicologists. (This neglect is not only modern: the state of many texts
in our manuscripts indicates that music copyists did not always take much
interest in them; sometimes it was already a corrupt text that the composer
set.)
Ancient and medieval metra

Although some surviving classical Latin poetry was written to be sung,
notably the cantica of early Roman drama and the Carmen Saeculare of
Horace (performed at a state occasion in 17 BC), and some dramatic pas-
sages were apparently delivered in recitative, we have no information about
the music beyond for certain Plautine comedies the name of the slave who
composed it. We are left to make inferences from metre, which as in Greek
was based on syllabic quantity, that is to say the distinction between long
and short syllables. The basic rule is that a syllable containing a long vowel
or a diphthong is itself long ‘by nature’; if the vowel is short, the syllable
is nevertheless long ‘by position’ if the vowel is followed by two or more
consonants, otherwise short. For this purpose x counts as two consonants
[225] (‘makes position’), as does Greek z within a word (initially it ceased to do so
226 Leofranc Holford-Strevens
around AD 100) but not qu; tr and some similar groups do not always make
position (hardly ever at the start of a word). Initial s + consonant does not
make position in the early poets but does in Catullus; the Augustans and
their successors, disliking both scansions, avoid placing such groups after
a short final vowel, but they return in medieval (and Renaissance) writers,
generally not making position. A final vowel, diphthong, or vowel + m is
elided when it precedes an initial vowel, diphthong, or h; this was a feature
of the spoken language at all levels, as it still is of Spanish and Italian. (Early
medieval writers sometimes treat h as a consonant, especially in Germanic
names.)
By the end of classical antiquity, vocalic quantity had ceased to be a
feature even of educated speech; which vowels were long and which were
short had to be learnt. Nevertheless, quantitative verse continued to be
written with a greater or lesser degree of correctness. For the Middle
Ages the most important metres are the dactylic hexameter, the dactylic
pentameter, and the sapphic stanza; these and a few others are explained
below. Note that – represents a long syllable, y a short syllable, × an anceps
position, where either is allowed, yy two short syllables that may be replaced
by a long, yy
× an anceps also admitting two short syllables, and that the final
position of any verse, though counted as long, may be occupied by a short
syllable.
The structures of the main metres are set out below.
Hexameter
– yy – yy – yy – yy – y y – –
In the tenth position y y is occasionally replaced by –. There must be a

word-break (caesura) in at least one of three places: after the fifth position,
after the seventh, or between the two short syllables of the sixth position, in
this case commonly supported by breaks after the third and seventh. Short
syllables ending in a consonant are occasionally admitted instead of long,
mostly at the caesura; this licence is abused in the Middle Ages, and even
extended to short vowels ending the word. There is a preference, which by
Augustan times is a rule, that save in satire, or for special effects, the last
two feet of a verse should have a word-break either between or after the
short syllables of the tenth position, or two word-breaks if a monosyllable
in ninth position is followed by two disyllables; monosyllabic prepositions
and conjunctions count as one with the following word. Not all medieval
writers respect this rule, though it was known.
Pentameter
– yy – yy – | – y y – y y –
The pentameter regularly follows a hexameter to form an ‘elegiac couplet’.

In classical poets the syllable before the caesura tends to be long by nature,
though this is far from a rule; by contrast, medieval writers admit short
syllables – even those ending in a vowel. In Augustan poets the last word
of the verse is usually a disyllable, or failing that, almost always comprises
four or more syllables. Ovid rarely allows the verse to end in short a not
followed by a consonant.
Sapphic stanza
This comprises three sapphic hendecasyllables (eleven-syllable lines of the
form – y – – – y y – y – –) and an adonic (– y y – –). After Horace, the
stanza is self-contained, and the hendecasyllable regularly has word-breaks
after the third and fifth syllables. This is the metre, for example, of Paul the
Deacon’s Ut queant laxis; occasionally, as in verse 49 of that poem, ‘Gloria
Patri genitaeque proli’ (‘Glory be to the Father and the begotten offspring’),
medieval poets adopt the licence of short syllable for long.
Iambic dimeter
(This is the metre of Saint Ambrose’s hymns and of Venantius Fortunatus’s
Vexilla regis prodeunt.)
yy
× – y – yy
× –y–
Iambic trimeter
yy
× – y – yy
× – y – yy
× –y–
There is a caesura after the fifth or seventh positions; when the ninth position
is the last syllable of a word, it is usually long (in contrast to Greek practice).
Trochaic tetrameter catalectic

(This is used as such in Venantius Fortunatus’s Pange lingua):
–y–×–y–×|–y–×–y–
In classical poetry, –, except in the last position, may be replaced by yy; in

Venantius’s hymn, the only possible instance, pretium, which would also be
the only instance of initial yy in Vexilla regis prodeunt, is probably to be
pronounced pretsjum.2
In addition there is a metre known to ancient metrists but not attested in

Latin poetry before the fifth century:
–––yy–|–yy––
Since this metre was used in several hymns ascribed or attributed to Hucbald
of St-Amand,3 it may be called the hucbaldian in preference to its technical
description of minor asclepiad catalectic. It regularly appears in four-line
stanzas on the analogy of Horace’s lyric metres (some of which are also
used in chant). In the fifth century too we find ‘stichic’ pentameters (that is,
pentameters used by themselves without hexameters), and likewise stichic
adonics.
Although rhyme between neighbouring verses occasionally happens in
classical poetry by accident or for special effect, it is not a structural princi-
ple; despite a few appearances in Christian poetry of earlier date it does not
become a frequent feature until the sixth century, and is extremely rare in
metra till the ninth. It then becomes frequent both between and within hex-
ameters, or within both lines of the elegiac couplet; these internal rhymes are
called ‘leonine’. A precedent was found in Ovid’s famous line ‘Quot caelum
stellas, tot habet tua Roma puellas’ (Ars amatoria 1. 59: ‘As many stars as
the heaven, so many girls has your Rome’), which when originally written
was less blatant because the e of stellas was long and closed (phonetically
[e:]), that of puellas short and open (phonetically [ε]). Rhymed hexameters
and pentameters are particularly frequent during the eleventh century, but
continued in use throughout the Middle Ages. Rhyme may be monosyl-
labic (of final syllables only), disyllabic (of the last two syllables), or even
trisyllabic (of the last three). Since Latin is not a difficult language to rhyme
in (especially since distinctions of quantity are ignored), the requirement is
rarely onerous.
Certain passages of classical and late antique poetry (for example, from
Vergil, Horace, Martianus Capella, and Boethius) are notated for music
in medieval manuscripts; the choice of texts often suggests educational
purposes, as does the musical setting of a prose calendrical table that Bede,
De temporum ratione, chapter 22 proposed for memorizing and reciting, but
there is no overlap between the Horatian odes selected for setting and those
included in anthologies.4 However, whereas in antiquity the quantitative
distinctions of metra were carried over into musical rhythm, and attempts
were made to do so in the Renaissance, in the Middle Ages no such effort
was made either in plainchant or in polyphony; at most, strong positions
may be represented by higher pitches, but there is no uniform practice,
either in this or in the treatment of elision, which (as later in vernacular
texts) is sometimes respected by the setting and sometimes undone.5
In Vergil and his classical followers, the individual hexameter need not
be the self-contained expression of a single idea; rather verses are combined
as it were into paragraphs, with frequent enjambment from line to line
and constant variation in the placing of sense pauses; this feature is not
always replicated by medieval poets, but when it is it may induce medieval
composers to override their normal practice of respecting verse-structure

in preference to sense. The most striking example is afforded by the six
hexameters of Alma redemptoris mater, broken in the chant into four main
parts (divided by vertical lines below) of which the first two end in mid-
verse:
Alma redemptoris mater, quae pervia caeli

porta manes,| et stella maris, succurre cadenti,
surgere qui curat, populo.| Tu quae peperisti,
Natura mirante, tuum sanctum genitorem,|
virgo prius ac posterius, Gabrielis ab ore
sumens illud Ave, peccatorum miserere.6
Hail, mother of the Redeemer, who remainest the open gate of heaven, and
star of the sea, aid the falling people that wishes to rise. Thou that, as Nature
gazed in wonderment, borest thy holy begetter, a virgin before and
afterwards, taking that famous ‘Hail’ from Gabriel’s mouth, have mercy on
sinners.
Medieval and even Renaissance polyphonic settings regularly follow the

chant rather than the verse-structure; a striking exception is that for four
voices by the apparently Coimbra-based composer Aires Fernandez (fl.
ca1550), in which the top voice or tipre clearly marks the verse ends even
where the chant does not.7
Syllabo-clausular rhythmi
In Latin, unlike Greek, verbal accent is regulated by syllabic quantity: if the
penultimate syllable is long it is stressed, otherwise the stress falls on the
antepenultimate; in consequence, according as words end at one place or
another in the verse the accent will either coincide or conflict with strong
positions in the metre. Accent, which inscriptions show to have been far
more perceptible to uneducated ears than quantity, displaced it in poems
written by (or for) persons without a literary schooling; such verses were
known as rhythmi, first distinguished from metra by grammarians who
assigned ‘rhythm without metre’ to the ‘songs of low-class poets’ (cantica
vulgarium poetarum).8
Saint Ambrose’s hymns soon inspired imitation by writers who no longer
knew their quantities; after some irregularities, a standard accentual adap-
tation of the iambic dimeter was developed comprising eight syllables of
which the sixth is stressed; such lines are notated 8pp, where ‘pp’ stands
for proparoxytone, ‘accented on the antepenultimate’. Compared with their
metrical antecedents, these verses admit long syllables in place of short and
vice versa, but exclude the resolution of one long into two short syllables
that Ambrose still freely used. A hymn in praise of Saint Patrick (Audite
omnes amantes Deum) attributed to the Irish saint Sechnall (d. 447), but
at any rate no later than the early seventh century, transforms the trochaic
tetrameter into a fifteen-syllable verse divided by caesura into eight syllables
with an accent on the seventh and seven syllables with an accent on the fifth
(the thirteenth of the line); this is notated 8p + 7pp, where ‘p’ stands for
paroxytone, ‘accented on the penultimate’.9 These four lines are grouped
into quatrains beginning with all 23 letters of the alphabet in turn, afford-
ing an early Latin example of the ‘alphabetic hymn’ ultimately derived from
Hebrew.
Although grammarians continued to parrot the reference to low-class
poets, the rhythmus was not confined to them; moreover, even before the
Carolingian reforms established a sharp distinction between the popular
lingua Romana and the educated lingua Latina, the emergence of a reading
pronunciation in which every word formed a unit by itself – and final m, now
silent in the living language, was artificially rendered as a full consonant – is
demonstrated by the rarity in rhythmi of elision, which remained the norm
in metra, even though it undoubtedly continued to be a feature of everyday
speech. (The exception that proves the rule is an 8p + 8p rhythmus in
semi-popular language and pronunciation by Saint Augustine, the Psalmus
contra partem Donati, in which elision is as freely and regularly used as in
any classical poet.) When elision is found, it is almost always with identical
vowels (monstra te esse matrem as 6p in the hymn Ave maris stella);10 usually
either the two syllables are left to stand in hiatus, or the collocation is avoided
altogether.
Accentual rhythmi should be distinguished from quantitative metra with
the occasional false quantity (e.g. patı̄bulo in Vexilla regis prodeunt, verse
4); in the better-educated writers false quantities are mostly found in Greek
words (cātholicus, ecclĕsia), though they are not unknown in Latin words,
especially those not familiar from Vergil and Ovid. Errors in accentuation,
though not unknown, are rare, since whereas quantity had by the end of
antiquity to be learnt from books, the position of the stress was appre-
hended orally (even in France, an attempt was made to realize it by pitch);11
nevertheless, some words acquired new stresses (muliéres, erádicans), and
Greek words sometimes retained the Greek accent in defiance of Latin
rules (paráclitus, Iácobus) but sometimes took a stress justifiable by neither
criterion (charáctere, epitrı́ta).
The earliest rhythmi showed no regularity of accent until the cadence;
this freedom remains characteristic of the 8pp line, despite a tendency
towards iambic rhythm with stress on the fourth and often the second
syllable, but 8p from the seventh century onwards shows a strong tendency
towards trochaic rhythm, being divided by internal caesura into 4p + 4p or

occasionally 5pp + 3p, relieved only by 3p + 5p; likewise 7pp, though freely
admitting 3p + 4pp besides 4p + 3pp and 3pp + 4pp, generally eschews
4pp + 3pp, and 6p admits 3p + 3p but not 4pp + 2p. This is not to deny
occasional exceptions, such as in the conductus Mundus vergens the 7pp
line quod explicit explicat, admitted for wordplay’s sake, or in Gedeonis area
the 8p lines radiat absque calore and liquitur petra liquore, both 3pp 2p 3p.12
Other rhythmi include 12pp, divided either 5p + 7pp in imitation of
the iambic trimeter or 6pp + 6pp, and accentual sapphics; these do not
mimic the quantitative structure of the metrum but preserve the normal
distribution of the stresses. The hendecasyllables thus become 5p + 6p, with
an iambic pulse varied only by the possibility of stressing the first syllable of
the line instead of the second; the adonic becomes 5p, with the same initial
option:
Aures ad nostras deitatis preces,

Deus, inclina pietate sola;
supplicum vota suscipe, precamur
famuli tui.13
God, bend thy divine ears to our prayers in pure pity; receive the vows of
suppliants, we thy servants beg thee.
This last verse-form apart, rhyme steadily becomes the norm in rhythmi
during the early Middle Ages; in paroxytone lines it is regularly disyllabic,
and from the twelfth century in proparoxytone lines too, though trisyllabic
rhyme is sometimes achieved.
Far from suppressing rhythmi as the Renaissance would do, the classi-
cizing movement of the twelfth century raised them to the same literary
level as classicizing metra (Hildebert of Lavardin is a master of both) and a
comparably disciplined technique; instructions are given in manuals either
of poetics or of dictamen, which emphasize that – as hymns, sequences, and
conductus bear out – rhythmi are especially suitable for setting to music.
Many are written in regular six-, eight- or ten-line double stanzas compris-
ing two lengths of line (in particular 8p and 7pp, or 7pp and 6p) and three
rhymes distributed aabccb, aaabcccb or aaaabccccb, the b rhymes being the
shorter lines.We also find monorhymed tercets and quatrains, characteristi-
cally 8pp or 8p + 7pp; but the most important monorhymed quatrain is the
‘goliardic stanza’ (Vagantenstrophe) comprising four ‘goliardics’ (Vaganten-
zeilen) of 7pp + 6p.14 Despite the names, suggestive of wandering scholars
and disreputable foolery, many writers in this verse-form were settled and
respectable, including such eminent men as Walter of Châtillon and Philip
the Chancellor; but they were scholars, who even when writing in satirical
vein or with less than total seriousness display their learning: a variant
form of the goliardic stanza consists of versus cum auctoritate (‘verses with
an authoritative statement’), three goliardic lines preceded or followed by a
hexameter (often from a classical or other prior poet) rhyming with them.15
This principle was later extended to other verse-forms.
The goliardic, in which the 7pp elements do not rhyme, should be dis-
tingished from combinations of independent 7pp and 6p lines, for example
in the conductus Novus miles sequitur, which is a ten-line stanza 7pp 6p 7pp
6p 7pp 7pp 6p 7pp 7pp 6p rhyming ababccdeed.16 There also appear a 10pp
line with caesura at the fourth syllable (usually 4p, but 4pp is not excluded),
which is a Latinization of the French décasyllabe (and therefore not to be
read with the iambic rhythm natural to English or German), and an 11pp
line divided 4p + 7pp. This does not exhaust the verse-forms attested, and
more irregular stanzas are found, for instance in the Carmina Burana. Like-
wise, there is a wide variety of rhyme patterns, often demonstrating the
poet’s ingenuity, for example in constructing long runs of lines on a single
rhyme, or in the use of internal rhymes; short rhymed lines seem especially
prominent in verses meant for singing.
Two points should be noted here. First, this versification, whatever the
origin of individual verse-forms, is international; English-speakers accept
the initial 3p inversions of stress that disrupt the trochaic flow, and good
French authors respect the Latin accent. Second, musical setting takes no
account of verbal accent either melodically or rhythmically.
It is difficult to correlate verse-form with poetic level: although goliardics
are often used for light or satirical verse, John Pecham could employ them
for his Passion meditation Philomena praevia temporis amoeni,17 frequently
ascribed to Saint Bonaventure; conversely the grandest of classical metra,
the hexameter, could as in Roman times be used for poems less than serious.
Many conductus (whose authors overlap with those responsible for goliardic
poems) are preserved for their literary quality in poetical as well as musical
manuscripts; most such texts concern religious or other serious themes, but
there are exceptions such as Consequens antecedente,18 a satire on venality
that purports to be a lesson in logic:
Consequens antecedente 8p a
destructo destruitur, 7pp b
bene namque sequitur 7pp b
nemine contradicente 8p a
quod si dabis dabitur; 7pp b
sed si primum tollitur 7pp b
non cures de consequente, 8p a
quoniam negabitur 7pp b
si non approbabitur 7pp b
auro viam faciente. 8p a
Once the antecedent has been refuted, the consequent is refuted; for it
properly follows, with no one gainsaying, that if you give, it shall be given;
but if the first is taken away, do not worry about the consequent, since it will
be denied [or your request will be refused], if it is not supported with gold
making the way.
In the conditional proposition ‘if the first then the second’ or ‘if p then q’,
p is called the antecedent, q the consequent; from it one may validly infer
‘but p, therefore q’ (the modus ponens, ‘putting-there mode’) or ‘but not
q, therefore not p’ (the modus tollens, ‘taking-away mode’). However, the
text offers the inference ‘but not p, therefore not q’, which is invalid, since
q may still be true: if Socrates is walking, he is awake; but even if he is not
walking, that does not mean he is not awake. Written by the educated for the
educated, Consequens antecedente wittily contrasts the manifest fallacy of
the logical contention with the undeniable truth of its practical application:
if you do not pay bribes you will get nothing. The same lightness of touch
may explain the loose rhythm of the first two 8p lines, which do not conform
to the regular patterns noted above.
In the Carmina Burana, we find a wide range of stylistic levels even in
erotic poetry, from macaronic texts and such Latinized vernacular as domi-
cella (meaning ‘damsel’, not ‘little house’)19 to goliardic parody of Scrip-
ture, liturgy, scholastic philosophy, and devotional address to the Mother
of God:20
Si linguis angelicis loquar et humanis . . .
Pange lingua igitur causas et causatum . . .
Ave formosissima, gemma pretiosa.

ave decus virginum, virgo gloriosa,
ave lumen luminum, ave mundi rosa,
Blanziflôr et Helena, Venus generosa.
Though I should speak with angelic and human tongues [cf. 1 Cor. 13:
1] . . . Therefore recount, my tongue, the causes and the effect . . . Hail most
beauteous one, precious jewel, hail ornament of virgins, virgin glorious, hail
light of lights, hail rose of the world, Blanchefleur [heroine of romance] and
Helen, noble Venus.
Syllabic verse
Besides quantitative and accentual verse, there is a third type governed
purely by syllable count. This is found, with rhyming final syllables, in
sixth- and seventh-century Irish Latin; but modern writers also reckon
under this heading the texts composed from the ninth century onwards
for sequences, known as prosae because they originated as art prose. The
main body of a prosa consisted of successive couplets comprising two lines
with the same number of syllables and set to the same melody. Accent and
quantity played no part, nor in principle did rhyme, though many West
Frankish prosae affected a final -a or -ia (as in alleluia) at the end of every
couplet, all too often at the expense of syntax and sense. Such texts, more
grandiloquent than coherent, contrast sharply with the elegant, complex
and rational unrhymed diction of Notker Balbulus at St Gall. (Since prosae
were sometimes sung as melismas, the term prosa was loosely extended to
the prosula, a text composed to match a chant melisma syllable for note.)
From ca1000 onwards, however, sequence texts moved in the direction of
verse, becoming more regular in scansion and/or adopting rhyme; by the
twelfth century most sequences are stanzaic rhythmi, though the form of
the stanza may change in the course of the poem.
In the thirteenth century, the practice of adding texts to melismas in
subordination to their phrase structure gave way to the addition of one,
two, or even three texts over a tenor; the resulting composition is known
as a motet (‘little word’).21 At first these texts, mostly in the vernacular
(outside England) but sometimes in Latin, were no more regular in their
syllabic count than prosulae; an example is the following motet – a tour
de force of rhyming – on the tenor ‘et gaudebit’, from the alleluia for the
Sunday after Ascension:22
Non orphanum 4pp a
te deseram, 4pp b
sed efferam 4pp b
sicut libanum, 5pp a
sicut clibanum 5pp a
ponam te virtutis, 6p c
sicut tympanum 5pp a
et organum 4pp a
leticie 4pp d
et salutis; 4p c
auferam 3pp b
Egyptie 4pp d
iugum servitutis, 6p c
conferam 3pp b
me secutis 4p c
post lacrimas gaudium, 7pp e
premium 3pp e
post laboris tedium; 7pp e
cum iero veniam, 7pp f
subveniam, 4pp f
per graciam 4pp f
tribuam veniam, 6pp f

celestium 4pp e
civium 3pp e
gloriam, 3pp f
mentem puram 4p g
et securam 4p g
efficiam, 4pp f
carnis curam 4p g
et pressuram 4p g
seculi reiciam. 7pp f
Inclitus 3pp h
Paraclitus 4pp h
divinitus 4pp h
tuum cor docebit, 6p i
et radicitus 5pp h
tuus spiritus 5pp h
Domino sic herebit 7p i
tuus ut introitus 7pp h
tutus sit et exitus; 7pp h
cor penitus 4pp h
gaudebit. 3p i
I shall not abandon you to be an orphan, but exalt you like incense-smoke
(?); like an oven of virtue shall I make you [cf. Psalms 20:10 Vulgate], like a
drum and organum [in medieval Latin this may be a stringed or a wind
instrument] of happiness and salvation; I shall take away the yoke of
Egyptian bondage, I shall bestow on those who have followed me joy after
tears, the reward after the weariness of toil; when I have gone I shall come, I
shall assist, by my grace I shall grant mercy, the glory of heaven’s citizens, I
shall make your mind pure and free from worry, I shall throw back the care
of the flesh and the oppression of the world. The renowned Paraclete in his
divine wisdom will instruct your heart [= mind], and your spirit will be so
rooted in the Lord that your going in and going out shall be safe; your heart
will rejoice through and through.
This motet already has a degree of independence from the clausula –

found also by itself – that serves as its tenor, since the setting is not entirely
syllabic; in the Las Huelgas manuscript the music is so heavily reworked as
no longer to fit the tenor, which is omitted. The same clausula is also used
for a vernacular pastourelle, El mois de mai, which again does not match
it syllabically but is also written in lines of varying length with insistent
rhymes; a triplum, Quant florist la violete, of similar type is found with both
the Latin and the French motetus.23
By the end of the thirteenth century, irregular versification had lost its
charms and motet texts were subjected to the laws of measured verse just like
other forms of poetry. When written in Latin, they are generally written in
rhythmi, in particular the decasyllable and the octosyllable, though in Italy
we also find the native endecasillabo, an 11p verse with stress on the fourth
and/or sixth syllable.
In both the irregular and the regular manners, French poets pay less
heed to the distinction between p and pp than in the conductus; from
successive centuries we find such rhymes as trı́na with máchina in the
irregular motet Benigna celi regina / Beata es, Maria / In veritate,24 nóbilis
with puerı́lis in the decasyllables of Servant regem / O Philippe / Rex regum,25
and probarétur with pátitur in the octosyllabic portion of Du Fay’s Iuvenis
qui puellam.26 This is but one sign that French-speakers were finding the
effort of reproducing Latin stress too great, along with monosyllabic rhymes
such as dixistis ∼ honestatis, arguo ∼ eo ∼ unico ∼ titulo in the last text,27
and irregular rhythms within the line such as dum ángelo credidı́sti and
inimicı́sque destrúctis in the triplum of Machaut’s motet Felix virgo / Inviolata
genitrix / Ad te suspiramus gementes et flentes.28 This is the versification not
of Philip the Chancellor but of Baudelaire.29
Although some motets use pre-existing texts, the majority of texts appear
to be newly written for the occasion, either by the composer or by someone
else, who may be named at the end of the motetus as in Argi vices Poliphemus
/ Cum Pilemon rebus paucis (written in or after 1410 for the conciliar Pope
John XXIII):30 ‘William wrote these words as a favour to Nicholas, who
sang them, in order for the work to be complete.’ Since composers are not
necessarily any better as poets than poets as composers, the quality of the
texts they write varies widely: some simply cannot be construed as ratio-
nal human discourse, such as Apta caro (the triplum to a straightforward
motetus, Flos virginum),31 whose first five lines,
Apta caro plumis ingenii

desidie barrum et studii,
laborisque foco mollicies
et coniuga centro segnicies
que pigrescit, plumbum consumito,
typical of the entire text, would have to be translated something like ‘Let
flesh fit for feathers consume the elephant of idleness of intellect and fer-
vour, and let softness at the hearth of labour, and laziness conjugate with the
centre, which grows sluggish, consume lead.’ On the other hand Machaut,
poet and musician, writes as fluently in Latin as in French; and texts of
Philippe de Vitry’s motets are found in literary manuscripts, one in a ser-
mon collection from Avignon in the late 1340s, others in fifteenth-century
humanistic anthologies compiled by German scholars who had been in
Italy.32 This is a testimony to his relationship with Petrarch, who called him
‘now the only poet of the Gauls’; his poetry certainly cannot be described
as humanistic (though a few specimens are in metre), but they are ambi-
tious, abound in classical and biblical allusions, and show considerable
power of rhetoric. Some of Vitry’s verse, as well as his music, may reside
in the expanded recension of the Roman de Fauvel, some texts in which
adopt the initial or closing auctoritas, and exploit classical quotations in
a way that suggests knowledge of their context, rather than reliance on a
florilegium.
Some motet texts praise music, or the musicians of the day, listed at
length, a genre still practised by Compère in the fifteenth century and Moulu
in the sixteenth. A widely disseminated example is Bernard de Cluny’s motet
Apollinis eclipsatur / Zodiacum signis lustrantibus / In omnem terram. The
duplum is written in octosyllables forming five enjambed sestets with the
rhyme scheme aabccb ddeffe gghiih jjkllj mmnoon:33
Apollinis eclipsatur
nunquam lux, cum peragatur
signorum ministerio
bis sex, quibus armonica
fulget arte basilica 5
musicorum collegio
multiformibus figuris:
e quo nitet I. de Muris
modo colorum vario;
Philippus de Vitriaco, 10
acta plura vernant a quo
ordine multiphario;
noscit Henricus Helene
tonorum tenorem bene;
Magni cum Dionisio 15
Regnaudus de Tiramonte
Orpheyco potus fonte;
Robertus de Palatio
actubus petulancia;
fungens gaudet poetria 20
Guilhermus de Mascaudio;
Egidius de Morino
baritonans cum Garino,
quem cognoscat Suessio;
Arnaldus Martini, iugis 25
philomena, P. de Brugis,
Gaufridus de Barilio;
vox quorum mundi climata
penetrat ad algamata,
doxe fruantur bravio! 30
(In verse 11 a quo in French pronunciation = aco, and hence makes the
requisite double rhyme with Vitriaco.) The sense is not always clear, but a
tentative translation might be:
Apollo’s light is never eclipsed, since it is achieved by the service of twice six
signs, whereby the church gleams with the harmonic art through the
company of musicians in note-shapes of many forms, from which
[company] shines Jean des Murs, with his varied manner of colours;
Philippe de Vitry, several deeds by whom flourish in many kinds of order;
Henri d’Hélène, who well knows the course of notes; with Denys le Grant,
Regnaud de Tirlemont, who has drunk of Orpheus’ fount; Robert of Aix,
with actions and forwardness; Guillaume de Machaut rejoices when
exercising poetry; Gilles de la Thérouanne, singing low with Guarin, whom
may Soissons know; Arnaud de St-Martin-du-Ré, a perpetual nightingale,
Pierre de Bruges, Godefroy de Baralle; may they whose voice pierces the
zones of the worlds to the high places enjoy the reward of glory!
The contratenor (which describes the above text as the triplum), in

decasyllables rhyming aab aab bba bba, also refers to music, and to these
musicians;
Zodiacum signis lustrantibus

armonia Phebi fulgentibus
musicali palam sinergia,
Pictagore numerus ter quibus
adequatur preradiantibus 5
Boetii basis solercia,
B. de Cluni nitens energia
artis pratice cum theoria
recommendans se subdit omnibus
presentia per salutaria; 10
musicorum tripli materia
noticiam dat de nominibus.
Again, translation is at times uncertain:
While the signs light up the zodiac and gleam with Phoebus’s harmony,
openly through musical cooperation – to which most radiant signs
Pythagoras’s number, taken thrice, is made equal by the ingenuity of
Boethius’s basis – Bernard de Cluny, illustrious as a practical musician who
also understands the theory, humbly recommends himself to all by these
present wholesome words; the subject matter of the triplum gives
information on the musicians’ names.
Much recent scholarship has sought to make all it can of thematic, verbal
and numerical relations between the texts of a motet, and to relate the tenor
phrase with its textual and liturgical context to them. Such an analysis would
find, in the case of Bernard’s motet, that the first word of the duplum text,
Apollinis, begins with A, that of the contratenor, Zodiacum, with Z; but each
text alludes to the other, for the duplum speaks of ‘twice six signs’ in the
zodiac (cf. Zodiacum), and the contratenor of ‘Pythagoras’s number, taken
thrice’, which matches the signs that light up the zodiac and shine with
Phoebus’s harmony (cf. Apollinis). Pythagoras’s number was 10, but called
the tetractys as being the fourth triangular number; hence we have both 3
× 4, the number of musicians mentioned in the triplum, and 3 × 10, the
number of verses. The duplum, in 30 octosyllables, contains twice as many
syllables as the contratenor, in 12 decasyllables; together they comprise
360 syllables, which corresponds to the number of days in twelve 30-day
months (as in the Egyptian calendar); the full year requires another five days,
supplied by the five syllables of the tenor incipit, In omnem terram. This
comes from Psalms 18:5 Vulgate. ‘In omnem terram exivit sonus eorum,
et in fines terrae verba eorum’, ‘Their sound hath gone forth into all the
earth, and their words unto the ends of the earth’ (Reims–Douay–Challoner
version), which is obviously appropriate for renowned musicians, some of
whom were also theorists or poets; since this text furnishes the first antiphon
at matins for the common of apostles, it might be thought to pick up on
the number twelve as being that of the first apostles, and suggest that as all
apostles, not merely the original twelve, ought to be venerated, so ought all
musicians, not merely those mentioned in the triplum.
Such subtleties are, alas, compatible with ungrammatical or hypercon-
torted diction. They are also imperceptible to the listeners, though the
singers may appreciate them if they pay attention to the sense of the words
that not only they but also their fellows are singing; how far the fact should
inhibit the analysis of the written texts is a matter of dispute, since poets and
composers were and are capable of building in features that only they, and
God, would notice. Moreover, echoes from one motet to another (such as
the phrase musicorum collegio, which begins the triplum of another musi-
cian motet)34 suggest that (as in the case of the Fauvel manuscript) we are
dealing not so much with an elite (a term that darkens counsel) as with an
in-group of persons who knew each other’s work and competed to better it.
By contrast, it is evident that composers sometimes took care to match
sound or indeed sense at certain places (particularly the beginning and the
end) in simultaneous voice-parts, with an effect that even the untrained
modern ear can recognize; thus in one anonymous motet of the thirteeth
century not only do quadruplum, triplum and motetus all begin Mors
(‘Death’), but the word forms the tenor incipit (if indeed that was sung);
every line but one ends in the vowel o, sung simultaneously in three voices
on eleven occasions and in two on thirteen, five of them against a mid-word
o in the third voice – including the close, where the triplum ends with
the words ‘O Mors’.35 In Vitry’s Vos quid admiramini / Gratissima / Gaude

gloriosa, the words hec regina (‘this is my queen’) in the triplum dovetail
with O regina (‘O queen’, meaning the Virgin) in the motetus, set to the
same music a fourth below.36 Such effects, however, pertain to poetical
technique only if planned before the texts were written, since they could be
achieved by the judicious selection of existing poems.
On the road to the Renaissance

Vitry’s motet O canenda / Rex quem / Contratenor / Rex regum37 has a
triplum in decasyllables but a motetus in hexameters; the setting respects
the verse-ends even at the one place where the sense continues. In the mid-
fourteenth-century motet Degentis vita / Cum vix artidici / Vera pudicitia38
both triplum and motetus are written in what the poet fondly imagined to be
hexameters with the occasional pentameter; the setting largely ignores line
ends, but pays some heed to rhymes; hexameters of no better quality form
the motetus of Inter densas deserti meditans / Imbribus irriguis / Admirabile
est nomen Domini,39 in which the composer respects the line ends both of
the hexameters and of the decasyllables in the triplum.
Metra become commoner in the fifteenth century, not least in Italian
ceremonial motets, though even there they do not oust the rhythmi with
which the northern composers were familiar; Ciconia, despite the classical
pretensions of his theoretical writings, sets only one metrical text, and that
not faultless: Ut te per omnes celitus / Ingens alumnus Padue in Ambrosian
iambic dimeters marred by false quantities.40 For composers, and those
who wrote their texts, metra were no more than another resource; thus Du
Fay’s Latin motets exhibit hexameters varying from the frankly medieval
to the would-be classical, elegiac couplets, stichic leonine pentameters, and
quatrains of stichic sapphic hendecasyllables, but also rhythmi of greater
or less regularity, syllabic verses of various measures (including endecasil-
labi), irregular rhymed verse, and prose.41 None of the classicizing texts
approaches the correctness and elegance of the elegiacs set by Ockeghem,
Intemerata Dei mater;42 however, Du Fay’s settings show respect for line
endings even when the text is enjambed (‘quamque | egregios’, ‘and how
| excellent’).43 Towards the end of the fifteenth century we begin to find
settings of classical poetry, which may be regarded as pertaining to the
Renaissance.44
14 Compositional trajectories
peter m. lefferts
This chapter is intended to operate as a complement to the survey of musical

theory presented in Chapter 16. Here, to illuminate a small set of issues in
respect to style and compositional practice, we will approach the medieval
composer via specific repertory, namely, some sacred chants and some
two-voice polyphony.
A persistent conviction of many relative newcomers to medieval music

is that all chant sounds the same – melodically vague, undifferentiable,
hypnotic and slightly ‘New Age’ – and that it is governed by a universal,
monolithic, standard medieval ‘theory of the modes’. Neither of these points
is true, but one needs to gain a broad familiarity with some very large bodies
of melodies, and the histories of their genres, to be able to come to grips
with chant’s diversity in all its dimensions, and it is equally important to
learn some individual melodies very well.
The plainchant of the medieval Western church was, in fact, highly var-
ied in musical language. There were different dialects, including Roman,
Gallican, Mozarabic, Beneventan and Ambrosian, before and after the hege-
monic rise of Gregorian chant circa 800. There are strong generic or func-
tional fault lines within the Gregorian core itself (distinguishing prayer and
reading tones, antiphonal psalmody, responsorial psalmody), and variant
idioms emerged within the later Gregorian universe (e.g. the German chant
tradition). On top of that, many different stylistic strands developed in
all the newly composed, later medieval plainsong from the ninth century
forward – melodies which over time far outdistanced the Gregorian core in
sheer numbers.
And as to mode, both in theory and in practice in respect to medieval
melody, the term has a rich and varied multi-dimensional history of mean-
ing and influence. The earliest trace of modal thinking in the West dates
to the very late eighth and early ninth centuries. In this era Carolingian
musicians were struggling to stabilize, learn and teach the vast body of
melodies in the hybrid Roman-Gallican chant dialect that became known
as ‘Gregorian chant’. Influenced by a recent eightfold system of classifica-
tion developed by contemporary Byzantine Greeks, the Franks worked out
a similar system to sort and classify liturgical melodies by two significant
[241] markers: the very last note (the final) and the range (distinguishing those
melodies lying above the final and those lying around the final as authentic
and plagal, respectively). In their early tonaries, which were books listing
chants by musical characteristics, the Franks then went another step, further
subdividing chant groups by a third powerful marker, the initial melodic
gesture.
This process of classification worked well because Western chant was
fundamentally diatonic. Indeed, a diatonic backbone is an underlying fea-
ture of most sacred and secular bodies of melody from northern Europe,
the Mediterranean basin, and East Asia going back thousands of years. For
medieval church musicians, the recognition that the myriad melodies of
Gregorian chant each ended on just one or another of four different finals
and could be conceptualized in notation along a single scale was a hard-
won discovery. It was, in fact, one of the signal triumphs of Frankish music
theorists in the late 700s and early 800s. The frequent addition of B flat into
the white-note scale was one small concession to problems in the process
of conceptualization and classification, and some early notations may be
attempting to convey microtonal nuances of performance practice as well.1
Tonaries allowed Frankish musicians (and us) to look at Gregorian
melodies of this or that mode and derive from them further observations
about the character of Gregorian melodies generally, the characteristics
specific to a given mode, or features specific to distinctive subcategories of
chants in that mode. In a small number of cases the three markers – final,
range and initial gesture – could be ambiguous or in open conflict, because of
a chant’s lack of consistent diatonicism or the conflict of assignment between
a chant’s beginning and end. Furthermore, some chants assigned to different
modes share a common vocabulary of interior gestures and phrases. The
discrepancies between real melodies and the Frankish a posteriori method of
classification shows us that mode did not originally govern the composition
of these melodies, and, moreover, that some chants were – how shall we say
it? – not well-behaved.
The discussions by theorists of chants whose modal assignment was
problematic offer us additional insights into the character of Gregorian
chant and the earliest conception of modality. Their proposals for resolving
difficulties in classification included transposition to unusual finals, using
accidentals beyond B flat, and, of course, outright amendment of the shape
of the non-conforming melody.
In later developments of the theory of the melodic modes that were
pursued from the ninth century down to the end of the Middle Ages,
theorists turned their attention from simple classification towards an effort
to account more abstractly and methodically for the characteristics of the
repertoire. They derived their concepts from two principal sources: much
earlier Hellenistic Greek theory as found in authors of late classical antiquity
and the Early Christian era, especially Boethius, and additional empirical
features of the Gregorian corpus and later medieval chants. Hellenistic
notions of scales generated by adjacent and overlapping tetrachords, of
mode as scale, and especially of mode as octave species comprised of species
of fourths and fifths – a body of concepts that the Franks did not fully
understand – eventually dominated the standard explanation of mode in
the later Middle Ages. The pseudo-Greek modal descriptions also absorbed
empirical features such as reciting tones, and theorists attempted to make
accommodation for problem children such as melodies of extremely wide
range and those that cadenced to a non-standard final. However, later
medieval theories of mode, whether derived empirically from melodies of
the Western church or prescriptively from Hellenistic models, still do not
account for all tonal features of Gregorian chant melodies.
In composing post-Gregorian chants, some composers looked back to
Gregorian idioms and turns of phrase. In other cases, composers struck
out in a direction reflecting local or regional melodic languages of their
own day, whether within the ecclesiastical realm or drawing on secular
or personal idioms. Some chant was directly affected by theory, including
both new melodies whose composers were constrained from the outset
by schoolroom doctrines, and older melodies that were re-edited to fit
the mould of theory, such as took place in the twelfth-century reform of
Cistercian chant. Pseudo-Greek modal constraints on melody also began to
influence secular melodies, but not until a relatively late date; the central
role of the fourth below the final and of the fifth and octave above are an
especially distinctive feature, for example, in the French chansons of Du Fay
written in the 1400s.
Medieval musicians were virtuosos of the diatonic, sensitized to the
subtle differences of weight and role of the various scale degrees and the
intervals between them, especially the semitones. They were accustomed
to locating themselves in tonal space by means of the final note of the
melody, from which they could assess the characteristic kernel of tones and
semitones around it, the melody’s range in respect to the final, and many
other tonal features. Tonal weight and role manifest themselves through
where individual phrases and whole melodies begin and end, what notes
most often appear or are directly repeated, what notes form the upper and
lower boundaries of melodic contours, what notes are constantly returned
to from above or below, what notes are approached or left by leap or step,
and so forth.
Two additional kinds of information are also valuable. The relationship
of text to music can hold clues to the tonal hierarchy by means of how
individual syllables, words, and larger syntactical and structural units are
set in tones. And in rhythmically measured music, especially in metrical
music, the length of a note and its weak or strong metrical position also
convey powerful tonal information. If we knew them, the dance steps for
dance songs and instrumentally accompanied dances would also help us to
understand the roles of the tones in their tunes. But most medieval sacred
monophony was either not measured or lost its rhythmic nuances over
time, becoming in simple terms ‘plain chant’ by the twelfth century.
To pursue mode in a musical and scholarly way beyond the simplest
classification schemes into subtler issues of melodic behaviour immediately
requires limits to be defined that are generic, chronological and geograph-
ical. Poised on the brink of that potentially vast effort, the work of many
books, a few examples will serve here briefly to lay some groundwork. To
begin, let us take the approaches just suggested for reading the tonal lan-
guage of a melody and put them to work on two medieval plainchants.
One, Exsurge domine, is Gregorian, thus a Roman chant of ca 700 preserved
in a Frankish melodic dialect of ca 800, and the other, In principio, is later
medieval German chant of the mid twelfth century. To make a pointed com-
parison, they are both in mode 3. Modes 3 and 4 have E as their final, and
here, the third mode is the authentic member of the pair, which means that
these melodies both move primarily above the final (rather than around
and below it).
To penetrate any farther into their melodic languages, an approach
through the text is essential. Exsurge domine is the respond of a gradual. In
most medieval service books it was performed at mass on the third Sunday
of Lent (see Example 14.1).2 Its prose-like text is one verse from the Latin
Psalter (Vulgate Psalm 9:20). Graduals are highly formulaic chants, and
Exsurge domine shares with chants in its family of mode-3 graduals many
specific formulaic gestures of melody. These gestures are most frequently
found at points of formal text articulation, so laying out the text following
its structure and syntax allows many features of the melody to come rapidly
into focus.3
The psalm verse is comprised of two half verses, each of two subphrases,
so we may speak of it in terms of four lines. Their music is rich in mode-3
clichés. The music of line 1a begins with what we know to be a common
initial formula, which is centred on F (the final, E, has a very minor role to
play here). Lines 1b, 2a and 2b share a subsidiary opening gesture for interior
lines that rises from G to C and then falls to A. Lines 1a and 2a end with the
same cadence, a formula for the mid-point of half verses that elaborates A
and then falls through B flat and G to F and, from there, on to a cadential
goal a minor third lower on D. This particular formula, known in mode-3
chants but even more a standard half-cadence in mode 4, ends with a figure
that is also typical of cadences in mode 1. Line 1b ends with a formula
for the close of half verses, rising and falling from D and then swirling
Example 14.1 Anon., respond of Exsurge domine, a Gregorian gradual of ca800
repeatedly around F before the cadential fall back to D once more. And line
2b ends with a formula for the close of the entire verse, twice rising to C
and then falling through B flat and G to F in a variation of the formula that
closes lines 1a and 2a. Only from there does it quickly move to the ultimate
final by reiterating G before falling to the cadential goal a minor third lower
on E.
The overall range of Exsurge domine is an octave and a step, the ninth
from C up to D, and thus does not even explore the full E to E octave.
The pitch collection is reducible to a white-note diatonic scale plus B flat,
where B natural is used in ascents to C, and B flat is used as the crest of an
arc (F–A–B–G–F) in a cadential formula. The melody spends most of its
time in the fifth between F and C before regularly falling to a frequent lower
boundary point and cadential goal on low D. The D an octave above appears
as upper neighbour to C, and C itself is frequently an upper boundary tone
and repeated pitch, just as we would expect from its status as the Gregorian
‘reciting tone’ in this mode.4 Exsurge domine’s wavelike rising and falling
Example 14.2 Hildegard of Bingen, beginning of In principio, 1140s
figures, reiterations of individual pitches, and insistent spinning around

single notes and intervals of a third, are typical of the most elaborate kind
of Gregorian idiom. Weighing the role of pitches, D–F–A–C emerge as a
central collection, pitted against a secondary set including E–G–B. Thus
it should come as no surprise that Exurge domine shares many of its turns
of phrase with D-final chants. Its own final, E, is an infrequent and weak
secondary pitch.
Our other third-mode chant, In principio, is the last number, a chorus,
in Ordo virtutum, a sacred music drama or sung morality play of the 1140s
by Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) (see Example 14.2).5 In its lyrics a
narrative introduction and conclusion frame the direct speech of Christ.
Hildegard writes a kind of heightened and occasionally rhymed prose that
can be parsed as a series of sentences. These are lines of irregular syllable and
word count that are syntactic units mainly ended by a verb. In setting her
text Hildegard employs a very personal non-Gregorian melodic language.
With only a few exceptions, each sentence unfolds as a free, florid variation
on the same melodic arc, beginning with an ascent from E to B, spinning
around B in the upper register, and cadencing via a descent from C, D or E
down to low E.
Here in In principio mode 3 is represented with very different pitch
language than that of Exurge domine. The melody is broader, extending
from the C below low E to the G above octave E, for the unusually wide
total span of a twelfth, though it principally unfolds within the E–E octave.
Most striking, the note E plays a very different and more central role here
than in the gradual. Low E begins and ends the chant, and it begins and
ends almost every text line, and high E is an important pitch, too, as a
frequently occurring upper boundary tone. The next most important pitch
to E is B natural, which is similarly emphasized. (There is no place for B
flat in this idiom.) Sentences, phrases, subphrases and individual words
begin and end on E or B, and most melodic gestures either spin around
E or B, or rise or fall through the fifth or fourth from one to the other.
The central melodic role of these two pitches, and the very minor role for
C, is the basis of a melodic language very unlike that of mode-3 Gregorian
melodies. Instead, it is a personal idiom consistent with other florid E pieces
by Hildegard, and at the same time it reveals Hildegard to be well-schooled
in the prescriptive Germanic modal theory of her era (species theory), with
its strong roots in quasi-Hellenistic notions of species of octave, fourth and
fifth.
Taken in sum, the melodic and tonal languages of Exsurge domine and In
principio, two florid chants classifiable in the same mode by final and range,
exploit their tonal space in very distinct ways. The differences are not those
of two different melodies by the same composer or by two contemporaries,
Example 14.3 Anon., sequence Fulgens preclara, ninth century
but are representative of the differences one finds between melodies in

bodies of plainchant written over 400 years apart in different geographical
regions by musicians with very different schooling and different ideas about
the roles of the tones in a high-lying E-final chant.
Two other post-Gregorian plainchants, Fulgens preclara and Ortum floris,
introduce issues having to do with consistency of tonal behaviour. Fulgens
preclara is a an early Frankish sequence of the ninth century for Easter
Sunday Mass (see Example 14.3).6 Its text has the typical couplet form
of the sequence, that is, a chain of paired text lines, in which each pair
of lines is set syllabically to a melody and its immediate repetition (with
some permissible irregularity at the start and finish of the chant). This
sprawling melody is interesting in the first place because of its unusually wide
Example 14.3 (cont.)
range – from G to the D a twelfth above. The span is not, however, articulated
as a single central octave that occasionally is breached, as Hildegard handles
it in In principio. Nor do we find it to be a modal octave articulated into
species of fifth and fourth, and then extended by a fourth or fifth above
or below, as one might expect in a melody governed by Hellenistic modal
theory (e.g., G–D–G with an extra fifth above to D, or D–A–D with an extra
fourth below to A). So it is not a melody ping-ponging between boundary

tones of the fifths and fourths, and cadencing to one of the boundary tones.
Rather, the melody rises through pitch regions best defined in terms of
ascending registers and successive pitch centres (cadential goals) around
which individual phrases and sections spin.
Fulgens preclara starts its fifteen arcs of melody in its lowest register,
the region from G to C, for couplet 1 (lines 1, 2), then shifts to E for
couplets 2 and 3 (lines 3–6) before settling around D for the next eight
couplets (lines 7–22). While cadencing to D, the melodic lines open up
a higher register in contours first reaching G, then A, then B flat. The
last three couplets and closing singlet (lines 23–9) move upward again to
centre around and cadence on high A (via material first introduced in
couplet 6).
The Fulgens preclara melody is highly motivic, with motives that are
closely word-bound, and it is repetitive both on a local scale and across
couplets. Most markedly, all couplets, in all pitch registers, present close
variants of a single cadential gesture. The tonal region around high A shares
figures with the phrases cadencing to D, especially in initial gestures (now up
a fifth), and with the phrases cadencing to E, especially at the cadence itself
(now up a fourth). Well-behaved and coherent in its own terms, Fulgens
preclara is not conventionally well-behaved either in textbook modal terms
or in respect to the empirical features of earlier Gregorian chants. Its melodic
language, not surprisingly, is most akin to other new Frankish compositions
of the ninth century.
Ortum floris is a non-liturgical Latin devotional song – a versus –
probably of the later twelfth century, in four stanzas set strophically (see
Example 14.4).7 As is typical for versus poetry, the text is rigorously gov-
erned by an elaborate and strict scheme of versification, which, in turn, is
tightly reflected in the melody’s repetitions of motive and phrase. It unfolds
in the relatively narrow range of a sixth, mostly above the final, in a tonal
realm with G as the final and a signature B flat. These features allow it to
be classified as a transposed first-mode chant. But the usefulness of that
classification is to be doubted. This song’s distinctive melody, alien to the
language of Gregorian first-mode chants, is cut from the cloth of a popular
G-major/G-minor idiom employed in many Anglo-French sequences, lais,
planctus, conductus and versus that were newly composed in the twelfth
century.8
The pitch collection of Ortum floris is diatonic with the addition of
B flat, but the B-flat/B-natural inflection is handled in a recurrent way that
strikingly challenges one of the most prominent musical features of first
mode, namely the minor third above the final, and defines what is best
explained as two alternating pitch sets or tonal areas, one primary and one
Example 14.4 Anon., versus Ortum floris, twelfth century
secondary. To grasp the alternation, let us formulize the melody as XYZY,

or in more detail, reflecting the versification, as
XX Y1 Y2 ZZY3 Y1 Y2
The first of the two pitch sets, the primary material, is the opening G
material in section X spanning the fourth F to B flat (i.e., from a tone below
G through the tone and a semitone above). It returns at section Z in a
recognizable extension opening up the fifth from G to D. The contrasting
or secondary pitch set, in section Y, functions as a realm ‘away from home’.
Spanning the fifth from F to C, it is centred not on the lowest pitch, F,
but on A, moving a minor third above to C (by tone and semitone, with B
natural) and a major third below to F. Y1 and Y2 are an open and closed
melodic pair (and the melodic phrase Y3 is a variant of Y1 ). Closure in Y2
is accomplished by a return to the original G pitch set via the cadential
reintroduction of B flat and the B–A–G descent. If the two pitch sets are
condensed to scales, we have F–G–A–B–C–D systematically contrasted
with F–G–A–B–C, with very different weights for the individual pitches in
each set.
To practised throats and ears, the four chants discussed above emerge
as representatives of very different tonal idioms and formal types. Each is
unique, yet is related to a larger repertory, grounded in a particular time

and place, with which it holds many features of style in common. Growing
in familiarity, and thus in individuality, all four chants resist being packaged
as New Age background music and reduced to the status of aural wallpaper.
Medieval chant is far from homogeneous, and its distinct idioms are there
to be savoured by the virtuosos (and connoisseurs) of the diatonic.
The medieval polyphony surviving in musical notation floats atop a vast

unwritten substrate whose roots undoubtedly go back for millennia before
a significant amount of evidence begins to turn up for it in the ninth
century. Procedures for making polyphony differ both chronologically and
geographically, and depend on the performance milieu as well. And it would
not be surprising if the elite practices of professional singers at cathedral
and court bore some kinship to local folk polyphony, though this escapes
proof for now.
As one secure point of departure for some basic considerations of
polyphony, we may safely say that a very high percentage of all medieval
polyphony is for just two voice parts. This is true historically, generically
and geographically well into the fourteenth century. It is true for ecclesi-
astical organa, for conductus and versus, for simple polyphony including
psalm and lesson tones, for secular and sacred motets from France, for sec-
ular songs in French, Italian and English, and for polyphonic instrumental
dances. Moreover, most of the three- and four-voiced polyphony from the
end of this epoch is based on two-part counterpoint, with two voices clearly
working as a structural duet to which one or more additional parts have
been added.
Questions of ultimate origins always lead scholars onto dangerous
ground, but it seems intuitively likely that two-voice polyphony began
in the decoration of unison performance, so that the discantus, the second
(‘dis’) melodic line (‘cantus’), may be understood as splitting off from the
first and ranging alongside it through the same tonal space.
The calculated addition of a second voice to a complete, previously
existing melody, whether the new musical line is added in precisely the
same register or lies generally higher or lower, seems plausibly to be a next
step (beyond splitting off and returning) in exploring the potential of the
effect. If instead the process of composition is more simultaneous in the
composing together of two entirely new voices (a way of making artful
polyphony from scratch that is new in the West in the twelfth century),
then we still normally assume, and can usually detect after the fact, the
priority of one voice over the other in the act of composition.
A basic observation, therefore, concerns the degree of entanglement
or separation of voices, the most fundamental and deliberate conception
under which composers and performers are operating. The new part may
be added above or below the original, or be deliberately entwined – that
is, sharing range and frequently crossing the given voice. We tend to find
that the crossing of voices is usually either welcomed or shunned. If mainly
unfolding in distinct registers, the two voices may stay free of all contact,
just touch on unisons, or cross occasionally.
The setting may be note-against-note (strictly or very nearly so), or
more florid. If more florid, it is most often the second part that will have
more notes than the original, as long as it is not merely adding some kind
of drone. The relationship may be to set many new notes against one in
the original or, in some cases, to set a larger number of notes in the added
voice against a smaller cluster of original notes. In the latter case, just how
to align the notes for a modern edition or performance can be a knotty
conundrum.
In the resulting polyphony, the original voice may retain its primacy,
or instead become a background element, a foundational tenor or cantus
firmus. Looked at from the other direction, we may ask of the second part
whether it remains subordinate or whether it emerges to an important
degree as independent, acquiring the characteristics of a cogent, coherent,
idiomatic melody. It may move entirely into the foreground, or have its
independence but still be subordinate, which is for example how we would
characterize the tenor of a Machaut chanson of the mid 1300s.
We further will want to know what constraints or rules are apparent for
the defining of consonance and dissonance, and for the handling of voice-
leading and cadences, and what is their effect on the independence and
tonal features of the new part. Under these constraints, how do the tonal
and melodic features of the new voice compare to those of the original? And
what is the stylistic relationship of the new line to contemporary idioms for
new monophonic songs, or in comparable polyphony?
The commonest simple form of polyphony is parallelism – a thickening
or doubling by mirroring the contour of the original a few steps away.
Whether flexibly or strictly applied, parallelism effectively preserves the
identity of the original melody. The two voices may move out and back from
unison to the interval of parallel motion – thus starting as one, then splitting
and rejoining. Alternatively, the discanting voice may be set from the outset
at the desired interval and remain always at that distance, or fall back into
a unison at cadences. Note-against-note parallelism appears to be a strong
norm in the earliest practices of which we have any record, for example
ecclesiastical organum of the ninth to eleventh centuries, and thereafter in
what scholars call simple polyphony, meaning the most rudimentary and
widespread practice of extemporized polyphonic adornment of a chant.
Some elementary written examples barely go beyond it.
Example 14.5a Guido, modified parallel organum at the fourth below from Micrologus, ca1025
Example 14.5b Anon., reciting tone for a Christmas matins lesson, ca1300
Example 14.5c Burgos, Monasterio de Las Huelgas 9, fol. 54v, from the sequence Victime paschali
laudes
Example 14.5d London, British Library, Additional 16975, fol. 166, from the hymn Conditor alme
siderum
From the medieval West there are examples in two voices of parallel
seconds, third, fourths, fifths and sixths. Not all possibilities for these inter-
vals sounding above or below are found, however, and some preferences
demonstrably unfold on geographical or chronological axes. For example,
parallel fourths lying beneath the chant are the predominant language of
Example 14.6a Anon., Nobilis humilis
Example 14.6b Anon., Laudes deo, troped lesson from Christmas midnight mass, mid fourteenth
century
ecclesiastical organum in Anglo-French theory and practice from the ninth

to the eleventh centuries (see Example 14.5a).
The status and role of the fourth, and of the location of the added
voice, then change in an extraordinary and epochal paradigm shift. By
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in organum, clausula and motet, the
counterpointing voice is conceived as lying above the original melody, and
the preferred interval for parallel voice-leading is at the fifth above (see
Examples 14.5b, 14.5c, 14.5d).9 Parallel fourths disappear in two-voice
writing, and the fourth is treated more and more as a harmonic dissonance.
A great sea-change in taste has occurred.
A different sonorous image emerges at the same time in some elite
polyphony in the British Isles, where thirds and sixths are often used har-
monically as consonances and in parallel voice-leading. We believe that this
very different sound world reflects folk practices and is a regional preference
that extends into Scandinavia and Iceland. English discant treatises allow
parallel imperfect consonances and acknowledge discanting below as well as
above the given voice. In practice, in two voices, thirds are found in parallel
above and below, as well as twining around the original voice, and sixths
are found below (see Examples 14.6a, 14.6b, 14.6c).10
Example 14.6c Anon., Ave celi regina virginum
Example 14.7 Anon., clausula on Nostrum, early thirteenth century
Far to the south, parallel seconds are attested in some Milanese funeral
music, where note-against-note polyphony follows beneath the chant in a
mixture of parallel seconds and parallel fourths.11
Elements of the parallel style often remain detectable in more elaborate
works, in particular where a counterpoint of varied harmonic intervals and
voice-leading can be read as the florid expansion upon a simpler substrate.
In a large number of two-voice Parisian conductus and discant clausulae of
the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for example, harmony is governed
by fifths sounding above the principal voice at the beginning and the end, at
the outset and conclusion of most important interior phrases and sections,
and in metrically strong positions more locally. Although the two voices
may cross, an underlying scenario of splitting and rejoining is not at work
here; rather, the rule is greater distance, independence, and equality of the
parts (see Example 14.7).12
The two-voice French and English ecclesiastical organa of the later tenth
century, such as are preserved in a Winchester repertory, are composed
Example 14.8 Guillaume de Machaut, refrain of virelai Se je souspir, mid fourteenth century
‘from the top down’, with the discanting line ranging beneath the given
chant, while organa of the twelfth century are composed ‘from the bottom
up’. Reversing field again, composing ‘from the top down’ defines the com-
positional strategy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century polyphonic French
refrain songs, where the tenor is added around or below the principal
melodic line, the cantus. Machaut and his contemporaries and successors
explored various possibilities for the relationship of the cantus and the tenor
in respect to cadences and the width of counterpoint, and on occasion they
will cross the voices.13
The tightly interwoven cantus and tenor of the refrain of Machaut’s
virelai Se je souspir show one possibility (see Example 14.8).14 In this song
the text is sung only by the upper voice, whose tune is a well-shaped melody
lying above and below its final on F. This melody in all likelihood was
composed in its entirety before the tenor was added to it. The tenor is
closely related, yet subordinate, helping to propel rhythmic activity within
the phrase by off-beat accents, and to sustain sound and motion across
the phrase rests in the cantus. It is, in respect to range, not a lower-lying
part but tightly intertwined with the cantus in the same plagal register
around the final; the voices share the ninth C to D, to which the cantus
adds one higher step (E); they cross regularly, and cadence to a unison.
The two parts sound mainly thirds and fifths together, with occasionally
unisons, seconds and fourths, while rarely separating to sixths and octaves,
and once a tenth; contrary motion between the voices predominates. In
other polyphonic French chansons we see composers explore different
Example 14.9 Giovanni da Firenze, first text line of madrigal Nel meço, mid fourteenth century
possibilities for the relationship of the two voices in respect to width of coun-
terpoint, especially with the duo lying further apart on average. In effect
this means that the tenor lies more consistently beneath, or further beneath
(rather than entwined around) the cantus. By later in the fourteenth cen-
tury the tenor most often sounds the octave beneath the cantus at structural
cadences.15
Early Italian trecento two-voice madrigals articulate a different concept
of polyphonic duo. Characteristically they begin and end on a unison and are
fully texted in both voices, with simultaneous declamation of syllables and
no crossing of parts. The conception is of two equal voices singing the text
together that split, keep their distance, and then rejoin. The duo is decidely
not entwining, however. The upper part is generally more rhythmically
active, while the lower has more long-sustained notes, especially in the
melismas that open and close the setting of each line of text; upper-voice
rhythmic diminutions usually decorate one tone or a simple progression
over the longer-held lower note. As a rule the upper voice here, too, as
in the French chanson, has precedence in the structural duet, and the
typical prevalence of harmonic fifths, and of parallel fifths in the underlying
contrapuntal motion suggest the conceptual origin of the style in modified
‘underfifth’ parallelism. The setting of the first text line of Giovanni da
Firenze’s madrigal Nel meço a sey paghone exemplifies these features of the
earliest two-voiced trecento duet songs (see Example 14.9).16
In two-voice polyphony that polyphonically elaborates a chant or chant
excerpt, tonality is ultimately governed by the behaviour of the chant.
In freely composed polyphony (free, that is, in the sense of lacking the
constraint of a pre-existing melody) of the later twelfth century and beyond,
the possibility exists for the deliberate juxtaposition of contrasting tonal
areas. As in monophonic chants, we may find temporary internal shifts and
Example 14.10 Anon., conductus Soli nitorem, early thirteenth century
also permanent shifts of tonal language and behaviour. One final example,
a two-voice Notre Dame era conductus, Soli nitorem, will introduce us to
some of the possibilities (see Example 14.10).17
The two voices of Soli nitorem are tightly entwined equal partners in their
duet. The overall tonal centre of the conductus is G, which is indeed the
tonal centre of about 60 per cent of the polyphonic versus and conductus
of the Aquitanian and Notre Dame repertories. Here, both voices move
primarily in the G to G octave, though the lower descends occasionally to
the D below lower G, and they hold a great deal of motivic material in
common. In the repertory to which Soli nitorem belongs, there are G pieces
with B natural and G pieces with signature B flat, but a very high percentage,
curiously, actually employ both B natural and B flat, changing from one
to the other in a structural way. Soli nitorem shows just this alternation.
(Ortum floris, the tonally fluctuating chant discussed above, originates in
the same milieu.)
This conductus explores a total of three tonal areas, which are aligned
with its formal architecture and with the poetry’s verse structure. An initial
cauda, none of whose musical material is later reused, is on G with signed
B flat. Then follow the first four lines of the conductus text, written as two
couplets. Each couplet is set with declamation on double longs for its first
line, moves to declamation on single longs (fifth mode) for its second line,
and is followed by a first-mode cauda that concludes with a short point
of sustained-tone organum. Tonally, the text couplets are set on G with
B natural; each musical section begins at the octave and concludes at the
unison.
In the second half of the poem, however, the poet shifts versification
and syntax, and the composer has matched this textual shift with a shift
of tonal material, now emphasizing the fifth A to E with C as central pitch
axis and (local) final. Closure is achieved in a final cauda that revisits
the musical material of the previous first-mode caudae, thus moving back
to a tonal centre on G with B natural, though the cauda material is now
recast into a rhythmically broader fifth mode before the final sustained-tone
flourish.
A move into a discussion of three- and four-voice writing, as it emerges at

the very end of the Middle Ages, would not be out of place at this moment,
but space does not permit it. I will simply emphasize that most fundamental
considerations are the same as for two-voice writing. We may ask if a pre-
existing melody is being garlanded with additional parts unfolding together
with it, or is the entire polyphonic complex of new composition? If new,
does one voice have priority? Or now is there perhaps a structural duet of
two counterpointing voices that has conceptual or chronological priority?
Can we speak of the work having been composed from the bottom up
or from the top down? And is its tonal language consistent or deliberately
varied? From these points of departure, our trajectory of inquiry must move
back into the theory treatises, to generate from their dicta a set of queries
involving the grammar and vocabulary of consonance and dissonance, and
of voice-leading and cadencing. Furthermore, the unfolding of constructive
principles in three and four parts is more diverse, and even more contingent
on genre (motet, chanson, conductus) and geography (for instance, the
fourteenth-century motet in Italy, England, and France) than previously.
But these must be topics and questions for another day.
15 Ecclesiastical foundations and
secular institutions
rebecca a. baltzer
After the fall of Rome and the disappearance of the Roman Empire in the late
fifth century, the sixth and seventh centuries are considered to represent the
low point of medieval civilization in the West, when Roman administrative
and political systems had crumbled and there was little to take their place.
The Christian church was scattered, fragmentary and unable to exert any
universal authority. As society became largely rural again under the control
of local lords, and as towns and cities declined, the light of classical learning
came close to being entirely snuffed out.
In Frankish territory, the sixth and seventh centuries are referred to as
the Merovingian period, after the Merovingian kings. By the eighth century
the Merovingian kings had become such ineffectual figureheads that the real
ruler/administrator was the Mayor of the Palace, supposedly the king’s chief
assistant. The Carolingian dynasty stemmed from two Mayors of the Palace –
Charles Martel (r. 714–41) and Pépin III the Short (r. 741–68), the father of
Charlemagne (r. 768–814). Pépin enquired of the pope if the person who
ruled as king of the Franks ought not to be called King of the Franks, and
the pope agreed. Thus in 751, with papal sanction, Pépin deposed the last
Merovingian king, sent him off to a monastery, and assumed the throne in
name as well as in fact.
In the Carolingian world of the eighth and ninth centuries, there were
three ‘orders’ of society: the regular clergy, the secular clergy, and the laity.
The regular clergy, who lived apart from the world under a rule (regula in
Latin) such as the Rule of St Benedict, included monks, nuns and a few
others. The secular clergy, who lived in the world (secula in Latin), were
those who staffed cathedrals and parish churches. The laity comprised the
complete spectrum of non-clerical society, from the poorest peasant to the
richest lord. Because life was still primarily rural, many members of the
nobility were more powerful than the churchmen in their territory and in
fact controlled the appointment of bishops and priests in their domains.
Except for the top ranks of the regular and secular clergy and the lay nobility,
the majority of society was largely illiterate.1 Many parish priests had little
education and could barely stumble through the liturgy in Latin. It was
primarily the regular clergy (monks) who copied manuscripts and preserved
[263]
264 Rebecca A. Baltzer
what remained of the classical and early Christian written heritage; their
schools, too, were more capable and more stable than cathedral schools at
this time, since the few cathedral schools often depended on a single teacher
who could not guarantee the school’s continuity. In the ninth century, the
largest monastic libraries were at Lorsch, which had some six hundred
manuscripts, and Fulda, which had nearly a thousand.
Early in his rule, Charlemagne perceived that to have the three orders
of society functioning as they should, a more educated and literate clergy
was needed. He depended on a partnership with the church to carry out
his political and educational goals; he sought to have the clergy function
as extensions of his government who could help to keep independent-
minded and rebellious lords in check and who could ensure the Christian
salvation of his people. For this, they needed more education. Not only
did Charlemagne establish his palace school, run from 782 to 796 by the
well-educated Englishman Alcuin of York (ca730–804), but he encouraged
the establishment of other schools throughout his realms. He appointed
men who had been educated at his palace school as bishops to go and do
likewise.2
Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard (d. 840), a son of noble parents
who was educated at the monastery of Fulda, was sent by his abbot to
Charlemagne’s palace school, and there he was a first-hand observer of
the last two decades of Charlemagne’s life. He reports in his Vita Caroli
interesting details of this life that shed light on music and the arts at court.3
For example, Charlemagne wanted all his children, both boys and girls,
to be instructed in the liberal arts. The sons also learned horsemanship,
hunting and battle, while the daughters learned spinning, weaving and
cloth-making. He took his children with him on journeys, and he always
wanted them present at meals. At the dinner table, it was his custom to listen
to readings or to music4 – the readings were about ‘the stories and deeds of
olden time: he was fond, too, of Saint Augustine’s books, and especially of
the one entitled The City of God’.5 Einhard adds that Charlemagne ‘also had
the old rude songs that celebrate the deeds and wars of the ancient kings
[chansons de geste] written out for transmission to posterity’, and that he
even began a grammar of his native language.6
Einhard reports that Charlemagne not only had an excellent command
of his native tongue (Frankish) but also could speak Latin as eloquently as
though it were his first language. He could understand Greek, too, but was
less adept at speaking it. Einhard adds:
He most zealously cultivated the liberal arts, held those who taught them in
great esteem, and conferred great honors upon them. He took lessons in
grammar of the deacon Peter of Pisa, at that time an aged man. Another
265 Ecclesiastical foundations and secular institutions
deacon, Albin of Britain, surnamed Alcuin, a man of Saxon extraction, who

was the greatest scholar of the day, was his teacher in other branches of
learning. The King spent much time and labor with him studying rhetoric,
dialectics, and especially astronomy; he learned to reckon, and used to
investigate the motions of the heavenly bodies most curiously, with an
intelligent scrutiny. He also tried to write, and used to keep tablets and
blanks in bed under his pillow, that at leisure hours he might accustom his
hand to form the letters; however, as he did not begin his efforts in due
season, but late in life, they met with ill success.7
He cherished with the greatest fervor and devotion the principles of the
Christian religion, which had been instilled into him from infancy. Hence it
was that he built the beautiful basilica at Aix-la-Chapelle [Aachen], which
he adorned with gold and silver and lamps, and with rails and doors of solid
brass. He had the columns and marbles for this structure brought from
Rome and Ravenna, for he could not find such as were suitable elsewhere.8
He was a constant worshipper at this church as long as his health permitted,
going morning and evening, even after nightfall, besides attending mass; and
he took care that all the services there conducted should be administered
with the utmost possible propriety . . . He was at great pains to improve the
church reading and psalmody, for he was well skilled in both although he
neither read in public nor sang, except in a low tone and with others.9
Charlemagne had a sincere high regard for the holy places in Rome and
for the pope; he saw himself as the protector of the pope and the church, and
he wanted Frankish churches to do as the Roman church did, insofar as it
was possible. Over time, his revival of learning, his interest in a well-ordered
liturgy performed by well-educated clerics, and his interest in building and
maintaining churches led to a true renaissance of education and the arts as
they functioned to serve the church.10 This Carolingian renaissance saw in
music the development of the ecclesiastical modal system; the beginnings
of musical notation; the rise of tropes, prosulae, sequences and liturgical
drama; and the beginnings of polyphony.
Charlemagne’s palace school included as students not only Charlemagne
himself but his entire family and his courtiers, as well as various scholars
attracted by Alcuin. Under Alcuin’s direction, the palace school focused
upon the verbal arts of the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic),
with selections from the mathematical arts of the Quadrivium (arithmetic,
geometry, music and astronomy) included, all for the purpose of producing
a more educated Christian society. Alcuin himself wrote treatises on the
arts of the Trivium – grammar, rhetoric and the virtues, and dialectic. A
very short treatise on music, known as the Musica Albini (‘the Musica of
Albinus’), dating from the end of the eighth century, has also been ascribed
to him. It is the first extant writing on music to mention the medieval
church modes. For much of the twentieth century, scholars believed that
the attribution of this little work to Alcuin was not true, but Hartmut Möller
has convincingly argued that this attribution is correct.11
Only four paragraphs long, the treatise says nothing about precise pitches
or how the modes differ from one another, except that the plagals are lower
than the authentics; it basically just reports that an eightfold classifica-
tion of Romano/Frankish (that is, Gregorian) chant was being made by
the Franks.12 Similarly, the earliest surviving tonary, the so-called Tonary
of St Riquier, is a late-eighth-century fragmentary source that classifies
chants by mode, comprising a list of various chants in each mode.13 These
two documents indicate that the Carolingian interest in things Byzantine
(in this case the Byzantine octoechos) together with the Frankish pas-
sion for order had already combined, before the beginning of the ninth
century, to begin modally classifying the large repertory of Gregorian
chant.
Charlemagne’s Admonitio generalis, issued in 789,14 contains a provision
listing the feasts of the liturgical year which should be universally observed
in churches: Christmas, St Stephen, St John the Evangelist, Holy Innocents,
the octave of Christmas, Epiphany, the octave of Epiphany, the Purification
of the Virgin, Easter week, the Major Litany, Ascension, Pentecost, St John
the Baptist, Sts Peter and Paul, St Martin, and St Andrew. It specifically left
open the question of the Assumption of the Virgin, which several centuries
later had become one of the most important saints’ feasts in the liturgical
calendar.
Despite the important courts of Charlemagne and his successors, espe-
cially that of his grandson Charles the Bald, who ruled 840–77, monasteries
remained the primary centres of learning in the ninth to the eleventh cen-
turies. During this time, of special significance for music was the south Ger-
man monastery of St Gall, today in Switzerland.15 Founded by Irish monks,
St Gall for several centuries had a very active scriptorium which produced
beautiful and important manuscripts, and a portion of its medieval library
still survives there today, with many codices now digitally available online.16
The earliest surviving liturgical book expressly designed to include musi-
cal notation comes from St Gall – Stiftsbibliothek MS 359, copied in the
very early tenth century: it is a cantatorium that provides neumes only for
the soloistic chants of the mass (graduals, alleluias, and tracts).17 Other
notated Sangallian chantbooks – graduals, the Hartker Antiphonal, and
several tropers – stem from the second quarter of the tenth century into
the twelfth. The tropers include works by Notker Balbulus (d. 912) and
Tuotilo (d. 915), both monks at the abbey. Notker’s Liber hymnorum (in
Stiftsbibliothek MS 381) is justly famous for its establishment of the East
Frankish liturgical sequence based on West Frankish models. Notker wrote

some forty eloquent sequence texts to improve upon those brought with
their West Frankish melodies to the abbey by a monk from Jumièges in
Normandy who was fleeing the Norman invasions; Tuotilo left us a number
of tropes for which he composed both text and music. In both cases, the
melodies are unquestionably from the ninth century.18
By the later tenth century a monastic revival was under way in England.
The Wessex king Edgar appointed his mentor Ethelwold (b. ca908) to be
Bishop of Winchester (963–84), and there Ethelwold removed the secular
canons and established a community of Benedictine monks to staff the
Old Minster.19 The multitude of new English monastic foundations led
abbots and abbesses to meet the king in circa 970 to formulate a universal
customary to regulate monastic life. The result was the Regularis Concordia,
drawn up by Bishop Ethelwold. It includes his well-known account of the
Visitatio sepulchri or Easter liturgical drama as performed by monks at
the Old Minster.20 Ethelwold thus provides the earliest description of the
widespread Easter dialogue trope Quem queritis performed as a drama at
the end of Easter matins. In this version the original introit trope has already
been expanded by the addition of several antiphons with appropriate texts
from elsewhere in the liturgy.
Within a period of about eighty years (circa 970–1050), the monks
at Winchester became renowned not only for the practice of troping the
liturgy but also for the creation of sequences for the mass and a large body
of liturgical polyphony, all preserved with Anglo-Saxon staffless neumes
in the two Winchester tropers: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 775,
and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 473. The tropers contain both
proper and ordinary tropes plus the largest repertory of early sequences
west of the Rhine and north of the Loire.21 And the Corpus Christi troper
contains the earliest collection of polyphony intended for performance in
the liturgy – that is, polyphony not found simply as examples in a theoretical
treatise. In the back of the book (fols. 135–190v) are organal voices for
more than 170 chants: Kyries, Glorias, alleluias, tracts (unique in medieval
polyphony), sequences, great responsories for vespers and matins, and a
few miscellaneous items.22 A difficulty for modern editors and performers,
however, is how to combine the staffless neumes of the organal voices,
which do not exist in more precisely pitched later copies, with the chant
voices elsewhere in the tropers; most efforts have followed the rules of
contemporary theoretical treatments of organum such as those of Guido of
Arezzo.
Overall, the monastic musicians at Winchester exhibited their liturgical
creativity on all available compositional fronts – tropes, prosulae, sequences,
polyphony, and liturgical drama, with significant interactions in the first

four categories such as troped polyphonic ordinary chants and polyphonic
settings of sequences. A major feast day at Winchester Cathedral in the first
half of the eleventh century, with the liturgy troped and embellished with
polyphony to the maximum extent possible, was no doubt a lengthy but
splendidly impressive occasion, one not immediately replicable anywhere
else at that time.
In the twelfth century we can witness the lives and effects on music
of two singularly important women who could hardly be more different:
Eleanor of Aquitaine (1124?–1204) and Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179).
Eleanor, who inherited the duchy of Aquitaine and the county of Poitou
from her father in 1137, soon became queen of France as the wife of
Louis VII; she later became duchess of Normandy and queen of England
as the wife of Henry II, and subsequently mother of two kings of Eng-
land, Richard the Lionheart and John. Over time she became a consum-
mate political figure who was not afraid to exercise her considerable power
and influence on behalf of her goals, even when they ran counter to her
husband’s.23
Undeterred by gender or motherhood, in 1147 Eleanor went with Louis
VII on the Second Crusade to retake the Holy Land. But as the marriage
produced only two daughters and grew increasingly cold, in the course of
a few weeks in 1152 Eleanor transferred control of huge territories in the
south of France from one kingdom to another when she left Louis and
married Henry, who became king of England in 1154. She bore him at least
eight children, but only two outlived her.
Eleanor was the granddaughter of one of the first troubadours
(Guillaume IX of Aquitaine), and her patronage in courtly life and sec-
ular song may be glimpsed in the troubadour songs – more than 40 cansos
on themes of fin’ amors – of Bernart de Ventadorn, whose posthumous vida
placed him at her court and even suggested a fanciful romantic involvement
between the two.24 Also the romances of the earliest known trouvère poet–
composer, Chrétien de Troyes, who was associated with Eleanor’s Capetian
daughter Marie, Countess of Champagne, give a vivid picture of music at
court, and we may assume that this picture reflects Eleanor’s court as well
as her daughters’, since they were often held together. Such gatherings were
important sites of musical mingling between south and north, troubadours
and trouvères, in the second half of the twelfth century. Erec et Enide, the
first of Chrétien’s romances, dates from ca1165–1170. Whenever a royal
wedding, coronation, or other joyous occasion is described, music takes
an important part in the proceedings. For instance, we find that after the
wedding of Erec and Enide,
Quant la corz fu tote asanblee, When the court was all assembled,
n’ot menestrel an la contree there was not a minstrel in the countryside
qui rien seüst de nul deduit, with pleasing accomplishment
qui a la cort ne fussent tuit. that did not come to the court.
An la sale molt grant joie ot; In the great hall there was much joy,
chascuns servi de ce qu’il sot; each one contributing what he could:
cil saut, cil tunbe, cil anchante, one jumps, one tumbles, one does magic;
li uns sifle, li autres chante, one whistles, another sings,
cil flaute, cil chalemele, one plays the flute, one the shawm,
cil gigue, li autres viele; one the gigue, another the vielle.
puceles querolent et dancent; Maidens carole and dance,
trestuit de joie fere tancent. and outdo each other in merrymaking.
Riens n’est qui joie puisse fere Nothing which can give joy
ne cuer d’ome a leesce trere, and incline the heart to gladness
qui as noces ne fust le jor. was left undone at the wedding that day.
Sonent tinbre, sonent tabor, There is playing of timbrel, tabor,
muses, estives et freteles, bagpipes, panpipes,
et buisines et chalemeles.25 buisines, and shawms.
On another joyous occasion at court it is mentioned that
Harpes, vieles, i resonent, Harps, vielles, gigues, psaltery,

gigues, sautier et sinphonies, and organistrums resound,
et trestotes les armonies and all the other hurdy-gurdies
qu’an porroit dire ne nomer.26 that one could name.
Eleanor’s incalculable influence on political and dynastic events con-

tinued on through her grandchildren and their children during most of
the thirteenth century. She personally chose her granddaughter Blanche of
Castile to marry Louis VIII of France; their heir, her great-grandson Louis IX
(1226–70), became a saint. She was also the great-grandmother of the most
prolific trouvère in the thirteenth century, Thibaut IV (1201–53), Count of
Champagne and ‘roi de Navarre’, who holds the place of honour under this
title at the beginning of several thirteenth-century chansonniers.27 Another
of her descendants in the same generation was Alfonso X (‘El Sabio’), king
of Castile and León, at whose court in the mid thirteenth century the col-
lections of more than 400 Cantigas de Santa Maria were produced, a rich
mine of music and folklore.28
In contrast to Eleanor’s political, dynastic and courtly visibility, Hilde-
gard of Bingen, the tenth child of noble parents, was given at an early age
as a tithe to the church and spent her long life as a cloistered nun in areas
along the middle Rhine. But Hildegard was unusual in the range of her
spiritual and intellectual activity, for which she became known as ‘the Sibyl
of the Rhine’. Over a period of some thirty years, around 1140–70, she
produced three books of her mystical visions and revelations, a treatise on

natural history and another on medical treatments, lives of the German
saints Disibod and Rupert, and more than 300 extant letters to contem-
poraries who range from popes and kings to other monastics and to ordi-
nary lay folk. During this same time, Hildegard’s spiritual and mystical life
inspired her to compose both sacred poetry and music – some 77 works
collected into her Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, extant in two
musical manuscripts from the 1170s and 1180s with German neumes.29
Though her musical style is distinctively different from the inherited
plainsong of her day, Hildegard nonetheless functionally labelled her com-
positions as antiphons, responds, sequences, hymns, a Kyrie and an alleluia.
They tend to have a wide ambitus (pitch range) extending through both the
authentic and plagal dimensions of a church mode, and they make frequent
use of recurring melodic formulas, including broad leaps of a fifth, that
coalesce to create a sense of ecstatic spirituality. We can only assume that
her compositions were included wherever appropriate in the liturgy of the
nuns under her spiritual care, since a particular use that they followed has
never been firmly identified. Hildegard also composed the earliest extant
dramatic morality play, the Ordo virtutum.30 Using more than eighty for-
mulaic melodies, it is sung throughout by personified virtues and the soul,
except for the part of the devil, who cannot sing and only speaks. Whether
Hildegard’s music was ever heard beyond her convent walls during her life-
time we cannot know, but it is evident that she considered sacred music to
be both an individual and a communal way of approaching God.
By the third quarter of the twelfth century, the new Gothic cathedral of
Notre Dame in Paris was under construction to replace an earlier church,
and with this building flowered a new creativity in sacred and liturgical
polyphony, designed to embellish the most important occasions of the
church year in this new ecclesiastical space. Notre Dame of Paris is a pre-
eminent example of a cathedral staffed by a chapter of secular canons,
presided over by a bishop. The hierarchy of secular clerical orders included
priests, deacons, subdeacons, acolytes, and tonsured clerks. The chapter at
Notre Dame was composed of 51 canons plus the dean. At the top were the
eight dignitaries – the dean (the spiritual and administrative head of the
chapter), the cantor or precentor (in charge of the music, liturgical books,
and basic education of the singers), three archdeacons (each in charge of
the lesser clergy in approximately one third of the diocese of Paris), the
succentor (the cantor’s chief assistant), the chancellor (in charge of the legal
work and the library of the chapter, and later, the head of the University of
Paris as well), and the penitentiarius (the bishop’s chaplain, who substituted
for him when necessary).31 Next in rank were the 28 beneficed clerks, each
of whom held a benefice or prebend that paid his living; these clerks were
the performers of the daily services of the opus dei. Twenty of the clerks
were canons (either priests, deacons, or subdeacons), while the other eight
were known as the ‘great vicars’ of Notre Dame; they served vicariously for
the dignitaries of the chapter, whose administrative duties frequently kept
them away from the choir. Though canons of the chapter did not live under
a monastic rule, most lived within the cloister to the north of the cathedral;
some were required to do so by virtue of their offices.
Below the beneficed clerks of the chapter were sixteen unbeneficed clerks,
known as the clerks of matins or pauperes clerici. Since they did not have
endowed positions, they were dependent on the charity of those who did.
While they might function as household help for the canons who lived in the
cloister, they also played a major role in the performance of the liturgy: the
six most senior clerks of matins, known as the machicoti, were the soloists
and singers of polyphony, who took special pride in their distinctive reper-
tory and musical skills. All the unbeneficed clerks were annually required
to submit their resignations to the chapter, who could refuse to reappoint
them if their work or behaviour had been inappropriate. Below the clerks of
matins in the thirteenth century were as many as fourteen choirboys; they
had specific singing assignments in the liturgy during vespers, matins, and
mass and were schooled in the cloister, with the hope that in due time they
might grow up to become canons.
The cathedral also employed four priests and four laymen as marguilliers
(matricularii) or sextons, who had responsibility for the security of the
building and the furnishings and people inside. One was required to sleep
in the cathedral every night, and at least two had to be present during the
day. They made sure that the right liturgical objects were in the right places
for the services; they replenished the candles; they put away the vessels and
utensils after a service; and they literally decked the halls (with banners
etc.) on important feast days. Not the least of their duties was bell-ringing
to signal the start of services and other important events in the life of the
chapter and the cathedral.32
Except for the area immediately surrounding the main altar, the cathe-
dral belonged to the chapter of canons, and the bishop needed their per-
mission to enter and approach his space at the altar to officiate at a service.
The chapter answered directly to the Holy See or to the papal legate, not to
the bishop, though the bishop had certain strings of power that he could
pull. For example, he appointed to office seven of the eight dignitaries of
the chapter – all but the dean, who was elected by the chapter; naturally, the
bishop would appoint officials who were sympathetic to his views.
In the liturgy at Notre Dame, polyphony could be heard on the most
important feast days at vespers, matins, mass and certain processions (a pro-
cession at vespers or the procession after terce). The great responsory and
Benedicamus Domino at first vespers; the third, sixth and ninth respon-
sories of matins (one of which might be the same as the vespers responsory);
the gradual and alleluia in the mass; and the verses of processional respon-
sories are the customary polyphonic items found in the Magnus liber organi.
More than a hundred days per year with sufficient rank for polyphony had
at least one organum available. On the four most important annual feasts
– Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and the Assumption of the Virgin, liturgical
books specify that the full complement of six soloists from the clerks of
matins sang polyphony. At the next level below (for example, St Stephen,
Epiphany, the Purification, Sts Peter and Paul), four soloists were required.
Feasts that minimally qualified for polyphony would have two soloists and
most likely only the gradual or the alleluia in the mass set in polyphony,
while the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin – the most important saint’s
feast at Notre Dame – included opportunities for as many as eight organa,
counting the vigil mass on the eve of the day. Thus the amount of polyphony
on a given feast, like the number and weight of candles specified to light
the cathedral, was an immediate indication of liturgical rank and signifi-
cance – and, more indirectly, an indication of cost to the cathedral and its
staff.
Both the bishop and the chapter owned large amounts of property –
their temporal, as opposed to their spiritual, authority – which produced
revenues for their respective operations. Overseeing the administration
and civil jurisdicition of those properties and supervising the collection
of revenues were very time-consuming obligations for the bishop’s men
and for the dignitaries of the chapter, but both employed a corps of civil
servants to administer them. The chapter even had its own ‘bar of justice’
where disputes were settled, and its own jail. These were needed because
living under its temporal jurisdiction were some 2,000 serfs who simply
belonged to the chapter, and during the years between the mid twelfth and
the mid thirteenth century the chapter imposed one ‘head tax’ after another
on the poor serfs. This was, of course, a very good source of income for the
building of the cathedral, and it was employed with shameless frequency –
several times in a given decade, on more than one occasion.
But a serf could pay a certain sum of money to the chapter – a ransom,
in effect – and free himself from the feudal obligation of serfdom, though
he was probably then indebted to a moneylender for the rest of his life.
The cost varied from 15 to 90 livres, and this ‘manumission’ of serfs, as it
was known, was another source of enormous income to the chapter. Great
numbers of serfs obtained their manumission in the 1230s and 1240s, for
instance, and it was during this same period that at least a dozen feasts were
either newly added or increased in rank in the cathedral calendar, doubtless
funded unawares by the freed serfs.
Adding a new feast to the calendar or elevating in rank a feast already

present required the agreement of both the chapter and the bishop; each
had to commit the necessary funds on an annual basis to pay for candles and
for those who participated at the altar or in choir in the services, extra pay
being an incentive to encourage fulfilment of their liturgical duties. In the
1240s, for instance, ordinary members of the choir received two deniers for
attending mass, but singers who ‘organized’ the alleluia were paid six deniers
each.33 Endowments for a specific feast were welcomed, but sometimes new
feasts were funded out of general revenues of the bishop and chapter. With
its vast properties and administrative operations, a secular cathedral such
as Notre Dame of Paris in the early thirteenth century was probably the
nearest thing in financial and management complexity to the headquarters
of a large multinational company in today’s world.
With increasing frequency during the course of the thirteenth century,
royalty took an interest in commissioning and owning beautifully produced
manuscript books.34 Large psalters with full-page miniatures of Biblical
scenes were perhaps the earliest type of personal book, giving way by the end
of the thirteenth century to smaller, lavishly illuminated books of hours,
but others of particular musical interest do make their appearance. The
two most heavily illuminated Parisian manuscripts of thirteenth-century
polyphony could well have been royal books. The Florence manuscript of
Notre Dame polyphony – illuminated, pristine, and lacking corrections and
other signs of use as a perfomance copy – has recently been posited as a royal
book made for Louis IX.35 And the Montpellier motet manuscript, the most
beautifully decorated and largest collection of thirteenth-century motets,
was in its Old Corpus (fascicles 2–6) very likely also a royal commission
from the time of Philip III’s second wife, Marie de Brabant, queen of France
1275–85, who brought with her from the north to the royal household a
taste for secular music and culture, a notable change after the more austere
years of Louis IX’s reign.36 Made near the end of the second decade of
the fourteenth century, another Paris manuscript with royal connections is
the earliest musical monument of the French Ars Nova – the distinctively
different musical manuscript of the Roman de Fauvel (F-Pn fonds fr. 146).
Unusual were its large three-column format, ad hoc insertion of miniatures
and musical compositions, use of the cursive chancery script rather than the
more formal and elegant Gothic bookhand, and scarcely veiled criticism of
the king and his ministers as well as the hierarchy of the church. Although
it was a book made in the royal chancery, its intended recipient is not
known.37
An exquisitely elegant book most certainly produced for royalty in the
1340s is the first of Guillaume de Machaut’s ‘complete works’ manuscripts,
known informally as Machaut MS ‘C’ (F-Pn fonds fr. 1586). It is thought
to have been begun for Bonne of Luxembourg, daughter of John of Lux-

embourg, King of Bohemia, Machaut’s earliest patron in the 1320s and
1330s. Bonne was the wife of the Duke of Normandy, who subsequently
became King John II of France (r. 1350–64), but she died unexpectedly of the
plague in 1349 before the manuscript was completed. In the next decade it
was probably finished for her husband. Although Machaut had more than
25 years of compositional activity still ahead of him, this first ‘complete
works’ manuscript gives us an early look at almost all the musical genres to
which he contributed, including motets and secular fixed-form pieces; only
the mass and the ‘David’ hocket were yet to come.
As though it were an entertaining primer of instruction on courtly
behaviour, Machaut’s narrative poem Remede de Fortune from the 1340s –
composed with Bonne of Luxembourg as both the model lady and the
intended recipient – included in MS ‘C’ notated examples of all the secular
fixed-form types of his day – the lai, the complainte, the chant royal, the
baladelle, the ballade, the virelai (or chanson balladée), and the rondeau –
as well as indications of their social setting. The virelai, for example, was
most likely to be monophonic, danceable, and syllabic in text setting; in MS
‘C’, the noted monophonic virelai in the Remede de Fortune is illustrated
with a miniature (No. 27) showing elegantly dressed courtiers, both men
and women, holding hands while dancing in a circle and singing, without
any instrumental accompaniment.38 On the other hand, the rondeau was
polyphonic from the beginning in Machaut’s oeuvre, since both the example
in the Remede de Fortune, which is the earliest rondeau in MS ‘C’, and his
subsequent rondeaux all have three, two, or even four voice-parts. Here
we should recall that polyphonic three-voice rondeaux first appeared in
the later thirteenth century in the works of Adam de la Halle, and thus in
this instance Machaut inherited the tradition. Similarly, it is evident that
Machaut’s musical composition began in the 1320s with isorhythmic motets
and those of Philippe de Vitry as his model, yet once Machaut turned to
fixed-form pieces in the 1340s, he ceased composing motets with French
texts on themes of love, though he later turned briefly to ‘occasional’ motets
with Latin texts.39
After Machaut became a canon at Reims Cathedral around 1340, accord-
ing to the tax rolls he had a large house outside the cloister of the canons,
and it was evidently a place hospitable to noble guests. We know that in
1361 the future King Charles V stayed with Machaut when he came to settle
a dispute between the Archbishop of Reims and the city officials. Charles
and his brothers John, Duke of Berry, and Philip, Duke of Burgundy, had
grown up knowing Machaut in the household of their mother Bonne and
their grandfather John of Luxembourg. Machaut composed several works
apparently intended for Charles V – a rondeau for his wedding in 1350, the
Latin motet no. 22 in 1358, and the ‘David’ hocket for Charles’s coronation
in 1364. In his semi-autobiographical late poem the Voir Dit (‘True Story’),
Machaut refers to Charles repeatedly as ‘Monseigneur’, and it is possible
that Machaut MS ‘A’ (F-Pn fonds fr. 1584) was intended for Charles. It is
certain that more than a decade after Machaut’s death in 1377, John of Berry
commissioned the copying of Machaut MS ‘E’ (F-Pn fonds fr. 9221) in the
1390s as a book for himself.40 All three brothers were great bibliophiles and
amassed significant libraries.
Ownership of important musical manuscripts in the later thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries is one signal that musical patronage was changing
along with other features of society. Courts of royalty and the nobility across
Europe began to employ musicians for their households and/or ‘chapels’,
whether these chapels were peripatetic or stationary, in increasing variety.
Whereas most earlier composers of polyphony had their livelihoods in the
church, Machaut enjoyed support from both royalty and Reims Cathedral.
At times in the latter part of his life, this secular and sacred patronage was
simultaneous. When courts in the fourteenth century retained musicians,
their duties tended to involve a mix of sacred and secular music; this was even
true of the Avignon papacy which, despite its sacred mission, was noted for
its lively patronage of secular music. A special example of courtly patronage
is that of the brilliant and learned Gaston Fébus (or Phoebus), third Count
of Foix (1331–91), himself a musician of substance.41 But churchly support
for musicians expanded, also, with such foundations as collegiate chapels42
and even nunneries giving evidence of polyphonic performance.43 Ulti-
mately, despite the devastating ravages of the Black Death and the Hundred
Years War in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the landscape of
institutions offering support to musicians began to broaden significantly as
the humanistic outlook of the Renaissance took root and began to flower.
16 Theory and notation
dolores pesce
An overview of medieval theory involves three primary content areas:

pitch, rhythm and counterpoint. Two far-reaching concerns of medieval
theory surface time and again in this overview: early theorists continu-
ally attempted to understand an inherited repertory, chant, in terms of an
evolving theory, and they tried to bring their own theory into congruence
with venerated ancient Greek theory. Not unrelated, the writers searched
for a satisfactory notation, both letters and music symbols, to transmit their
repertory and theory about it. As we read these theorists’ exposés, differ-
ences emerge in how they formulate and present their ideas. With respect to
audience, teaching in the Middle Ages shifted increasingly from monastic
settings to cathedral school and university settings. We also witness cer-
tain differences in genre presentation, including dialogues and compendia.
Finally, it is useful to think of early theoretical writings in terms of categories
set up by Claude Palisca: precompositional, compositional, executive (per-
formance) and critical.1 That is, theorists could engage in theory largely for
its own sake, prescribe how to compose and perform, and describe/critique
the music they were hearing in their respective societies.
Early Middle Ages

The writer who unquestionably exerted the greatest influence on medieval
theorists was Boethius (AD 480–524). In De institutione musica,2 one of
four treatises he devoted to the quadrivium or the four mathematical dis-
ciplines, Boethius foregrounded an understanding of music in terms of
numerical ratios: he interpreted musical intervals as consonant or disso-
nant in accordance with the simplicity of their ratios. Through Boethius the
emphasis on unison, octave, fifth and fourth as perfect consonances entered
the consciousness of the medieval mind.
Although Boethius had taken his harmonic science from the Greek writer
Nicomachus (first–second century), he contributed his own thoughts on
the classification of music and the definition of a musician. He divided
music into three types: musica mundana, musica humana and musica instru-
mentalis. Thus, music determines planet movements and other natural
[276] cycles, harmonizes the body and soul, and is created by man through
his voice or an instrument. Music, in essence, is a microcosmic reflec-

tion of the macrocosmic experience. Boethius also emphasized music’s
potential ethical power to influence human behaviour, an idea he had
inherited from Plato. As to the musicus or musician, Boethius asserted
that this individual (as opposed to one who composed or performed)
applied his knowledge of music’s principles to judging music composi-
tions and performances – in short, the musicus exercised critical judge-
ment. Although many medieval theorists passed on Boethius’s definition of
a musician, some challenged the elevated status of the musicus as opposed
to a singer or cantor whose practical musical skills aided in the Christian act
of worship.
The final aspects of Boethius’s theory that affected medieval theory
concerned letter notation and scales. Using a monochord to derive his
tonal system, Boethius designated points on the string with the letters
A to P; although he may have intended these letters in a theoretical sense
only, some tenth- and eleventh-century manuscripts actually notated chant
using A to P. Boethius also explained the Greek tonoi, or transpositions of
the entire two-octave tonal system, each of which carried a Greek name
such as Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian. Later writers appropriated these tribal
names as designations for the medieval modes.
Three other pre-ninth-century writers deserve mention. Martianus
Capella (first part of the fifth century) predates Boethius; his significance
rests in having supplied a widely read allegory about the seven liberal arts,
in which music was included.3 Cassiodorus (ca485–580) was pivotal, with
Martianus, in establishing the number of liberal arts as seven; he also argued
that music theory could be founded on a quadrivial approach yet remain
applicable to Christian practice.4 Isidore of Seville (559–636) provided an
account of musical terminology in his encyclopaedia on all branches of
knowledge. Most important, he described music in the divine office, offer-
ing us a glimpse of musical practice at a very early date.5
From the seventh to the ninth century no new music theory appeared.
Beginning in the ninth century manuscripts with some music notation sur-
vive. Charlemagne’s politically driven educational and ecclesiastical reforms
are discussed in Chapter 15, but the reforms’ importance must be reiterated
in a discussion of how music theory grew and notation took shape around
this time. To guarantee that his kingdom would be strong, Charlemagne
followed on Alcuin’s late-eighth-century educational initiative, and further-
more promoted a unified liturgy, both textually and musically. Charlemagne
wanted to disseminate throughout the Frankish kingdom the chant heard
by his emissaries in Rome, the so-called Gregorian chant, whose develop-
ment was credited to Pope Gregory I (590–604). Hence among the Franks
the impetus grew to develop a musical notation and theory through which
278 Dolores Pesce
singers could be trained to read and sing the all-important music of the
church.
As we turn to the ninth-century treatises, we recognize that none of
the specific notational solutions they proposed was widely adopted. But
some surviving ninth- and tenth-century manuscripts reveal a first step
in notational standardization: they use musical symbols called neumes,
probably derived from the Greek system of accents, indicating from one
to usually four notes; the neumes themselves may be diastematic, that
is, they indicate the pitch of notes by their vertical placing on the page
(in the absence of ruled horizontal lines), or non-diastematic (which
requires the singer to remember the relative directional movement from
one neume to another). A handful of manuscripts from the St Gall
monastery uniquely preserve neumes with performance nuances such as
lengthening of note values, microtonal inflections, acceleration, etcetera
Surviving chant manuscripts in general reveal a fair amount of unifor-
mity in their pitch content, despite the regional notational dialects that
emerged.6
Aurelian (fl. ?840), one of several ninth-century Frankish theorists, pro-
vides a view of plainchant repertory and its performance at this time.
Unfortunately, he did not possess the nomenclature to describe with any
accuracy what he experienced, so his treatise Musica disciplina is of lim-
ited use when we attempt to re-create his examples of modes, psalm for-
mulas, and office and mass chants.7 The slightly later anonymous Alia
musica (ca900) deserves mention: it associated the medieval modes with
the Greek tribal names and their associated octave species.8 For some time,
this appropriation was an isolated case, but use of the Greek tribal names
eventually became the norm once a scalar understanding of mode took
hold.
The third ninth-century writer is Hucbald (ca840–930), who wrote his
Musica as a handbook for training young monks in psalmody.9 Musica
is organized in a cyclical manner, going through its subjects three times,
each time elaborating them and compensating for the lack of a dedicated
medieval music nomenclature: he asked the reader to recall chant melodies
which illustrated his points; he referred to Boethius’s A–P notation and
even suggested adding some of the letters, in lower-case form, to neumes
to pinpoint some pitches; and he proposed a kind of graphic notation in
which syllables of chants would be placed between lines on a six-line staff,
to which tone (T) and semitone (S) would be attached in the manner of
clefs. Most important, Hucbald fruitfully began the process of discussing
the tonal system that lay behind the chant repertory; provided with such a
vocabulary, the singers could learn the chants more quickly. In essence, he
introduced the idea of the tetrachord of the finals D, E, F, G as the primary
building block of the medieval gamut, explaining it by reference to the

Greek division of their tonal system by a different tetrachord; the medieval
gamut is thus divided into 4 tetrachords whose pitches are separated by
tone–semitone–tone (Hucbald’s Greek names for letters are given below in
their modern equivalent):
T S T T S T T T S T T S T T
A B c d e f g a b c d e f g a
The final relevant ninth-century treatises are known as Musica enchiri-

adis and Scolica enchiriadis (reaching their standard form by the end of the
century).10 Both treatises serve as handbooks for training singers (hence
enchiriadis), while the Scolica additionally presents the quadrivial rudi-
ments. The Scolica was written as a dialogue between master and pupil,
modelled after Augustine’s De musica. The Enchiriadis treatises provided
the earliest instruction in improvising organum or polyphony: organum
consisted of a vox organalis moving in parallel movement with the chant
or vox principalis, at the perfect intervals of an octave, fifth or fourth. A
second type of organum grew from the practice of sounding a drone under
the chant: the vox organalis, at first stationary (that is, in oblique motion),
moves into parallel motion with the chant, then reaches a unison with the
chant at the end. The Enchiriadis treatises presented their exposés using a
variation of the notation Hucbald had proposed, namely, text syllables are
placed in between lines. But in this case, the lines are prefaced by a system
of clefs derived from manipulations of the daseia of ancient Greek prosody,
hence the term Daseian notation. While the concept of a staff, albeit with
notes on the lines and spaces, was to become standard, the Daseian sym-
bols presented orthographic difficulties that prevented their widespread
adoption.
Medieval music theory experienced a breakthrough in the late tenth
century with the treatise known as Dialogus de musica, most likely written
in the province of Milan by an anonymous monk.11 Presented as a dialogue
between master and pupil, the Dialogus codified the letters A B C D E F G
with octave duplication as the standard nomenclature for the medieval
gamut; the next octave was designated by lower-case a–g, culminating in aa
to complete the two-octave span (below A lay , hence the word ‘gamut’).
The tone b was inflected: it could appear as ‘square’ or ‘hard’ b ( ) and
‘round’ or ‘soft’ b (). One of the writer’s pedagogical innovations was to
promote the use of the monochord, whereby a singer could learn a chant
quickly by imitating its intervals sounded on the monochord. Significantly,
he contributed to the classification of chants according to mode, which
also helped singers master the vast repertory. Following on Hucbald’s ideas
about the importance of the finals D E F G within the gamut, the Dialogus
280 Dolores Pesce
author identified their importance for modal recognition in the first clear
definition of mode: ‘A tone, or mode, is a rule which classes every melody
according to its final.’ That is, the final of a chant identifies its mode. Each
of the finals is designated by a Greek number, as shown in column 2 of
Table 16.1,
Table 16.1 Finals and their modes
Alternative naming system
D protus modes 1 and 2

E deuterus modes 3 and 4
F tritus modes 5 and 6
G tetrardus modes 7 and 8
and each numerical modal category in turn can be subdivided into authentic
and plagal, depending on the range of the melody: specifically, an authentic
melody usually does not ascend more than an octave above and one tone
below the final, while a plagal melody usually does not ascend more than
a fifth, sometimes a sixth above, and a fifth below the final. (An alternative
naming system shown in Table 16.1 simply assigned two numbers in order
to each final for its authentic and plagal form.) Despite his spelling out of
the ranges as quasi-octaves in order to distinguish authentic and plagal,
the Dialogus author was not proposing a scalar concept of mode; clearly,
a final could identify a melody’s mode only by virtue of its distinguishing
intervallic movement around that final tone: D protus moves a tone and
a semitone up, a tone down; E deuterus moves a semitone and a tone up,
a tone down; F tritus moves two tones up, a semitone down; G tetrardus
moves two tones up, a tone down.
Often accompanied by the Dialogus de musica, Guido d’Arezzo’s treatises
(1026–33) were the most widely circulated music writings of the Middle
Ages.12 Since Guido devoted his writings to his thoughts on how to train a
choir, probably in Arezzo, his works have little quadrivial content. The wide-
ranging topics of his Micrologus include an introduction to the emotional
qualities of the modes, a method for composing chant, the rhythmic per-
formance of neumes, and a brief overview of organum. The latter suggests
he witnessed the parallel organum described in the Enchiriadis treatises, but
also a freer sort of parallel organum into which a higher degree of oblique
motion had infiltrated.
The Micrologus also extended the discussion begun by Hucbald about the
gamut’s construction; although Guido did not use tetrachord terminology,
he recognized that the interval set of the finals D E F G (tone–semitone–
tone) was replicated at the fifth above on a c d and fourth below on A B
C D, a relationship he referred to as affinitas. Guido recognized a practical
aspect of this theory by stating that these related tones can serve as alternative
finals or affinales (at least for a c) since they share the same configuration
of surrounding intervals as the finals. In his Epistola ad Michahelem, Guido
presented what is now a well-known pedagogical tool to aid singing, the
hymn Ut queant laxis, whose lines’ opening syllables are ut re mi fa sol la,
matching up with the pitches C D E F G a. Although Guido did not discuss
a second site at a c d e f, one can assume that he recognized it, since
the core of these two six-note segments are, respectively, the four finals
and the four affinales or cofinales, whose relationship he did acknowledge.
Eventually, the two segments came to be known as the natural and hard
hexachords, while a third segment with b flat, F G a c d, was called the soft
hexachord. Mi–fa signalled the semitone in any of the three locations. The
fundamental importance of the hexachordal concept in medieval musicians’
thinking is reflected in the fact that from 1270 onward, some theorists, in
discussing the mode of a chant, referred to a modal final by its pitch or
by its vox or syllable, so that re signalled protus, mi deuterus, fa tritus, and
sol tetrardus.13
Guido’s final pedagogical contribution involved notation. By the late
tenth century some scribes had begun to scratch onto the parchment a single
line in relationship to which neumes could be arranged diastematically.
What Guido seems to have promoted for the first time was multiple lines
separated by a third. He also prescribed using letter clefs before certain lines
or spaces, but a surviving manuscript from Dijon suggests that letter clefs
(without lines) may have predated 1031. His third suggestion, unique to his
writings, involved adding coloured lines to certain lines or spaces, notably
those signifying C and F, the two notes in the gamut distinguishable by
the semitone that falls below them. This last innovation manifested itself
in European manuscripts from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries. Of
course, the multiple-line staff based on the separating interval of a third has
continued to the present day.
Two non-Italian theorists deserve some mention in this overview of early
theory. A contemporary of Guido, Hermannus Contractus (1013–54) was
a Benedictine monk associated with Reichenau. Hermannus mentioned
the principle of affinitas as he knew it through Guido as well as his own
interpretation, which grew from an eleventh-century Germanic emphasis
on species of fourth, fifth and octaves as basic building blocks of the tonal
system: that is, D E F G and a c d are identical tetrachords, an identity
retained when one extends the core by one tone in either direction, yielding
two identical six-note segments.14
The other non-Italian was Johannes Affligemensis (fl. 1100), most likely
from southern Germany or northeast Switzerland. Johannes’s De musica,
essentially a reworking and expansion of Guido’s Micrologus, diverged in its
282 Dolores Pesce
prescription for writing organum: Johannes favoured contrary motion in

the newly composed voice.15 Examples of free organum survive from the
late eleventh century and became the norm in the twelfth century.
Early polyphony and mensural music

Whereas how to discuss, notate, and teach chant dominated Carolingian
music writings, twelfth- and thirteenth-century theoretical writings turned
to polyphony – how to improvise it, compose it and notate its rhythm. The
theoretical endeavours were initially centred in Paris, whose cathedral of
Notre Dame spawned a renowned body of polyphony and whose univer-
sity attracted scholars and students to ponder man’s achievements, music
included. The scholasticism of Parisian thinkers at the time affected the cast
of some music theoretical writings.
The music of the cathedral of Notre Dame survives in three main
sources dating from considerably later than the repertory’s concep-
tion between the 1150s and ca1200: W1 (1230s), F (1245–55), W2
(ca1260).16 This gap between conception and transmission allows that
the notation does not necessarily represent what was current at the
time of conception. When we turn to the theorists for clarification, par-
ticularly of the rhythm, a similar disconnect occurs, since they too –
Johannes de Garlandia (second quarter of the thirteenth century), the St
Emmeram Anonymous (1279), Franco of Cologne (after 1279), Anony-
mous 4 (after 1279) – were looking retrospectively at the Notre Dame
repertory.
Until recently Garlandia was thought to have written De musica plana
and De mensurabili musica17 as texts for the University of Paris; the most
recent scholarship suggests they were probably the work of another, name-
less author active about the middle of the thirteenth century.18 Following
the scholastic tendency to create classification schemata, this anonymous
author presented a new consonance theory with three subdivisions: perfect
(unison and octave); intermediate (fourth and fifth); imperfect (major and
minor thirds). Dissonances too were imperfect (major sixth, minor sev-
enth); intermediate (whole tone, minor sixth); perfect (semitone, tritone,
major seventh). A similar classifying tendency led the author to present an
elaborate working out of the rhythmic modes that underlay Notre Dame
polyphony. The rhythmic modes, particularly relevant to the subspecies of
polyphony called discant (where both voices are measured), were based on
a common unit called the tempus. The tempus could appear singly (a short
or breve), in a note twice its length (a long or longus), or three times its
length (an extended long). Assuming a tempus of , the six rhythmic modes
were:
mode 1 mode 4
mode 2 mode 5
mode 3 mode 6
A discant in a given mode reiterates the succession of values proper to that

mode. A glimpse at the Notre Dame sources does not in fact reveal all of
the modes nor all of the variations on them that the author proposed.19
This same author explained the notational concept that underlay the
rhythmic modes: the modal pattern is not shown primarily by individual
note shapes, but instead by a combination of ligatures (neumes) and single
notes of the ‘square’ plainchant notation that developed in France during
the twelfth century. Each mode was identified by a particular succession of
ligatures and single notes, as follows: first mode: 3–2–2 . . . 2; second mode:
2–2–2 . . . 3; third mode: 1–3–3 . . . 3; etc.20 This notation relying on liga-
ture patterns was appropriate only for melismatic passages. Even then, the
author recognized its ambiguity, particularly for more complicated rhyth-
mic substitutions, and made some innovative suggestions. But these were
codified and applied more generally only through the influence of Franco of
Cologne’s Ars cantus mensurabilis,21 hence the expression Franconian nota-
tion. Franconian notation specified a distinct note shape for a short value
and the various forms of a long, presented rules for ligatures in standard
and modified form, and created a set of graphics for rests. Thus mensu-
ral notation provided a reasonably unambiguous way to present rhythm
in syllabic contexts. Once such unequivocal symbols were available, com-
posers could move outside the confines of the rhythmic modes and their
underlying adherence to triple metre. But most music continued for some
time to be written under the influence of the rhythmic modes, as witnessed
by the primary motet manuscripts from the later part of the thirteenth
and early fourteenth centuries: Montpellier, Bamberg, La Clayette and
Las Huelgas.22
Mention of the motet links back to the issue of polyphonic genres and
styles. The writing previously attributed to Garlandia described organum per
se, copula, and discant, three styles that coexist within a two-part organum
(still the generic term for polyphony in the thirteenth century). Whereas
discant is measured in both voices, copula has sustained tones in the lower
voice (tenor) presenting the chant, while the upper organal voice uses
the rhythmic modes; organum per se is distinguished by sustained notes
in the tenor and a rhythm not strictly modal (modus non rectus) in the
upper part (that is, the modal ligature patterns appear sometimes, but not
always). Organum per se is thus not measured in the regular way that dis-
cant and copula are, and the treatise offered three not always compatible
rules for distinguishing long and short notes in this species: they included
284 Dolores Pesce
judging the length of a note by its relative consonance with the tenor,
and attending to its note shape. The explanations for interpreting
organum per se given by the St Emmeram Anonymous23 and Franco of
Cologne are no less ambiguous. Consequently, the rhythm of these sec-
tions in Notre Dame polyphony remains conjectural in modern-day per-
formances. Some scholars argue that a flexible approach is consistent with
the rise of Notre Dame polyphony from an improvisatory tradition.
The three main Notre Dame sources contain conductus and motets, in
addition to organum. Franco of Cologne referred to the conductus as the
one type of liturgical music that was not based on a pre-existing melody. He
mentioned the motet without defining it; in short, it is a genre that arose
from texting the upper voice(s) of discant sections of organum, while the
lower voice (the chant-based tenor) remained untexted. Conductus nota-
tion is problematic in that this syllabic genre required the use of single notes,
whose as yet unstandardized shapes could not convey an unequivocal rhyth-
mic meaning. The few comments offered by the theorists, together with a
verse analysis of the poetic text, make it possible to come up with reason-
able guidelines for rhythmic interpretation of the genre. Similar problems
plague the early motets transmitted in the Notre Dame sources, but the
genre attained clarity through the use of Franconian notation to varying
degrees in the main motet manuscripts from the end of the thirteenth and
early fourteenth centuries.
One final rhythmic development of the thirteenth century concerned
shorter note values. Franco extended the basic relationship that governed
the long ( ) and breve ( ) to the breve ( ) and semibreve ( ), that is, the
principle of ternary mensuration. Petrus de Cruce (fl. ca1290) took the next
step of introducing a notation that could allow other subdivisions of the
breve: he accepted up to seven within the breve, subdivisions that could
be shown by placing a dot of division (punctus divisionis) on either side of
the grouping.24
Finally, the thirteenth-century treatise by Hieronymus de Moravia, writ-
ten shortly after 1272, represents a new genre: a compilation made up of
excerpts and a few entire treatises, ranging from Boethius to Hierony-
mus’s contemporaries. Hieronymus was a member of the Dominican order,
believed to have been active in Paris at the order’s convent on the rue
St-Jacques. He apparently compiled the work to help his fellow Domini-
cans to judge, compose and perform chant and polyphony, but he also
addressed some precompositional concerns of quadrivial writers, includ-
ing the science of harmonics. In Hieronymus’s four positiones or theses
on polyphony, he transmitted the mensural treatise formerly attributed to
Johannes de Garlandia uniquely with chapters on three- and four-voice
writing.25
The fourteenth century

France and England
Fourteenth-century theorists confronted two main challenges: how to
expand the notational system to accommodate duple as well as triple
metres and note values shorter than the semibreve, and how to contextu-
alize the increasing number of accidental pitches appearing in polyphony.
The latter concern at times took them into highly speculative realms, in
which they expanded on the mathematical calculations of their Greek fore-
bears. Some theorists also provided a critical, quasi-historiographical view
of earlier music which was still being performed even as new repertory
emerged.
The primary name associated with fourteenth-century rhythmic theory
is Philippe de Vitry (b. ?Champagne, 31 October 1291; d. 9 June 1361),
a composer and bishop who travelled in royal and princely circles from
the 1320s onward. Although de Vitry was long considered the author of
a treatise known as Ars nova, scholars now agree that while its teaching
may be associated with Vitry and with the innovations of his compositions,
its connection with him as author is tenuous. The treatise can be dated
to around 1320 based on comparisons of its contents with other dated
treatises.26
While the thirteenth-century motet repertory offered some isolated
examples of duple metre, the fourteenth century witnessed its full-blown
acceptance on an equal level with triple metre. This change in rhythmic
profile is acknowledged by both the Ars nova and Johannes de Muris (b.
diocese of Lisieux, ca1290–95; d. after 1344), the latter in his Notitia artis
musicae of 1319–21.27 The French notational system now contained four
graphically distinct values: long ( ), breve ( ), semibreve ( ), and minim ( ).
The relationship of long to breve was termed modus, of breve to semibreve
tempus, and of semibreve to minim prolatio. Each of these relationships
could be ternary (perfect or major) or binary (imperfect or minor) and
their combinations came to be known as mensurations. The signs for the
four combinations of tempus and prolatio were attributed to de Vitry:
perfect tempus, perfect prolatio imperfect tempus, perfect prolatio
= = = =
perfect tempus, imperfect prolatio imperfect tempus, imperfect prolatio
= = = =
286 Dolores Pesce
These signs did not attain much currency until late in the century. While
the L had been the basic unit of the musical measure in the thirteenth
century, the B took that role in the fourteenth century. Most upper-voice
parts moved in a combination of tempus and prolatio as shown above, while
lower-voice parts used modus and tempus.
The other notational innovation of the Ars nova treatise was the use of
red colour to indicate a number of rhythmic changes. Where black notes
were perfect, red signalled imperfect modus or imperfect modus and tempus;
the roles of black and red could also be reversed. Furthermore, red could be
used to prevent individual notes from being perfect or altered (that is, to fix
their value regardless of context). Later fourteenth-century treatises begin
to discuss dots: dots of division on either side of a group of notes indicated
how many fell within the breve, while a dot of addition added half again to
the value of an imperfect note, a usage it retains to the present.
Outside the realm of rhythmic concerns, several fourteenth-century
treatises deserve mention. Walter Odington and Jacobus de Liège wrote
significant compendia. The Benedictine monk Odington (fl. 1298–1316), an
English theorist and scientist, dedicated part of his Summa de speculatione
musice28 to the quadrivial aspects of music theory, then turned to the
practising musician, including sections on chant, a tonary, discant theory
and notation, and a discussion of polyphonic genres. The Summa continued
to be copied into the fifteenth century. Jacobus of Liège (born ca1260;
died after 1330), a Franco-Flemish theorist, wrote his principal work, the
Speculum musice,29 probably in Liège, not before 1330, after he had spent
most of his life in Paris. The Speculum is the largest surviving medieval
treatise on music, containing 521 chapters arranged in seven books, of
which the first five treat speculative music largely according to Boethius; the
sixth deals with ecclesiastical chant, and the seventh discant. In the seventh,
Jacobus defended ‘ancient’ practice according to Franco of Cologne versus
the more modern rhythmic and notational usages he was witnessing. He
commented specifically on how there had been a slowing of performance
tempo to accommodate the smaller note values (minims) employed by the
‘moderns’, and he also weighed the relative perfection, subtlety, freedom
and stability of the older and newer styles. Like Odington, Jacobus discussed
various categories of polyphonic composition.
The issue of genres brings us another theorist who contributed a great
deal to our understanding of medieval music and its performance contexts,
Johannes de Grocheio (fl. ca1300) in his De musica.30 Grocheio is linked to
Paris both because his observations focused most pointedly on the prac-
tices of that city and because he showed a deep knowledge of Aristotelian
thinking, which may have been garnered while he was a Parisian master.
Grocheio’s significance lies in his abandonment of the Boethian taxonomy
of music that had been handed down for centuries. First, he rejected celestial
music (Boethius’s musica mundana), then set out his own classifications for
Paris: musica civilis (music for laymen), musica canonica (music for cler-
ics) and musica ecclesiastica (chants of the mass and offices). He rejected the
dichotomy between measured and unmeasured music, saying that all music
is measured to some degree. Whereas musica canonica included precisely
measured polyphonic music such as the motet to be performed before indi-
viduals who could appreciate subtleties in the arts, musica civilis included
a variety of monophonic music such as trouvère songs, rondeaux, epics,
dances, and instrumental genres. Interestingly, when Grocheio described
chants, he compared them to secular genres, perhaps suggesting the ‘affec-
tive power of plainchant over the minds of clergy and laity alike’.31 By
applying to his generic taxonomy the Aristotelian practice of describing
each subject three times, Grocheio offered a highly detailed and perceptive
account of musical experience in his time.
Italy
Marchetto da Padova wrote his Lucidarium in 1317 or 1318 and the
Pomerium shortly thereafter but no later than 1319.32 Marchetto is a valu-
able source of information on the rhythm not only of Italian music of the
early fourteenth century but of contemporaneous French music as well. The
earliest surviving Italian manuscripts date from the mid to late fourteenth
century: Rossi/Ostiglia and Panciatichi33 .
Italians based their notational system on a breve which could encompass
8 divisiones as follows, wherein the first option is to divide the breve into 2
or 3 semibreves:
divisio prima: binaria ternaria
divisio seconda: quaternaria senaria imperfecta Senaria perfecta novenaria
divisio tertia: octonaria duodenaria
On the level of the divisiones secunda and tertia, the semibrevis carried
an upward stem (we would call it a minim). A given grouping of notes
within one divisio was marked with a dot on either side, a feature suggesting
that Italian notation was related to Petronian usage. In some manuscripts, a
piece’s divisio was indicated at the outset by an abbreviation: .q.: quaternaria;
.i.: senaria imperfecta; .p.: senaria perfecta; .n.: novenaria; .o.: octonaria; .d.:
duodenaria.
288 Dolores Pesce
This notational system was responsive to the fluid, melodic character

of Italian music, characterized by chains of short note values, often in
sequential patterns. It also allowed for adjustments and variations within a
divisio, both through additional note shapes and contextual rules such as
via naturae (when less than the full complement of notes are present in a
divisio, long notes appear at the end of a group) versus via artis (larger values
at the beginning or middle of the group, indicated by an altered semibreve
shape). On the other hand, the system basically precluded syncopation
across the breve unit. Perhaps because of this feature and because of Italian
contact with contemporary French music which showed a predilection for
syncopation, a hybrid notation developed. It combined French and Italian
features, which scholars today call ‘mixed’ notation. In fact, many of the
surviving Italian manuscripts that preserve fourteenth-century repertory
are primarily in mixed notation.
Marchetto da Padova deserves further mention because he developed an
influential extended theory of mode for plainchant. According to Marchetto,
a mode is either perfect, imperfect, pluperfect or mixed, depending on
whether its range is respectively normal, narrow, wide in the direction away
from the mode’s authentic or plagal partner, or wide in the direction of that
of the partner. A further term, ‘mingled’ (commixtus), was applied when
the mode in question showed qualities of a mode other than its authentic
or plagal partner. In addition, Marchetto tackled the problem of explaining
the increasing number of inflected pitches in Italian pieces by devising a
division of the Pythagorean whole tone into five equal parts. His thinking
represented a highly innovative, speculative extension of what had been
passed down from the Greeks, and it opened the way to experiments in
tuning and temperament in centuries to come.
The late fourteenth century

The end of the fourteenth century witnessed an extraordinarily compli-
cated music and notation that has come to be known as mannered or
Ars Subtilior, based on Philippus de Caserta’s Tractatus de diversis figuris
(ca1370), which referred to composers moving away from the style of the
Ars Nova motets ‘post modum subtiliorem comparantes’ and developing
an ‘artem magis subtiliter’;34 similarly Egidius de Murino (uncertain dat-
ing) referred to composition ‘per viam subtilitatis’ in his Tractatus cantus
mensurabilis.35 The musical style demanded greater rhythmic complexities,
primarily of syncopation and proportional relationships, to which end the
two primary manuscript transmitters, Chantilly and Modena,36 are filled
with new note shapes, many of which have varied meanings from piece
to piece and even within a piece. Red coloration, both filled and void, is
used generously, and a beautifully decorated circle and heart convey the
technique of canon.
This striking style developed in the secular courts of southern France,
Aragon and Cyprus during the period known as the Great Schism. From
1309 to 1377 the papacy had been exiled to Avignon, but now the schism
(1378–1417) produced rival popes in Avignon and Rome. The creative
impetus in the realm of sacred music first associated with the papal chapel
and rival cardinals’ chapels now transferred to secular courts, which had
available to them virtuosic singers and an intellectually sophisticated audi-
ence who were amused by both the notational and sounding complexities.
The Ars Subtilior manuscripts include works by both French and Italian
composers.
Mode and musica ficta

The theory of the eight church modes (protus, deuterus, tritus, tetrardus, each
with an authentic and plagal member), conceived for plainchant, was regu-
larly appended to medieval discant treatises although most did not establish
any definitive link between composing counterpoint and modal theory. A
continuous tradition applying mode to polyphony began only in 1476 with
Tinctoris,37 who worked with Marchetto’s extended theory of mode. Tinc-
toris touted the tenor as establishing the mode for the polyphonic complex
as a whole, though scholars interpret this to mean the soprano–tenor pair
which together form most of the principal cadences. As for polyphonic
music before Tinctoris, often one or two tonal foci inherent in the pre-
existing tenor may be emphasized as a piece unfolds.38 Sarah Fuller holds
that a composer such as Machaut chose tenors not for their modal coher-
ence, but for their distinctive tonal traits that could be developed through
harmonic and linear means.39 One can describe many thirteenth- and
fourteenth-century pieces not so much as being ‘in a mode’, but rather as
having certain tonal emphases.
Modern scholars refer to the issue of pitch inflections in medieval music
as musica ficta. As explained earlier, the medieval gamut, allowed for the
inflection of the tone b as hard b ( ) and soft b (). The entire gamut,
including the inflected b, came to be known as musica vera or recta. From
the ninth century onward, medieval theorists began to discuss tones they
could not notate within their tonal system, at first referring to them as
semitones outside the gamut, in the thirteenth century as musica falsa, and
in the fourteenth century as musica ficta or coniuncta. Such tones could
arise in plainchant, but theorists tended to concentrate on their occurrence
in polyphony where they were essential to consonant contrapuntal writing;
290 Dolores Pesce
this was particularly true in the fourteenth century when theorists placed
greater stress on contrary motion and a controlled succession of imperfect
to perfect intervals. A perfect interval is approached by a third or sixth, with
a semitone movement in one part; thus, at cadences, an octave is preceded by
a major sixth, a unison by a minor third, and a perfect fifth by a major third.
Theorists linked ficta notes to producing such correct interval successions;
for example, when the sixth B–G progresses to the octave A–A, either B or
G would move to A by a semitone, requiring that one of them be inflected.
A few theorists from ca1300 onward distinguished the reasons for using
semitones as causa necessitatis and causa pulchritudinis; the former appar-
ently referred to the essential correcting of vertical perfect consonances (for
example, making a diminished fifth perfect) while the latter referred to the
‘colour of beauty’ that resulted when a tone was inflected in the imperfect
to perfect progression.40 Beginning with the treatise formerly attributed to
Johannes de Garlandia, the latter inflected tones are described as melodic
‘leading notes’ a semitone from their destination. More detail comes from
Johannes de Muris who stated that lower returning notes (e.g. in the progres-
sion G–F–G) should be raised (G–F–G); and that leading notes approached
by any other means (for example, by leap) should be raised. This concept
of leading tones in imperfect to perfect progressions resulted in double
leading-tone cadences in fourteenth-century manuscripts; in essence, two
interval progressions are combined: a sixth to octave and a third to fifth,
each with inflected tone.41
Medieval manuscripts do not always show pitch inflections in the very
situations theorists described as requiring them. Most scholars accept that
inflections were and should be applied according to a partly or largely
unnotated tradition.42 This viewpoint is supported by the late-fourteenth-
century Berkeley treatise author: ‘But these are frequently present virtually
in BfaBmi although not always notated’,43 as well as several others slightly
later. When signs were used, they were the same ones, and , hard and soft
b, that were applied to the tone b. Hard b signified mi and soft b fa, that is,
they indicated where the semitone lies in relation to the sign, even when it
occurs in a location other than in the three basic hexachords on C, F and G.
By referring to inflected notes in this way, medieval writers revealed that the
ut–la syllables served as the primary navigational tool for discussing their
tonal system. Many scholars today hold that the syllables served the same
purpose in practice.44
17 Music manuscripts
emma dillon
Unless sounds are remembered by man, they perish, for they cannot be written down.1
Isidore of Seville
Of all the evidence we rely on to construct the story of the medieval musical
past, the manuscript is the most important, but also the most capricious.2
Not only are the extant sources just a tiny portion of the original bib-
liographic picture, but they also transmit repertories that were, in Nino
Pirrotta’s famous characterization, the ‘tip of an iceberg, most of which is
submerged and invisible’.3 Created in a culture sophisticated in practices
of memory and improvisation, the written record was one among many
technologies for storing music. Moreover, the written record connects to
oral practices in numerous ways: notation is a shorthand more than a pre-
scription, assuming the invisible knowledge of a performer. Finally, writers
from Isidore of Seville to Ingarden suggest a drastic distinction between
inscription and performance: music exists in sound, and writing (on the
page, or, in Isidore’s case, in the memory) is a representation removed from
musical reality.
If music manuscripts are incomplete witnesses to sound, they still have
much to tell, particularly when we consider not just what they transmit,
but also how they do so. ‘Manuscript’ is a retrospective designation that, as
Peter Stallybrass reminds us, is only possible with the advent of print.4 No
mere truism, this distinction emphasizes the technologies and materials of
textual production: manuscripts are made by the hand. From the fingers
flow implements of inscription – pen, brush or rastrum; and, from these,
ink, paint or the dry marks or prick points that produce a text-line; then to
the surface – parchment (also referred to as ‘vellum’), cut from the hides of
sheep, goats, cows, or pigs. Beyond the writing surfaces are bindings, clasps
or seals that encase or endorse the texts. Meanwhile, behind the hand lies a
body of producers – scribes, illuminators, parchment makers, binders and
compilers. Enfolded in the hand, then, are both the physical properties of
written texts and the agency of those who assemble these materials.
‘Manus’ thus invites contemplation of manuscripts not just as conduits
of texts but as objects whose materials inflect the reception of the things
they contain. From the economic value of raw materials to the subjective
[291] agency of the scribe, production shapes sense; or, as bibliographer Donald
292 Emma Dillon
McKenzie has it, ‘forms effect meaning’.5 Two examples can illustrate that
dictum. The earliest music books, produced in the monastic foundations of
ninth-century Europe, and containing their most sacred liturgies, were not
only objects of reverence or reference, but also part of a monastic micro-
economy. Parchment production coexisted with provision for housing and
slaughtering livestock. The ninth-century statutes of the abbey of Corbie
make a rare allusion to a parchment maker, and, in considering his job
description, Rosamund McKitterick conjures in flesh-crawling detail the
practicalities of production:
Skins, if they are to be of any use for parchment making, must be fresh and
put to soak soon after the animals have been killed . . . Corbie’s own livestock
included cattle, sheep, goats and pigs, so that there was the potential for a
regular supply of skins. Whether skins for parchment making would only
have been available at particular killing seasons is not known, but it seems
most likely. The season of the year in which the animals are slaughtered
determines the fat content, and thus the quality, of the skins. The possibility
cannot be excluded, moreover, that some centres imported their parchment
from a supplier who was able to work in close proximity to an abattoir,
rather than preparing their own skins.6
The cost of livestock necessary for usable parchment helps explain why
contemporary inventories of monastic treasuries located books alongside
precious reliquaries, icons and devotional objects.
Outside the monasteries and royal houses of the early Middle Ages,
manuscripts would have been little known. By the thirteenth century, pro-
duction of manuscripts was increasingly more public and commercial, with
university cities such as Paris, Oxford and Cambridge hosting a lively book
trade. In Paris, the ‘orchard of books’,7 books were evident to anyone who
passed through the city gates, literate or illiterate. Some would have known
manuscripts only as the stink of parchment shops on Rue neuve Notre
Dame, the street running up to the cathedral; for others, books were a geo-
graphical marker – Rue des Escrivains, like many Parisian streets, took its
name from those who worked there.8 At a minimum, then, books signified
urban commerce.
In what follows, we shall need to keep in mind McKenzie’s proposition,
and examine ways in which the physical remains of lost sound encode in
their very materiality a little of the values and meanings of music in the
world beyond their bindings. But there is also a more practical purpose:
to examine what makes a music manuscript different from other kinds
of manuscripts, and what were the specific technical demands required to
position music on the page, and to organize repertories across folios. As we
shall see, the look of music could be determined by a host of motivations,
from the banally practical to the eloquently expressive. Where possible,
manuscripts cited exist in modern facsimile, and readers are directed to the
bibliography and New Grove ‘Sources’ article for full citations.
Reading music manuscripts

Forms
The main form in which medieval music survives is the book, which
in the Middle Ages most often took the form of a codex (as distinct from the
book roll).9 Before going further, it will be helpful to describe some of the
bare essentials, and essential vocabulary, associated with codices. Closing
the covers of a manuscript, and tipping its spine up for scrutiny, the naked
eye can usually see an even, clustering pattern of parchment folios, as if into
mini-books within the book. These mark the arrangement into gatherings
(also known as ‘quires’), which, Christopher de Hamel argues, ‘is probably
the single most important observation that can be made about the making
of medieval books’.10 Produced from large sheets of parchment (treated ani-
mal hides), gatherings were made by placing sheets on top of one another,
normally with hair side facing hair side, and flesh side facing flesh side
(the flesh side of parchment is more velvety to the touch than the waxier,
sometimes bristly hair side). These were folded in half, the groove of the
fold later being sewn to secure the leaves, and trimmed to size. A gathering
normally comprised four bifolia, a total of eight folios (also described as
a quatern or quaternion), although three-, five-, six- and even eight-sheet
gatherings were also sometimes used.
The gathering was the unit by which scribes and artists operated. Inscrib-
ing onto unbound gatherings, it was possible for scribes, notators and illu-
minators to work simultaneously, with a scribe passing on gatherings he
had finished working on to the next in the production line, while moving
on to inscribe the next gathering. To keep track, scribes used catchwords
(the first word of the following gathering was written at the very end of
the gathering preceding), or even numbering or lettering systems, traces
of which are often still visible. Sometimes, gatherings never made it to the
binders. The texts circulated in individual gatherings, or in gatherings sewn
together to form the unit of the libellus, or fascicle. As we shall see, these
more ephemeral forms of circulating texts are particularly important in the
history of music transmission.
Despite uniformity of design, the same materials, ordered in the same
structures of gatherings, and transmitting the same musical texts, could
produce radically different effects. Placing a gradual of the ninth century,
small enough to fit in the hands, next to a huge, table-top-sized missal of
the fifteenth century, so heavy as to need two people to heave it from shelf
294 Emma Dillon
to library desk or lectern, the sense of how ‘forms effect meaning’ is never
more evident. While the books contain the same melodic material, the
visual impression communicates the texts in different ways. One suggests
intimacy, privacy, and singular access; the other implies communality and
display, designed to be big enough for its notations to be seen by a group
standing at some distance.
Size is just one variable. The cantatorium, one of the oldest liturgical
service books, often took unusual and precious forms. Cantatoria had an
elevated status, containing some of the most important chants of the liturgy,
those sung by the cantor during the mass (graduals, alleluias or tracts; some
also contain solo tropes, or the verse portions of chants intended for solo
performance). Their form articulates that special role. Early, unnotated
examples were inscribed in silver and gold on purple-dyed parchment,
colours of economic and symbolic prestige.11 Others have a distinctively
thin, spindly format, and spectacular bindings. CH-SGs 359, dating from
the early tenth century and the earliest to contain musical notation, has
long, delicate ivory covers that are widely accepted to predate the contents
by several centuries. Carved with images that have little to do with the sacred
contents (scenes of combat), the covers nonetheless appear to have dictated
the shape of this codex: the ivories were a precious part of the monastery’s
treasure, and part of the book’s function was to furnish an opportunity both
to display that collateral, and also, perhaps, to mingle the earthly value of
its exterior with the mystical, liturgical purposes of its contents.
The codex was by no means the only musical form. Music also circulated
in unbound units, either of sheets, gatherings or libelli. This is particularly
relevant to understanding the transmission of liturgical polyphony and non-
liturgical traditions. Medieval compositions do not take up much physical
space – a sheet or two at most – and for a composer or singer wanting to
copy down a new piece, a sheet or notebook could be an inexpensive solu-
tion (and, practically, easier to perform from than a cumbersome book).12
What is more, these free-floating ‘ephemera’, as Andrew Wathey designates
them, are intricately bound up in book making, their relationship being one
of ‘interdependence’. The libellus or sheet could contain excerpts of a larger
book, and some extant manuscripts are nothing more than bound com-
pilations of once-independent libelli. Missals, for example, which brought
together all the texts and chants of the mass, evolved as a consolidation
of smaller, discrete books that together had performed that function. The
earliest missals from the eleventh and twelfth centuries are little more than
a binding together of separate, smaller books – gradual, sacramentary and
lectionary. In the thirteenth century, some French chansonniers include
once-independent fascicles of songs in their final compilation. Many books,
however, cover their tracks, and are the copied consolidation of a process
of material assembly and design of assorted ephemera now long gone.
Occasionally, though, books offer a snapshot of that process: the study by

Wulf Arlt and Susan Rankin of two early St Gall tropers (CH-SGs 484 and
381) illustrates how the books’ scribe puzzled over how to transform small,
independent written sources for a growing repertory into the finite form of
a book.13
Another important musical surface was the book roll, or rotulus, which,
like the codex, had a history dating back to antiquity. Although produced
with the same raw parchment material, the roll is read, referred to, and
handled in a very different way from a codex, being designed to be scrolled
through, rather than flipped back and forth. Made by sewing sheets of
parchment together, the blocks of texts in a roll do not, however, correspond
to the leaf of a book: texts were copied to be read vertically, with page-like
units often spilling over the parchment joins, and with just the face side used
(although in the later Middle Ages it was common to use the verso, or dorse
side, too). While the codex supplanted the roll as the more popular form
around the fourth century, rolls persisted, but in the early Middle Ages their
use was often confined to special ceremonial occasions, signifying gravity
and prestige. Most musical rolls date from a later period, when the roll had
assumed a more practical function; like the sheets and libelli, rolls were an
ideal and cheap way to transmit individual or small compilations of music.
The fourteenth-century GB-BER sel. 55, containing a collection of English
polyphony, neatly captures that more practical, disposable quality of the
later roll. The music is copied onto the dorse of a roll whose face contains
a series of household accounts dating from a couple of decades before the
music was added.14 The roll’s double function is vivid illustration of the
sheer economy and pragmatism often associated with parchment use. By
contrast, the ‘exultet’ rolls popular in southern Italy from the tenth to the
fourteenth centuries illustrate how music could participate in the more
solemn function of the early roll.15 These magnificent objects contained
texts and notation for a portion of the Easter Vigil, and their use was thus
limited to a one-off ritual appearance each year. Adding to their prestige was
the tendency to illuminate them, but in inversion to the liturgical texts: as the
deacon or celebrant sang from the roll, with text and music facing him, he
unravelled the roll to reveal images upside-down from his perspective, but
the right way up for those listening and watching. Conscious of their own
innovative technology, some of those images are self-referential, depicting
rolls unfurling from the pulpit, complete with their topsy-turvy layout.
Finally, a word about some more unusual sites of music inscription.
Notation could serve a decorative function, serving as a kind of musi-
cal wallpaper. A much-quoted passage from the early-fourteenth-century
Chroniques de France states that the great lord and trouvère Thibaut de
Champagne composed songs and ‘had them inscribed in the chambers
of Provins and Troyes’ (‘les fist escripre en la sale a Provins et en celle
296 Emma Dillon
de Troyes’).16 Although no physical traces of such wall paintings at either

location survive, a romance from roughly the same period, the Roman de
Fauvel, describes the genres and notational details of the music painted on
the palace walls of its fantastical hero, the horse-king Fauvel. Contemporary
archaeological evidence relating to the palace of the late Capetian kings, the
model for the satire, indicates that wall decorations were part of the decor,
suggesting a lost reality behind the roman’s fantasy palace.17 While musical
writing on the wall in these examples has a symbolic or heraldic func-
tion, making the culture of the court visible to those who visit, there are
some later ‘sources’ that fall between the poles of decoration and use. The
Philadelphia Art Museum has a collection of musical knives from the late
fifteenth century: each blade is etched with a short line of polyphony which,
when the blades are assembled, form the voices of a four-part benediction.
While music manuscripts adapt to the forms of other sorts of texts in
the Middle Ages, the technology of musical notation represented unique
challenges to the scribes and compilers responsible for the folio-by-folio
organization of texts. In the next section I will trace some of the main modes
of designing music on the page: far from being exhaustive, my purpose is to
select from a range of periods and repertories, to illustrate just how different
the look of the musical book could be. It will be helpful to adopt a medieval
framework for thinking about the design of the book: this loosely conceived
writing at the micro level, according to the layout and order of individual
folios (or ordinatio), and at the macro level, according to the organization
or order of things at the level of the codex (or compilatio).18 As we shall see,
both in their different ways have an impact on the meanings of the texts:
at the technical level of performance, but also at the hermeneutic level – in
determining what the reader understood the text of music to be.
Designing music
Service books
How did the earliest scribes and compilers conceive of a space for music on
the page? Like most successful revolutions, the emergence of music writing
(in service books of the ninth century) involved a minimum of change. The
earliest music scribes were pragmatic in their efforts to make space on the
page for notation. Neumatic lines first appeared in places traditionally given
over to commentary, afterthought or correction: in between text lines, and,
less frequently, in the margins. In some early sources, no provision was made
for music in the pricking and ruling of the folios. The layout of text was
undisturbed by the presence of simple accent neumes inserted between lines
spaced with the same regularity as non-notated books. As notation became
more widespread and prescriptive, folios were subject to more systematic
preparation for the insertion of melody. Again, though, older, pre-notation
systems of page design were barely disrupted by the presence of music.
The text line remained the governing unit of page division, and music was
simply assigned lines originally occupied by text. If allocation of space was
a relatively simple matter, scribes faced more complicated challenges at the
moment of inscription, particularly with regard to the spacing of text to
allow for vocal melismas. In CH-E 121 (1151), a compilation of graduals,
with assorted processional antiphons, texts and proses, dating from the late
tenth century, neumes sit comfortably in campo aperto, positioned roughly
halfway between two lines of text, as if hovering around an invisible text line.
However, throughout the book melismas (characteristic in the chants of the
gradual) consistently creep out into the margins, as the scribe struggles to
make verbal space wide enough to accommodate melodic expanse.
Neumes in these examples make no use of vertical space to indicate
pitch relations. With the emergence of diastematic notations, the ghostly
text-line (or text-lines) over which music was copied were put to new use
as a fixed pitch reference, turning gaps between texted lines into a pitch-
sensitive space. Even before systematic use of the staff (as envisioned by
Guido of Arezzo around 1030), a number of notational systems deployed
the text-line as a basic tonal reference point. From the late tenth century,
certain Aquitanian manuscripts ruled lines within the music space in dry-
point as pitch reference.19 The staff ’s institution thus exploited what was
already available in the language of books. Indeed, in two-staff systems like
those found in many Beneventan sources, the use of two-colour staves (red
and yellow) to mark different pitch points took advantage of another book-
ish technology – using ink’s expressive capabilities now to communicate
musical information (for a sample of Beneventan notations see I-BV 34, 38,
39 and 40). What we often perceive as musical-theoretical innovations are
thus bound into the broadest context of writing: indeed, we could go so far
as to say that the staff is the work of a bibliographer as much as of a theorist.
While developments in notational technology did little more than mod-
ify the basic graphic ingredients, the form and order of liturgical books
underwent constant change. Although there is not space here to detail the
many genres of service book, it will be helpful to make a broad distinc-
tion between the function and order of books of the earlier Middle Ages
and those more common from the thirteenth century onwards. Many early
notated books were defined by highly specialized function, and often by
the person using them. The sacramentary mentioned above is a case in
point: it was limited to texts and chants relating to the mass and was used
exclusively by the celebrant. Likewise, the pontifical, the earliest examples
of which date from the tenth century, contained rites relating exclusively
to bishops. Although books with a more comprehensive function were also
common in the earlier Middle Ages (for example the gradual, containing
mass propers), the small format of many implies a fairly limited use, per-
haps restricted to the cantor, who would consult the book and then teach
298 Emma Dillon
its melodies to the choir. However, not all service books were designed for
exclusively practical purposes. Examples of manuscripts produced for the
abbey of St Gall include some containing not only bibliographic staples
like the gradual, but also sequences and writings attributed to the abbey’s
own Notker the Stammerer (ca840–912). The abbey also produced some
of the earliest tropers (such as CH-SGs 484), likely composed in situ. Such
codices are more than just reference tools: they are archives of an erudite
and creative musical monastery tradition.
There is significant change both in the format and in the function of
service books in the later Middle Ages. Two of the most popular books
from the thirteenth century were the missal and the breviary, encyclopaedic
and comprehensive compilations of text, chants and instructions relating
to the mass and offices. While versions of both had been around since the
eleventh century, their importance (and complex design) grows in ensuing
centuries. Designed to do the job of several books at once, they often rely
heavily on abbreviation, multiple ink colours, and a variety of script sizes
to communicate information about texts, chant, ritual movements, and
performing forces. With barely a patch of parchment left unfilled, these
books reflect broader advances in the complexity of book design in the later
Middle Ages; we should situate them in the landscape of the great glossed
bibles of the thirteenth century, or the encyclopaedias and florilegia that
were renowned for their innovative systems of organization and navigating
technologies.
Early polyphony
Roughly around the time of Guido’s Micrologus, another technological chal-
lenge emerged: that of how to represent music in more than one voice.
Early sources reflect a range of solutions: solutions that, as with chant, often
demonstrate a surprising lack of disruption of older writing habits, and that
suggest a conceptualization of polyphony not as novelty but as a facet of
chant. While theorists had described polyphony well over a century earlier,
in texts such as the Musica enchiriadis, the earliest written source dates from
the first half of the millennium. GB-Ccc 473 is one of two manuscripts
(the other is GB-Ob Bodley 775) containing tropes, proses, sequences and
other liturgical chants made for the Benedictine house at Old Minster in
Winchester, and known collectively as the Winchester Tropers.20 GB-Ccc
473 also contains 174 organal settings, appearing alongside tropes, proses,
sequences and a fascicle of alleluias, all organized according to the order
of the liturgical year. Thus, the design programme makes clear that the
addition of a new voice, the vox organalis, to the older chant voice, the vox
principalis, was understood within a liturgical framework, as a form of the
trope.
Described as ‘both a treasure and a tragedy’,21 GB-Ccc 473 provides only

the vox organalis: the chant voices to which the newly created voices were set
are all absent. Moreover, the notation is English non-diastematic neumes,
typical of the rest of the manuscript, and, at this early stage in the history of
notation, devoid of any kind of rhythmic indicators. While difficult for the
modern scholar to decipher, early readers would have known the chant and,
most likely, the organal voices by heart. The book, then, can be understood
as part memory prompt, and part repository for the melodic treasures of
the institution.
By the twelfth century, polyphony began to look very different. In the
four Aquitanian sources loosely known as the ‘St Martial’ manuscripts
(F-Pn fonds lat. 1139, F-Pn fonds lat. 3549, F-Pn fonds lat. 3791, and GB-
Lbl add. 36881, also often referred to as St-M A–D), the need to notate
both voices was inevitable, given that at least half of the roughly seventy
pieces extant included versus that had a newly composed vox principalis.
While polyphony once again shares space with monophonic additions to
the liturgy, the sense of ‘liturgical’ is here considerably looser than in the
Winchester manuscript, as liturgical order is abandoned in the organization
of the versus.
The two distinct styles of polyphony – note-against-note discant style,
and the florid styles that would eventually come to be known as organum
purum (where the vox organalis performed lengthy melismatic flourishes
over a static lower voice) – posed practical problems to which scribes
responded with a range of solutions. The first important difference when
compared to GB-Ccc 473 is the score representation. The same dry-point
ruling as we saw in the monophonic chant books prevails here, with clefs
and in some cases custos marks (small notes at the ends of lines to indicate
the first note at the beginning of the next line). Now, though, voices are
aligned over one another, and in some cases the distinction between the two
parts is made visible by use of a dividing line, often in red ink. But score is
just one solution. On one occasion, in F-Pn fonds lat. 3791 (St-M C), the
two voices appear on different parts of the folio. On another, in F-Pn fonds
lat. 1139 (St-M A), two Benedicamus settings have the unusual design of
having both voices on one staff. In both instances the polyphony takes the
florid, organum purum style, which means that there are only a few notes
in the vox principalis. The scribe distinguishes them from the vox organalis
by notating them in red ink in one setting, and marking a circle around the
notes of the second setting.
However, the books in this repertory are far from consistent in their
presentation of polyphony. It is in the thirteenth century that we witness
a systematic, professional method for copying music that was outside the
remit of the traditional chant manuscripts. And little wonder. The famous
300 Emma Dillon
compendia of Notre Dame repertories are contemporary with the estab-

lishment of a commercial book trade in Paris, and right at the doors of the
very cathedral whose music was inscribed on their folios.
Magnus liber organi

The thirteenth century bears witness to a repertory synonymous with the
book. Anonymous IV’s celebrated account of the musical tradition of the
Paris cathedral characterized it as a ‘Magnus liber organi’, deploying ‘liber’
in the sense of ‘opus’ or repertory, but also perhaps in a material sense.
Referring to liturgical polyphony associated with the generation of Leon-
inus and his successor Perotinus, Anonymous IV’s musical descriptions
match portions of several extant manuscripts, the earliest dating from the
third or fourth decade of the thirteenth century. The main sources of Notre
Dame polyphony embody an important change in the history of music
manuscripts. Comprehensive – even dogmatically encyclopaedic – in their
range of music, these new collections also deploy elaborate and varied new
systems of compilatio and ordinatio. There are also numerous correspon-
dences between manuscripts: not just a high degree of concordance, but also
many precise shared features of design and layout, hinting at a tradition of
music outside the realms of liturgical chant.
The design of I-Fl Plut. 29.1 (commonly referred to as F), which dates
from the 1240s, illustrates some of the main technological advances in
the material life of this repertory. It reflects a summatic attitude to its
diverse musical contents, in part via sophisticated systems of ordering:
the manuscript is organized in a series of libelli or fascicles within the
liber, defined by genre and, where appropriate, liturgical function. Begin-
ning with forms with a strictly liturgical context, organum and clausula,
it progresses through genres with increasingly tenuous liturgical connec-
tions (conductus and motet), concluding with a collection of Latin refrain
songs. Each fascicle is subject to careful planning, the earliest shadow-
ing the order of service books – arranging pieces according to liturgical
order of the temporale and sanctorale. Within genres, the scribes cre-
ate order through number of voices: pairing organum with clausulas of
the same number of voices, it opens with the great quadrupla setting
Viderunt omnes, and ends with two-part settings. That the manuscript was
regarded as more than purely functional is emphasized by the illuminations.
Exquisitely decorated throughout, F begins with a statement of purpose,
a threefold depiction of Musica, reflecting the threefold Boethian notion
of music known through the university curriculum and contemporary
music theory. This explicitly theoretical gesture thus frames the collection
as ‘music’ in the sense of the quadrivium, as well as of a practical, singable
collection.
While the many different genres in the book may suggest a challenge
for the scribe, the mechanics of making I-Fl Plut.29.1 (F), as other books
of this tradition, were not as complex as one might imagine. Although
the scribes moved between score format for organum and clausula settings,
and successive layout for the texted repertories, folios were ruled throughout
according to a simple rule of thumb. In scored sections (organum, clausula
and polyphonic conductus), tenor or chant voices were generally ruled
with a four-line staff, and all other voice-parts with five lines, with regular
amounts of space left between staff blocks to accommodate text underlay
(see Figure 17.1); scribes left blocks of space at the end of conductus settings
for additional text verses, to be set to the preceding music (see Figure
17.2). Notice also how the decorated capital also serves to beam. In the
monophonic and motet sections (where voices were copied successively),
pages were ruled up with staffs of five lines, and with uniform space between
each for text; chant tenors were tucked in at the end of each motet (see
Figure 17.3).
While there is continuity of repertory across the four main sources (I-Fl
Plut. 29.1, D-W 628, D-W 1099 and GB-Lbl Egerton 2615, also commonly
referred to as F, W1 , W2 and LoA), there is also consistency – and sometimes
interesting change – in the organization. Most of the manuscripts open with
four-part organal settings, following the same liturgical sequence witnessed
in F. However, while the motets in I-Fl Plut. 29.1 (F) are organized accord-
ing to the liturgical order of their tenors (reflecting the original status of
the motets as clausulae), motets in D-W 1099 (W2 ) are not only more
extensive and linguistically diverse, including French-texted works, but are
also ordered according to a new priority: they are arranged alphabetically,
a shift that suggests a loosening of liturgical associations in this genre. At
the same time, certain continuities of page set-up suggest close relations
between manuscripts. Mark Everist’s in-depth palaeographical study not
only of the main sources but also of more fragmentary traces demonstrates
precise consistencies down to the very dimensions of the written block,
number and proportions of staff lines, pointing not only to the possibility
that existing manuscripts were copied from a common exemplar but also,
more intriguingly, indicating ‘evidence of a systematized, and perhaps pro-
fessional production of music books in Paris between ca1240 and ca1300’.22
For the first time outside the main service books of the liturgy, then, we
have something approaching a tradition of musical book production.
Contemporary with the multi-genre compendia associated with Notre
Dame are other more specialized compilations. I shall deal with vernacular
chansonniers presently, but closely related to the Notre Dame repertories
are the motet-only collections of the thirteenth century (of which F-MOf
H. 196, D-BAs lit. 115, and F-Pn n.a.f. 13521 are classic examples). Although
302 Emma Dillon
Figure 17.1 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut.29.1, fol. 12r
generically independent of the earlier tradition, some motet collections

nonetheless gesture to their heritage. The Montpellier Codex (F-MOf
H. 196), created in the final decades of the thirteenth century, contains
a rich assortment of motets at all stages of the genre’s development. Orga-
nized into eight fascicles, each ordered by voice number and language, and

304 Emma Dillon

moving in a roughly chronological sequence stylistically speaking (old to

new), the book begins with a fascicle largely devoted to organum (including
pieces transmitted in the Notre Dame manuscripts), a brief retrospective
gesture to the musical origins of the motet genre that ensues. Moreover,
as Montpellier illustrates, the emergence of new motet forms in as many
as four voices inspired new column-format page design, in which differ-
ent voices were visible simultaneously, not in score, but in parallel-column
voice format. Although scribes did not always coordinate voices to cor-
respond with folio turns, the technology of column format in this and
other motet compendia marks a significant broadening of the visual vocab-
ulary of medieval music, one that would have far-reaching consequences
for the layout of music in the later, choirbook formats of the fifteenth
century.
Chansonniers
At the same time that scribes were standardizing the Notre Dame reperto-
ries, another repertory was starting to appear in manuscript. The thirteenth
century is also the epoch of the chansonnier – retrospective compilations
of vernacular lyrics of the troubadours and trouvères in France, and Min-
nesang of Germany, and the vernacular devotional songs comprising the
Cantigas de Santa Maria of the Iberian peninsula.
Before examining the forms of the chansonnier, we must consider a
startling absence of written evidence: there is a considerable time lag
between the moment at which songs were created and their first extant
written record. The earliest of the forty chansonniers containing Occitan
song all date from the middle of the thirteenth century, with the biggest
wave of production occurring in the fourteenth century – well over a cen-
tury after the period of the earliest troubadour for whom songs survive,
Guillaume IX, Duke of Aquitaine (1071–1126), and a good fifty years after
the main period of troubadour activity.23 Although trouvère chansonnier
production (the earliest date from ca1250) coincides with the active life of
trouvères such as Adam de la Halle, the earliest Northern poets had likewise
been dead for almost half a century by the time their songs were writ-
ten down.24 How, then, did the repertory survive prior to writing? While
memory was undoubtedly a major factor in songs’ survival, some scholars
speculate that internal evidence of the poems, where the poet-protagonist
alludes to notating songs, implies a situation in which songs were written
down, most likely on rolls or song-sheets, whose ephemerality may explain
their loss.25
Chansonniers reflect their temporal distance from the originary moment
of their songs in numerous ways: although there are important differences
between the transmission of northern and southern French traditions, their
306 Emma Dillon
creators were united in their awareness of themselves as history makers. As

William Burgwinkle writes, chansonniers were not just records for per-
formance but were ‘complex and encyclopedic, documenting not just the
lyrics but also the lives of the poets, the development of the genres’.26 Such
perspective requires a certain amount of distance. Moreover, in the case
of the troubadours, there is an added geographical distance between the
chansonnier makers and the Occitan origins of the songs: the majority were
produced in northern France and Italy, the Italian chansonniers reflecting
a quasi-antique taste for the long-vanished cultures of Occitan in culture-
driven courts such as the Visconti.
What of the forms of the chansonniers? Not all are notated: indeed,
melodies of troubadour song survive in just four sources, two of which
contain predominantly Northern repertories; there are likewise numer-
ous text-only trouvère chansonniers. The absence of melody may again
reflect the books’ distance from a living performance tradition. Those with
melodies are fairly consistent in the format of their music. Songs occupy
either one or two columns per folio; the first strophe only is notated, with
subsequent strophes copied out beneath, often in prose format, with punc-
tuation and small decorative capitals to mark strophe breaks. Figure 17.4
carries a typical example. Taken from the opening folio of the Chanson-
nier Cangé (F-Pn fonds fr. 846, also referred to as Trv O), it begins with
the first notated strophe of Thibaut de Champagne’s Ausi com unicorne
sui at top left, followed by unnotated strophes (marked in all but one case
with a coloured capital letter); his second song, Amours me tant comment,
begins at the bottom. It is not uncommon to see gaps left for staves, or
simply empty staves: lacunae suggesting that scribes had not yet access
to musical exemplars when they inserted texts. We see a vivid example
of gaps left for songs in Figures 17.5 and 17.6, from the Chansonnier du
Roi (F-Pn fonds fr. 844, referred to also as Trv M), dating from the 1260s
or 1270s. In a section attributed at the head of the folio to ‘Vidames de
Chartres’, notice the empty parchment following the song D’amours vient,
spilling over to the top of the verso. Because of the simple syllabic or neu-
matic style of vernacular song, scribes did not necessarily need access to
exemplars to determine text spacing: notice that the text underlay in these
two manuscripts is more spacious than for the prose sections, but essen-
tially evenly paced and roomy enough for the style of melodies in this
repertory.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of chansonniers is their complex
systems of organization, which tell a story about the songs – about the
poets, about the cultural world of song, and about a tradition (its chronol-
ogy and genres). In the Occitan tradition, the biographical component of
song was heightened by the inclusion of prose vidas and razos, short lives
Figure 17.4 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 846 (Chansonnier Cangé), fol. 1
of the poets, and vignettes explaining the real-life scenarios that prompted
the creation of a given song (as in F-Pn fonds fr. 22543, referred to also
as Trb R).27 Authorship is also the guiding principle in many trouvère
chansonniers, and extends to the German Minnesang tradition. In many
308 Emma Dillon
Figure 17.5 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 844 (Chansonnier du Roi),
fol. 14r
cases, songs are arranged by poet, an arrangement enhanced in some cases

by red rubric names and small author portraits to mark the beginnings of
each mini collection. Authors are often arranged by social rank, with the
noblest poets listed first: trouvère collections invariably begin with Thibaut
de Champagne (as in the Cangé example, Figure 17.4), the so-called ‘prince’
of poets, or Roi de Navarre, and conclude with gatherings of anonymous
songs. The Chansonnier du Roi often adds to the sense of social order with
Figure 17.6 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 844 (Chansonnier du Roi),
fol. 14v
the inclusion of heraldry in its surviving illuminations. Moreover, certain

authors may have circulated separately. In the Chansonnier de Noailles
(F-Pn fonds fr. 12615, also known as Trv T), for example, the songs of
Thibaut may originally have formed a separate libellus: the dimensions of
the layout as well as the foliation set them apart from the rest of the book.
Authorship was not the only compilatory rationale. The Chansonnier
Cangé, for example, organizes songs alphabetically, according to the opening
310 Emma Dillon
incipit of the song. However, within each letter, songs are generally ordered
by author. In the example shown in Figure 17.4, for example, the opening
collection of Thibaut de Champagne (‘Roi de Navarre’) begins with songs
that start with the letter ‘A’ (Ausi, Amours). A final mode for organizing
song was according to genre, an ordering that suggests ways in which book
design was theoretical as well as practical: defining genre in the act of writing
connected book production to the intellectual enterprise of treatises such
as Johannes de Grocheio’s De musica, from the early fourteenth century,
which takes a similarly encyclopaedic look at music, defining it genre by
genre.
The chansonnier was just one form of song transmission. Another
important context was within the lyric-interpolated romances of north-
ern France, the most famous of which is Jean Renart’s Roman de la Rose,
dating from ca1227, in whose prologue the author declares an intention to
notate songs for posterity. The ensuing romance gives incipits for a number
of well-known troubadour and trouvère lyrics, but in the only extant source
no notational provision is given. Other romances have an interesting means
of signalling the presence of a song, often just as an incipit or line, rather
than the complete lyric. They are inked in red, or indented, or marked off
with capitals; only occasionally are they fully notated. Song’s presence, then,
may be felt in a number of manuscripts we do not traditionally think of as
being musical.
The later Middle Ages

While the fourteenth century is often cited as the start of an Ars Nova, the
‘new’ often implied no more than a fresh sense of the ‘old’. Retrospection
and historical awareness in contexts of change shape attitudes not only to
notation and musical design, but also towards the material. Chansonniers
containing repertories long past their performance life continued to be
produced, while older books, secular and sacred, took on new status as
collectors’ pieces, finding their way into the libraries of the great and the
educated. While scribes devised new ways of designing music on the page,
there was also continuity, with occasional, self-conscious citation of older
systems of organization. One book to embody awareness of past forms in a
spirit of innovation is F-Pn fonds fr. 146, containing a famous version of the
Roman de Fauvel. Produced in Paris in the second decade of the fourteenth
century, the manuscript contains a range of music from older-repertory
chant and conductus to state-of-the-art motets. The encyclopaedic scope
also extends to design. As well as the roman the book contains a collection of
songs, attributed to Jehan de Lescurel, that has a classic alphabetical chan-
sonnier format. Within the roman, scribes, working with the constraints of
fitting song into written narrative, deployed a range of systems for copying
Figure 17.7 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 146, fol. 1r
polyphony. In Figure 17.7, the scribes use familiar column format for pre-
senting three two-part motets, tucking tenors in at the end of each duplum
voice. On the verso, Figure 17.8, we see a design that is by contrast highly
unconventional, responding to the demands of images and text on the page,
and also to the musical style of the motet. The three voices (each marked
by a decorated capital) are copied separately, the triplum beginning lower
left, the motets upper right, and the tenor again at the bottom of the centre
312 Emma Dillon
Figure 17.8 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 146, fol. 1v
column. The scribe mainly drew staves column by column, each block sep-
arate from the next. However, like many motets of the early fourteenth
century, the triplum has more words, and also a faster, more note-filled
musical line. The resulting, complex spatial problems were resolved by
adding an extra line of staves at the very top of the central column, where
the triplum continues; and, most dramatically, by ruling four sets of staves
across two columns, so the scribe could copy the concluding section of the
triplum across the space.
By the middle of the fourteenth century, the composer, poet and clerc
Guillaume de Machaut was overseeing the compilation of his life’s work.
Accounting in part for why he is sometimes known as the last trouvère,
Machaut’s books echo earlier, single-author compilations (such as F-Pn
fonds fr. 25566, the Adam de la Halle manuscript). At least four of the six
main Machaut manuscripts were copied during his lifetime, probably with
Machaut’s direct involvement. The earliest, F-Pn fonds fr. 1586, referred
to also as MachC, dates from ca1350; US-KAferrell (Mach Vg) dates from
ca1370, while F-Pn fonds fr. 1585 (MachB), a copy, was made shortly after;
F-Pn fonds fr. 1584 (MachA) dates from just prior to Machaut’s death; F-Pn
fonds fr. 22545–6 (Mach F–G) and F-Pn fonds fr. 9221 (MachE) postdate
the composer. There is a vita-like quality to the chronological ordering
of works in the manuscripts, so that they simultaneously document the
history of a creative life. Moreover, recent work by Elizabeth Eva Leach and
Anne Walters Robertson suggests that the order within individual lyric units
determines and reflects narrative and musical connections between works.
There is also a fascinating meshing of authorial and scribal identities. In
F-Pn fonds fr. 1584 (MachA), for instance, the composer assumes scribal
authority in the paratextual incipit ‘Vesci l’ordenance que G. de Machaut
vet qu’il ait en son livre’. Meanwhile, among the numerous author portraits
that decorate the books, we see Machaut in a variety of poses, emphasizing
that composition is linked to writing: in his atelier, book before him, or in
a pastoral setting, quill in hand, roll unfurling over his knee.
Echoes of chansonnier-like forms are heard as late as the fifteenth cen-
tury. While the troubadours and trouvères were by now a distant memory, a
manuscript such as the Squarcialupi Codex (I-Fl Palatino 87) illustrates how
older systems of manuscript organization still had relevance. The book is
organized by composer, in a chronological sequence, beginning with some
of the earliest trecento composers and extending to those active at the time
of the book’s production. Each section begins with an author portrait whose
attention to attire communicates information about the author’s social or
ecclesiastical rank; authors’ names run as headers in coloured ink across
each opening. The book thus functions as a chronicle of trecento song,
while the costume and attires remind the viewer of the specific world from
which those song makers come – the order of song reflecting and enhancing
with its luxury and coherence the social world of the book’s makers and
consumers.
The books described thus far are the exception rather than the rule: they
are luxury items, demanding a team of artisans to produce, and made with
a specific patron in mind. Moreover, their emphasis on order suggests that
they were made to an explicit design, probably determined by a compiler,
or someone overseeing the whole project. By contrast, many manuscripts
314 Emma Dillon
of this period are far from luxurious, and far more haphazard in their
design. The mid-fourteenth-century Ivrea Codex (I-IV 115), containing a
collection of Latin and French motets, and a corpus of liturgical polyphony,
came together almost by accident. Produced by two scribes, with a third
filling in remaining space at a later stage, its gathering structure suggests
that it started out as separate libelli, which were only later constructed into
a single book.28 We cannot know who determined its assembly, or why.
Yet the story of I-IV 115 is indicative of a fluidity and opportunism in the
compilation of musical repertories.
Scribes and compilers of the later Middle Ages faced challenges that
reflected not just changes in reading habits but also shifting geographical
and political identities. In an era of papal schism, war, peace and interna-
tional treaties, and with expanding trade routes, the world became suddenly
more accessible, and culture flowed down its newly opened routes. While
many have written of the so-called international style in music of this period,
internationalism also has a material correlate. Many of the great trecento
sources are truly bilingual in their juxtaposition of French and Italian song
traditions, with scribes switching between formats and notations. The Pan-
ciatichi Codex (I-Fn Panciatichiano 26) is an excellent illustration of these
hybridities (along with the Reina Codex, F-Pn n.a.f. 6771). Combining
repertories that overlap with manuscripts such as the Squarcialupi Codex,
and the French-repertory Chantilly Codex (F-CH 564), it documents the
many musical, notational and visual languages of music, a snapshot of the
flexibility of the period. Like the Ivrea Codex, the book was an ongoing
project, with numerous scribes participating in its production well after
the first main scribe finished work in the 1390s. Its musical contents are,
not surprisingly, rather broad, with concordances with some of the oldest
trecento manuscripts, including the Rossi Codex (I-Rvat Rossi 215); it also
contains a large corpus of French polyphony, including ballades by Machaut.
Frenchness was present, too, in certain scribes’ tendency to translate Italian
notational language into French. The shift into different conventions for
visual disposition of voices and texts could sometimes lead to visible confu-
sion. For example, the ballade format, particular to the French corpus and
visually distinctive on account of its musical reprise, was sometimes taxing
to Italian scribes who were unaccustomed to its conventions for underlaying
the musical return.29
Paradoxically, in an age of hybridity and experimentation, the other
lasting achievement of music writers of this period was the creation of a
uniform language for the layout of polyphony. By the end of the fourteenth
century, the standard procedure was now to distribute one voice per folio,
abandoning the older column formats we saw with the thirteenth and early
fourteenth-century motet compendia. The legacy of this choirbook format

would be far-reaching, extending beyond the culture of parchment and into
the era of print.
Traces
Music books, particularly the non-liturgical kind, often had short shelf
lives. However, medieval attitudes to books were ferociously economical,
and old books were habitually dismembered and reconstituted in service
of the new. Among these discards are echoes of lost musical repertories.
The recent supplement to the RISM (Répertoire international des sources
musicales) volume of sources of polyphony from the British Isles, a tradi-
tion notoriously sparse in its sources, reads like a chronicle of bibliographic
massacre, of books systematically torn apart to become binding leaves and
spine reinforcers or wrappers, or scraped clean to make surfaces for new
texts.30 Part of manuscript studies, then, is the examination of traces: locat-
ing, extracting and scrutinizing history’s tattered leftovers, extrapolating
from them spectres of books vanished for ever. Yet with the forensic work of
palaeography, and with analytical techniques to interpret the musical lines
that remain, it is possible to reconstruct forms of lost choirbooks to rival
Old Hall (GB-Lbl add. 57950),31 or to trace the movement of French Ars
Nova motets to England.
Traces prompt other questions. Why do some books survive and not
others? Were books kept for their material value alone, or were certain
repertories felt to be ‘classic’? Does a book’s survival necessarily mean its
contents were still performed? In short, can the survival patterns of books
tell us anything about the values, meanings and uses of the repertories they
contain? In the case of English polyphony, the questions are tricky, given
the extraordinary erasing effects of the Reformation on liturgical practice,
musical and otherwise. However, evidence can occasionally offer more
concrete insights. The scribe of I-Bc Q15, an early-fifteenth-century Italian
compendium, returned to add to and edit his work over several years:
as pieces seemed outdated to his taste, he cannibalized them by excising
decorated capitals and pasting these into newer sections.32
Other kinds of evidence help in determining value. Like other material
goods, manuscripts had a meaning beyond their practical use: the very
substance of their production could be accounted for, as prized possession,
as practical transaction between patron and producer, and, more often than
not, as yet one more item to be inventoried in the goods and chattels of a
library or household treasury. This evidence is not only useful for revealing
316 Emma Dillon
what books were ‘worth’ (inventories often ascribe to them a monetary

value), but can also tell us about circulation and ownership. Once again,
such evidence frequently records absence: part of the picture of English
polyphony is gleaned from inventories of books that no longer exist.33
For example, inventories point to the existence of at least one additional
notated Fauvel text, cautioning us about overemphasizing the uniqueness
of F-PN fonds fr. 146;34 in the later fifteenth century, they reveal that the
same manuscript was in the hands of none other than the French king,
François I.35
In the case of the Notre Dame repertory, evidence of lost manuscripts
points not only to an international taste for the music, but also an interest
in it after it ceased to be performed. Investigations into inventory accounts
of organum by Rebecca A. Baltzer and Peter Jeffrey gather evidence for as
many as seventeen lost sources for the Parisian repertory in addition to the
extant sources.36 A sense of the repertory’s prestige and international repu-
tation may be inferred from those who owned copies: books of organum are
mentioned in England in the household of Edward I and in the possession
of one William de Ravenstone, who was a schoolmaster at St Paul’s, London;
elsewhere, copies surface in the library of the popes from Boniface VIII and
his successors, and in the library of Charles V of France. As Baltzer points
out, mere possession of a book does not necessarily mean the repertory was
performed – indeed, in many cases there is no evidence to support such a
claim – however, in the case of Edward I’s book ‘we can only assume
that Edward or some member of his family felt that these books were
worthwhile to own, whether this feeling was prompted by the manuscripts
themselves or by having heard such polyphony performed’.37 On the other
hand, Baltzer’s investigation of accounts of two modest books of organum
at the Sorbonne in Paris makes the convincing argument for the use of
books in performance. Not only are the books themselves cheap by com-
parison to others in the inventory (and therefore likely to be preserved
for purposes of performance rather than material pride), but the big-
ger picture of the liturgy of the Sorbonne, gleaned from extant liturgi-
cal books, points to a shared liturgical usage with the cathedral of Notre
Dame. If the Sorbonne shared the main liturgical use, it is all the more
likely that, in such close proximity to the cathedral, and within easy
reach of its singers and books, the college also adopted its prestigious
musical traditions; ‘from a liturgical standpoint, Notre Dame organum
would have been perfectly appropriate in the Sorbonne chapel’.38 Finally,
evidence of the treasury inventories in Notre Dame itself details where,
precisely, books were positioned in the cathedral, allowing us to imag-
ine books back into practical and ceremonial positions within the ritual
space.39
Future bound
What does the future hold for medieval music manuscripts? After more
than a century of cataloguing, describing and editing, what more can they
yield? Indeed, the seeming limitations of manuscript studies – bounded
by the finite nature of the object’s materiality – has become a theme
within medieval studies in the past couple of decades, and also in cari-
catures of medievalism by those outside the discipline. Traditional philo-
logical methodologies for contextualizing and editing manuscripts have
been described as fetishistic, driven by a ‘neurotic obsession’ to generate
hard facts from the concrete evidence, and as the antithesis to the plurality
of meaning advocated in the theoretical and critical climate of the start of
the twenty-first century.40
While such characterization has of course provoked dispute, the ‘philol-
ogy versus interpretation’ debate has nonetheless generated fruitful new
directions in manuscript studies. One trajectory has been to look back, not
just to medieval contexts for manuscripts, but also to the emergence of
philology. Across medieval studies, this historiographical turn has resulted
in studies of disciplinary origins, many under the aegis of the so-called New
Philology or New Medievalism. Work by Bernard Cerquiglini, Michael
Camille, R. Howard Bloch, Hans Gumbrecht and Kathleen Biddick, in par-
ticular, historicizes the philological movements of the nineteenth century,
suggesting that the ‘science’ of textual criticism and codicological analysis
were part of highly contingent and politicized discourses of the time, and
illuminate scholarly formations that continue to shape the questions we
ask even today. The afterlife of manuscripts is also a lens through which
to view other historical narratives: manuscript sales in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries lead us into the world of bibliophiles such as Pierpont
Morgan, the Rothschild family, and more generally into the place of the
Middle Ages in the cultural aspirations of early Americans. Music is part
of these stories; at the same time, the historiography of music books leads
us to the foundations of the entire discipline, as Katherine Bergeron’s study
of the nineteenth-century chant revival at Solesmes illuminates. There,
efforts to resuscitate liturgical rites for practical use via editing and study-
ing chant manuscripts fostered traditions of musical study that endure
today.
Reappraisal has also inspired a new kind of hands-on interpretative
approach, in which differences between sources of the same text are cele-
brated as evidence of creative agency rather than of human fallibility in the
act of copying. Donald McKenzie’s edict, that ‘forms effect meaning’, has
been realized in a number of recent case studies that approach the variance
of text, illuminating, design, order and layout of books as expressive. Sylvia
318 Emma Dillon
Huot’s studies of French literary and lyric repertories exemplify ways of

seeing the book as a kind of performance, a theme taken up still further
in Ardis Butterfield’s recent monograph on French song. Meanwhile, the
significance of the compilatory order of Machaut’s opus has been newly
emphasized by Anne Walters Robertson’s work on his motets.
The early years of this century also mark a revolution within more tradi-
tional philological methods. No matter how rich the new critical approach
to manuscripts may be, practical challenges persist: despite their extraordi-
nary resilience, books are organic objects, and in a constant state of decay.
Even with the sophistication of modern restoration techniques, librarians
face ethical issues in keeping books available for reading: to read is ulti-
mately to participate in a book’s demise. As a result, ‘originals’ are now less
accessible. Yet in another sense manuscripts have never been more visible.
In place of originals, there are ever-crisper photographic reproductions,
while innovations in digital imaging, computer technology and the internet
create a major new forum for consulting manuscripts. In the past decade,
research libraries have not only increased the number of books they repro-
duce digitally, but have turned more and more to the internet as a site of
access for their holdings. In the United States, projects such as the Digital
Scriptorium are burgeoning: hosted by a consortium of academic institu-
tions and funded by national arts foundations, the Digital Scriptorium, free
and accessible to all, brings images and catalogue descriptions of a range of
medieval sources to life at the click of a button.41 In the more specifically
musical domain, the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music aims to make
available all sources of English music, and is constantly added to as new
discoveries are made.42 The virtual realm thus makes more efficient tradi-
tional kinds of philology: in the space of the screen, leaves and fragments
detached from the same book centuries ago, now held in different libraries,
sometimes on different continents, can rub shoulders again, while the dig-
ital technology permits us to ‘see’ manuscripts with a clarity that is denied
the naked eye or magnifying glass.
Let us conclude by returning to the opening citation of this chapter.
Writing at the cusp of a technological transformation of music, Isidore of
Seville imagined the unimaginable – a world in which sound did not decay.
Despite his seeming denial of a materiality in music, it is possible that he had
in fact glimpsed strange, wispy signs hanging over words, the first indicators
of vocal sound, and that affirmation of sound’s perishability was a resistance
to the possibility that inscription could be an aesthetic equivalent to living
sounds.43 Little could he have known how the signs of song would solidify
into the range of forms that became the written tradition of music. Perhaps
we detect a hint of awe in Isidore’s rumination: awe at the incredible notion
that music could exist and endure in realms that were more tangible than
memory, less fleeting than performance. Perhaps we may relate to that

sense of possibility, and feel in our own epoch the insinuation of another
conceptual transformation of the stuff of music. As our eyes adjust to the
new clarity of the past flickering on our computer screens, we cannot but
wonder what lies ahead for musical sound, and wonder (like Isidore) not
only at conceptions of sound beyond our experience, but also at new, as
yet unthinkable ways to re-vision or experience afresh what has long since
passed.
18 The geography of medieval music
christopher page
The space where medieval music happened: the Latin West

In the 1290s an Italian friar travelled through part of what is now Iraq and
found a Latin missal on sale in Al-Mawsil, north of Baghdad. The book
had undoubtedly been looted from a church in one of the last Crusader
possessions, probably from the port city of Acre that fell in 1291. The missal
was the token of a failed endeavour to carry the ritual music of the Latin
West to the Holy Land and to install it there. By the time the first Crusaders
took Jerusalem in 1099, a shared body of Frankish-Roman or Gregorian
chant for the mass arose whether it was night or day, and regardless of the
normal patterns of sleep and sustenance, from western Spain to Hungary
and from Scandinavia to Sicily. The intention had been that conquests in
Palestine and Syria should become part of this Latin-Christian territory
forever, and when the Crusading enterprise collapsed another Franciscan
complained that ‘there is only the abominable melody of Saracens where
there should only be psalmody’. The muezzin and minaret had silenced the
cantor and the bell tower.1
The medieval music addressed in the Cambridge Companion to Medieval
Music is essentially the liturgical and vocal music, both sacred and secu-
lar, of this Latin and Western civilization. It was performed in a particular
geographical space and shaped by its patterns of communication, by its
shifting political configurations and even perhaps by its many and varied
ecologies. Figure 18.1 shows the principal territories at issue. Bounded on
three sides by water, this space corresponds to the lands where Alexan-
der the Great had no interest in making conquests and where Greek
was therefore never imposed as the language of administration and lit-
erature. Under the Roman Empire, and indeed long afterwards, Latin
was the principal language associated with a functional literacy in this
Occidental space and, as a result, Latin was also the only language used
for Christian worship, whether for readings or for the massive reperto-
ries of sacred song, in contrast to the linguistic pluralism of the Eastern
churches.
To a considerable extent, this Latin Occident acquired its medieval form
by accident, or rather through major territorial losses. It is easy to forget
that one of the richest and most important territories in the Christian West
[320]
Figure 18.1 The geography of medieval music expressed as circuits of communication and
long-term political history (I: West Frankish; II: East Frankish; III: Alpine Gate; IV: Romania south;
V: Anglo-Norman)
once bordered the Sahara and vanished in 698. This was the Christian
civilization of Roman, Vandal and then Byzantine Africa, strung out along
the narrow lowlands from Tunisia westward to Morocco (approximately the
part of Africa shown in Figure 18.1). In botanical and ecological terms, this
coastal band is unmistakably of a piece with Mediterranean Europe. The
significance of Africa’s removal from the medieval Mediterranean system
can be gauged from the riches that the littoral provided while it was still
322 Christopher Page
Latin and Christian. The earliest reference in any document to the psalmody
of the fore-mass, destined to be of capital importance for the evolution of
Western musical art, appears just after 200 in the Latin writings of Tertullian
and relates to the Catholic liturgy of Carthage. The history of the chant later
known as the gradual, in other words, opens in Africa. Examples between
the third century and the fifth could be multiplied up to the time of Saint
Augustine (bishop of a provincial African city) and beyond. A case might
be made that the cradle of the Western and Latin-Christian space lies not
in Rome but in Carthage, and therefore in a city whose ruins stand today
in Tunisia.2
Much of Spain was also lost to the same invaders in 711, marking the
western extreme of an expansive wave that saw Islamic armies in Pak-
istan the following year. The conquest of Spain drove the Latin-Christian
civilization of the Visigoths to the north, and when it fell this kingdom
was in full flower. Ruled by Catholics from 589, Spain was highly cre-
ative in matters of liturgical music (the names of several composers are
known) and could produce a scholar such as Isidore of Seville (d. 636)
whose Etymologies remained a fundamental work of reference for a thou-
sand years. The Visigothic civilization was also remarkably self-contained;
its bishops in the 600s undertook far-reaching reforms of liturgy and chant
with only the most passing reference to Rome. The kingdom possessed
a palace administration, indeed a palatine culture, funded by the land
tax and based in the royal capital of Toledo, such as kings elsewhere in
the West could only envy. Had Spain not fallen, the musical achievement
of the Carolingian Franks (see below) might appear in a very different
light.3
The circuits
Figure 18.1 shows the principal circuits of communication and long-term
political history that shape the surviving medieval music. It cannot be
stressed too strongly that this map has been drawn with reference to what
survives in notation, with results that reveal a slippage between the nota-
tional record and major currents in the social, political and ecclesiastical
history of the Middle Ages, to say nothing of musical life in the broader
sense of all music making, regardless of whether it has left a deposit in
notation or not. The immense contribution of Ireland to the monastic and
spiritual history of the medieval West, for example, fails to register on this
map because there are virtually no notated remains from medieval Ireland.
In the same way, the rich evidence of Irish (or Icelandic) minstrelsy, men-
tioned in literary sources, does not register, because there is no notational
record of medieval date.
These circuits are not geographical in a sense that can be explored with
a physical map showing mountains, rivers and coasts. Both the Pyrenees
and the Alps are crossed, and it is not the Rhine that separates I from II but
a broader zone of overlap approximately corresponding to Lotharingia (>
Lorraine), a product of Frankish politics with no logic in either nature or
the frontier between Romance and Germanic speech. Indeed, these circuits
do not follow any linguistic boundaries save in the very approximate sense
that I is largely an area of Romance speech and II of Germanic. Nor is
there much in these circuits one could trace with a modern political map.
They do not follow the boundaries of nation states formed in post-medieval
Europe, and therefore pull away from the nineteenth-century tradition of
interpreting Western European history in terms of peoples with an ethnicity
expressed above all in relationships of language to territorial home, viewed
as the foundation for nation states. Circuits I and II, for example, do not
define a nascent France or Germany; the ‘French’ zone reaches too far south
and the ‘German’ zone is inextricably linked to III as the Holy Roman
Empire. To some extent, these circuits follow ecological lines more closely
than any others. Most of circuit IV corresponds quite well to what botanists
and climatologists define as the Mediterranean environment in Western
Europe. Circuits I, II and V mostly fall in temperate Europe, and although
I has a considerable southern reach its core political name, France, was still
confined to lands north of Lyon as late as the seventeenth century.
I The West Frankish circuit

Between the sixth century and the ninth, when a new political order of
kingship was consolidated in the West, circuits I and II defined the largest
and most powerful polity in existence, namely the kingdom of the Franks.
Charlemagne’s conquest of Lombardy and his acclamation as [Western]
Roman Emperor in 800 annexed III and created the Carolingian Empire.
The foundational music of the Western musical tradition, namely Gregorian
(or, better, ‘Frankish-Roman’) chant, was developed here between ca750 and
ca850 in churches of the Carolingian core such as the cathedral of Rouen on
the lower Seine and the abbey of St-Denis near Paris, but more consistently
in the eastern reaches of I where the Carolingians were most at home,
notably at the cathedral of Metz but also perhaps at heartland monasteries
such as Prüm, refounded by Charlemagne’s father, Pépin. It is certain that
at least one Roman singer came north to teach Frankish pupils. This was
at Rouen, a vital port where commodities brought by barge traffic could
be unloaded onto sea-going vessels, but there are other reports of ninth-
century singers travelling between the Frankish kingdom and Italy using the
Alpine Gate (III). The Gregorian music spread into other circuits in ways
to be described below, creating a truly Western European repertory whose
melodic idioms and sense of musical line were to saturate the hearing, the
artistic imagination and the musical articulacy of Western musicians for
centuries to come.
Many new compositions were created here for the liturgy between the
ninth and the eleventh centuries. Chant composers can be traced by name
at Auxerre, Chartres, Corbie, Fleury, Montier-en-Der, St-Riquier and Sens,
among other places, together with centres showing a vigorous northeastern
reach such as Gembloux, Liège, Metz, Toul and Trier. The sequence appears
to have emerged from circuit I in the earliest layers of this activity, but
since music for the mass was otherwise a more or less closed repertory
of Gregorian plainsong the aim of these composers was often to compose
tropes (verbal and musical additions to an existing Gregorian composition)
or to create office chants, antiphons and responsories, for new or revived
cults of saints. Their most ambitious project was to create a complete matins
service, both the readings and the chants, producing a complex assemblage
of music, poetry and prose that was often undertaken in a conscious effort
to improve on the quality of older materials. (The sense of wielding a
superior Latinity, a gift of the Carolingian Renaissance, was thus a vital
spur to composition.) These office chants rarely achieved a wide circulation
because the saints honoured were often of little fame elsewhere, but they
could make a major contribution in a local context. The city of Mons,
for example, grew around the family seat of the counts and the church of
St Waudru; a count translated the relics of Saint Veronus there in 1012
and soon afterwards the monk Olbert of Gembloux composed a set of
matins chants, at the count’s request, for the Feast of the Translation. In
gratitude, the count and his wife donated lands to Olbert’s abbey. Thus the
monastery, the power of the comital family and the nascent settlement of
Mons prospered together, and new chants helped to foster all three.4
The rise of Gregorian chant in the northerly districts of I, and the sheer
density of composers traceable there, firmly establish this as the long-term
metropolitan district in the geography of medieval music. The luxuriant
twelfth-century developments south of the Loire, including superbly elastic
compositions in two parts set to a wide range of devotional and accentual
poetry (called versus by the scribes), show Aquitaine joining the old Frankish
core as a productive zone yet maintaining an independence in its choice
of texts, and in the fluidity of the voices in the two-part texture, which
probably owes something to Aquitaine’s long geopolitical history as a far-
from-compliant dependency of the Frankish (or by now French) kingdom
to the north. The metropolitan status of circuit I is sometimes also very
evident in developments around its periphery. In 1080, Spanish bishops
at the Council of Burgos decided to replace their indigenous Mozarabic
liturgy with the Frankish-Roman rite and its Gregorian chant, a decision that
reflected mounting pressure from Pope Gregory VII but also from the abbey
of Cluny, the massive Benedictine prayer-factory in the centre of circuit I.
Several generations later, the same process of conscious assimilation to the
metropolitan zone can be seen in the twelfth-century collection now known
as the Codex Calixtinus, probably created in central I for use in the cathedral
of St James in Galicia. This book contains the Historia Turpini, ostensibly a
ninth-century account of how Charlemagne crossed the Pyrenees to Galicia
and uncovered the relics of Saint James (a fine picture in the manuscript
shows him riding out from Aachen to do so). There are also monophonic
and polyphonic pieces in the book attributed (by a later hand) to churchmen
associated with Vézelay, Bourges, Paris, Troyes and Soissons, among other
places evoking Burgundy, Champagne and Picardy. Those territories had
defined the principal region of monastic revival in western Europe – the
Cistercians, the Cluniacs and the Premonstratensian canons had all begun
somewhere there – just as they produced the greatest contribution to the
Crusading enterprise. The music of the Codex Calixtinus is not a preamble
to later achievements at Notre Dame of Paris. Instead, it sings circuit I, the
heartland of the twelfth-century West.5
The importance of Paris as a Capetian capital, and as a centre for poly-
phonic composition after approximately 1150, reveals once more the vigour
of circuit I and exposes the region’s deep geopolitical roots in the north.
Paris is a natural fort, protected to the east by a series of escarpments, able
to receive provisions along the Seine, one of the most important fluvial
highways of France, and fed by the vast agricultural expanse of La Beauce.
Benefactions to the abbey of St Denis, and the distribution of fiscal lands,
show that Paris had been important to Frankish kings of Merovingian and
Carolingian descent for many hundreds of years before Capetian ascen-
dancy in the city added another layer. (It is salutary to remember that Paris
became a centre for masters and students because there was no room for
expansion on the Plateau of Laon, a Carolingian heartland city if ever there
was one. This is where Charlemagne has his core estate or cambre in the
Song of Roland.) By 1175 Paris was a place of exceptional opportunity with
sophisticated arrangements for copying texts and music. Drawing men from
all over the Latin world, it was an unparalleled and international clearing-
house for musical talent. Music redacted and copied, but not necessarily
composed, in Paris could reach the far ends of the Latin West, including
St Andrews in Scotland (D-W 628, the ‘Notre Dame’ source W1 ) and the
chapel of the royal monastery at Burgos (the Las Huelgas manuscript), cen-
tres which lie not far short of two thousand miles apart. The importance
of Paris as a musical centre continued into the first half of the fourteenth
century when the musical interpolations in the Français 146 manuscript
of Le Roman de Fauvel (F-Pn fonds fr. 146), principally comprising
monophonic songs and polyphonic motets, give Paris an unrivalled claim

to be the centre of notational and stylistic developments associated today
with the term Ars Nova. This was once more a function of the city’s power
to draw men of talent from many miles distant, including Philippe de Vitry
who was probably from Champagne.6
At this point, with Philippe de Vitry’s fellow Champenois Guillaume de
Machaut on the horizon, one should look back to review the geographical
origins of courtly song in circuit I. Places mentioned in this survey so far,
all associated with named composers, include Auxerre, Bourges, Chartres,
Corbie, Fleury, Gembloux, Liège, Metz, Montier-en-Der, Paris, St-Riquier,
Sens, Soissons, Toul, Trier, Troyes and Vézelay. The majority of these cen-
tres lie between the Loire and the Moselle, with a marked concentration
in lands east of Paris. These are mostly regions of immense open plains
produced by forest clearances (already accomplished by the beginning of
the Middle Ages) or of softly undulating mountains. From the eighth cen-
tury, when they were Carolingian heartland and the probable birthplace
of Gregorian chant, these sweeping cornlands continuously produced their
crop of musical talent. After a great many chant composers of 900–1150,
the period 1150–1300 brings a new harvest with the trouvères who created
some two thousand monophonic songs with texts in French (to count only
the songs that survive) in an immense arc of territory reaching as far south
as Berzé near Cluny in Burgundy but mostly encompassing cities, towns and
smaller settlements further north such as Amiens, Arras, Béthune, Cam-
brai, Chartres, Coucy, Épinal, Soignies, Nesles and St-Quentin. The easterly
distribution of the trouvères’ art is evident from the relatively small number
of them securely connected with Paris, from the almost complete absence
of Normans or Bretons among them, and from the quasi-classical status
(very apparent in the manuscript record) of songs by Thibaut de Cham-
pagne and Gace Brulé, both associated with the Champenois district. In a
sense, that tradition continued into the fourteenth century with Philippe
de Vitry, but it survives more durably with the ‘last of the trouvères’, the
Champenois Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377), who was considerably more
interested than his older colleague in vernacular song. Although Machaut
was a much-travelled man with many court connections, the geographical
background to his songs, both monophonic and polyphonic, lies in the great
French song-making region of grands chants, ballades, rondets de carole, pas-
tourelles and other lyric genres extending east of Paris from approximately
the Plateau of Langres to Lille and Arras.
In the final decades of the fourteenth century the legacy of Machaut
and other composers from the northerly reaches of circuit I was subjected
to a major stylistic and geographical shift. Practised by composers such
as Senleches and Solage, the rhythmic refinements of the phase in poly-
phonic song now commonly called Ars Subtilor were cultivated in southern
regions of I at the courts of Foix and Béarn, in Aragon and Catalonia.

The composers almost exclusively used texts in French, not in any form of
literary language used in Romania south (IV), marking this development
as an unexplained southern extrusion of a polyphonic art whose principal
elements were developed further north (one of Solage’s most exuberant
pieces honours Jean of Berry). There is no clear connection between the
Ars Subtilior and the monophonic vernacular-song traditions of circuit
IV, save perhaps in the composers’ fondness for the inherently serious
and grandiloquent form of the ballade, arguably their equivalent of the
troubadour canso or the northern chanson. Comparable developments in
circuit III, with composers such as Matteo da Perugia, also make exten-
sive use of French texts, suggesting once more the predominant influence
of the north, partly exerted through the French-dominated papal court at
Avignon.
With the fifteenth century, the Seine–Moselle district of circuit I pro-
duced a crop of talented musicians all over again. The cities that will figure
in the lives (and to some extent the careers) of Ciconia, Du Fay, Binchois,
Josquin, Pierre de la Rue and many other Franco-Flemish musicians include
Bruges, Cambrai, Ghent, Liège, Mons, St-Quentin and Tournai. This is
deep Frankish territory. In the city of Tournai, today just across the Franco-
Belgian frontier, Josquin walked over the concealed grave of Childeric, the
father of Clovis the first Christian king of the Franks (d. 511), every time
he passed the church of St Brice. In Liège, Ciconia sang barely a few kilo-
metres from the birthplace of the first Carolingian king and the instigator
of Gregorian chant, Charlemagne’s father Pépin (d. 768). For the history
of medieval music in its geographical aspects, these connections are the
equivalent of aerial photography.
II The East Frankish circuit

Gregorian chant spread eastwards into circuit II from the core Carolingian
abbeys and churches of I, and in many different ways. Some of the forces
concerned were in operation well before the Treaty of Verdun in 843 that sep-
arated the West Frankish and East Frankish kingdoms with a Lotharingian
band between them (note the overlap of I and II). Much was achieved by
conversion at the point of a sword, especially in Saxony where Charlemagne
hammered away for decades and eventually saw Paderborn emerge as a
major ecclesiastical centre. The establishment of new bishoprics in the east,
such as Würzburg and Salzburg, both of them eighth-century creations,
created churches in which the Carolingians had a direct reforming interest,
while imperial chapels founded in palaces at Aachen, Worms, Ingelheim
and elsewhere established centres where the palatine chaplains, the pala-
tini, followed the emperors to sing Gregorian chant for mass and office.
The prayer confraternities, predominantly a ninth-century phenomenon,
which bound abbeys and churches together throughout circuits I, II and

III were of great importance in the work of dissemination, and so were ties
of blood and friendship between abbots and bishops; a letter survives in
which one Frankish churchman of the ninth century asks another to send
a singer trained in ‘Roman’ (that is to say, Gregorian) chant as a personal
favour. As in circuit I, the period 850–1100 brings many composers who
created liturgical chant, including the East Frankish repertory of sequences
and responsories for the offices for the Sanctorale. Again as in circuit I,
these melodies were often composed against the grain of Gregorian style, so
to speak, by those who regarded themselves as moderni for doing so. Com-
posers mentioned in literary sources were active at the Bavarian abbey of
St Emmeram in Regensburg (with a rich musical legacy, and surviving musi-
cal remains), Eichstätt, Fulda, Mettlach, Säckingen, St-Gall and Utrecht, to
look no further.7
Circuit II was home to a vigorous and expansionist Catholic civiliza-
tion. In the 860s, missionaries directed from frontier sees such as Freising,
Salzburg and Passau can be found among the Bulgars and Slavs, trying
to prevail over their Byzantine competitors and characteristically insisting,
with papal approval, that converts should worship exclusively in a Latin
liturgy. A century later, the sheer military and political strength of the Holy
Roman Emperors forced a complete reconfiguration of Hungary, shatter-
ing the tribal structure and introducing both kingship and Catholicism
through German missionaries (facing down Byzantine competitors) under
Prince Géza (ca970–97) on the model of realms further west. By 1000, the
see of Esztergom was in existence and Hungary, gradually assimilating
Gregorian chant, was established as the eastern frontier of the Latin-
Christian world. By the thirteenth century, narrative sources show priests
singing Latin sequences at mass in the stockade churches of Riga in mod-
ern Latvia; charters reveal hospitals, many with chapels for daily chanted
masses, in Mecklenburg and Pomerania.8
In the polyphonic arts, the contribution of circuit II was minimal, being
confined before the fifteenth century almost entirely to oddities such as the
polyphonic songs of the Monk of Salzburg. There was no German Machaut
to marry the polyphonic techniques of the Ars Nova to an adapted form
of the lyric traditions inherited from the thirteenth century. (Something
similar may be said for England; the influences of I and IV, with their vari-
ous traditions, were so strong that no form of vernacular polyphonic song
developed in any Germanic language before the fifteenth century). Yet the
situation with regard to monophonic song in the vernacular, or Minnesang,
was very different. The imperial and aristocratic courts of circuit II yielded
nothing in either grandeur or historical importance to their counterparts in
I. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Holy Roman Emperors recruited
their bishops from the palace chaplains – from specialists in liturgy and
chant, in other words – and the candidates for such offices were admired
for a wide range of courtly skills including eloquence, decorous bearing and
reserve under the stress of court life with its many intrigues. Courtliness, or
curialitas, is insistently celebrated in the biographies devoted to these men
when they became bishops, providing an open window onto the milieu
where German courtly song was beginning to emerge by 1150 or so. The
range and sophistication of the musical arts that such a milieu could encour-
age are well illustrated in poems such as the Latin Ruodlieb of ca1000 and
the thirteenth-century Tristan of Gottfried von Strasburg. The celebrated
Carmina Burana manuscript (D-Mbs clm 4660), though using unheighted
neumes, also suggests the sophistication of vernacular and Latin song at the
German courts and in the monastic or cathedral refectories of the Empire.
The musical remains of courtly lyric in various dialects of Middle High
German are much less abundant than those in French, but they are enough
to reveal an art of song deeply indebted to contacts with circuit I. The earliest
German songmakers, for example, who were for most part Rhineland and
Westerly poets of the period 1150–1200, seem to have derived their contact
with troubador lyric through French intermediaries (that is to say circuit II
reached through I into IV). From there the art of German lyric expanded in
the thirteenth century to fill the lands of the Holy Roman Empire, embrac-
ing all of present-day Germany (including the Low German dialect area of
the north), Austria and German-speaking Switzerland.9
III The Alpine Gate

There are two principal ways of viewing this circuit. For the period 800–
900, it principally figures as the zone that gave elements of the Roman
liturgy, including musical materials, to the Franks in circuit I, and which
then became the district where the immense cultural achievements of I were
gathered and transmitted through transalpine links to northern and central
Italy. For the period 900 onwards, circuit III is much more closely linked to
circuit II, for the two interlink to form the transalpine polity of the Holy
Roman Empire of the German Nation.
Gregorian chant came to northern Italy with Charlemagne’s conquest
of Lombardy in 774, as witness the magnificent Monza cantatorium, one
of the earliest sources for the Gregorian gradual and probably copied in
Francia during the ninth century then taken across the Alps to Monza by an
emigrant Frankish bishop or abbot. By the ninth century, many churches
in circuits I and II were bound in ties of prayer confraternity to houses of
III, further establishing lines of transmission. Maritime contact between
I and III could be fluent in the warmer months when the sea was open,
but the ninth century brought a shift to the transalpine land route. This
helps to explain how an abbey in an obscure place like the monastery of

St Gall could mature into a wealthy house and become a major centre of
Frankish-Roman chant with associated arts composition (including a major
contribution to the sequence repertory) and of notation carried to a level
of the utmost sophistication. The house chroniclers of St Gall cherished
especially vivid (and mostly apocryphal) stories of Roman singers passing
northwards through the Alpine Gate and remaining in their abbey to teach
pure Roman chant.10
There were two principal non-Gregorian liturgies in III, the Ambrosian
and the Beneventan, the former reflecting the wealth and independence
of what had once been a Western-imperial capital and the latter the long-
standing (but precarious) autonomy of the Lombard duchy of Benevento.
In the half-century 1050–1100 that produced the First Crusade and the
Spanish bishops’ decision to suppress the Mozarabic liturgy in favour of
the Frankish-Roman, Pope Stephen X (1057–8) demanded the end of
Beneventan chant at the great abbey of Monte Cassino and the imposi-
tion of the Gregorian. Monte Cassino at this time was a major musical
centre, home at various times to composers such as Leo of Ostia, Alfanus
(also a physician, a reminder that Salerno and the Greek south of Italy are
not far away) and Alberic (a composer and theorist). Stephen IX was a
Lotharingian, appointed as part of the Holy Roman Emperors’ policy to
put trusted northerners on the throne of Saint Peter instead of the scions of
feuding Italian families whom the Germans were inclined to regard as deeply
untrustworthy. The kind of liturgical change Stephen demanded could not
be accomplished overnight, but with the decisions at Monte Cassino and
Burgos, only a few decades apart, a little more of the Latin-Christian sound-
scape that characterizes the medieval West fell into place.11
Soon after 1000, the ‘monk’ Guido of Arezzo, who spent all or most of
his life in III, gathered up existing techniques of notation and created what
is arguably the defining technology of the Western musical tradition: the
staff with meaningful spaces as well as lines. So fluent was the movement
of envoys, military retinues, traders and pilgrims through the Alpine Gate
in the eleventh century that Guido’s new technique was being taught in
the distant imperial city of Liège within a generation of his death, perhaps
less. The background to this seminal invention lies with the wealth of the
Canossa family in the Po valley; enriched by rents from land reclamation
and forest clearances, they were effectively Guido’s patrons both at the
abbey of Pomposa and subsequently at the cathedral of Arezzo where his
invention was developed and tested. Equally important was the nearness of
southern Italy with its wide contacts in the Arabo-Byzantine Mediterranean
and links with Islamic science, manifest in the adoption of Hindu-Arabic
numerals, recorded in Italy within Guido’s century. (Guido’s notation is
essentially a form of graph, the earliest known in the Western tradition.)

Finally, the context for Guido’s invention should be sought in the quicken-
ing of monastic and clerical conscience in northern Italy after 1000, often
prompted by lay congregations in the new hilltop towns of the incastel-
lamento who demanded higher moral and pastoral standards from their
priests. This breadth of reference is necessary, for Guido was far from being
a simple choirmaster; he was remembered by the Canossa family several
generations after his death as a ‘blessed hermit’, and he probably possessed
a conspicuously ascetic temperament that was inseparable, in his judge-
ment, from the highest standards in the performance of chant. He invented
his notation to preserve Roman chant in its pure state (that is to say, to
disseminate it in his preferred form) and went to Rome where John XIX
approved it.12
Italian sources of the thirteenth and indeed the fourteenth century con-
tain numerous examples of indigenous polyphony whose techniques stand
outside the ‘Notre Dame’ tradition, although literary records of polyphonic
composition (such as the remarkable detailed references to song making
by several Franciscans in the Chronicle of Salimbene de Adam, including
settings of poems by Philippe the Chancellor of Paris) suggest that Parisian
materials were by no means remote; they were probably brought through
the Alpine Gate by the well-attested travels of Franciscan scholars attending
the university. For vernacular song, including the trecento repertory, see the
next section.13
IV Romania south
By the twelfth century, Circuit IV can be traced as a large area of southern
Romance speech used for a rich and interconnected culture of lyric in
Gallego, Catalan, Old Occitan, Sicilian and ‘Italian’. The extensive song
repertories that survive from this circuit, almost exclusively monophonic,
include the massive Alfonsine anthology of the Cantigas de Santa Maria,
the troubadour corpus and the lauda repertory from Italy. Much material,
especially pertaining to lighter-courtly or satirical genres, has been preserved
without musical notation, or only in fragments that have serendipitously
survived, such as the Cantigas de amigo of Martin Codax.
The vernaculars of this circuit, even when cast in artificial literary forms,
were probably comprehensible across the whole area. There was also a
consensus that they were suitable for different things than the French or
langue d’oı̈l used in the northern parts of circuit 1. Soon after 1200, the
Catalan poet Raimon Vidal de Besalú wrote that French is best for romances
(that is to say for narratives in poetry or prose), for retronsas (a refrain
form, not well represented) and for pasturellas (a lighter-courtly and semi-
narrative genre), whereas literary Occitan or Lemozi was most appropriate
for high-style love songs and for lyrics of political or satirical comment.
About a century later, Dante was so impressed by the long-established
tradition of grave and authoritative French prose, represented by works such
as the Vulgate Arthurian romances, that he praised French as an especially
fit language for ‘compilations from the Bible and the histories of Troy and
Rome, and the beautiful tales of King Arthur and many other works of
history and doctrine’. Old Occitan prose was by no means so assured at this
date, for it was not stiffened by the usage of clerics with a background in
Paris or some other northern cathedral school. There seems to have been a
consciousness throughout this circuit that a central and prized troubadour
tradition existed whose language had a richness and dignity that made it
especially appropriate for songs of love and ethical instruction: for amors
and essenhamen. There was a widespread conviction that this Occitan was
a quintessentially lyric medium, inspiring closely related forms of romance
speech to comparable heights of literary eminence from Galicia to Sicily,
and correspondingly less appropriate for the august purposes in prose that
the langue d’oı̈l served so well. It was the privilege of those using southern
romance in this circuit to share in that troubadour tradition, even though
long study of the accepted literary language might be necessary to acquire
proficiency.14
Despite the importance of Gallego (the literary language of Galician-
Portuguese, and an Atlantic tongue), IV is a Mediterranean circuit with the
area of Occitan speech as its metropolitan district, essentially comprising
the Auvergne, Aquitaine, the Limousin, Provence and Languedoc. The pri-
macy of the troubadour material in this circuit seems undeniable, as witness
the immense respect in which Dante held the art of the troubadours (while
lamenting the lack of a court speech in Italian) at the eastern end of the
circuit and the similar reverence shown by the Gallego poets in their imita-
tions of troubadour forms and literary manner at the far west. It was also in
this circuit that the art of vernacular song first acquired its own tradition of
theory. Handbooks for those wishing to compose troubadour poetry began
to appear in Spain, Catalonia, Italy and Occitania during the thirteenth cen-
tury and continued to be written well into the fifteenth. Some are manuals of
grammar or dictionaries; others, like the celebrated Leys d’Amors, produced
in Toulouse during the early fourteenth century and existing in various ver-
sions, adapt the entire apparatus of Latin grammar and rhetoric to create a
new art of good judgement in vernacular song based upon literacy, ethical
discernment and the acute sensitivity to the sounds of the human voice that
was one of the glories of the Greco-Roman education in grammar. Some
of these manuals include references to the musical idioms of the songs,
even to their mode of performance, and suggest that contemporaries were
well aware that the musical language of their lyrics, including its rhythmic
aspect, was not the same as that of Ars Nova songs practised in the north
of circuit I, just as they regarded the literary languages of IV as essentially
different from French. The Leys d’amors, in one of the most explicit remarks
about musical idiom, inveighs against those who spoil the dansa by assimi-
lating its music to the redondel and introducing ‘the minims and semibreves
of their motets’. Since the compiler of the Leys d’amors, Guilhem Molinier,
regarded the redondel as primarily a French-language form, this is probably
a fling at very up-to-date monophonic songs like those in the manuscript
of the Roman de Fauvel (F-Pn fonds fr. 146), whose notation (including
unsigned semibreves) is probably to be read in the up-to-date manner cod-
ified in the dossier long associated with the name Ars Nova and regarded as
a treatise by Philippe de Vitry.15
Only in northern Italy did a genre of polyphonic song develop applying
music with the ‘minims and semibreves’ of Ars Nova notation to poetry in
a literary language of Romania south. The large and predominantly two-
part repertory of trecento lyric with forms such as the madrigale, caccia
and ballata is one of the mysteries of medieval music. More or less entirely
contained by the fourteenth century, and barely known to traverse the Alps,
this often determinedly virtuosic music shows signs of dependency upon
earlier, extemporised practices of two-part florid counterpoint, revealing a
sense of melody quite unlike anything shown by antecedent monophonic
song in IV or the French Ars Nova. By the end of the fourteenth century
it was gone, and manuscripts from what is now northern Italy (a zone
where French was widely understood and spoken as a court language)
begin to reveal extensive traces of transalpine contacts with music from the
metropolitan zone, preserving much music by composers such as Binchois,
Du Fay, Brassart and others from oblivion. The sheer long-term prestige of
that metropolitan district is strikingly apparent in the way musical history
during the first half of the fifteenth century runs in the opposite direction
to the received narrative of an Italian renaissance feeding the north.
V The Anglo-Norman zone

England between 1066 and 1500 was a country of small account, produc-
ing only one pope (suggesting a massive failure of influence at the papal
curia) and only one monastic order (the Gilbertines) which was of no
interest elsewhere. In some respects, the music that survives unsurprisingly
demands that Circuit V be drawn down to northern France. A small but
remarkably precocious corpus of courtly songs with Anglo-Norman texts,
and of Anglo-Norman motets, shows that there were trouvères and sophis-
ticated polyphonists in the insular reaches of V, and numerous manuscripts
(including the Dublin Troper, GB-Cu Add. 710) attest to the wealth of Latin
songs in circulation, some of them truly ‘international’ pieces brought
in by what has been called the ‘Channel culture’ of the twelfth and thir-
teenth centuries. Music redacted in Paris found its way as far north as St
Andrews in Scotland. Nonetheless, there is a distinctively insular story to
be told. Musicians in England heard the intervals of third and sixth in a
fundamentally different way to their Continental counterparts (suggesting
the use of Just rather than Pythagorean intonation) and treated them as
consonances. English composers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
sometimes assembled substantial sections of their pieces from chains of par-
allel chords with the third present, suggesting the closeness of extemporized
techniques, and were even prepared to countenance pieces with the third
in the final sonority. In other words, the long history of England’s inward-
looking concern with its own overflowing creativity in musical art had
already begun by 1250. The music of the celebrated Old Hall manuscript,
however, dating from the first years of the fifteenth century, nonetheless
reveals substantial exposure to the late Ars Nova and indeed to the French
polyphonic chanson of the Loqueville generation, presumably gained dur-
ing the residence of household chaplains in Rouen, Paris and elsewhere
during various stages of the Hundred Years War. This transplanting of the
English musical language to France does much to explain the Continental
reception of music by John Dunstaple and other English composers.
By 1400 there were three districts of polyphonic expertise in the West,
defined by circuits I, III and V. The musicians of circuits III and V were
not often in frequent or close communication (although signs of Italian
influence appear in the Old Hall manuscript). For a central and European
language of counterpoint to emerge it was necessary for musicians in I,
III and V to come into sustained contact – or, in less abstract (and less
accurate) language, for English, French and Italian musicians to pool their
resources. The Conciliar movement of the fifteenth century provided the
means for this to happen with results of far-reaching consequence for the
rise of a European language of counterpoint to match the European music
of Gregorian plainsong that was already some five hundred years old.16
19 Reception
lawrence earp
The following survey distinguishes three types of music – plainchant, ver-

nacular song, and polyphony – each with a very different reception history.
Plainchant enjoyed an active and constantly evolving reception even in the
Middle Ages; its modern reception history dates from the efforts, beginning
in the early nineteenth century, to restore the medieval shape of the chant,
a project that would bear fruit in the early twentieth century. New interest
in vernacular song came in the wake of philological and historical research
into European languages strongly under way by the eighteenth century. The
unaccompanied melodies, free from any religious association, were sub-
ject to a variety of adaptations, often tinged by nationalism and ideology.
Medieval polyphony was completely lost until isolated fragments came to
light in the late eighteenth century, and it was well into the twentieth century
before its outlines became clear.
Most medieval music was improvised, and so is lost or only dimly
discernible through performance directions in music theory treatises.
Works transmitted in musical notations required an active generation-
to-generation updating to remain current. Liturgical chant – a repertory
not as stable as we might think – was retranslated, sometimes undergoing
recomposition. Notations for secular monophony and polyphony tended
to fall out of use, since each generation was sufficiently occupied with the
cultivation of its own new music. By the time we reach the point when
scholars took a modicum of interest in the remnants of medieval music –
the mid eighteenth century – no one could read the sources any longer. The
problem was particularly acute for polyphony, usually notated in separate
parts. All told, it required around a century and a half to crack the various
codes and to put the polyphony in score for study. If we add to this the
need to reconstruct performance practices in music, we see how difficult
and ramified the project has been.
Medieval plainchant
Some of the most interesting yet intractable problems of reception in music
history involve plainchant, a development that can be traced over 1,250
years.1 At times the faithful have adapted liturgical chants to changing
[335] tastes and local needs; at other times, the church has taken care to maintain
336 Lawrence Earp
a venerable sacred tradition, as well as its own central authority. Here I will
epitomize the many issues surrounding the reception of Gregorian chant
in one moment: the legend of Saint Gregory as the codifier of ‘Gregorian’
chant. The legend holds out the promise of a repertory bequeathed in toto
by a canonized pope, yet at the same time warns of the ease with which the
repertory could be corrupted.
The period of the creation of Gregorian chant in the wake of the alliance
between the Carolingians and the papacy came at a decisive moment in
the emergence of northern and western Europe. For both the papacy and
the Franks, the alliance filled urgent political needs. The papacy gained an
ally against the resurgent Lombards, while the Franks, now defenders of
the faith, gained liturgical uniformity based on the Roman rite to help hold
their far-flung realm together, as well as papal legitimation of their royal
blood line.
All this happened quickly. The Frankish church had reached a lamentable
state of moral and disciplinary turpitude under Charles Martel. His son and
heir Pépin (r. 741–68) was more open to Roman influence, and the pope
immediately dispatched the English Benedictine missionary Saint Boniface,
who consolidated the highly decentralized Gallican church, introducing
archbishops and yearly synods. Through Boniface and later Chrodegang,
who became Archbishop of Metz after the martyrdom of Boniface in 755,
Pépin pushed for the adoption of the Roman rite. The indigenous Gallican
chant either succumbed to Pépin’s order, or was absorbed into the new
chant.
Strong ties with Rome also served to legitimize the Carolingian rulers
as kings. Still nominally the mayor of the palace, Pépin ousted the last
Merovingian king and was first anointed king of the Franks by his bishops
in 751. The anointing was repeated in 754 by Pope Stephen II, who had
come to consult Pépin on the matter of the Lombards. Pope Stephen’s trip to
Francia, accompanied by Chrodegang, turned out to be decisive for Pépin’s
design to institute the Roman usage throughout his realm. Stephen brought
Roman singers and chant books, and Bishop Chrodegang went on to form
a schola cantorum at Metz. Meanwhile, Remedius, Bishop of Rouen (and
Pépin’s brother) was inculcating the Roman chant there. Pope Paul I (r. 757–
68), who sent an ‘antiphonale’ and a ‘responsale’ (gradual and antiphoner?)
to Rouen, indicates in a letter that the monks had not fully mastered the
chant when he had to recall his emissary from the Roman schola cantorum,
and so monks from Rouen came to Rome for further instruction. This
incident may be the source of a story embellished in different ways some
125 years later by John the deacon and Notker Balbulus.
The programme of reform continued under Pépin’s son Charlemagne
(r. 768–814). Charlemagne’s Admonitio generalis of 789 to the Frankish
337 Reception
clergy ordered that all clergy should learn and perform the Roman chant
that Pépin had directed to be substituted for the Gallican chant, and further
urged that books be carefully emended, including both cantus and nota
(chants and signs?).2 While we should not impugn the spiritual motives
behind the Carolingian move to replace diverse Gallican usages with the
Roman rite, there were also undeniable political advantages to the reli-
gious unification of the realm. Unity was maintained partially through
the missi, a team of royal inspectors sent far and wide to assure broad-
based loyalty and adherence to directives on diverse matters including
chant.
The Carolingians introduced several means to establish liturgical fixity.
Carolingian scholars were committed to careful verification and emendation
of written texts. Not only did the Carolingians revise liturgical texts to
conform to the scriptures, but whole services had to be filled in by the
Franks, for the books sent from Rome only contained texts used by the pope
on special occasions. To help fix music in the memory, chants came to be
categorized by the eight modes, a system foreign to Old Italian chant dialects
(Old Roman, Beneventan and Ambrosian). Our earliest extant tonary, a
book organizing chants in modal order, is the St Riquier tonary (F-Pn fonds
lat. 13159), datable to the late eighth century. Another means of establishing
musical fixity for subsequent transmission was musical notation. Our first
extant complete neumed source for the gradual is datable to the late ninth
century; for the antiphoner, ca1000. Despite an enormous amount of recent
research, there is no agreement on how far back the origin of neumes can be
pushed. Were they applied to the chants already in the late eighth century,
or did notation grow up piecemeal in the course of the ninth century, at first
for special purposes, later systematically applied to the entire repertory?3
Finally, and I will dwell on it because of its importance to reception, there
was a third means of enforcing fixity in the chant: the legend associating the
invention of Gregorian chant with Saint Gregory. This story lent a particular
authority to the Roman chant, providing spiritual conviction to supplement
the royal decree.
The legend of Saint Gregory

Pope Gregory (r. 590–604) was indeed an important pope. Two hundred
years before Charlemagne, he reasserted the primacy of Rome at a dangerous
juncture in church history. Further, it was Gregory who undertook the con-
version of England in 597 by dispatching Saint Augustine, later the first
Archbishop of Canterbury. The Venerable Bede maintained favourable
memories of Pope Gregory in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People
(finished 731), and the strong influence of English scholars such as Alcuin
338 Lawrence Earp
of York at the Carolingian court may have been critical in maintaining the
prestige of Pope Gregory as the inventor of plainchant.
Late-eighth-century sources indicate that both Rome and the Franks
had already attached the authority of Saint Gregory to the chant, and two
important narratives linking Gregory to the invention of the chant date
from the ninth century.4 Our principal source is the Life of Saint Gregory
(ca873–5) by John the deacon of Monte Cassino. John credits Gregory
as the founder of the Roman schola cantorum, and as the compiler of a
‘centonate antiphonary’ (presumably texts for mass chants pieced together
from Biblical citations). Though John describes Gregory as inspired by
the dove of the Holy Spirit, he associates this anecdote with Gregory’s
writings on theology, not music. John writes that efforts to transmit the
Roman chant to Gaul were difficult due to the Gauls’ ‘natural rusticity’ and
their horrible voices. Eventually Charlemagne left two clerics in Rome with
Pope Hadrian I (r. 772–95) to learn the chant; they returned to teach at
Metz, and from there the chant spread throughout Gaul. After their death,
Charlemagne once again found the chant of churches outside Metz to be
corrupt, whereupon Hadrian sent two more singers.
A further source for the story of the transmission of the chant has an
entirely different perspective. According to the Deeds of Charlemagne (883–
5) by Notker Balbulus of St Gall, Charlemagne obtained twelve singers
from the pope. Jealous of the glory of the Franks, they sabotaged the effort
by singing poorly. After Charlemagne discovered this, Pope Leo III (r. 795–
816) suggested that Charlemagne infiltrate the papal schola with two trusted
clerics in disguise. They returned to teach the chant, one at the imperial
court in Aachen, the other at Metz. Finally, the last step in the formation of
the legend of Saint Gregory, the association of the dove of the Holy Spirit
with Gregory’s dictation of notated music, is first found in an illumination
in the Hartker antiphoner (CH-SGs 390–391, ca980–1011), the first extant
complete neumed manuscript of office chants.5
In the end the experiment, strictly speaking, failed. But in another sense,
the vision succeeded in forming an enormous body of music that was indeed
transmitted whole. We celebrate the Carolingians for their preservation of
most of what remains of ancient literature, and we celebrate them for the
Carolingian minuscule. Yet it appears that the reception, assimilation and
transformation of the Roman chant resulted in the greatest artistic creation
of the Carolingians, Gregorian chant. Eventually it drove out all regional
chant dialects in Europe except the Ambrosian, which was maintained in
Milan because of Saint Ambrose’s prestige there. Mozarabic chant survived
until the eleventh century in Moorish Spain, and we have full manuscripts
with music, unfortunately copied before the palaeographical revolution of
heighted neumes. Beneventan chant, practised in south Italy, was finally
339 Reception
suppressed in the eleventh century. Rome itself fell before the onslaught
of the imported repertory, though not until the thirteenth century. The
notion of a uniform music – reproducible and transmissible, and guarded
from change – was new, the invention of the Carolingians. It determined
as no other single factor the subsequent development of Western music.
The very notion of the ‘reception’ of music depends on it. Despite the long
road before the full implications of an opus perfectum would be realized in
Western music history, Pépin’s vision of imposing the Roman chant on the
Carolingian realm effectively foreordained the path.
Gregory stands at the centre of a circumpolar history. Succeeding ages, in
pruning accumulated abuses, often sought justification in Gregory for the
changes, even when they were in no position to consult old manuscripts.6
When finally the nineteenth century took on the restoration of the chant, the
legend of Saint Gregory made it an ideal subject for scholarly investigation
in nineteenth-century terms, since it taught that Gregorian chant was a
coherent work of genius, the closed oeuvre of a saint and pope inspired by
the Holy Spirit. Heeding the lesson of the myth, scholars sought the original
state of the core repertory, ignoring decayed and peripheral later forms.
In 1889, with systematic, devastating logic, Gevaert showed that docu-
mentary evidence does not support the notion that Pope Gregory invented
plainchant.7 The Benedictine scholars at Solesmes immediately rejected
Gevaert’s argument, and in the end it took generations of scholars working
after 1950 to draw the full implications of this change of view. Just as it had
been essential to scholarly progress in the nineteenth century to maintain
the Gregory legend, the discarding of the legend was essential to open new
avenues of research in the second half of the twentieth century.
That, and the discovery in 1886 of the ‘Old Roman’ chant, a complete
repertory for the mass and office, virtually identical to Gregorian chant
in terms of the texts set but utilizing different melodies, or, more pre-
cisely, melodies vaguely similar, but usually more florid and less sharply
profiled.8 Initially the Old Roman repertory was dismissed as a corruption
of the Gregorian. By the 1950s, however, scholars had begun to confront
the fact that our earliest extant chant manuscripts from Rome itself trans-
mit the Old Roman rather than the Gregorian melodies. Further, these
Roman manuscripts, which date from 1071 to the early thirteenth century,
postdate by nearly 200 years the earliest northern manuscripts transmit-
ting the familiar ‘Gregorian’ repertory. At first liturgists tried to place both
chant dialects in Rome at the same time, associating one or the other
with a special chant reserved for the pope. Many musicologists, however,
realized that such a scenario, besides ignoring the curious manuscript tra-
dition, also ignored common-sense issues of musical transmission. Until
the twentieth century, scholars had assumed that Pope Gregory had fixed
340 Lawrence Earp
the propers in writing around the year 600 by means of a letter notation.9
Now, with no direct evidence of chant notation until around the middle of
the ninth century, and no fully notated graduals until around 900, the terra
incognita of a notationless culture loomed. It was simply impossible that two
such distinct repertories could have maintained themselves unchanged over
centuries.
With the challenge of a Roman chant in a different melodic tradition,
fresh scrutiny of the documents surrounding the legend of Saint Gregory
took on new urgency. Indeed, the legend’s salient point – the difficulty
inherent in transmitting a chant dialect from one soil to another – was
finally revealed. In a brilliant new synthesis, Helmut Hucke, a German
musicologist not yet thirty years old at the time, proposed that what we call
‘Gregorian’ chant is actually a product of the Frankish reception of the Old
Roman chant.10 Authenticated by a newly concocted imprimatur of the Holy
Spirit acting through Saint Gregory, the transformed chant conquered most
of Europe, displacing the indigenous chant in Rome itself by the thirteenth
century. While there remain quibbles with details of Hucke’s theory, the
outlines remain the dominant view.11
Through a series of articles starting in 1974, Leo Treitler has been the
moving force behind a mode of inquiry hardly conceivable before the second
half of the twentieth century, the effort to characterize a musical repertory
operating through oral transmission.12 Studies from the late nineteenth
and first half of the twentieth century regarding compositional processes
in chant, finding in some genres a restricted number of melody types, or
in other genres a process of deploying mosaic-like formulas at beginnings,
middles and ends of sections, now found a new context. It is no accident
that the deposing of ‘Homer’ as ‘the’ poet who composed ‘the’ Iliad and
Odyssey set the stage for Treitler’s line of inquiry, in which the deposing
of ‘Gregory’ as ‘the’ composer of ‘the’ Gregorian chant led to the study of
oral processes in the early centuries of the church. The challenge has been
in determining the constraints under which the Old Roman chant – in the
shape it had 200 years before it was fixed in writing – was transformed into
Gregorian chant, and how quickly this happened, and when it was written
down.
Kenneth Levy has proposed that the Gregorian mass propers were
recorded in the course of the late eighth century in Palaeo-Frankish neumes,
a no-nonsense style of neumation that directly traces the ups and downs of
melody, lacking the beautiful ductus and performance indications of many
of the later styles of neumation. By ca800, a complete notated gradual –
the ‘Carolingian archetype’ – was available for transmission throughout
the realm.13 This hypothesis explains the relative fixity and authority of the
corpus as the Gregorian propers were transmitted abroad, and yet allows
341 Reception
time for the palaeographical richness of later regional neume families to

develop. It argues that the propers were fixed in relatively short order after
their transmission from Rome. Unfortunately, we lack unequivocal proof
that such a document existed.
In any case, scholars today believe that Roman chant was transmitted
to the north in an oral state (the vicissitudes witnessed by the Gregory
legend confirm as much), but what connection either the Old Roman chant
in its earliest extant written form ca1071 (in pitch-specific neumes) or
Gregorian chant in its earliest extant written form ca900 (in unheighted
neumes) might have had to what Chrodegang sang to his students at Metz
ca775 is still untouchable. Further, there is the question of the Carolingian
reception and adaptation of Byzantine modal theory, an aspect foreign to
the Old Italian repertories.
When fully notated graduals did finally appear on the scene, it was at a
time when there was wholesale new composition of accretions to the core
liturgy, including ordinaries with and without tropes, tropes to the core
propers, and sequences. Perhaps it was the vast increase of service music
that left overly taxed memories in need of notation.14 It is noteworthy,
however, that the accretions do not show the degree of fixity of the old core
propers: they are malleable new materials added in and around the propers,
which shine like jewels, the legacy of Pépin’s bold experiment.
Chant reforms and late plainchant composition

New religious orders, first the Cistercians and later the Dominicans, sought
simplicity, pruning accretions to the chant, also calling for the reform of the
melodies of the propers themselves.15 Examination of early manuscripts
at Metz proved disappointing in this goal; with melodies shaped by the
sophisticated modal theory of the eleventh century in their ears, the Cis-
tercians went about emending the chant according to the modern aesthetic
understanding of the twelfth century.
Always in the service of clearing away layers of abuses of previous gen-
erations, countless later episodes of chant reform exhibit exactly the same
tension, a tension between the allure of a mythical original state – vouch-
safed by the divine transmission through Saint Gregory – and practical
exigencies, among them the musical aesthetic values of the moment. Battles
pitting the allure of an endangered ‘Classical’ past against the inexorable
pull of modernism are nothing new.
From the perspective of the scholars of the late nineteenth century work-
ing like archaeologists to recover a mythical original layer of the chant, the
reforms of the Cistercians held little interest; variants in a late manuscript
represent a level of corruption easy to eliminate on philological grounds.
342 Lawrence Earp
More recently, however, scholars have begun to historicize later plainchant,

taking up repertories formerly considered peripheral. Myriad local idiosyn-
crasies touching the entire service, concerning saints venerated in newly
assembled offices, the selection of accretions performed (tropes, sequences,
liturgical drama), not to mention the diverse application of improvised
polyphonic performance practices – all of this would have varied over time.
Today, ongoing musicological projects are busy organizing and collecting
the great corpus of medieval accretions to plainchant. After the Solesmes
emphasis on graduals and antiphoners, one is beginning to see the publi-
cation of more and more facsimiles of tropers and prosers. Late chant also
brings with it developments in rhymed poetry; it is here that the historical
narrative links to that of vernacular monophony, which entered on the scene
slightly later than rhymed Latin chant.
What had once appeared as a coherent historical development moving
from freedom and variety towards schematic order – as in the case of
the history of the sequence from Notker to Adam – is now challenged by
the rehabilitation of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), a figure previously
simply ignored in music history.16 How the larger narrative will be adjusted
to account for Hildegard’s music is not yet clear. It may force us finally to
acknowledge a vastly more complex narrative, with sharper geographical
distinctions and a great richness of local practices.
The Council of Trent

The crisis of the Protestant Reformations in the sixteenth century dealt
the biggest blow to the ongoing cultivation of the chant rooted in the
Frankish tradition of the Carolingian Empire. The Council of Trent (1545–
63) quickly established the texts of a reformed liturgy, stripping off most
of the accretions, publishing a Breviary in 1568 and a Missal in 1570. A
more difficult task lay ahead, touching the shape of the ancient melodies
themselves.
By the late sixteenth century, humanists cultivating a polished Latin style
found their sensitivities offended by the ancient Gregorian chant, in which
one was apt to find long melismas emphasizing unimportant syllables. The
chant was surely corrupt and in need of reform. In 1577 Pope Gregory XIII
engaged Pierluigi da Palestrina and Annibale Zoilo to revise the chantbooks
for mass and office, which he found ‘filled to overflowing with barbarisms,
obscurities, contrarieties, and superfluities as a result of the clumsiness or
negligence or even wickedness of the composers, scribes, and printers’.17
The new Gradual, the so-called Editio Medicaea edited by Anerio and
Soriano, finally appeared in 1614 (temporale) and 1615 (sanctorale). It is
popularly thought that that was largely the end of the story until the late
343 Reception
nineteenth century, when the assiduous work of the Solesmes monks led to
the publication of the Editio Vaticana in 1908, approximately restoring the
readings of the oldest manuscripts. This view, however, is vastly oversim-
plified. Theodore Karp has recently catalogued over 650 Graduals printed
in the period from about 1590 to 1890. Even his preliminary analysis shows
not only that the Medicean Gradual was not universally adopted, but also
that its music exerted little influence on subsequent reformed Graduals.18
In general, post-Tridentine editors, responding to the humanist demands
outlined above, made changes to provide clear prosody, but also to sharpen
modal focus. Thus a chant already exhibiting good prosody and a strong
modal profile, such as Puer natus est, introit of the Third Christmas Mass,
was typically left with few emendations, but the very next proper chant
in the same mass, the gradual Viderunt omnes, was subject to much revi-
sion. Nothing is systematic; anonymous editors made ad hoc decisions, and
were even inconsistent in their adjustment of chants that are musically
related.
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century chant reforms

Nineteenth-century movements for the restoration of plainchant to its
medieval state are so complex that no single study has yet encompassed
the broad-based, multinational efforts, each with different coteries and
motivations. The amount of space to cover, both from the perspective of
scholarship and from the perspective of human consciousness, is enor-
mous. Nostalgia for the Middle Ages and a concomitant Catholic revival
were awakened partly in reaction to the anti-religious rationality of the
Enlightenment, and, in France, partly by the destruction of religious mon-
uments in the French Revolution. A political component is seen in the
support for the revival of medieval chant lent by partisans for the restora-
tion of the monarchy.19 The project to recover the ‘original’ state of the
chant through the application of the scientific principles of Lachmannian
philology received confirmation in the Gregory legend, which promised
that there was an original form. Confidence was particularly strong in the
wake of the discovery and publication of new sources. In 1851 Lambil-
lotte published the St Gall cantatorium (CH-SGs 359), considered to be
the antiphoner of Saint Gregory himself, in a diplomatic facsimile (hand-
drawn lithography).20 Though written in unheighted neumes, the identity
of neumes and later melodies was evident after the discovery of the ‘rosetta
stone’ for neumatic notation, the tonary of St Bénigne of Dijon (F-MOf
H.159), discovered in 1847 by Danjou and published by Nisard in 1851.
The inertia of custom, however, was strong, and it took the entire nine-
teenth century to bring about chant restoration, which occurred in two
344 Lawrence Earp
stages. First, Pope Pius IX (r. 1846–78), after over 250 years of Vatican
acquiescence to a variety of chant editions, gave exclusive recognition to
the Catholic publisher Pustet in Regensburg to publish the official chant, a
monopoly that would last thirty years. The 1871 Pustet Gradual, edited by
the German scholar and church musician Franz Xaver Haberl, did not in
any sense restore medieval chant, but instead presented the post-Tridentine
melodies of the Medicean Gradual of 1614–15, and, since the Medicean
lacked ordinaries, Haberl composed new ones. At this stage the pope sup-
ported uniformity of practice, but not yet the restoration of medieval
melodies.
In the meantime, the scientific musicology of the Solesmes monks, under
way since 1856, had borne fruit in Dom Joseph Pothier’s Liber gradualis
(1883), followed by a Liber antiphonarius (1891), the first Liber usualis
(1895), and other books, all displaying a beautiful new typography modelled
on thirteenth-century square notation.21 To support Pothier’s readings,
Dom André Mocquereau launched in 1889 the Paléographie musicale, a
series of photographic facsimiles of early chant manuscripts that present
the evidence for the essential uniformity of the early readings for all to
verify. Looking back from 1921, Mocquereau characterized the Paléographie
musicale as a ‘kind of scientific tank – powerful, invulnerable, and capable of
crushing all the enemy’s reasoning’.22 The French team was aiming directly
at the German edition and the papal privilege supporting it.
A second stage, the actual restoration of medieval melodies, came early in
the new century. In 1901, Pope Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903) let Pustet’s privilege
lapse. Finally, on 22 November 1903, the famous motu proprio of Pope Pius
X (r. 1903–14) approved the restoration of Gregorian chant following the
principles of the Solesmes research:
These qualities [of sacred music] are found most perfectly in Gregorian
chant, which is therefore the proper chant of the Roman Church, the only
chant which she has inherited from the ancient Fathers, which she has
jealously kept for so many centuries in her liturgical books, which she offers
to the faithful as her own music, which she insists on being used exclusively
in some parts of her liturgy, and which, lastly, has been so happily restored
to its original perfection and purity by recent study.23
In the end, the contentious commission charged with implementing the

reforms accepted the earlier work of Dom Pothier over the most recent
research of Dom Mocquereau (the commission was particularly dubious
about Mocquereau’s rhythmic theories and their overly fussy typographi-
cal presentation). The hierarchy of the church, not surprisingly, found it
impossible to ally itself unconditionally with the forces of scientific research,
with the promise (or threat) of rendering its authority obsolete tomorrow.
345 Reception
Despite its shortcomings, the Vatican edition should be recognized as

a great achievement, characteristic of the nineteenth century. Yet after a
century of effort, the reforms stood for less than sixty years. The Second
Vatican Council (1962–5) revised the liturgy again, admitting vernacular
languages and popular idioms of sacred song, and leaving the Latin mass
and plainchant as a rarity. New service books of Latin plainchant continue
to be published, however, and most recently, the church has adopted a new
typography and rhythmic principles based on the work of Solesmes scholar
Dom Cardine.24
Secular monophony
Before secular music of the Middle Ages came into play as an area of
scholarly research, Classical antiquity had to make room. Around 1700
a literary debate broke out concerning the relative merits of the ancients
and moderns, pitting those who upheld the order, balance and rule-bound
models of ancient Greece and Rome against those who argued for originality
in form and flexibility of genre. One aspect of the debate – ongoing since
Dante – defended the use of the vernacular languages, arguing that native
poets in their native language were perfectly capable of rivalling the ancients.
In France, the discussion led to the first serious efforts to recover the legacy
of the Middle Ages. Medieval literature became a legitimate subject for
scholarship, a sign of pride in a French civilization not indebted to the
ancients. It was, after all, not Classical antiquity but the French antiquity –
the antiquité françoise – that had produced the roots of the language and
manners that eventually culminated in the refined taste of the eighteenth
century.25
Such enthusiasm was not universal. To radical Enlightenment
philosophes such as Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists, the Middle Ages truly
were the Dark Ages. It was conservatives, such as the scholars associated
with the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, a branch of the French
Academy instituted in 1701 specifically for the study of the history and
antiquities of France, who saw the Middle Ages as a heroic age of chivalry,
as valid as the heroic age of ancient Greece. The historical record of the
Middle Ages, preserved not only in charters but also in literature, provided
the foundations for kingship, upholding the ancien régime. Particularly
important were the troubadours, the first important secular culture since
antiquity, who produced the first modern poetry, rooted not in ancient
poetic metres, but in rhyme scheme and syllable count. Manuscripts of
troubadour poetry were culled not only for philological study of the lan-
guage and its relationship to Old French, but also for historical material on
society and customs.
346 Lawrence Earp
The most important of the eighteenth-century scholars was Jean-

Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye.26 Sainte-Palaye’s enormous project
of a glossary of Old French (left incomplete at his death in 1781 in sixty-
one manuscript volumes) was path-breaking in its systematic use of original
manuscripts as sources. Work on the dictionary contributed to the Mémoires
sur l’ancienne chevalerie (1759) and the Histoire littéraire des troubadours
(1774), well known throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe
in English and German translations (Herder’s knowledge of medieval cul-
ture rested on Sainte-Palaye’s scholarship).
Sainte-Palaye was also among the popularizers of the Middle Ages, freely
translating monuments of Old French and Provençal into modern French.
His modernized edition of Aucassin et Nicolette (1752) was the source for
Sedaine’s libretto Aucassin et Nicolette, set as an opéra-comique by Grétry in
1779. Another collection of popularizations, the Bibliothèque des romans,
attributed to the marquis de Paulmy, was the source for the story of the
rescue of King Richard Lionheart by Blondel de Nesle, set by Grétry as
Richart Coeur-de-Lion in 1784. Grétry used no medieval sources for the
music of either of these opéras-comiques.
Attention turned only slowly to the musical aspect of the trouvères
and troubadours. A stroke of good fortune led Burney to Gaucelm Faidit’s
Fortz causa es, a lament on the death of Richard Lionheart – of interest
to his English readers – in a manuscript at the Vatican. It would remain
the only troubadour melody published in the eighteenth century.27 Music
of the trouvères fared much better. The first publication of a chanson was
Thibaut de Navarre’s Je me cuidoie partir, published in 1702 by Crescim-
beni, and reprinted by Hawkins in 1776.28 Several early-eighteenth-century
French aristocratic book owners, royal servants and copyists were active
as scholars, exchanging chansonniers, comparing readings of texts, even
annotating the margins of the manuscripts they owned.29 The most well
known of these was the Châtre de Cangé, who owned three chansonniers,
F-Pn fonds fr. 845, 846, and 847. Soon quite a lot of trouvère music became
available.30
There was also much publication of ‘romance’ – songs evoking the style
of the trouvères – for example, Moncrif ’s Choix de chansons (1755–6).31
Further, Burney and Forkel were willing to supply accompaniments in the
style of Moncrif to trouvère songs. By the addition of accompaniments,
the songs obtained a form palatable to contemporary readers.32 Neither
Burney nor Forkel could have entertained the notion that he was sub-
ject to prejudice, to the limitations of his historical situation. For both,
the goal was to master music as natural scientists were mastering the
physical world. No eighteenth-century scholar had a true nostalgia for
the Middle Ages. It went without saying that Enlightenment culture was
superior.
347 Reception
The revival of medieval music in the wake

of the French Revolution
A very different feeling for the Middle Ages developed after the French
Revolution, when various threads came together leading to the definitive
revival of medieval music – chant, vernacular monophony, and, eventually,
polyphony. The following points only touch on a few of the issues at play.
Reacting to the anti-Christian scepticism of the Enlightenment, many in
the early nineteenth century turned to Christianity – particularly to the
mysteries of Catholicism. Chateaubriand’s popular Génie du christianisme
(1802) can be considered in this light, as well as the more general anti-
intellectual tendencies of Romanticism, which in some circles found solace
in the mysticism of the Middle Ages. This, of course, was important for the
revival of Gregorian chant, as well as for the Palestrina revival, the first step
in the recovery of early polyphony.
Further, the dissolution during the Revolution of the French maı̂trises,
the cathedral schools for the teaching of vocal music, required the founding
of new institutions of music pedagogy, of which the Paris Conservatoire,
founded in 1796, was the most important. At a time well before the estab-
lishment of musicology as an academic subject, the position of librarian
at the Paris Conservatoire supplied a chair for many scholars of critical
importance to the revival of early music, including Perne, Fétis, Bottée de
Toulmon, and later Weckerlin. Fétis went on to head the new Brussels Con-
servatory and was followed there by Gevaert. Institutional support was still
not the rule, however. Some armchair scholars important to the revival of
medieval music in the first half of the nineteenth century include Thibaut, a
jurist and law professor in Heidelberg, Kiesewetter, a government counsellor
in Vienna, and Coussemaker, a lawyer in northern France.
In Germany reaction to the Enlightenment took on a strong anti-French
flavour, an aspect of the growing nationalism in response to Napoleon’s
occupation forces. But even before this, Herder had set the stage with his
emphasis on the genius of the common people (Volk) as the root of culture,
having found the cultural orientation of late-eighteenth-century German
princes too Frenchified for his taste. Herder’s view strongly shaped a new
approach to the reception of secular monophony in the early nineteenth
century. He put the troubadours and trouvères in the position of folk singers,
and included the texts of two trouvère songs in his collection of Volkslieder
(Folksongs, 1778–9), thereby feeding the early Romantics’ search for quasi-
mythical roots of a nation’s culture. The attribute of Volkstümlichkeit (a
quality characteristic of the common people), formerly a liability, was now
a positive virtue.33
The destruction of cultural monuments lamented by Victor Hugo in the
preface to his novel Notre-Dame de Paris 1482 (1832) was among the factors
348 Lawrence Earp
that fostered the preservation movement in nineteenth-century France, of

which Viollet-le-Duc’s reconstruction of the cathedral of Paris is the best-
known monument. The analogous movement in Germany, which saw the
completion of Cologne Cathedral during the years from 1842 to 1880, had
a different emphasis. A growing consciousness of the power of a unified
national state, awakened by the challenge of France and the Napoleonic
wars, brought new interest in medieval German culture to the politically
fragmented Germans. Cologne Cathedral thus became a symbol of German
nation building.34
Long the cosmopolitan consumers of foreign styles, the Germans now
focused on authentic German roots. But as with Herder’s Volkstümlichkeit,
early stages of this cultural programme were already in place in the late eigh-
teenth century. Annette Kreutziger-Herr emphasizes the new aesthetic seen
in Goethe’s hymn to Strasbourg Cathedral (1772) as a watershed moment.35
Here Goethe found himself unexpectedly awed, even dizzied, by the sheer
grandeur of the medieval architectural setting. The new enthusiasm for
German medieval (‘Gothic’) culture saw the publication of some seventy
editions of Middle High German and Middle Low German poems between
1760 and 1800, as well as popular collections of folk poetry and fairy
tales, the Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805) of Arnim and Brentano, and the
Märchen (1813–14) of the brothers Grimm. By the end of the nineteenth
century, German historical scholarship had outstripped that of all other
countries, voraciously gobbling up records of the past and printing great
collections of documents. Throughout Europe, the unaffiliated armchair
scholar was replaced by research concentrated at universities. There was
also an upsurge of French philological research, seen, for example, in the
founding of the journal Romania in 1872, and the establishment in 1875
of the series of literary monuments published by the Société des Anciens
Textes Français, founded, as Gaston Paris put it, so that ‘Germany should
no longer be the European country where the most monuments of our
language and literature are printed’.36
Rhythm in secular monophony

We have seen some of the ideological and national issues that attended
the rediscovery of medieval monophonic song. Most of these issues were
stimulated by the poetry. Musical rhythm, however, remained the sole
domain of the music scholar. To eighteenth-century readers, publications
of trouvère songs in loose diplomatic facsimile may have implied rhythms
something along the lines heard in contemporary performances of
plainsong, either an equalist approach or one distinguishing long, breve,
and semibreve.37 In any case, the first scholar to grapple seriously with the
349 Reception
problem of transcribing the rhythms of the trouvère sources was François

Louis Perne (1772–1832). Perne’s study of black mensural notation
culminated in a complete transcription of Machaut’s Mass presented to the
French Institut royal in 1814, but unfortunately these materials never saw
publication. Later an opportunity arose to collaborate with the philologist
Francisque Michel on an edition of the chansons of the Châtelain de Couci,
and Perne applied his mensural rules to an edition of twenty chansons,
published in 1830.38 A few years later, this mensuralist approach was
given a firmer grounding by Coussemaker, whose study of the Montpellier
Codex (F-MOf H.196) led him to identify several trouvères as composers
of polyphony – trouvères-harmonistes.39
The French mensuralist approach had a certain logic because the note
shapes used for chansons are the same as those used to notate motets.
By contrast, the German sources of Minnesang offer nothing of the sort.
Throughout the nineteenth century, there had been little attention to the
musical component of Minnesang. Sources for the music of Minnesinger
songs are comparatively meagre and very late, beginning over 200 years after
the art they transmit. Even single manuscripts display a bewildering variety
of notational styles, none of them providing consistent clues to scholars
attempting transcription into modern notation.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Riemann seized upon text metre
as the key to rhythm in Minnesang, and ranged all medieval secular
monophony into an all-encompassing theory of metrical organization in
music. The norm prescribed duple metre in regular periods comprising
pairs of four-bar phrases, and Riemann adjusted note values as needed to
force lines of varying lengths to fall into four- or eight-bar periods.40
Not long after Riemann proclaimed his theory as a universal truth,
Pierre Aubry, Jean Beck and Friedrich Ludwig began to work on applying
the rhythmic modes of Notre Dame polyphony to the problem of rhythm
in the trouvères.41 Music scholars justified the application of the system
of the rhythmic modes to secular monophony because they found refrains
incorporated into thirteenth-century motets. Refrains are short bits of text,
sometimes found with music, that may appear in hybrid narratives or
as parts of chansons or dance songs. Thus the refrains were considered
crossovers between the trouvère repertory and the modal rhythm of the
early motet. Before long, what we now know to be a very problematic link
authorized wholesale adaptation of the principles of modal rhythm to all
categories of monophonic song.
In the early twentieth century, the question of rhythm in secular
monophony took on a life of its own, becoming the overriding issue for
any musicologist engaged with this repertory. John Haines has traced the
scholarly debate, which became particularly intense in the first decade of the
350 Lawrence Earp
twentieth century, involving Riemann, Aubry, Beck and Ludwig.42 Nation-

alist tensions lay close to the surface. Riemann had seen military service in
the Franco-Prussian War, while Aubry considered it his mission to restore
the glories of French musicology after France’s political defeat. Beck was
a bilingual Alsatian, a doctoral student at the newly established Friedrich-
Wilhelm Universität at Strasbourg working in the high-powered Romance
section under Gustav Gröber and studying musicology with Friedrich Lud-
wig. In the end the battle over credit for the initial formulation of the
theory left Aubry shamed and hastened his death in 1910, a likely suicide,
and discredited Beck.
Jacques Handschin raised important objections to the modal interpre-
tation in reviewing Carl Appel’s path-breaking 1934 edition of Bernart de
Ventadorn, which gives the music in black note-heads.43 But the allure of
the fixity of modern notation in metre and barlines has been hard to resist.
Hendrick van der Werf was almost alone among musicologists in his call
in the 1970s for more refined views of genre and orality in the songs of
the troubadours and trouvères, and in his admonitions against the use of
refrains in motets as grounds for rhythmicizing the melodies.44 After the
refined work on genre by the French literary scholar Pierre Bec was applied
by John Stevens and Christopher Page to musical questions, new views have
begun to emerge.45 Yet the fact that Hans Tischler could still publish fifteen
volumes of melodies in 1997 transcribed according to principles of modal
rhythm indicates the obstinate nature of the problem.46
The twentieth-century story of modal rhythm in monophonic song is
a sad chapter in music history, and the question of the nature of rhythm
in secular monophony is still unsolved. Unfortunately the nature of the
sources precludes a definitive answer to the problem. Of all of the surviving
monophonic repertories from the Middle Ages, it is the Minnesang sources
that present the question in the bluntest form. It would be easy to belittle
the German manuscripts as inadequate to the task of transmitting the art
of the Minnesinger. Burkhard Kippenberg states it well when he finds fun-
damental issues of composition, performance and transmission at stake in
Minnesang: ‘to what extent was medieval secular monophony in its essence
– not considered merely by the level of the notation – notatable at all in its
own time?’47 The question could well be posed regarding any of the surviv-
ing monophonic repertories, all of which were arts that resisted writing.48
Hearing medieval polyphony in the nineteenth century

The turn to historiography around 1800 strongly affected scholarship on
Gregorian chant and secular monophony, as we have seen, and soon
these repertories were harnessed for ideological projects that manifested
351 Reception
themselves throughout the nineteenth century. There was no urgency to

the study of medieval polyphony, however. While chant fulfilled a func-
tion within the Catholic church, and secular monophony was adaptable to
modern circumstances through the addition of a suitable accompaniment,
medieval polyphony had been an embarrassment since Gerbert published
examples from the Musica enchiriadis in 1774.49 Despite Herder’s appeal
that understanding depends on history and cultural context, scholars still
assumed the unchanging nature of human hearing, and thus only one of
two conclusions was possible: either composers of polyphony were incom-
petent, or theorists were making up abstractions. Kiesewetter, for example,
found it inconceivable that organum of the style described in the Musica
enchiriadis (ascribed to Hucbald in Gerbert) was ever performed:
Even Hucbald must have renounced the organum, if he could ever have
listened to it with his own ears; but the superior of his monastery would
most probably have put an immediate stop to its use after trial of the first
couplet, since, among the penances and mortifications in the rules of the
order, one of a nature so painful to the senses could never have been
inflicted.50
Until the twentieth century, scholars lacked a sufficient store of practi-

cal monuments to evaluate medieval music theory, tiptoeing around the
incomprehensibility of medieval polyphony by evoking the gulf between
the good and natural contributions of the folk and the crabbed and unnat-
ural speculations of scholastic theorists. Paradoxically, one and the same
composer, such as Adam de la Halle or Guillaume de Machaut, could
embody both tendencies, the childlike simplicity of monophony and the
‘scholastic rubbish’ of polyphony.51
Coussemaker had no patience for this sort of thing. Already in 1852, he
insisted ‘that most of these pieces were conceived according to ideas different
from those that prevail today, that it is necessary, in order to appreciate their
value, to clear one’s mind of the predisposition that one usually brings to
the judgment of a piece of modern music’.52 Coussemaker was a lawyer,
and his approach was to adduce enough evidence to overwhelm earlier
interpretations. But he only made a start.
Today Helmholtz is credited as the first to assert the variability of fac-
tors that go into musical perception, although in fact this insight was a
fundamental precept of Fétis’s philosophy of music history, which saw
scale systems – the qualities and disposition of scale degrees – as the basis
for musical expression, a mirror of society itself.53 But neither Fétis nor
Helmholtz immediately affected the historiography of medieval music. The
theory of the folk origins of all that is good in music lived on in Riemann’s
all-encompassing project. He too held to the view of an unchanging human
352 Lawrence Earp
faculty of hearing and put the Musica enchiriadis into the realm of an
abstract theory reflecting no practice.54
Soon the sheer weight of the practical monuments Ludwig adduced
provided the evidence to dislodge Riemann’s fantastic theories, showing
the links between theory and practice. By the 1920s, it is easy to ascertain
a change in hearing as well, expressed in the views of Heinrich Besseler
and Rudolf Ficker.55 Karl Dèzes soon expounds a view completely in tune
with our own time, and yet not so far from Coussemaker: ‘If Machaut, as
main representative of the “ars nova”, amounts to nothing because he is as
yet unable to fulfil the ideals of Palestrina, that is proof you are applying
principles that were never valid for his work . . . the reason for the difficulties
is not that the composer was incapable of finding the right path, but that
we are incapable of following him on his path.’56
The Palestrina revival

The modern periodization of music history, with its division between
‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ as ‘periods’ does not fit the slow recovery
of medieval polyphony over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. An accurate account would start not with medieval music, but
with the twin peaks of J. S. Bach and Palestrina, demonstrating that the
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were being reclaimed at around
the same time as the sixteenth and late fifteenth centuries. The situation had
evolved very little by the late nineteenth century, when Ambros definitively
recovered the late fifteenth century, reaching back to Obrecht, Josquin and
Pierre de la Rue. He had little sympathy, however, for earlier music, and
indeed polyphony of the early fifteenth century and before remained off
limits except to the most diehard music historians, who demonstrated at
best an impersonal interest; true sympathy for the music itself would have
to await the cataclysms of the twentieth century.
Although the Palestrina renaissance of the early nineteenth century
was only the first step in the recovery of what we would term ‘medieval’
polyphony, the historiographical issues raised at this time formed the back-
drop as a handful of amateurs undertook the slow and specialized course
of research into earlier periods. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s essay ‘Alte und neue
Kirchenmusik’ (Old and New Church Music) can stand as a guide. Some
of Hoffmann’s observations were hardly new as he wrote in 1814; oth-
ers changed the direction of musical research, while still others remained
controversial and have been open to different approaches to this day.57
Hoffmann’s picture of a decayed state of church music was nothing new,
as we have already seen in our consideration of Gregorian chant. But the
question specifically of church polyphony had a broader resonance. With
353 Reception
actual relics of the Palestrina style largely confined to the Sistine Chapel
since the beginning of the seventeenth century, more and more the church
style in practical use had become indistinguishable from opera. Historicism
answered the practical problem of religious expression at a time when the
current art (which at least for Hoffmann was indeed technically superior to
the old art) was not a suitable religious art.
What Hoffmann brings to the table is an explicit nationalist dimension.
The issue had been latent in Herder. Now, in the wake of the first victory
over Napoleon, Hoffmann explicitly blames the Enlightenment, in other
words, the French, the enemies of religion, for the frivolousness affecting
church music. From now on, nationalist agendas would colour the emerg-
ing narrative of medieval music history, as we have seen from the course
of the recovery of medieval secular monophony, intimately associated with
language. It would be a mistake, however, to overplay the nationalist card at
this point in the recovery of medieval polyphony. Polyphony was so pow-
erfully connected with the Italian tradition that it took a long time before
even French scholars would acknowledge French contributions to medieval
polyphony, mainly because the polyphony itself was not congenial to the
nineteenth-century ear. Hoffmann pushed the origins of music back to
Gregory the Great, confirming Italy as the traditional leader in music, and
now he would draw upon the great Italian polyphonist Palestrina as a foil
against the French. What Palestrina had to offer, first and foremost, was
myth, the story of Palestrina as the ‘saviour of church music’. This sin-
gle composer now stood as a monumental focal point for writing music
history.58 For Hoffmann, Palestrina was the beginning point for a magnifi-
cent 200 years of church music, while for others he stood at the end of the
painfully slow development of polyphony since the Musica enchiriadis.
Hoffmann’s strategy takes on a special twist here, yielding a point criti-
cal to the recovery of medieval music: he dismisses the relevance of ancient
Greece. Lacking both melody and harmony, the sort of music the Greeks
cultivated was simply not music in the modern sense of the word. Murmur-
ings to this effect are already present in Burney, who was not happy about
having to rehearse the tedious details of ancient Greek theory, and soon the
trend led to histories that omitted the Greeks entirely. Kiesewetter’s History
of the Modern Music of Western Europe, for example, begins with the Middle
Ages.
Hoffmann characterizes the a cappella Palestrina style as ‘simple, truth-
ful, childlike, pious, strong, and powerful . . . Without any ornament, with-
out melodic drive, mostly perfect consonant chords succeed one another,
with whose strength and boldness the heart is seized with inexpressible
power and raised up on high.’59 Hoffmann thereby makes Palestrina a
new classical antiquity of music, evoking Winckelmann’s characterization
354 Lawrence Earp
of ancient art, epitomized in the famous expression ‘noble simplicity and

serene grandeur’. As James Garratt has noted, Hoffmann, the great admirer
of Beethoven’s Romantic instrumental music, thereby sets up Palestrina as
a composer of absolute music, affirming the spiritual power of music as
an autonomous art – texts are unimportant, for the music in and of itself
is now an object of aesthetic enjoyment.60 This brings up two final issues
critical to the revival of early music, both still relevant to us today: the
problem of the function of early music brought to performance in new
contexts, and the problem of the appropriation of old music by composers
in a new present. We will return to these questions after surveying some of
the important scholars actually involved with research on medieval music
in the nineteenth century.
Some nineteenth-century musicologists

No myth comparable to Palestrina could champion the cause of medieval
polyphony. The best available, an eighteenth-century invention associating
Machaut’s Mass with the coronation of Charles V, did not live up to the
promise of the small fragment of the Gloria made available at the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century, still found replete with errors in Riemann’s
1891 revision of Ambros.61 Two nineteenth-century transcriptions of the
entire mass, one by Perne (ca1810), another by Auguste Bottée de Toulmon
(ca1830), never saw publication.62
After the deaths of Kiesewetter and Bottée in 1850, Fétis and Cousse-
maker were left as the most important scholars with interests in medieval
music. Twenty-one years older than Coussemaker, Fétis had already staked
out positions he was unwilling to alter. In Fétis’s history, music up to the
time of Palestrina utilized the ‘tonality of plainchant’, that is, the church
modes. Since all but the F modes lack a leading tone, the basic character is
perforce one of calm and serenity, a religious demeanour. Palestrina rep-
resented perfection in this line of development, the end point of a great
historical arch.63
Fétis considered the period circa 1480–1590, what we tend to label the
Renaissance, sufficiently well outlined in Burney and Forkel; the challenge
was to fill the gap from the thirteenth century up to 1450. Schooled in the
Winckelmannian organic model of origin, growth, change and decline, Fétis
considered it the task of music history to show how early music prepared
the high point of Palestrina. Fétis found the minimum number of practical
monuments to fill the gap to his satisfaction: a single rondeau of Adam
de la Halle at the early end and a single ballata of Landini at the later
end.
355 Reception
The section of rondeaux in the Adam de la Halle ‘complete works’

collection, F-Pn fonds fr. 25566, provided ideal material: a series of short
three-voice works notated in score, which facilitated vertical alignment of
the sonorities despite Fétis’s rudimentary knowledge of mensural nota-
tion. Fétis printed one example in 1827, the rondeau Tant con je vivray
(Figure 19.1 gives Fétis’s original transcription).64
Adam’s rondeau stands between parallel organum and fifteenth-century
counterpoint. Fétis’s transcription generated considerable comment (spar-
ring with Fétis was something of a sport for nineteenth-century musical
scholars), and competing transcriptions of Tant con je vivray mark stages
along the path towards full mastery of the Franconian system of notation
by the 1860s.
Just a month after the first publication of Tant con je vivray, Fétis closed
in on the last part of the gap in the practical sources, offering a transcription
of Landini’s three-voice ballata Non avrà ma’ pietà, which he considered
another milestone in the history of harmony, the origin of the counterpoint
that would be perfected in the sixteenth century.65 The work confirmed
the superior role of the Italian trecento for the progress of music, an idea
carried into the twentieth century by Riemann and Wolf. By 1835, when
Fétis published his ‘Résumé philosophique de l’histoire de musique’, the
254-page general history of music prefacing the first volume of the first
edition of the Biographie universelle, a few additional pieces had assumed
supporting roles in his narrative, and from this point on Fétis dismissed all
challenges to his views.66
Function and appropriation of early music

in the nineteenth century
Let us conclude our survey of nineteenth-century historicism by returning
to a consideration of the two questions raised by Hoffmann’s essay: the
function of early music brought to performance, and the appropriation of
early music in new compositions. We can distinguish a variety of functions
for the performance of early music (not yet encompassing medieval music)
in the nineteenth century. For the early Romantics, early music induced
a sublime and ineffable schwärmerei, a mood expressed in Wackenroder,
Tieck and Hoffmann. More or less explicit efforts to reform culture lie
behind performances of early music, usually the church style, by musicians
in several German-speaking regions, such as Zelter in Berlin, Thibaut in
Heidelberg, and Kiesewetter in Vienna. Choron’s concerts in Paris were a
bit different, because they were public, and therefore cultivated an aesthetic
appropriate to entertain the Parisian audience. Fétis’s concerts historiques in
Paris and Brussels had a different focus still, namely pedagogical inculcation,
356 Lawrence Earp
Figure 19.1 Adam de la Halle, Tant con je vivray (rondeau) (transcribed by F.-J. Fétis [ca1827],
B-Bc X 27.935 [unnumbered folio]). With permission of the Conservative royal – Koninklijk
Conservatorium Brussels.
a function to which I will return shortly. None of these instances, of course,

is true to the original function of the music.67
Hoffmann himself was not in favour of the actual restoration of
early church music, believing that young composers should simply find
357 Reception
inspiration from the old masterworks. Echoing Herder, Hoffmann consid-

ered it impossible for a contemporary composer to write like Palestrina
or Handel. His view was an early salvo in a long and continuing debate
concerning the degree and manner of incorporating the old into the new.68
The same debate occurred in France, and it is this less studied side that
I would like to dwell on, for potentially the most promising answer to the
problem of reconciling early music and a contemporary compositional style
was Fétis’s doctrine of eclecticism, which dealt at the same time with both
function and appropriation. In essence, Fétis’s eclecticism stems from his
urge to put historical research in the service of the present, as a way forward
for composers facing the many crises that he perceived in the music of his
time, such as the exacerbated materialism brought on by the end of the
patronage system, the decline of taste as composers catered to a new public,
and the end of the reign of tonality as new harmonic possibilities were
almost exhausted. The answer to the many crises lay in the selective use of
past masters to reinvigorate present-day composition:
the simplicity and the majesty of the style of Palestrina, the scientific and
elegant forms of Scarlatti, the poignant expression of Leo, of Pergolesi, of
Majo, and of Jomelli, the dramatic force of Gluck, the incisive harmony of
Johann Sebastian Bach, the massed power of Handel, the richness of Haydn,
the passionate accents of Mozart, the independent spirit of Beethoven, the
suavity of Italian melodies, the energy of German songs, the dramatic
decorum of French music, all the combinations of voices, all the systems of
instrumentation, all the effects of sonority, all the rhythms, all the forms, in
short all resources, will be able to find their place within a single work, and
will produce effects all the more penetrating in that they will be employed
apropos.69
Eclecticism reveals the point behind Fétis’s famous concerts historiques,

practical efforts to demonstrate the palette of genres and affects available to
the composer for the purpose of revitalizing music.
The ultimate failure of this plan is symptomatic of one moment in
the ongoing historicist debate. Looking back from our vantage point, one
might attribute its failure to the fact that the affects Fétis attributes to
various early musics are not hard-wired into human consciousness (nor
would later research find his characterization of the affects accurate). But
in the context of the nineteenth century, the plan failed for ideological
reasons.
Fétis saw an ideal representative of his music of the future in Meyerbeer.
That composer was eminently suitable to French taste, cosmopolitan and
sure of itself after centuries of development. But Meyerbeer horrified the
German nation builders, who resisted foreign influence in an effort to
358 Lawrence Earp
forge a national taste. Herder, Hegel and Hoffmann all agreed that form
and content must reflect the Zeitgeist authentically.70 Meyerbeer – a German
Jew who followed a pan-European career not unlike that of the great Handel
or Mozart – was incompatible with the new demands for originality, a fact
brutally exposed by the spokesmen Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner.
Eventually their view won out over public taste itself.
Following several more years of diligent archaeology, a new medieval
world revealed itself once scholars again occupied themselves with forming
a narrative. Fétis’s research, exposed as factually insufficient by Kiesewetter
and especially by Coussemaker, would no longer be cited by musicologists,
but by then it had stamped the narrative subliminally.
The twentieth century: Friedrich Ludwig

Already in the 1902–3 volume of the yearbook of the International Musi-
cal Society, Friedrich Ludwig sketched out a survey of fourteenth-century
music that is the sort of account one still reads, covering sources, genres,
major figures and style history.71 Ludwig’s treatment of fourteenth-century
music history weighs the significance of national developments according
to political history. French music receives pride of place, because it was
the most broadly based and most influential musical art of the fourteenth
century: ‘The world of tones in these masterpieces – at that time experi-
enced as such – had unified the entire western cultural world in common
admiration and enjoyment . . . Italian music . . . lacked this sounding board
which French art enjoyed throughout the West.’72 It is clear why Ludwig
later began publication of practical monuments with Machaut’s works: it
was a matter of historical balance. Yet Ludwig is unequivocal in stating
that he finds the aesthetic rewards of the Italian trecento superior to the
‘clear-headed’ French, trusting his ear in this matter:
We would certainly find among the sonorities sufficient asperities and all
manner of progressions whose impossibility and deficiency later belong to
the elementary rules of compositional technique and which we no longer
encounter from the mid fifteenth century on, but alongside these there is
also a wealth of passages that prove how often the Italians dared to follow
the ear against the conventions of the school and thereby to obtain effects
that we seek in vain among the French.73
Having transcribed virtually the entire repertory (almost none of which,

incidentally, would have been accessible to his readers), Ludwig saw the
possibility of writing a history without drawing on invented influences,
‘before we proceed further on shaky ground, going in quest of the influence
of so-called folk music and instrumental music, questions that have more
359 Reception
frequently led researchers in medieval music astray’.74 Even simple Latin-

texted two-voice polyphony receives an airing in Ludwig’s survey, since it is
found throughout the Western cultural sphere in that period, even on the
periphery.75 Without evoking the label ‘Renaissance’, the survey ends with a
glance towards the very different circumstances of the fifteenth century, to
the ‘great invasion’ of foreign musicians into Italy, when the national forms
cultivated in the fourteenth century disappear in a lively exchange of artists
of different nations.
Ludwig’s fundamental contribution was his exhaustive knowledge of
the sources and repertory of polyphony and secular monophony, from the
twelfth to the early fifteenth century. Not relying on music theory treatises
to organize medieval historiography, as had been done from Gerbert to
Johannes Wolf, Ludwig shifted the balance, seeking his point of departure
in the music itself. Ludwig carried out not just the first step of positivist
historiography – to ascertain the facts – but also the second, rarely seen at
the time – to formulate a general picture based on just that evidence.
Rudolf Ficker and Geistesgeschichte

From around the last decade of the nineteenth century through the first third
of the twentieth, many German historians in reaction to positivism pursued
Geistesgeschichte – the history of the intellect – an approach to history
that seeks to demonstrate how the Zeitgeist, the unifying inner spirit that
characterizes an age, manifests itself in the cultural phenomena of that age.76
The approach was highly influential at the time, and though unfamiliar as a
concept today, to some extent it continues to colour music history writing.
A sketch of medieval music history by Rudolf Ficker, published in 1925 and
dedicated to Guido Adler, can stand as an example.77 The following extended
paraphrase of Ficker’s imaginative narrative – a succinct, though complete
history of medieval polyphony – is warranted in order to understand other
twentieth-century trends in historiography.
Ficker begins by staking out a new point of departure. In the past, he
avers, medieval music had been branded as primitive, aesthetically foreign to
a nineteenth-century ideal of music imprinted in our ears since childhood.
It is now clear, however, that this ideal is only one of many musical and
aesthetic possibilities, none of which have universal validity, but which
are determined by context: ‘today we listen completely differently than we
did even ten or twenty years ago, when for example we suddenly hear
the monotonous song of a savage South Sea islander from a gramophone.
Today the laughter that formerly accompanied our feelings of superiority
over such a song has passed.’78
360 Lawrence Earp
In this survey, the developmental stages do not so much trace a pro-

gression as they document artistic responses to cultural clashes rooted in
deep-seated intellectual propensities of north and south. There are, accord-
ing to Ficker, only three fundamental driving forces of music: the melodic,
the ‘sonorous-chordal’, and the rhythmic. Melody, a sinuous and sensual
microtonal improvised melody that originated in the Orient, epitomizes
the culture of the south.79 Nordic musical culture is epitomized by the
‘sonorous-chordal’, a dubious concept that Ficker supports by citing the
nineteenth-century discovery of the lur, a 3,500-year-old brass instrument
found in Denmark.80 (Writing in the 1920s, Ficker associates the term
‘Nordic’ as much as he can with the German orbit, but often and somewhat
reluctantly it refers to the French – as one would think it must, given the
facts of the development of medieval polyphony – and in one instance even
to the English.) Since lurs were always found in pairs, this is proof enough,
he concludes, that Ur-Germanic peoples practised a polyphony of diatonic
overtone combinations.
Under these dialectical circumstances, a first confrontation is not long
in coming. It brought about a number of milestones, including diatonicism
in the chant, staff notation, the earliest polyphony, and the concept of the
cantus firmus. In earlier music histories, singing in parallel fifths or fourths
had always been considered an indication of the musical barbarity of ‘our
Germanic ancestors’.81 In Ficker’s new interpretation, the diatonic chant
chafed against the northerners’ fundamental musical orientation toward
the sonorous, and so they further transformed it, building a fundamental
sonority on each pitch, each sonority a world unto itself.
A second conflict between north and south produced the Gothic, and
with it rhythm as a third constituent element of music. The most decisive
development took place in France, for the Crusaders left from France in the
eleventh century, and contact with the ‘strange fairy-tale land of the Orient’
stimulated a new music. Instead of the weighty chords above chant pitches
seen in ‘Romanesque’ organum, Gothic organum exhibits a lively, freely
composed, naturalistic melody, juxtaposed with the intellectual symbol of
the supporting cantus firmus.82
A comparison of Romanesque and Gothic architecture provides Ficker
with numerous analogies to musical practice. While the Romanesque
church presents a unified conception of space, weighty and powerful, the
Gothic church has a multitude of complementary parts, banishes forces
of weight, and places structural elements in full view. Similarly, while
Romanesque organum had exhibited spatial and chordal unities, Gothic
organum and motet dissolve these into a multiplicity of lines. The new
feeling for life expressed in Gothic art transformed music, placing a new
structural element in full view: rhythm.
361 Reception
Ficker’s stylistic analysis of an early motet is highly charged.83 The tenor

cantus firmus, the symbolic foundation, fragments the melodic sense of
the chant, analogous to the visible skeleton of Gothic cathedrals. Different
texts gloss the basic idea in the two upper voices, which appear to have been
created independently, and later forcibly welded together, resulting in some
harsh dissonances at points of overlap. The aesthetic of the French motet is
even more difficult for moderns to comprehend, an extreme confrontation
of ‘unbridled naturalism’ in the vernacular texts of the upper voices with
‘religious-dogmatic subordination’ in the chant tenor.84 The result resem-
bles a French Gothic cathedral bristling with grotesque gargoyles. Although
perplexing to the modern observer, the mixture of the sacred and the secular
expresses the Gothic ideal of linking religion to all aspects of the natural
world.
Soon intellectual values lose control over secular naturalism, and a third
conflict between north and south signals the early Renaissance (ca1300),
the first and only time that Ficker posits an initiative from the south.
Significantly, it will fizzle out. Italy had already displayed an ambiguous
reception of northern Gothic architecture, transferring stylistic elements
into a ‘more earthbound’ spatial conception. Similarly, Italian trecento
composers borrowed the outward stylistic forms of instrumentally accom-
panied French secular vocal music in their madrigals, but the musical results
were uniquely Italian. Now divergent forces are reconciled in a more unified
complex eschewing religious symbolism. Melody is freely rhythmicized and
set in a sonorous harmony exhibiting a sense of progression. Unfortunately,
later composers, especially the last great Italian of the fourteenth century,
Francesco Landini, yield too much to French influence.
Ficker pauses here in recounting the epoch-making struggles of medieval
music history to pick up the late Gothic art of fourteenth-century France.
Too little of the Ars Subtilior was known at the time to be of any use to
Ficker; for him, the most extreme tension between the old and new, the
Gothic and the emerging Renaissance, is found in Burgundy, and it is in
this context (drawing upon a new book by Johan Huizinga) that Ficker
considers an excerpt from a Machaut motet, Tous corps / De souspirant /
Suspiro.85
It appears completely senseless to us that a completely unintelligible and free

rhythmic scheme, lacking any causal melodic relationship, could determine
the structure, and that all harmonic and melodic activity should be
completely dependent on this schema, even imputed to mere chance.
Nowhere does the purely constructive treatment of form manifest itself with
such naked and unjustifiable candour as in the fourteenth-century
isorhythmic motet. If we recall the immeasurable rigidity of, say, the
Burgundian court ceremony, with its boundless formalism, its extravagance
362 Lawrence Earp
of class distinctions, and the frequently grotesque pomp of its dress, then we
must indeed admit that this Zeitgeist found a congenial musical expression
in the isorhythmic motet.86
The fourth conflict between north and south comes after 1400, when
‘the Nordic Gothic attempts to summon all its powers once again to subdue
the forces awakened in the south’.87 Emotionally detached yet exhibiting
a kind of mystical rapture, the new musical style resembles the spirit of
early Netherlandish painting, like the panel of a cappella singers in the
Ghent altarpiece, ‘filled with secret symbols that are neither audible nor
visible’.88 English composers, and Burgundian masters working from the
example of the English, reconciled apparently incompatible demands by
joining a flowing melos, sensual and individualistic, with the religious
symbolism of the rigid cantus firmus, which is now invisible and inaudi-
ble, for the individual pitches fall ‘arbitrarily’ along the course of a new
melody.
A fifth and final confrontation between north and south comes in the sec-
ond half of the fifteenth century, and this time the Netherlanders obtained
a definitive synthesis, settling the two-centuries-long tension between the
Renaissance call for individual emotion and the medieval propensity for the
intellectual and for musical construction. Here, free or borrowed musical
motives are subject to repetition and development throughout the texture,
and according to Ficker this principle characterizes music to the present
day.
Ficker’s survey synthesizes the history of music, art and architecture
to distinguish five periods: the Romanesque, the Gothic, the early Renais-
sance, the later-Gothic, and the Renaissance, each with a logic of its own.
His new hearing, aided by art-historical analogies, for the first time affords
an essentially positive (if curious) assessment of ninth-century organum.
The Gothic is treated most thoroughly in Ficker’s account, sympathetically
accompanied by numerous vivid analogies from architecture.89 The place-
ment of a French ‘late Gothic’ after the discussion of an early Renaissance
highlights the perplexity with which a scholar in 1925 greeted the discovery
of isorhythm. Tempted by the outrageous images of Huizinga’s court of
Burgundy, Ficker alters the chronology by about a hundred years in order
to call up an analogy between society and art to explain it.
Most troubling to our sensibilities is our knowledge of the future
of Ficker’s north/south dichotomy. As Leech-Wilkinson puts it, ‘Ficker’s
Nordic reading of so much medieval music . . . was itself warped, regardless
of how it may later have been used.’90 Writing in 1936, Collingwood saw
the roots of such readings in the proto-anthropology of Herder, attributing
different natures to different races, whose individual character depends on
363 Reception
geography and environment. There were dire consequences: ‘Once Herder’s

theory of race is accepted, there is no escaping the Nazi marriage laws.’91 It
is ironic that in the nineteenth century Herder’s attribution of the diversity
of human nature was an essential factor in opening people’s minds to other
musics, including medieval music.
The density of interrelationships between music and art seen in Ficker’s
narrative continued to provide a compelling model for large-scale music
history. For example, it reappears in the structure and in the detail of Paul
Henry Lang’s account of the same periods in his Music in Western Civi-
lization. Compare the following passage, characterizing the upper voice in
trecento polyphony, one example of many close paraphrases of Ficker: ‘This
melody was a happy medium between Nordic rigidity and the contourless-
ness of Oriental melismatic flow, and, free from the shackles of modal meter,
it obeyed a natural sense of free symmetry and articulation.’92 In textbooks,
Ludwig’s drier, more sober account has tended to prevail, one richer in
factual material and illustrative examples, but now and again musicologists
have found images of the sort Ficker evokes irresistible to provide a splash
of cultural context or local colour.
Edward Lowinsky and the historiography of medieval music

As knowledge of early music grew, musicological training beginning around
the 1930s tended more and more to produce specialists. Particularly after
the Second World War, this usually led to source studies and edition making,
biography and style analysis, but some scholars were capable of a broader
view. I would like briefly to consider one example, Edward Lowinsky, a
specialist in music of the Renaissance. Trained at Heidelberg under Besseler,
Lowinsky was one of the many Jewish scholars who found their way to the
United States in the wake of Nazi social policy of the 1930s. Although one
might not expect to see Lowinsky figuring in a sketch of the historiography
and reception of medieval music, the positioning of the Middle Ages in his
influential essay ‘Music in the Culture of the Renaissance’ (1954) is worth
reviewing, for Lowinsky’s stark formulations continue to frame questions
that occupy musicologists.93 The overall approach shares the concern for
cultural context and the long-range perspective of Geistesgeschichte, but
Lowinsky’s specialist’s viewpoint finds only one historical moment of any
consequence, the one focused on the creation of the Renaissance that he so
loved.
The dominant force characterizing the Renaissance for Lowinsky was
the ineluctable urge to individual freedom, and he links this cultural force
to musical developments. For example, Lowinsky relates the hold of the
cantus firmus on the medieval motet to the hold of the church on the
364 Lawrence Earp
individual. The advent of the Renaissance saw emancipation from a whole

host of shackles. Critical to the evolution of vocal music, in Lowinsky’s
estimation, was its delivery from ‘ready-made patterns’, including the pre-
existing melodies of Gregorian chant subject to the old church modes, the
straitjacket of the cantus firmus, the fixed forms, and fixed rhythms (the
rhythmic modes). Further, medieval music was constructed in layers by
successively adding voices over a cantus firmus, while Renaissance com-
posers could think in harmonies and conceive of voices simultaneously.
The imitative style developed in vocal music then contributed to the evo-
lution of instrumental music, emancipating it in turn from vocal models,
and pointing the way towards the ultimate perfection of absolute music to
come. Once again, essential qualities of north (Flanders) and south (Italy)
were locked in a struggle, this time between northern polyphony and south-
ern harmony, reaching a first synthesis in Josquin des Prez. The dialectical
struggle, always between these two poles – sensuous sound (material, body)
and linear counterpoint (intellect, spirit) – sums up the rest of music his-
tory, reaching perfect balance in Viennese Classicism (especially in Mozart),
only to shift emphasis to the material in the nineteenth century and to the
intellect in the twentieth.94
Lowinsky devotes a special segment of his argument to the Ars Nova,
which he delimits as the period 1300–1450. In Lowinsky’s scenario, this
period does not merit the term ‘Renaissance’, though a few of the Renais-
sance’s formative aspects are put in place at this time. For example, the
break-up of the rhythmic modes and the new short note values available
around 1300 imply a new rhythmic freedom, but composers did not take
advantage of their accomplishment: ‘As if bewildered and frightened by
the onrush of so many novel rhythmic possibilities, the musician of the ars
nova immediately imposed severe restrictions on them.’95 In the event, the
strict and at the same time arbitrary constraints of isorhythmic periodicity
would postpone for a century the realization of full freedom of rhythmic
invention.
In my view the most pernicious thread running through the three sam-
ples of twentieth-century historiography of medieval polyphony that I have
surveyed here is the rigorous propensity to label, expressed as a distinction
between ‘medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’. This is the sort of history writing that
Collingwood characterized as ‘apocalyptic’.96 Originally an aspect of early
Christian historiography in which the birth of Christ was viewed a climac-
tic dividing point between a period of darkness and light, of preparation
and revelation, the ‘apocalyptic’ approach was later applied to all sorts of
decisive events, such as the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. It leads to
rigorous periodization. It is least present in Ludwig. It essentializes periods
in Ficker, reaching a moment of near-religious revelation in Lowinsky, and
365 Reception
continues to maintain a hold on historiography today. More recently, how-

ever, Reinhard Strohm has realized both a new periodization and new views
of musical centres in his history of late-fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
music.97
Instrumental accompaniment of late medieval song

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has traced the curious origins of the practice, com-
mon through much of the twentieth century, of accompanying voice with
instruments in the performance of late medieval songs. His research points
to Riemann who, on the basis of a remark in the 1898 Stainer edition of
works from GB-Ob Can. misc. 213, shifted his view of the late medieval
chanson from an a cappella conception to one treating the chanson as
accompanied melody, a view that conveniently served Riemann’s account
of a long historical development culminating in the German Lied.98 Soon
Riemann’s editions of late medieval chansons strongly encroached on the
sources, rearranging texting to set off melismatic segments as instrumen-
tal preludes and interludes. Slightly later, Schering offered a hypothesis
even more distant from the original sources, proposing that songs in the
manuscripts are actually organ pieces embellishing a simple melody, whose
original shape is adumbrated by the text underlay of the source.99 Despite the
less dogmatic views of Adler, Kroyer and Handschin, and some half-hearted
misgivings of Reaney and Harrison, it was Riemann’s view that prevailed,
and so performance practice rested on dubious premises for a good seventy-
five years before Christopher Page returned to the a cappella conception,
demonstrating first in 1977 that it was typical medieval practice to perform
songs of Machaut and Du Fay with voices on all parts.100 The circumstances
surrounding the origin of the voices-and-instruments hypothesis and the
long adherence to it do not, in Leech-Wilkinson’s view, paint a favourable
picture of the workings of musical scholarship: ‘Judgements about history,
therefore, depended on assumptions specific to a particular group at a par-
ticular time. Evidence (of which there was only a little) played only a small
part in the process, and what it meant changed.’101
I am a bit less pessimistic in looking back at this episode, one that so
effectively sums up the twentieth-century recovery of medieval polyphony.
In one sense Riemann did arbitrarily change a prevailing nineteenth-century
conception of late medieval song as a cappella music. But in another sense he
did not, because there was no active performance tradition of late medieval
music in the nineteenth century. Riemann in effect prepared the way for
the very first serious tries at performing medieval polyphony at all. From
his time to the present, the scholarly aspect and an aesthetic aspect would
proceed in a more or less reciprocal relationship.
366 Lawrence Earp
Numerous factors came together to lend support to Riemann’s hypoth-

esis. All of them, of course, are explicable given the circumstances and
personalities of the early twentieth century. Yet enough of them resonate
with the state of the evidence as it stood at the time to make me feel that
the approach to performance was not an arbitrary encroachment.
A prerequisite to any aesthetic engagement with early polyphony was
the new hearing, the ability to regard non-tonal music with equanimity.
Assaults on tonality, either through extreme harmonic instability or through
exploitation of non-functional colouristic harmony, as well as exposure
to exotic cultures at world expositions and ongoing ethnomusicological
research, led to a new openness to give this music a chance that it had never
before enjoyed. Harmony had killed the prospects for medieval polyphony
from its first rediscovery; now, changes in the musical world offered a new
possibility for understanding.
In fact the new understanding came not so much through harmony as
through counterpoint. Writing in 1912, Schering explicitly related the con-
trapuntal complexity of early-twentieth-century music to that of a Machaut
ballade: ‘the attention is not so much on the sounding together of the voices
as on their horizontal stretching-out . . . For at the time of Machaut chords
are not bound one to another but rather only “voices”, a peculiarity in which
the compositional technique of this time in many ways touches that of the
present.’102 The emphasis on linearity (a genuine quality of this music)
made the music less strange to the modern ear. Theoretical authorization
of this tack lay in the concept of ‘successive composition’, traced back to
Johannes de Garlandia in the mid thirteenth century.103
Both literary and iconographical sources seemed to support the use
of instruments. Besides vague popular conceptions of the wandering
troubadour, some more concrete material justified the notion of instru-
mental accompaniment, such as the following passage from a letter in
Machaut’s Le Livre dou Voir Dit (1363–5), in which Machaut provides some
valuable yet curious indications of performance practice of the ballade Nes
qu’on porroit (named in the letter by its refrain):
I am sending you my poem entitled Morpheus, also called The Fountain of

Love, along with ‘The Great Desire I Have to See You’, on which I have made
the music as you have ordered, and in the German style [a la guise d’un rés
d’Alemangne104 ]. And by God, it has been a long time since I composed
anything good that pleased me this much. And the tenor parts are as sweet
as unsalted porridge. And so I beg you to be willing to hear and learn the
piece exactly as it has been written without adding to or taking away any
part, and it is intended to be recited with a quite long measure, and whoever
could arrange [it] for the organ, the bagpipe, or other instruments that is its
very nature.105
367 Reception
It would be easy to interpret the letter to mean that one performs the work
as written, most effectively by assigning instruments to the lower voices.
This was the performance practice before the 1980s. Today, however, even
in light of our best scholarship, the passage resists interpretation. On the
one hand, the composer wants the work to be learned precisely as written,
which we believe to mean voices on all three parts; on the other hand,
he claims that the work’s true nature lies in instrumental arrangement,
presumably without voices. In our current view, this does not mean an
ensemble of instruments literally playing the written music, but some kind
of creative rearrangement, and thus not ‘exactly as it has been written’,
because that segment of the musical practice was carried on in a largely
unwritten tradition.
From the beginning of modern performances, performers tended to
score pieces with dissimilar instruments. Contrasting sonorities not only
highlighted the linear aspect of the music, but also helped to mask unusual
vertical combinations.106 Musicologists justified a piebald instrumentar-
ium with a variety of evidence. Iconography, such as the panel of the Ghent
altarpiece showing angel musicians playing different instruments (this time
not the panel of a cappella angel singers), or, better, Memling’s angel musi-
cians of the Najera Triptych, confirmed literary evidence known since the
eighteenth century, such as the two long lists of miscellaneous instruments
in Machaut.107 Bottée de Toulmon had imagined in 1832 a large orchestra
of instruments (the list in Machaut’s Remede de Fortune) in unison with
voices, and this was the image, supported also by the colourful soundscape
implied by Huizinga, that Ficker realized in sound in his 1927 concerts
at the Beethoven centenary festival conference in Vienna.108 In sum, to
performers and scholars of the first three-quarters of the twentieth cen-
tury, iconographical, literary, and historical evidence sufficiently supported
then-current practical realizations of medieval polyphony.
At least three new interdisciplinary points of departure of the 1970s con-
tributed to the discarding of the voices-and-instruments approach in favour
of the a cappella approach. First, a revolution in French studies brought a
new focus on late medieval poetry. New literary sources, as well as new
interpretations of old literary sources, were brought to bear on the issue
of music performance.109 Second, renewed scrutiny of historical archives
sharpened our knowledge of the actual performing forces available to var-
ious institutions.110 Finally, detailed codicological studies of late medieval
manuscripts found evidence of scribal practice bearing on text entry and
thus indirectly on performance practice.111
Some aspects of the new performance practice deserve more atten-
tion. For example, highly refined experiments in tuning by the professional
voices required for a cappella scoring reveal an unsuspected dynamic.112 The
368 Lawrence Earp
ramifications are enormous, particularly if Page’s view of a Pythagorean

Continental tuning on the one hand, and a mean-tone English tuning on
the other, can be maintained. Now, for example, the degree of instability
of the sonorities categorized by Sarah Fuller needs to be evaluated in both
tunings, and the actual compositional practice re-examined in this light.113
The new sound, utilizing voices alone instead of voice accompanied
by contrasting instruments, focuses on uniform sonorities, a chordal flow,
instead of counterpoint, a network of lines unfolding linearly. Riemann
had already laid out the stark contrast of vertical as against linear construc-
tion in 1905, and the two twentieth-century performance practices seem
to represent just these two approaches to the music.114 I hope that my pre-
sentations of Ficker’s 1925 article and Lowinsky’s 1954 article sufficiently
warn of the danger of playing one concept against its opposite. To do so
makes for a powerful narrative, but runs roughshod over the complexity
of the material. Ficker’s opposing concepts are oversimplified, and thus his
syntheses do not convince. Lowinsky omits synthesis entirely, leaving (in
his mind) a set of bad choices and a set of good choices. Unfortunately it
is Lowinsky’s stark conceptual contrast of ‘simultaneous composition’ with
‘successive composition’ that has remained the most common shorthand
for these two views, a gross oversimplification in both cases.
Kevin Moll has brought historiographical material to bear on this ques-
tion, demonstrating that German writings on the question of composi-
tional process in the early fifteenth century are actually more nuanced than
Anglo-American writings, which have been too prone to emphasize the
polar opposites of ‘successive’ and ‘simultaneous’.115 Moll’s examination of
repertory and quibbles with Besseler’s anachronistic premises led him to
support a new refinement of Ernst Apfel’s work, which argues for com-
posers’ continuing dependence on a two-voice contrapuntal framework up
to ca1500, a view long argued by Margaret Bent as well.116 If we accept
this analysis, we still need to explain a question posed by reception history,
namely, what was the sonorous quality in Du Fay that Besseler perceived that
led him to explain it in terms of emerging tonality, and by what strategies
did composers obtain it?
One might imagine a way forward – or at least some new questions to
pose – through the recent emphasis on musical hearing. Citing examples
from Ciconia’s Doctorem principem / Melodia suavissima, and quoting work
of Peter M. Lefferts and Julie Cumming, Richard Taruskin characterizes
the late medieval motet using terms such as ‘monumental’ and ‘grandiose’,
music in the service of despots.117 To my modern ear, the most grandiose
moments in several of Ciconia’s motets are the passages at the ends of sec-
tions, sustained in harmonic rhythm but active in rhythmic and motivic
vitality. This texture was initiated about thirty years earlier in another
369 Reception
Example 19.1 Philippe Royllart, end of first talea of motet, Rex Karole / Leticie, pacis / Virgo prius
ac posterius
political motet, Philippe Royllart’s widely transmitted Rex Karole / Leticie,

pacis / Virgo prius ac posterius, which concludes its five taleae with rhyth-
mically animated sections of a style directly analogous to those in Ciconia
(Example 19.1).118
It would seem that Royllart’s purpose was the sonically monumental,
a visceral effect that moves the listener on a grand scale. Composers con-
tinued to cultivate Royllart’s procedure for a period of about fifty years in
motets and mass ordinaries. At some point however, this awesome sonority
gave way to a different awesome sonority, that of comparatively unani-
mated, ringing chords. Were the harmonic asperities occasioned by over-
lapping motifs now old-fashioned, or was hyperanimation not suitable to
the acoustics of certain architectural surroundings, or did English pieces
heard at church councils in a different tuning demonstrate the effectiveness
of chordal sonorities? This is the new sound that Besseler heard, although
he was unable to find a suitable analytical model to express it appropriately.
370 Lawrence Earp
For our part, in moving ahead, we must learn to separate a potentially

useful insight from its presentation, the baggage of a particular moment in
history. After all, our present views are subject to the same strictures, and
they too will be found wanting. I agree with Dahlhaus that ‘not all insights
into the past are possible at all times’, but by now it ought to be possible to
cumulate insights, even if we must concede that we will always have only a
partial answer.119
Notes
1 Plainsong 9 The Te Deum, which concluded matins, was

1 Peter Jeffery, ‘Rome and Jerusalem: From sung to a melody that somewhat resembled a
Oral Tradition to Written Repertory in Two psalm tone.
Ancient Liturgical Centers’, in Graeme Boone, 10 See Michel Huglo, ‘Tonary’, Grove Music
ed., Essays on Medieval Music: In Honor of David Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com.
G. Hughes (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University 11 For an edition of mode 1 antiphons, see
Press, 1995), pp. 207–47. Lázsló Dobszay and Janka Szendrei, eds.,
2 Jeffery, ‘Rome and Jerusalem’, and James Antiphonen, Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi
McKinnon, ‘Liturgical Psalmody in the Sermons 5, vol. I (Kassel and New York: Bärenreiter,
of St Augustine: An Introduction’, in Peter 1991).
Jeffery, ed., The Study of Medieval Chant: 12 From the ninth to the eleventh century,
Paths and Bridges, East and West, in Honor of hymns were sung primarily in the monastic
Kenneth Levy (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), office.
pp. 7–24. 13 Susan Boynton, ‘Orality, Literacy and the
3 Joseph Dyer, ‘The Desert, the City, and Early Notation of the Office Hymns’, Journal of
Psalmody in the Late Fourth Century’, in Sean the American Musicological Society 56 (2003),
Gallagher, James Haar, John Nádas and Timothy pp. 99–168.
Striplin, eds., Western Plainchant in the First 14 A great responsory could also be performed
Millennium: Studies in the Medieval Liturgy and at vespers.
Its Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 11–43; 15 In the monastic office of matins, the third
Peter Jeffery, ‘Monastic Reading and the nocturn had canticles rather than psalms.
Emerging Roman Chant Repertory’, in 16 James Grier, ‘The Divine Office at
Gallagher et al., eds., Western Plainchant in the Saint-Martial in the Early Eleventh Century:
First Millennium, pp. 45–103; James McKinnon, Paris, BNF lat. 1085’, in Fassler and Baltzer, eds.,
‘Desert Monasticism and the Later Divine Office, pp. 179–204, describes an unusual
Fourth-Century Psalmodic Movement’, Music manuscript that indicates the performance of
and Letters, 75 (1994), pp. 505–21. the entire doxology at the conclusion of every
4 Margot Fassler, ‘Sermons, Sacramentaries, responsory, which the compiler would have
and Early Sources for the Office in the Latin thought reflected Roman (rather than Frankish)
West: The Example of Advent’, in Margot practice.
Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer, eds., The Divine 17 The ceremonial of the mass described here
Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and reflects the state of the liturgy in the central
Source Studies, Regional Developments, Middle Ages.
Hagiography (Oxford University Press, 2000), 18 On the Kyrie see Hiley, Western Plainchant,
pp. 15–47. pp. 150–6.
5 On gospel tones see David Hiley, Western 19 David Bjork, The Aquitanian Kyrie Repertory
Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford: Clarendon of the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries, ed. Richard
Press, 1993), pp. 55–7. L. Crocker (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).
6 For an outline of this system see John Harper, 20 Emma Hornby, Gregorian and Old-Roman
The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from Eighth-Mode Tracts: A Case Study in the
the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century: A Historical Transmission of Western Chant (Aldershot:
Introduction and Guide for Students and Ashgate, 2002); Edward Nowacki, ‘Text
Musicians (Oxford University Press, 1991), Declamation as a Determinant of Melodic Form
pp. 243–50. in the Old Roman Eighth-Mode Tracts’, Early
7 Joseph Dyer, ‘The Singing of Psalms in the Music History 6 (1986), pp. 193–226.
Early-Medieval Office’, Speculum 64 (1989), 21 Joseph Dyer, ‘Tropis semper variantibus:
pp. 535–78. Compositional Strategies in the Offertories of
8 Joseph Dyer, ‘Monastic Psalmody of the Old Roman Chant’, Early Music History 17
Middle Ages’, Revue bénédictine 99 (1989), (1998), pp. 1–60; Rebecca Maloy, ‘The
pp. 41–74. Word–Music Relationship in the Gregorian and
[371]
372 Notes to pages 17–24
Old Roman Offertories’, Studia musicologica 45 29 A list of sources of the Roman liturgy before
(2004), pp. 131–48. the fourteenth century appears in Joseph Dyer,
22 Regula benedicti 43: ‘nihil operi dei ‘Prolegomena to a History of Music and Liturgy
praeponatur’ (‘may nothing be placed before the at Rome in the Middle Ages’, in Boone, ed.,
work of God’). Essays on Medieval Music, pp. 87–115.
23 Regula benedicti 19: ‘Ergo consideremus 30 See Kenneth Levy, ‘A New Look at Old
qualiter oporteat in conspectu Divinitatis et Roman Chant I’, Early Music History 19 (2000),
angelorum eius esse, et sic stemus ad pp. 81–104; Kenneth Levy, ‘A New Look at Old
psallendum, ut mens nostra concordet voci Roman Chant II’, Early Music History, 20 (2001),
nostrae.’ pp. 173–98; Hornby, Gregorian and Old-Roman
24 James McKinnon, The Advent Project: the Eighth-Mode Tracts; Andreas Pfisterer, Cantilena
Later Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Romana: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung des
Mass Proper (Berkeley and Los Angeles: gregorianischen Chorals (Paderborn: Schöningh,
University of California Press 2000), and the 2002).
important review by Joseph Dyer in Early Music 31 Peter Jeffery, ‘The Earliest Oktōēchoi: The
History 20 (2001), pp. 279–309; Peter Jeffery, Role of Jerusalem and Palestine in the
‘The Lost Chant Tradition of Early Christian Beginnings of Modal Ordering’, in Jeffery, ed.,
Jerusalem: Some Possible Melodic Survivals in The Study of Medieval Chant, pp. 147–209.
the Byzantine and Latin Chant Repertories’, 32 Thomas Forrest Kelly, The Beneventan
Early Music History 11 (1992), pp. 151–90; Chant (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
and Jeffery, ‘The Earliest Christian Chant 33 Thomas Forrest Kelly, The Exultet in
Repertory Recovered: The Georgian Southern Italy (Oxford University Press, 1996).
Witnesses to Jerusalem Chant’, Journal of the 34 The use of letter notation in some
American Musicological Society 47 (1994), pp. manuscripts and theoretical writings also
1–39. facilitates transcription.
25 Susan Rankin, ‘Ways of Telling Stories’, in 35 See especially James Grier, The Musical
Boone, ed., Essays on Medieval Music, pp. World of a Medieval Monk: Adémar de
371–94. Chabannes in Eleventh-Century Aquitaine
26 For both mass and office chants, however, (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
manuscripts from central and eastern Europe 36 Thirteen editions of offices have been
exhibit an avoidance of the melodic half-step published thus far in the Historiae series
that is known as the ‘Germanic chant dialect’; (Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1995–).
see Alexander Blachly, ‘Some Observations on For a study and electronic edition of many
the “Germanic” Plainchant Tradition’, in Peter compositions see Andrew Hughes, Late
M. Lefferts and Brian Seirup, eds., Studies in Medieval Liturgical Offices, Subsidia Mediaevalia
Medieval Music: Festschrift for Ernest H. Sanders 23–24 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
(New York: Department of Music, Columbia Mediaeval Studies, 1994–6).
University, 1990), pp. 85–117. 37 An important study of this phenomenon is
27 This is a very brief summary of a much Andrew Hughes, ‘Modal Order and Disorder in
larger debate regarding the function and origins the Rhymed Office’, Musica Disciplina 37 (1983),
of Western notation in the transmission of pp. 29–51.
Gregorian chant. For representative statements 38 Hartmut Möller, ‘Office Compositions from
of three points of view see David Hughes, St Gall: Saints Gallus and Otmar’, in Fassler and
‘Evidence for the Traditional View of the Baltzer, eds., The Divine Office, pp. 255–6,
History of Gregorian Chant’, Journal of the suggests that this innovation could have
American Musicological Society 40 (1987), pp. originated around the same time at St Gall,
377–404; Kenneth Levy, Gregorian Chant and during the reign of Abbot-Bishop Salomo III
the Carolingians (Princeton University Press, (890–920), as attested by the office of St Otmar.
1998) and Leo Treitler, With Voice and Pen: 39 For studies of ‘post-Gregorian’ office
Coming to Know Medieval Song and How It Was chant see David Hiley, ‘The Historia of St Julian
Made (Oxford and New York: Oxford University of Le Mans by Létald of Micy: Some Comments
Press, 2003). and Questions about a North French Office of
28 The character of the Gallican chant can only the Early Eleventh Century’, in Fassler and
be surmised from its purported survivals in Baltzer, eds., The Divine Office, pp. 444–62;
some Gregorian melodies. See Michel Huglo and Hiley, ‘Style and Structure in Early Offices
with Jane Bellingham and Marcel Zijlstra, of the Sanctorale’, in Gallagher et al., eds.,
‘Gallican Chant’, Grove Music Online, Western Plainchant in the First Millennium, pp.
www.oxfordmusiconline.com. 157–79.
40 Andrew Hughes, ‘Late Medieval Plainchant of Manuscript Plainsong Choirbooks: A

for the Divine Office’, in Reinhard Strohm and Preliminary Report and Checklist’, Notes 63
Bonnie Blackburn, eds., Music as Concept and (2006), pp. 289–328.
Practice in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford 48 Jaroslav Kolár, Anežka Vidmanová and Hana
University Press, 2001), pp. 31–96; Eyolf Vlhová-Wörner, eds., Jistebnický kancional, MS
Østrem, The Office of Saint Olav: A Study in Praha, Knihovna Národniho muzea, II C 7,
Chant Transmission (Uppsala Universitet, Kritická edice/Jistebnice Kancionál, MS Prague,
2001); Kay Slocum, Liturgies in Honour of National Museum Library II C 7, critical edition,
Thomas Becket (University of Toronto Press, vol. I, Graduale, Monumenta Liturgica
2003). Bohemica 2 (Brno: LuBos Marek, 2005)
41 James John Boyce, ‘The Carmelite Feast of 49 Barbara Haggh, ‘The Celebration of the
the Presentation of the Virgin: A Study in “Recollectio Festorum Beatae Mariae Virginis”,
Musical Adaptation’, in Fassler and Baltzer, eds., 1457–1987’, Studia Musicologica Academiae
The Divine Office, pp. 485–518. Scientiarum Hungaricae 30 (1988), pp. 361–73.
42 See Manuel Pedro Ferreira, ‘Music at Cluny, 50 Barbara Haggh, ‘Nonconformity in the Use
The Tradition of Gregorian Chant for the of Cambrai Cathedral: Guillaume Du Fay’s
Proper of the Mass – Melodic Variants and Foundations’, in Fassler and Baltzer, eds.,
Microtonal Nuances’, PhD diss. (Princeton The Divine Office, pp. 372–97; see also her
University Press, 1993); Hiley, Western ‘Foundations or Institutions? On Bringing
Plainchant, pp. 574–8. the Middle Ages into the History of
43 See particularly Chrysogonus Waddell, ‘The Medieval Music’, Acta Musicologica 68
Origin and Early Evolution of the Cistercian (1996), pp. 87–128.
Antiphonary: Reflections on Two Cistercian 51 For a recent study of eighteenth-century
Chant Reforms’, in M. Basil Pennington, ed., chant see Xavier Bisaro, Une nation de fidèles:
The Cistercian Spirit: A Symposium: In Memory L’Église et la liturgie parisienne au XVIIIe siècle
of Thomas Merton, Cistercian Studies 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006).
(Washington, DC: Cistercian Press, 1970), pp.
190–223. 2 Enriching the Gregorian heritage
44 James Boyce, Praising God in Carmel: Studies 1 The adoption of the Roman rite was never
in Carmelite Liturgy (Washington: Carmelite comprehensive or universal. See James W.
Institute, 1999). McKinnon, The Advent Project: The Later
45 Leonard E. Boyle, Pierre-Marie Gy and Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Mass
Pawełs Krupa, eds., Aux origines de la liturgie Proper (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
dominicaine: le manuscrit Santa Sabina XIV L 1, California Press, 2000), pp. 375–403; for the
Collection de l’École Française de Rome 327, incorporation of non-Roman elements see
Documents, études et répertoires publiés par Kenneth Levy, ‘Toledo, Rome, and the Legacy of
l’IRHT 67 (Paris: CNRS Éditions and Rome: Gaul’, Early Music History 4 (1984), pp. 49–99;
École Française de Rome, 2004). ‘A New Look at Old Roman Chant I’, Early
46 Andrew Mitchell, ‘The Chant of the Earliest Music History 19 (2000), pp. 81–104; ‘A New
Franciscan Liturgy’, PhD diss. (University of Look at Old Roman Chant II’, Early Music
Western Ontario, 2003); Stephen J. P. van Dijk History 20 (2001), pp. 173–198.
and Joan Hazelden Walker, The Origins of the 2 See for example Lori Kruckenberg-
Modern Roman Liturgy: The Liturgy of the Papal Goldenstein, ‘The Sequence from 1050–1150:
Court and the Franciscan Order in the Thirteenth Study of a Genre in Change’, PhD diss.,
Century (London: Westminster, 1960). University of Iowa, 1997, pp. 137–9, 155–60 and
47 Barbara Haggh, ‘Reconstructing the 176–184; and Klaus Rönnau, Die Tropen zum
Plainchant Repertory of Brussels and Its Gloria in excelsis Deo. Unter besonderer
Chronology’, in Musicology and Archival Berücksichtigung des Repertoires der St
Research: Proceedings of the Colloquium held at Martial-Handschriften (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf &
the Algemeen Rijksarchief, Brussel, 22–23 April Härtel, 1967), pp. 5 and 76–82.
1993, Archief- en Bibliotheekwezen in België, 3 See, for example, Richard Crocker and David
Extranummer 46 (Brussels: Archives Générales Hiley, eds., The New Oxford History of Music,
du Royaume, 1994), pp. 177–213; Marica vol. II, The Early Middle Ages to 1300 (Oxford
Tacconi, Cathedral and Civic Ritual in Late and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990),
Medieval and Renaissance Florence: The Service p. 225.
Books of Santa Maria del Fiore (Cambridge 4 For studies of these sources see Paul Evans,
University Press, 2006); Michael Noone and The Early Trope Repertory of Saint Martial de
Graeme Skinner, ‘Toledo Cathedral’s Collection Limoges (Princeton University Press, 1970);
Richard Crocker, The Early Medieval Sequence 15 David Bjork, ‘The Kyrie Trope’, Journal of
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of the American Musicological Society 33 (1980),
California Press, 1977); and Susan Rankin, pp. 1–41.
‘From Tuotilo to the First Manuscripts: The 16 St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 381, p. 288.
Shaping of a Trope Repertory at Saint Gall’, in 17 For the sources of this terminology see Ritva
Wulf Arlt and Gunilla Björkvall, eds., Recherches Jonsson, ‘Corpus troporum,’ Journal of the
nouvelles sur les tropes liturgiques, Studia Latina Plainsong and Medieval Music Society 1 (1978),
Stockholmiensia 36 (Stockholm: Almqvist and pp. 98–115.
Wiksell International, 1993), pp. 395–413. 18 An introduction to the melodic style of
5 Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek: tropes appears in Hiley, Western Plainchant,
Cod. Guelf. 1062 Helmst., fol. 219r; Wilfried pp. 215–23.
Hartmann, ed., Die Konzilien der Karolingischen 19 For a discussion of this shift see James Grier,
Teilreiche 843–859, Monumenta Germaniae ‘A New Voice in the Monastery: Tropes and
Historica, Concilia III (Hanover: Hahn, 1984), Versus from Eleventh and Twelfth Century
p. 129. Aquitania’, Speculum 69 (1994), pp. 1024–69,
6 Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, 10127–10144. esp. 1027–8.
7 The chants are Alleluia / Beatus vir, Alleluia / 20 See Leo Treitler, ‘The Polyphony of
Dominus regnavit decorem, Alleluia / Iubilate Saint Martial’, Journal of the American
deo, Alleluia / Te decet hymnus, and the extra Musicological Society 17 (1964), pp. 29–42,
verses Laudamini in nomine and Notum fecit esp. 35–39.
dominus. See Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, 21 An analysis of a versus appears in Leo
10127–10144, fols. 114v–115 and René-Jean Treitler, ‘Medieval Lyric’, in Mark Everist, ed.,
Hesbert, Antiphonale missarum sextuplex Models of Musical Analysis: Music before 1600
(Brussels: Vromant, 1935), p. 198. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), pp. 1–19.
8 For a transcription of the neuma triplex see 22 For the complete text of Notker’s preface, see
Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, eds., Music in
Music, vol. I, The Earliest Notations to the the Western World: A History in Documents (New
Sixteenth Century (Oxford University Press, York: Schirmer, 1984), pp. 46–7.
2005), p. 38. For Amalrius’s comments see 23 Susan Rankin, ‘The Earliest Sources of
David Hiley, Western Plainchant: A Handbook Notker’s Sequences: St Gallen Vadiana 317, and
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 200–1 and Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale Lat. 10587’, Early
569–71. See also Johannes M. Hanssens, Music History 10 (1991), pp. 201–33.
Amalarii episcopi opera liturgica omnia (Vatican 24 The details of the two traditions are
City: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1948–50); beautifully surveyed and discussed in
for the sequentia see Liber officialis 3.16 (vol. III, Kruckenberg-Goldenstein, ‘The Sequence from
p. 304); for the neuma triplex see Liber de ordine 1050–1150’, pp. 86–139. Richard Crocker sees
antiphonarii 18.2 (vol. III, p. 54). greater unity in the eastern and western
9 St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 484, pp. 185–86. traditions. See his Early Medieval Sequence,
10 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm pp. 1–14.
9543, fol. 119v. For a facsimile see Hartmut 25 See Henry Marriot Bannister, Anglo French
Möller and Rudolf Stephan, Neues Handbuch Sequelae (London: Plainsong and Medieval
der Musikwissenschaft, vol. II, Die Musik des Music Society, 1934); and Bruno Stäblein, ‘Zur
Mittelalters (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1991), Frühgeschichte der Sequenz’, Archiv für
p. 190 for a facsimile; for a transcription see Musikwissenschaft 18 (1961), pp. 1–33.
Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 13 vols. (New 26 Kruckenberg-Goldenstein, ‘The Sequence
York: Scribner, 1982–2003), under ‘Tropes to from 1050–1150’, pp. 111–13 and 137–9.
the proper of the mass’. 27 Translation from David Hiley, ‘The
11 For a transcription see ‘Plainchant’, section 6 Sequence Melodies Sung at Cluny and
(ii): ‘Expansion of the Liturgy: Prosula’, The New Elsewhere’, in Peter Cahn and Ann-Katrin
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Heimer, eds., De musica et cantu: Studien zur
edn. Geschichte der Kirchenmusik und der Oper:
12 Richard L. Crocker, ‘The Troping Helmut Hucke zum 60. Geburtstag (Hildesheim:
Hypothesis’, Musical Quarterly 52 (1966), pp. G. Olms, 1993), p. 139.
183–203; see also Paul Evans, The Early Trope 28 A thorough discussion of this composition
Repertory of Saint Martial de Limoges (Princeton appears in Crocker, The Early Medieval
University Press, 1970), pp. 1–15. Sequence, pp. 189–203.
13 Hiley, Western Plainchant, p. 196. 29 Translations of this sequence by Leofranc
14 Evans, Early Trope Repertory, p. 3. Holford-Strevens. See liner notes for Musique et
poésie à Saint-Gall. Séquences et tropes du IXe the Monks and Nuns of the English Nation
siècle, Harmonia Mundi France 905239, p. 40. (London and New York: Nelson, 1953), section
30 Kruckenberg-Goldenstein, ‘The Sequence 51.
from 1050–1150’, pp. 273–9. 48 For a survey see C. Clifford Flanigan, ‘The
31 Ibid., pp. 160–6. Fleury Playbook, the Traditions of Medieval
32 Text and translation in Margot Fassler, Latin Drama, and Modern Scholarship’, in
Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Thomas P. Campbell and Clifford Davidson,
Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris eds., The Fleury Playbook: Essays and Studies
(Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 331. (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute
33 Fassler, Gothic Song, pp. 64–70. Publications, 1985), pp. 1–25.
34 Ibid., p. 70. 49 Norma Kroll explores this feature and
35 For Adam’s life see ibid., pp. 209–19. frames it in Augustinian terms in her ‘Power
36 Ibid., pp. 209–10. and Conflict in Medieval Ritual and Plays: The
37 Ibid., pp. 267–320. Re-Invention of Drama’, Modern Philology 102
38 Margot E. Fassler, ‘The Role of the Parisian (2005), pp. 452–83.
Sequence in the Evolution of Notre-Dame 50 For a discussion of Herod’s anger and
Polyphony’, Speculum 62 (1987): 345–74. Rachel’s sorrow see John Stevens, Words and
39 Fassler, Gothic Song, pp. 321–43, esp. pp. Music in the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance
330–34. and Drama, 1050–1350 (Cambridge University
40 More than six hundred texts are preserved in Press, 1986), pp. 348–71.
Karl Young’s The Drama of the Medieval Church, 51 Young, Drama of the Medieval Church,
2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933); nearly vol. II, pp. 411–14.
four hundred of these are examples of the Easter 52 For a glimpse of the type of behaviour that
play. The Easter plays alone are edited in disturbed and alarmed Gerhoh and Herrad see
Walther Lipphardt, Lateinische Osterfeiern und Margot Fassler, ‘The Feast of Fools and the
Osterspiele, 6 vols. (Berlin and New York: Walter Danielis Ludus: Popular Tradition in a Medieval
De Gruyter, 1975–81). The term ‘liturgical Cathedral Play’, in Thomas Forrest Kelly, ed.,
drama’ was coined by Félix Clément in the mid Plainsong in the Age of Polyphony (Cambridge
nineteenth century. University Press, 1992), pp. 66–99.
41 Susan Rankin, ‘Liturgical Drama’, in R. 53 See, for example, Anne Walters Robertson,
Crocker and D. Hiley, eds., The Early Middle The Service-Books of the Royal Abbey of
Ages to 1300, vol. II of The New Oxford History of Saint-Denis: Images of Ritual and Music in the
Music (Oxford and New York: Oxford Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 1991),
University Press), 1990, p. 313. pp. 235–71.
42 The version in Mark is the only one to 54 Jean-Baptiste Pelt, Études sur la cathédrale de
mention three women explicitly. The scene is Metz, vol. IV, La liturgie 1: Ve–XIIIe siècle (Metz:
also found in Matthew 28:1–7 and Luke 24:1–9. Imprimerie du Journal le Lorrain, 1937), p. 378;
43 As in St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 484, p. Metz, Bibliothèque municipale 82, fol. 96v. The
111. The oldest version, preserved in Paris, manuscript was destroyed in World War Two
Bibliothèque nationale fonds lat. 1240, is slightly and survives only on microfilm.
more elaborate than this. 55 Pelt, Études, p. 286; Metz, Bibliothèque
44 The chronology of the early sources is a municipale 82, fol. 27r.
complex matter. See David A. Bjork, ‘On the 56 Pelt, Études, p. 425; Metz, Bibliothèque
Dissemination of Quem queritis and the municipale 82, fol. 129v.
Visitatio Sepulchri and the Chronology of Their 57 Pelt, Études, p. 425; Metz, Bibliothèque
Early Sources’, Comparative Drama 14 (1980), municipale 82, fol. 129r.
pp. 60. Bjork makes a convincing argument that 58 Pelt, Études, p. 283; Metz, Bibliothèque
the geographic pattern of preservation tells us municipale 82, fol. 25v.
more about the early history of Quem queritis 59 Pelt, Études, p. 294; Metz, Bibliothèque
than the chronology of the sources. municipale 82, fol. 32v.
45 Timothy J. McGee, ‘The Liturgical 60 Lanfranc, Decreta Lanfranci monachis
Placements of the “Quem Queritis” Dialogue’, Cantuariensibus transmissa, ed. David Knowles,
Journal of the American Musicological Society 29 Corpus Consuetudinum Monasticarum 3
(1976), pp. 1–29. (Siegburg: F. Schmitt, 1967), p. 50; J. B. L.
46 Rankin, ‘Liturgical Drama’, p. 320, fn 25. Tolhurst and the Abbess of Stanbrook, eds., The
47 Thomas Symons, ed. and trans., Regularis Ordinal and Customary of the Abbey of Saint
Concordia Anglicae Nationis Monachorum Mary, York (St John’s College, Cambridge, ms. D.
Sanctimonialiumque. The Monastic Agreement of 27), vol. II, Henry Bradshaw Society
Publications 75 (London: Henry Bradshaw or the human voice. Here, the sense
Society, 1936), p. 187; Antonia Gransden, ed., appropriately embraces both ‘pitch’ and ‘line’.
The Customary of the Benedictine Abbey of Bury Dissonare is here used not in its later, cognate
St Edmunds in Suffolk (from Harleian MS. 1005 sense, but simply to indicate separation or
in the British Museum), Henry Bradshaw Society distinction in sound. Guido’s statement is itself
99 (London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1973), indebted to the formulation in Musica
p. 93. Enchiriadis, Chapter 13.
7 See the remarks by Susan Rankin in
3 Early polyphony to circa 1200 ‘Winchester Polyphony: The Early Theory and
1 ‘Superficies quaedam artis musicae pro Practice of Organum’, in S. Rankin and D. Hiley,
ornatu ecclesiasticorum carminum utcumque in eds., Music in the Medieval English Liturgy:
his designata sit.’ Musica Enchiriadis, Chapter Plainsong and Medieval Music Centennial Essays
18, ca850. H. Schmid, ed., Musica et Scolica (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 65, 70–8.
Enchiriadis una cum aliquibus tractatulis 8 Individual notions of ‘how the music
adiunctis, Bayerische Akademie der went’ also play a substantial role in modern
Wissenschaften Veröffentlichung der reconstructions, a situation evident in
Musikhistorischen Kommission 3 (Munich: widely divergent editions and recorded
Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der interpretations of Aquitanian and Compostelan
Wissenschaften, 1981), p. 56. There is a slightly polyphony.
different English translation in C. V. Palisca, ed., 9 See the Quatuor Principalia Musicae written
Musica enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis, trans., by an anonymous English monk and dated
R. Erickson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1351, Book 4:2; L. F. Alua˛s, ed. and trans., ‘The
1995), p. 30. Quatuor Principalia Musicae: A Critical Edition
2 ‘Incipiunt melliflua organorum modulamina and Translation, with Introduction and
super dulcissima celeste preconia’, GB-Ccc 473, Commentary’, PhD diss., Indiana University
fol. 135r, ca1000. (1996), pp. 746–7. Susan Rankin discusses
3 ‘Sed quocumque modo fiat . . . [MS retrospective Italian polyphony in ‘Between
illegible] . . . sic faciendo precentori conveniat et Oral and Written: Thirteenth-Century Italian
creatori laudem diaphonia concinat.’ I-PCd 65, Sources of Polyphony’, in G. Cattin and F. A.
fol. 268r, ca1142. Facsimile in B. M. Jensen, ed., Gallo, eds., Un millennio di polifonia liturgica tra
Il Libro del Maestro Codice 65 (Piacenza: Tip. Le. oralità e scrittura, Quarderni di Musica e storia 3
Co. editore, 1997). (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), pp. 75–98. An
4 On important and complex aspects of important study of the persistence of early
improvisation and intersections between oral organum teaching is F. Reckow, ‘Guido’s Theory
and written practices, see L. Treitler, With Voice of Organum after Guido: Transmission –
and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and Adaptation – Transformation’, in G. M. Boone,
How It Was Made (Oxford University Press, ed., Essays on Medieval Music in Honor of David
2003), pp. 1–67. Treitler’s views include, but are G. Hughes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
not limited to, polyphony: ‘The production of Press, 1995), pp. 395–413.
music as the actualization of both written and 10 Both Guido of Arezzo and John [of
unwritten composition is a premiss for the Afflighem] refer to their local ‘use’ rather
understanding of medieval music cultures’, than claiming a monolithic, standard
p. 11. practice. See Micrologus, Chapter 18, Palisca,
5 Musica Enchiriadis, Chapter 13, Schmid ed., Hucbald, Guido and John on Music,
edition, p. 37; Erickson translation, p. 21. pp. 77–8 and John, De Musica, Chapter 23, in
6 ‘Diaphonia vocum disjunctio sonat, quam ibid., p. 160.
nos organum vocamus, cum disjunctae ab 11 ‘Que omnia melius usu organizatorum
invicem voces et concorditer dissonant et quam regulis declarantur.’ H. H. Eggebrecht and
dissonanter concordant.’ Guido of Arezzo, F. Zaminer, eds., Ad Organum Faciendum:
Micrologus, ed., J. Smits van Waesberghe, Lehrschriften der Mehrstimmigkeit in
Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 4 (American nachguidonischer Zeit (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne,
Institute of Musicology, 1955), pp. 196–7. There 1970), p. 160. This treatise, designated as Berlin
is a slightly different translation in C. V. Palisca, B within the ‘new organum teaching’ orbit, is a
ed., Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music: Three descendant of Ad organum faciendum. For the
Medieval Treatises, trans. W. Babb (New Haven, Musica Enchiriadis statement, see note 1.
CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 77. Latin vox 12 Andreas Holschneider suggests that
is multivalent as used by early medieval Wulfstan, Cantor at Winchester, was responsible
theorists and can denote a pitch, a melodic line, for the Winchester organum repertory, notated
in the first quarter of the eleventh century. See 21 See the studies of Holschneider, Die Organa
Holschneider’s Die Organa von Winchester: von Winchester and Rankin, ‘Winchester
Studien zum ältesten Repertoire polyphoner Polyphony’, pp. 59–99. Facsimiles of the
Musik (Hildesheim: Georg Olms notation are published at the end of
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1968), Holschneider’s book.
pp. 76–81. The repertory evidences a 22 See Rankin, ‘Winchester Polyphony’, for an
concentration on chants in which soloists excellent overview.
already took a leading role. 23 The transcription of this excerpt is based on
13 The thirteen polyphonic proses in this the full realization by Holschneider in Die
repertory exhibit no coherent liturgical Organa von Winchester, pp. 165–7. The notes in
ordering, and most are incomplete, the the principal voice have here been numbered for
polyphony ceasing after the first few text ease in reference. Because the notation is not
couplets. pitch-specific, the reconstruction is conjectural,
14 The variety in strands of teaching signals based on properties of the neumes in
that theorists were trying to fix through written conjunction with theoretical precepts of the
precepts and plausible rationales what was epoch.
essentially an informal practice. On those 24 The xs in the transcription suggest alternate
strands, see S. Fuller, ‘Early Polyphony’, in R. readings that generally increase the proportion
Crocker and D. Hiley, eds., The New Oxford of fourths.
History of Music, vol. II, The Early Middle Ages to 25 See W. Arlt, ‘Stylistic Layers in
1300 (Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. Eleventh-Century Polyphony: How Can the
497–502. Continental Sources Contribute to Our
15 Guido of Arezzo, Micrologus, Chapter 18, Understanding of the Winchester Organa?’ in
Palisca, ed., Hucbald, Guido and John on Music, Rankin and Hiley, eds., Music in the Medieval
pp. 77–8. Guido stands apart in giving a strict English Liturgy, pp. 101–41.
example in parallel fourths rather than fifths. 26 Eggebrecht and Zaminer, eds., Ad Organum
16 The text of the formulaic psalm tone in Faciendum, p. 46. Ad Organum Faciendum is a
Example 3.1a is verse 31 of Psalm 103. Nancy pivotal document for the start of this phase; its
Phillips identified the melody and proposed an teachings are often paraphrased and modified in
elegant solution to a notational error in the subsequent redactions.
sources, a solution followed here. See 27 For a facsimile of the original alphabetic
N. Phillips, ‘“Musica” and “Scolica Enchiriadis”: notation, and staff transcriptions of Examples
The Literary, Theoretical, and Musical Sources’, 3.3a and 3.3b, see Eggebrecht and Zaminer, eds.,
PhD diss., New York University, 1984, pp. Ad Organum Faciendum, plate 5 and pp. 48–9,
459–60. 52–3.
17 Ipsi soli is an antiphon from the Matins of St 28 An excellent recording of this polyphonic
Agnes. Its text units are: ‘To him alone / I keep Alleluia can be found on Aquitania Christmas
faith / to him all [my] / devotion I commit.’ Music from Aquitanian Monasteries (12th
Lack of occursus in Guido’s third phrase reflects Century), Sequentia, B. Bagby and B. Thornton,
the ongoing syntax of the text at that point, ‘tota dirs., Deutsche Harmonia Mundi / BMG Music
devotione’. C and F, the two diatonic tones with 05472–77383-2 (1997), track 8.
a half-step interval below, are the tritus 29 Eggebrecht and Zaminer, eds., Ad Organum
boundaries. The Musica Enchiriadis formulates Faciendum, p. 111. On the significance of the
its boundary tone theory in a different way notion of ‘affinity’ within early organum theory,
consistent with the daseian scale. see S. Fuller, ‘Theoretical Foundations of Early
18 See the significant digest and reworking of Organum Theory’, Acta Musicologica 53 (1981),
Musica Enchiriadis designated the ‘Paris pp. 62–6.
Elaboration’ by H. Schmid: see Schmid, ed., 30 Eggebrecht and Zaminer, eds., Ad Organum
Musica et Scolica Enchiriadis, p. 206. Faciendum, p. 115. This celebration of a
19 ‘Verumtamen modesta morositate edita, dominant organal voice is not taken up in later
quod suum est maxime proprium, et concordi treatises.
diligentia procurata honestissima erit cantionis 31 Ibid., pp. 113, 115.
suavitas.’ H. Schmid, ed., Musica et Scolica 32 Chapter 23, ‘Caeterum hic facillimus eius
Enchiriadis, p. 97. There is a slightly different usus est, si motuum varietas diligenter
translation in Palisca, Musica enchiriadis and consideretur; ut ubi in recta modulatione est
Scolica enchiriadis, p. 58. elevatio, ibi in organica fiat depositio et e
20 See the rubrics edited in Holschneider, Die converso.’ J. Smits van Waesberghe, ed.,
Organa von Winchester, pp. 41–55. Johannis Affligemensis: De musica cum tonario,
Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 1 (Rome: conductus. The Codex Calixtinus offices for
American Institute of Musicology, 1950), St James and some thirteenth-century
pp. 159–60. English translation, in Palisca, Circumcision offices indicate how versus were
ed., Hucbald, Guido, and John On Music, incorporated in church rituals.
p. 160. 39 Some of the libelli were bound together in
33 For the Latin, see the Smits van Waesberghe the thirteenth century. On the separate sources
edition, p. 160; English translation, Palisca, ed., and on concordances, see Sarah Fuller, ‘The
Hucbald, Guido, and John On Music, p. 161. The Myth of Saint-Martial Polyphony: A Study of
Latin verb indicating multiplication of notes is the Sources’, Musica Disciplina 33 (1979),
conglobare. pp. 5–26. The exact tally of polyphonic works is
34 The prevalent German term, often adopted uncertain, due to some notational ambiguities
in English-language studies, is ‘Klangschritt- and differing judgements about whether some
Lehre’. The classic study of these texts is K.-J. apparently monophonic songs are actually
Sachs, ‘Zur Tradition der Klangschritt-Lehre: polyphonic, inscribed in successive notation.
Die Texte mit der Formel “Si cantus 40 Treatises of this period shift their
ascendit . . . ” und ihre Verwandten’, Archiv für terminology from ‘principal’ and ‘organal’
Musikwissenschaft 28 (1971), pp. 233–70. voices to ‘cantus’ and ‘organum’.
35 On the important role of memorization 41 On approaches to medieval lyric,
in medieval music training, see A. M. Busse including two monophonic Aquitanian versus,
Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of see L. Treitler. ‘Medieval Lyric’, in M. Everist, ed.,
Memory (Berkeley: University of California Models of Musical Analysis: Music Before 1600
Press, 2005), especially Chapter 4 on (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), pp. 1–19. R. G.
counterpoint. Carlson analyses two versus (one monophonic,
36 While largely promoting contrary motion, one polyphonic), giving particular attention to
the much-perused Vatican Organum Treatise text, in ‘Striking Ornaments’, pp. 541–55.
includes some examples of parallel motion; 42 Transmitted in three sources, Per partum
see the conspectus of progressions in M. virginis is among the more widely circulated of
Bernhard, ‘Eine neue Quelle für den the polyphonic versus.
Vatikanischen Organum-Traktat’, in 43 The transcription given here of couplets 1, 4
Bernhard, ed., Quellen und Studien zur and line 5 respects the rhythmic indeterminacy
Musiktheorie des Mittelalters, vol. III, of the original notations. Editorial alignments in
Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, indeterminate passages are suggested on the
Veröffentlichungen der Musikhistorischen basis of vertical consonance. For the complete
Kommission 15 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), versus in a striking variety of rhythmic
pp. 178–83. A study of late medieval singing realizations see B. Gillingham, Saint-Martial
in fifths is S. Fuller, ‘Discant and the Theory Mehrstimmigkeit / Saint-Martial Polyphony,
of Fifthing’, Acta Musicologica 50 (1978), Musicological Studies 44 (Henryville, PA:
pp. 241–75. Institute of Medieval Music, 1984), pp. 71–4,
37 For a map showing the area in which 102–6, 144–9; T. Karp, The Polyphony of Saint
Aquitanian notation flourished see Le Graduel Martial and Santiago de Compostela, vol. II,
Romain II, édition critique par les moines de (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
Solesmes, Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Solesmes, California Press, 1992), pp. 8–11, 50–4, 117–20;
1957, p. 231. The older designator for this and H. van der Werf, The Oldest Extant Part
repertory, Saint-Martial (still preserved in the Music and the Origin of Western Polyphony
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, (Rochester, NY: the author, 1993), vol. II, pp.
2nd edn), was based on a mistaken impression 17–31. Each editor presents the three versions
that the sources originated at the monastery of separately. Noteworthy recorded interpretations
St-Martial of Limoges, the locale where many of are Shining Light: Music from Aquitanian
them were collected by the early thirteenth Monasteries, Sequentia, B. Bagby and B.
century. Thornton, dirs., Deutsche Harmonia Mundi /
38 For text topics and possible contexts see R. BMG Music 05472 77370 2 (1996), track 10 and
G. Carlson, ‘Striking Ornaments: Complexities The Fire and the Rose: Aquitanian Chant,
of Sense and Song in Aquitanian “Versus”’, Heliotrope, J. Todd, dir., Koch International
Music and Letters 84 (2003), pp. 527–56 and S. Classics, 3–7356-2H1 (1998), track 3.
Fuller, ‘Aquitanian Polyphony of the Eleventh 44 Many versus settings have a greater degree of
and Twelfth Centuries’, PhD diss., University of musical repetition, often a simple strophic
California, Berkeley, 1969, pp. 16–22. The design or the same music for both lines in a
northern European term for versus was couplet, as Examples 3.4a, 3.4b here.
45 These terminal melismas are ancestors of 55 An exception is the mass gradual ‘Misit
Parisian conductus caudae. Herodes’, where the elaborative voice dips below
46 See, for example, clausit, line 1b, the cantus several times.
est clemencia, line 4a, Immortalis, line 5 56 The transcription of O adjutor presented
(Examples 3.4a, 3.4b), and the reduction of line here uses perfect consonances and scribal
1a given in Example 3.5a. neume groupings as guides to a contingent but
47 Example 3.4a, verse 1a, hominis sunt, 1b not implausible alignment between the voices.
tribuitur. For other transcriptions see Karp, The
48 The binary progressions shown in the Polyphony of Saint Martial and Santiago de
reduction relate well to the teaching methods of Compostela, vol. II, pp. 219–22; van der Werf,
the interval-progression manuals. The Oldest Extant Part Music, vol. II, pp. 202–3;
49 Facsimiles of the notated versions of Per and J. López-Calo, La musica en la Catedral de
partum virginis may be found in B. Gillingham, Santiago, vol. V (La Edad Media, La Coruña:
ed., Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds Latin Diputación Provincial de La Coruña, 1994),
3549 and London, British Library 36881, pp. 378–85. For a performed interpretation, see
Publications of Musical Manuscripts No. 16 Miracles of Sant’Iago Music from the Codex
(Ottawa: Institute of Medieval Music, ca1987); Calixtinus, Anonymous 4, Harmonia Mundi
fol. 150v (F-Pn fonds lat. 3549, ‘B’) and fol. 4r France, HMU 907156 (1995), track 18. For the
(GB-Lbl add. 36881, ‘D’). The version in F-Pn original notation, see the facsimile cited in note
fonds lat. 3719, fol. 64r closely resembles the ‘B’ 51 above, fols. 217r–217v.
version. 57 On these resemblances see Fuller,
50 The ‘B’ version as I interpret it increases the ‘Perspectives on Musical Notation in the Codex
similarity to the parallel moment on virginis. Calixtinus’, pp. 218–19. The porrectus
51 Facsimile edition in Codex Calixtinus de la praepunctis figure common in the treatise and in
Catedral de Santiago de Compostela (Madrid: the repertory occurs in the second and sixth
Kaydeda Ediciones, 1993). A plausible segments of the O adjutor verse. These
dating for the manuscript is ca1150–60. E. similarities bring a slightly different perspective
Roesner summarizes divergent opinions on the to the Vatican Organum Treatise, which is
dating in ‘The Codex Calixtinus and the Magnus chiefly linked with Parisian organum
Liber Organi: Some Preliminary Observations’, traditions.
in J. López-Calo and C. Villanueva, eds., El
Códice Calixtino y la Música de su Tiempo (La 4 The thirteenth century
Coruña: Fundación Pedro Barrié da la Maza, 1 The cartoon was published in the syndicated
2001), pp. 146–7. press on 20 March 1987 and is available at www.
52 Despite its codicological status as a mycomicspage.com/feature/doonesbury/?date=
supplement, the polyphonic section is an 19870320.
integral component of the Codex Calixtinus in 2 The word conductus is found in medieval
terms of relationships to the music of Book I sources in both the second and fourth
and notational traits. See S. Fuller, ‘Perspectives declensions with the plural in conducti and
on Musical Notation in the Codex Calixtinus’, in conductus respectively.
López-Calo and Villanueva, eds., El Códice 3 The conductus repertory has been
Calixtino, p. 188. inventoried no less than three times. See
53 On the origins of the codex, see M. Dı́az y Eduard Gröninger, Repertoire-Untersuchungen
Dı́az, El Codice Calixtino de la Catedral de zum mehrstimmigen Notre-Dame Conductus,
Santiago: Estudio Codicológico y de contenido, Kölner Beiträge zur Musikforschung 2
Monografias de Compostellanum 2 (Santiago de (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1939);
Compostela: Centro de Estudios Jacobeos, Gordon Anderson, ‘Notre-Dame and Related
1988), pp. 90–1, 310–14. Most of the music is Conductus: A Catalogue Raisonné’,
attributed (probably spuriously) to clerics from Miscellanea musicologica 6 (1972), pp. 153–229;
northern cities, such as Bourges or Troyes. 7 (1975), pp. 1–81; Robert Falck, The Notre
54 Ad superni regis decus is a version of Noster Dame Conductus: A Study of the Repertory,
cetus psallat letus (copied in three Aquitanian Musicological Studies 33 (Henryville, Ottawa,
sources, including the earliest), while and Binningen: Institute of Mediaeval Music,
Gratulantes celebremus festum is cognate with 1981). Although published after Anderson’s
the Aquitanian Ad honorem sempiterni regis. For catalogue, Falck’s was based on a doctoral
notational and musical comparisons between dissertation finished in 1970, and although
these pieces, see Fuller, ‘Perspectives on Musical Anderson’s work is more complete, Falck’s is the
Notation in the Codex Calixtinus’, pp. 211–14. more accessible.
4 There is a facsimile of I-Fl Plut. 29.1 in Luther Anonymous IV, Brill Studies in Intellectual
Dittmer, ed., Facsimile Reproduction of the History 57 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 37–53.
Manuscript Firenze, Biblioteca 9 For a wider discussion on the terms cum and
Mediceo-Laurenziana Pluteo 29.1, sine caudis, see Ernest H. Sanders, ‘Sine littera
2 vols., Publications of Mediaeval Musical and Cum littera in Medieval Polyphony’, in
Manuscripts 10–11 (Brooklyn, NY: Institute of Edmond Strainchamps, Maria Rika Maniates
Mediaeval Music, [1966]–7). and Christopher Hatch, eds., Music and
5 A complete edition of the conductus Civilisation: Essays in Honor of Paul Henry Lang
repertory is in Gordon Anderson, ed., (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1984),
Notre-Dame and Related Conductus: Opera pp. 215–31.
omnia, 10 vols., [Institute of Mediaeval Music] 10 I-Fl Plut. 29.1, fols. 322r–322v.
Collected Works 10 (Henryville, Ottawa, and 11 The text of Virtus moritur is a trenchant
Binningen: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1979–) attack on the place of money at the papal curia.
(all but vol. VII have appeared). A smaller but The translation of the text of Example 4.1
useful edition is in Janet Knapp, ed., Thirty-Five is ‘Virtue is dying / Sin lives / Faith is cast out /
Conductus for Two and Three Voices, Collegium into Exile.’
Musicum 6 (New Haven: Yale University 12 I-Fl Plut. 29.1, fols. 359v–360. The versions
Department of Music Graduate School, 1965). presented here may be compared with the
Both editions attempt to present the rhythm of metrical transcriptions in Anderson, Notre
the cum littera (texted) sections of the Dame and Related Conductus, vol. V, pp. 71–2
conductus in a metrical, if not modal, form, in and 20–1.
contrast to the examples provided here. 13 The repertory of Parisian organum is edited
6 For thoroughgoing studies on the from I-Fl Plut. 29.1 in Mark Everist, ed., Les
chronology of the conductus, see Ernest H. Organa à deux voix du manuscrit de Florence,
Sanders, ‘Style and Technique in Datable Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Plut. 29.1, 3
Polyphonic Notre-Dame Conductus’, vols., Le Magnus liber organi de Notre Dame de
in Luther Dittmer, ed., Gordon Athol Paris 2–4 (Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre,
Anderson (1929–1981) In memoriam von 2001–3); the repertory from D-W 1099 is edited
seinen Studenten, Freunden und Kollegen, in Thomas B. Payne, ed., Les Organa à deux voix
2 vols., Musicological Studies 49 (Henryville, du manuscrit de Wolfenbüttel, Hertzog [sic]
Ottawa, and Binningen: Institute of Mediaeval August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 1099 Helmst.,
Music, 1984), vol. II, pp. 505–30, and Thomas 2 vols., Le Magnus liber organi de Notre-Dame
B. Payne, ‘Datable “Notre Dame” Conductus: de Paris 6A-6B (Monaco: Éditions de
New Historical Observations on Style and l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1996).
Technique’, Current Musicology 64 (2001), 14 For the three- and four-part organa, see
pp. 104–51. Edward H. Roesner, ed., Les Quadrupla et tripla
7 A useful analysis of the subject matter of de Paris, Le Magnus liber organi de Notre-Dame
conductus texts (but restricted to those in I-Fl de Paris 1 (Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre,
Plut. 29.1 and including liturgical and motet 1993).
texts) is in Massimo Masani Ricci, Codice 15 Fritz Reckow, ed., Der Musiktraktat des
Pluteo 29.1 della Biblioteca Laurenziana di Anonymus 4, 2 vols., Beihefte zum Archiv für
Firenze: storia e catalogo comparato, Studi Musikwissenschaft 4–5 (Wiesbaden: Franz
musicali toscani 8 (Pisa: ETS, 2002), Steiner Verlag, 1967), vol. I, pp. 46, translated in
pp. 513–46. Jeremy Yudkin, The Music Treatise of Anonymous
8 The literature on the genre’s function is IV: A New Translation, Musicological Studies
enormous. The current views are represented by and Documents 41 (Neuhausen-Stuttgart:
the following texts: Frank Ll. Harrison, American Institute of Musicology, 1985), p. 39.
‘Benedicamus, Conductus, Carol’, Acta 16 See Mark Everist, Polyphonic Music in
Musicologica 37 (1965), pp. 35–48; Bryan Thirteenth-Century France: Aspects of Sources
Gillingham, ‘A New Etymology and Etiology for and Distribution (New York: Garland, 1989),
the Conductus’, in Bryan Gillingham and Paul pp. 1–6 and the sources cited there.
Merkley, eds., Beyond the Moon: Festschrift 17 For the date of D-W 628 (known as W1 in
Luther Dittmer, Musicological Studies 53 older literature), see Mark Everist, ‘From Paris
(Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1990), to St Andrews: The Origins of W1 ’, Journal of the
pp. 100–17; Nancy van Deusen, ‘Ductus, Tractus, American Musicological Society 43 (1990),
Conductus: The Intellectual Context of a Musical pp. 1–42; Rebecca A. Baltzer, ‘The Manuscript
Genre’, Theology and Music at the Early Makers of W1: Further Evidence for an Early
University: The Case of Robert Grosseteste and Date’, in Quomodo cantabimus canticum? Studies
in Honor of Edward H. Roesner, ed. David Butler Max Niemeyer, 1910; R [ed. Luther A. Dittmer,
Cannata, Gabriela Ilnitchi Currie, Rena Charnin Musicological Studies 7] Brooklyn, NY: Institute
Mueller and John Louis Nádas (Middleton, WI: of Mediaeval Music; Hildesheim: Georg Olms,
American Institute of Musicology, 2008), pp. 1964; 1/2 – [345–456 ed. Friedrich Gennrich
103–20. For I-Fl Plut. 29.1, see Rebecca A. including R of ‘Die Quellen der Motetten
Baltzer, ‘Thirteenth-Century Illuminated altesten Stils’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 5
Miniatures and the Date of the Florence (1923), pp. 185–222 and 273–315, Summa
Manuscript’, Journal of the American Musicae Medii Aevi 7] Langen bei Frankfürt:
Musicological Society 25 (1972), pp. 1–18. n.p., 1961; R [345–456] [457–783, ed. Luther A.
18 For a broader view of the liturgical Dittmer, Musicological Studies 26] [Binningen]:
dimension of Parisian organum, see Craig Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1978; 2 – [1–71
Wright, Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of ed. Friedrich Gennrich, Summa Musicae Medii
Paris 500–1550 (Cambridge University Press, Aevi 8 – 65–71 in page proof only] Langen bei
1989), pp. 258–67. Frankfürt: n.p., 1962; R [1–64, 65–71 corrected]
19 I-Fl Plut. 29.1, fols. 121v–122r; D-W 1099, [72–155 ed. Luther A. Dittmer, Musicological
fols. 81r–82r. It is edited in Everist, ed., Les Studies 17] Brooklyn, NY: Institute of Mediaeval
Organa à deux voix du manuscrit de Florence, Music, n.d.; Hildesheim: Georg Olms,
vol. III, pp. 190–200. 1972).
20 See, for example, the older editions of this 24 Mark Everist, French Motets in the
repertory that transcribe organum per se Thirteenth Century: Music, Poetry and Genre,
according to the principles of the rhythmic Cambridge Studies in Medieval and Renaissance
modes: William Waite, ed., The Rhythm of Music (Cambridge University Press, 1994),
Twelfth-Century Polyphony: Its Theory and pp. 15–42.
Practice, Yale Studies in the History of Music 2 25 For views on chronology, see Everist,
(New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Polyphonic Music in Thirteenth-Century France,
Geoffrey Cumberledge and Oxford University pp. 6–27.
Press, 1954), and Hans Tischler, ed., The Parisian 26 The clausula is found in I-Fl Plut. 29.1, fol.
Two-Part Organa: Complete Comparative 158r and edited in Rebecca A. Baltzer, ed., Les
Edition, 2 vols. (New York: Pendragon, 1988). clausules à deux voix du manuscrit de Florence,
21 There is an important variant in the two Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Pluteus 29.1,
cursus of the tenor here: the pitch is g at 32 but a fascicule V, Le Magnus liber organi de
at 47, and the manuscript is clear in both cases. Notre-Dame de Paris 5 (Monaco: Éditions de
However, the plainsong preserves an a (the l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1995), p. 82. The motet is in I-Fl
second of the two choices) which could point to Plut. 29.1, fols. 411r–411v, and edited in Hans
an error in pitch in I-Fl Plut. 29.1 at 32. Tischler, ed., The Earliest Motets (to circa 1270):
22 Although the discussion of copula in A Complete Comparative Edition, 3 vols. (New
theoretical sources is extensive – and hotly Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982)
debated – its identification in sources such as vol. II, p. 490. There is a single exception to the
I-Fl Plut. 29.1 or D-W 628 and 1099 is much less exact congruity of the two tenors: at 33–5 the
clear. See Fritz Reckow, Die Copula: Über einige notation of the clausula tenor has a descending
Zusammenhänge zwischen Setzweise, conjunctura (three lozenges, indicated in the
Formbildung, Rhythmus und Vortragstil in der example by a broken slur) whereas the motet
Mehrstimmigkeit von Notre-Dame, has a straightforward ligature.
Abhandlungen der Geistes- und 27 For a fuller account of Immolata paschali
Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse der Akademie victima / Latus, and of a large number of
der Wissenschaften und der Literatur 13 analogous motet–clausula pairs, see Norman E.
(Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1972), pp. 609–70; Jeremy Smith, The Earliest Motets: Music and Words’,
Yudkin, ‘The Copula according to Johannes de Journal of the Royal Musical Association 114
Garlandia’, Musica disciplina 34 (1980), pp. (1989), pp. 141–63, especially 160–3.
67–84; and his ‘The Anonymous of St 28 See Rebecca A. Baltzer, ‘Aspects of Trope in
Emmeram and Anonymous IV on the Copula’, the Earliest Motets for the Assumption of the
Musical Quarterly 70 (1984), pp. 1–22. Virgin’, in Peter M. Lefferts, and Brian Seirup,
23 With nearly 100 organa some of which are eds., Festschrift for Ernest Sanders (New York:
in three sources, the permutations of clausulae Trustees of Columbia University, 1991),
become truly staggering. This aspect of the pp. 7–42.
repertory is controlled in Friedrich Ludwig, 29 In this context, the list of functions for the
Repertorium organorum recentioris et motetorum motets in I-Fl Plut 29.1 in Ricci, Codice Pluteo
vetustissimi stili, 2 vols (1/1 – Halle: Verlag von 29.1, is valuable.
30 Anderson, ‘Notre Dame Bilingual Motets: A 42 The range of functions of the refrain within
Study in the History of Music, c.1215–1245’, the motet is outlined in Everist, French Motets in
Miscellanea musicologica 3 (1968), pp. 50–144. the Thirteenth Century, pp. 54–66.
31 Ludwig’s Repertorium not only explains how 43 See the listing and discussion in Thomas
organa and clausulae interrelate, but also links Walker, ‘Sui Tenor Francesi nei motetti del
the motet repertory into the same “200” ’, Schede medievali: rassegna dell’ officina di
bibliographical tool. That part of his work that studi medievali 3 (1982), pp. 309–36.
deals with the motets was updated in Friedrich 44 Everist, ‘Motets, French Tenors and the
Gennrich, Bibliographie der ältesten Polyphonic Chanson ca. 1300’, Journal of
französischen und lateinischen Motetten, Summa Musicology 24 (2007), pp. 365–406.
Musicae Medii Aevi 2 (Darmstadt: author, 45 F-MOf H.196, fols. 273r–275r; I-Tr vari 42,
1957). fols. 14r–15v; edited in Tischler, Montpellier
32 D-W 1099, fol. 181v–182r. Codex, vol. III, pp. 65–7.
33 F-Pn fr. 12615, fols. 186r–186v; F-Pn fr. 844, 46 The innovations found in ‘Aucun ont trouvé
p. 200. chant par usage’ were attributed to Petrus de
34 D-W 1099, fols. 198v–199v; F-Pn n.a.f. Cruce in the thirteenth century. A full list of
13521, pp. 738–9; F-MOf H.196, fols. 126v–127r. these works, together with the evidence for his
35 D-BAs Lit. 115, fol. 55r. authorship, is in Emest H. Sanders and Peter M.
36 Gordon Anderson, ‘Notre Dame Latin Lefferts, ‘Petrus de Cruce’, Grove Music Online,
Double Motets ca.1215–1250’, Musica disciplina www.oxfordmusiconline.com.
25 (1971), pp. 35–92. 47 Albert Seay, trans., Johannes de Grocheo:
37 The standard bibliography for the texts of Concerning Music (De musica), Colorado
refrains is Nico H. J. van den Boogaard, College Music Press Translations 1 (Colorado
Rondeaux et refrains du xiie siècle au début Springs: Colorado College Music Press,
du xive: collationnement, introduction, et 1967–74), p. 26.
notes, Bibliothèque française et romane, D:3 48 Christopher Page, The Owl and the
(Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1969). For the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in
music, see Anne Ibos-Augé, ‘La fonction France 1100–1300 (London: Dent, 1989),
des insertions lyriques dans des oeuvres pp. 144–54.
narratives et didactiques aux xiiième 49 See, among others, Jeremy Yudkin, ‘The
et xivème siècles’, 4 vols. (PhD diss., Université Rhythm of Organum Purum’, Journal of
Michel de Montaigne-Bordeaux III, Musicology 2 (1983), pp. 355–76.
2000). 50 For the conductus around 1300 see Mark
38 The motet ‘Amis, vostre demoree / Pro Everist, ‘Reception and Recomposition in the
patribus is unique in F-MOf H.196, fol. 249r and Polyphonic Conductus cum cauda: The Metz
edited in Hans Tischler, ed., The Montpellier Fragment’, Journal of the Royal Musical
Codex, 4 vols. [vol. IV ed. and trans. Susan Association 125 (2000), pp. 135–63 and the
Stakel and Joel C. Relihan], Recent Researches in sources cited there. The key sources for the
the Music of the Middle Ages and Early recasting of organum are the first fascicle of
Renaissance 2–8 (Madison, WI: A. R. Editions, F-MOf H.196, D-B Lat. 4◦ 523; and DK-Kk 1810
1978–85), vol. III, p. 28. 4◦ . For the former, see Kurt von Fischer, ‘Neue
39 The Quinque incitamenta are edited in Quellen zur Musik des 13., 14., und 15.
André Wilmart, ‘Gérard de Liège: Quinque Jahrhunderts’, Acta Musicologica 36 (1964),
incitamenta ad Deum amandum ardenter’, pp. 80–3, and for the latter John Bergsagel, ‘The
Analecta reginensia, Studi e testi 59 (Vatican Transmission of Notre-Dame Organa in Some
City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1933), Newly-Discovered “Magnus liber organi”
pp. 205–47; see also Nico van den Boogaard, Fragments in Copenhagen’, in Angelo Pompilio,
‘Les insertions en français dans un traité de ed., Atti del XIV Congresso della Società
Gérard de Liège’, in Rita Lejeune, ed., Marche Internazionale di Musicologia: Trasmissione
romane: mélanges de philolologie et de littératures e recezione delle forme di cultura musicale,
romanes offerts à Jeanne Wathelet-Willem (Liège: 3 vols. (Turin: EDT, 1990), vol. III, pp. 629–
Cahiers de l’A. R. U. Lg., 1978), pp. 679–97. 36.
40 The song is found in F-Pn fr. 844, fol.118v;
F-Pn fr. 12615, fol. 118r; I-Rvat Reg. Lat. 1490,
fol. 44r. 5 The fourteenth century
41 See the editions of the refrain in Ibos-Augé, 1 Barbara Wertheim Tuchman, A Distant
‘La fonction des insertions lyriques’, vol. II, Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
pp. 145–6. (New York: Knopf, 1978).
2 See Andrew Tomasello, Music and Ritual at Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge University
Papal Avignon 1309–1403, Studies in Press, 1988).
Musicology 75, ed. George J. Buelow (Ann 12 See Frank Hentschel, Sinnlichkeit und
Arbor and Epping: Bowker Publishing, 1983); Vernunft in der mittelalterlichen Musiktheorie:
Yolanda Plumley, ‘An “Episode in the South”? Strategien der Konsonanzwertung und der
Ars Subtilior and the Patronage of French Gegenstand der ‘musica sonora’ um 1300
Princes’, Early Music History 22 (2003), pp. (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2000); Nan Cooke Carpenter,
103–68; Margaret Bent, ‘Early Papal Motets’, in Music in the Medieval and Renaissance
Richard Sherr, ed., Papal Music and Musicians in Universities (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Late Medieval and Renaissance Rome (Oxford: Press, 1958).
Clarendon Press, 1998). 13 While this might seem rather abstract it has
3 See Lawrence Earp, ‘Lyrics for Reading and been argued that this ‘mania for measurement’
Lyrics for Singing in Late Medieval France: The (sometimes the rather intangible quantification
Development of the Dance Lyric from Adam de of qualities such as God’s mercy) was a direct
la Halle to Guillaume de Machaut’, in Rebecca result of the engagement by academics in the
A. Baltzer, Thomas Cable and James I. Wimsatt, busy monetarized marketplaces of Oxford, Paris
eds., The Union of Words and Music in and other university towns, their management
Medieval Poetry, (Austin: University of Texas of college accounts, and their practical
Press, 1991). Philippe de Vitry was later elected understanding of the functioning of money in
Bishop of Meaux; see ‘Vitry, Philippe de’, New the newly monetarized economy. See Joel Kaye,
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century:
edn. Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of
4 Andrew Wathey, ‘The Motets of Philippe de Scientific Thought (Cambridge University Press,
Vitry and the Fourteenth-Century Renaissance’, 1998). Artistic creation (especially poetry – an
Early Music History 12 (1993), pp. 133–5. On oral performance art in this period) was often
Clement VI in general see Diana Wood, Clement compared metaphorically to coin. This period
VI: The Pontificate and Ideas of an Avignon Pope sees it, like coin, being commoditized within the
(Cambridge University Press, 1989). emerging market economy.
5 It should be noted that Clement VII was also 14 See the arguments in Dorit Esther Tanay,
the name used by Ippolito Aldobrandini, elected Noting Music, Marking Culture (Holzerlingen:
Pope in 1592. Hänssler, 1999). See also ‘Muris, Johannes de’,
6 See Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years New Grove.
War: England and France at War (Cambridge 15 Albert Douglas Menut, Maistre Nicole
University Press, rev. edn 2001). Oresme: Le livre de politiques d’Aristote
7 Andrew Wathey, ‘The Peace of 1360–1369 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society,
and Anglo-French Musical Relations’, Early 1970).
Music History 9 (1989). 16 See ‘Versified Office’, New Grove.
8 See William Chester Jordan, The Great 17 See the comments in Anna Maria Busse
Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory
Century (Princeton University Press, 1996); (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005),
Gregory Clark, ‘The Economics of Exhaustion, Chapter 1.
the Postan Thesis, and the Agricultural 18 A summary of, and bibliography for, these
Revolution’, Journal of Economic History 52 developments can be found in ‘Motet’, New
(1992). Grove.
9 The Black Death has been believed by many 19 The terms color and talea are used here as
to have been the bubonic plague (yersinia pestis) commonly applied in modern scholarship; their
spread by fleas from infected rodents; modern medieval use was less clearly distinct.
epidemiologists dispute both the Overlapping taleae are more common in the
microbiological agent and the means of later motets of Vitry and widely used by
transmission. See Ole Benedictow, The Black Machaut.
Death 1346–1353: The Complete History 20 On the meaning provided by number in
(Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004). specific examples of fourteenth-century motets
10 Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval see Margaret Bent, ‘Deception, Exegesis and
Courts and Culture in North-West Europe Sounding Number in Machaut’s Motet 15’, Early
1270–1380 (Oxford University Press, 2001). Music History 10 (1991); David Howlett,
11 M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written ‘Apollinis eclipsatur: Foundation of the
Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn, (Oxford: “Collegium musicorum”’, in Suzannah Clark
Blackwell, 1993); Peter Spufford, Money and Its and Elizabeth Eva Leach, eds., Auctoritas in
Medieval and Renaissance Musical Culture: and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca:
Learning from the Learned (Woodbridge: Cornell University Press, 2007).
Boydell Press, 2005). 31 See ‘Lai’, New Grove.
21 See ‘Motet’, New Grove. 32 Ibid.
22 For this point and for reasons behind his 33 Gilbert Reaney, ‘Concerning the Origin
choice, see the analysis in Anne Walters of the Medieval Lai’, Music and Letters 39
Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: (1958).
Context and Meaning in His Musical Works 34 ‘Lai’, New Grove.
(Cambridge University Press, 2002). 35 The poet Eustache Deschamps reports of the
23 See Jacques Boogaart, ‘“O Series Summe lai ‘c’est une chose longue et malaisiee a faire et
Rata.” De Motetten van Guillaume de Machaut. trouver’ (‘it is long and difficult to do and to
De Ordening van het Corpus en de Samenhang invent’). Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, ed.,
van Tekst en Muziek’, PhD diss., Utrecht, 2001; Eustache Deschamps L’Art de dictier (East
Thomas Brown, ‘Another Mirror of Lovers? Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1994), p. 94.
Order, Structure and Allusion in Machaut’s 36 ‘Madrigal’, New Grove.
Motets’, Plainsong and Medieval Music 10 37 ‘Mass’, section II, 3–4, New Grove.
(2001); Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut and 38 The Ivrea and Tremoı̈lle manuscripts; see
Reims. ibid.
24 See Peter M. Lefferts, The Motet in England 39 Janet Knapp, ‘Polyphony at Notre Dame of
in the Fourteenth Century (Ann Arbor: UMI, Paris’, in Richard Crocker and David Hiley, eds.,
1986). However, pieces from the international The New Oxford History of Music, vol. II, The
repertory of French motets circulated in Early Middle Ages to 1300, (Oxford University
francophone England as well as elsewhere in Press, 1990); Mark Everist, French Motets in the
Europe. Thirteenth Century: Music, Poetry and Genre
25 See Earp, ‘Lyrics for Reading and Lyrics for (Cambridge University Press, 1994); Rebecca A.
Singing’. Baltzer, ‘Aspects of Trope in the Earliest Motets
26 One balade by Vitry survives, without for the Assumption of the Virgin’, Current
music, in F-Pn lat. 3343. James I. Wimsatt, Musicology 45–7 (1990) (Festschrift for Ernest
Chaucer and the Poems of ‘Ch’ in University of Sanders, ed. Peter M. Lefferts and Brian Seirup);
Pennsylvania MS French 15 (Cambridge: Brewer, Gerald R. Hoekstra, ‘The French Motet as
1982), pp. 56–7 dates this between 1340 and Trope: Multiple Levels of Meaning in Quant
1361, most likely after 1346. F. N. M. Diekstra, florist la violete / El mois de mai / Et Gaudebit’,
‘The Poetic Exchange between Philippe de Vitry Speculum 73 (1998).
and Jean de le Mote’, Neophilologus 70 (1986) 40 ‘Mass’, section II, 4, ‘Toulouse Mass’, and
suggests it could be earlier. ‘Barcelona Mass’, New Grove.
27 Christopher Page, ‘Tradition and Innovation 41 Andrew Kirkman, ‘The Invention of the
in BN fr. 146: The Background to the Ballades’, Cyclic Mass’, Journal of the American
in Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey, eds., Musicological Society 54 (2001).
Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and 42 Roger Bowers, ‘Guillaume de Machaut and
Image in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, His Canonry of Reims, 1338–1377’, Early Music
MS français 146 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, History 23 (2004); Robertson, Guillaume de
1998). Machaut and Reims, Chapter 9.
28 Texts edited in Georg Steffens, ‘Die 43 Margaret Bent, ‘Fauvel and Marigny: Which
altfranzösische Liederhandschrift der Bodleiana Came First?’ in Bent and Wathey, eds., Fauvel
in Oxford, Douce 308’, Archiv für das Studium Studies, p. 52.
der neueren Sprachen und Litteraturen 99 (1897). 44 Passerose and Roses et lis, both in the
29 The picture is on fol. 51r of F-Pn fr. 1586 Chantilly Codex; see Gilbert Reaney, ‘The
and is reproduced in colour as plate 24 in Manuscript Chantilly, Musée Condé 1047’,
François Avril, Manuscript Painting at the Court Musica Disciplina 8 (1954), pp. 76–7.
of France: The Fourteenth Century (1320–1380) 45 Robertson argues that M18 was adapted for
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1978), p. 87. later reuse; Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut
Low-definition copies can be viewed online by and Reims, Chapter 2, especially p. 60. However,
entering ‘Machaut’ as a search term into an given that its use as the initial triplum rhyme
image search engine and following the links. (Guillerme / inerme) locks the name of this
30 See Virginia Newes, ‘Chace, Caccia, Fuga: specific archbishop tightly into the work, it
The Convergence of French and Italian might be better to view it as serving an ongoing
Traditions’, Musica Disciplina 41 (1987); warning to later incumbents rather than as
Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, something that could be substituted.
46 See Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut and 55 See the arguments in Margaret Bent, ‘The
Reims. Grammar of Early Music: Preconditions for
47 Kevin Brownlee, ‘Machaut’s Motet 15 and Analysis’, in Cristle Collins Judd, ed., Tonal
the Roman de la Rose: The Literary Context of Structures in Early Music (New York: Garland,
Amours qui a le pouoir / Faus samblant m’a deceü 1998).
/ Vidi Dominum’, Early Music History 10 56 See the bibliography supporting ‘Notation’,
(1991). section III, 3, New Grove.
48 See Sylvia Huot, ‘Guillaume de Machaut and 57 See, for example, the essays in Margaret
the Consolation of Poetry’, Modern Philology Bent, Counterpoint, Composition, and Musica
100 (2002). Ficta (London and New York: Routledge, 2002)
49 See Christopher Page, The Owl and the compared with the differing views in Karol
Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France Berger, Musica Ficta: Theories of Accidental
1100–1300 (London: Dent, 1989), pp. 33–40. Inflections in Vocal Polyphony from Marchetto da
50 Saint Augustine, ‘On Music’, in Writings of Padova to Gioseffo Zarlino (Cambridge
Saint Augustine, vol. II, trans. and ed. Robert University Press, 1987) and Thomas Brothers,
Catesby Taliaferro (Washington, DC: Catholic Chromatic Beauty in the Late Medieval
University of America, 1977), p. 171, explains Chanson: An Interpretation of Manuscript
that noblemen properly use music to relax from Accidentals (Cambridge University Press,
their labours. Isidore, Etymologies III: 17 1997).
mentions that ‘music soothes the mind so that it 58 Sarah Fuller, ‘Tendencies and Resolutions:
can endure toil, and song assuages the weariness The Directed Progression in Ars Nova Music’,
encountered in any task’ (trans. in James Journal of Music Theory 36 (1992).
McKinnon, ed., The Early Christian Period and 59 See entries for ‘Ars Antiqua’, ‘Ars Nova’, and
the Latin Middle Ages, vol. II [New York: W. W. ‘Ars Subtilior’, New Grove.
Norton, 1998], p. 40). Later, Peter the Chanter 60 US-BEm 744, p. 62. See Richard Crocker, ‘A
admits the morality of paying for music so long New Source for Medieval Music Theory’, Acta
as it is designed either to relieve sadness and Musicologica 39 (1967), and Figure 5.1 on
tedium (‘tristia et taedium amoveantur’), or to p. 101 below.
excite devotion (the latter also an Augustinian 61 See, for example, the arguments made in
rationale mentioned in the Confessions). Peter’s James Webster, ‘The Concept of Beethoven’s
views were developed throughout the thirteenth “Early” Period in the Context of Periodizations
century by Thomas Chobham (Penetential, in General’, Beethoven Forum 3 (1994).
1216), Robert Courson (Summa, 62 Sarah Fuller, ‘A Phantom Treatise of the
1208–1212/13), and the Franciscan Thomas Fourteenth Century? The Ars Nova’, Journal of
Docking (Commentary on Galatians, 1265). In Musicology 30 (1985–6).
general, thirteenth-century preachers 63 Elizabeth Randell Upton, ‘The Chantilly
recognized a division between entertainers who Codex (F-CH 564): The Manuscript, Its Music,
were primarily acrobats, actors etc. and those Its Scholarly Reception’, PhD diss., University of
professionals who sang with instrumental North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001.
accompaniment of exploits to give relaxation 64 M. T. Clanchy, ‘Moderni in Education and
(recreationem) or instruction (informationem). Government in England’, Speculum 50 (1975).
See Page, The Owl and the Nightingale, pp. 20–2, 65 MS 0744, fol. 31v, Jean Gray Hargrove Music
citing J. Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter 66 Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior:
and His Circle (Princeton University Press, Symbols in Architecture, Theology, and Music
1970). (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
51 See Mary B. Schoen-Nazzaro, ‘Plato and 2001), pp. 239–42.
Aristotle on the Ends of Music’, Laval 67 Anne Stone, ‘Self-Reflexive Songs and their
Théologique et Philosophique 34 (1978). Readers in the Late 14th Century’, Early Music
52 Full exposition in Leach, Sung Birds, 31/2 (2003); Stone, ‘The Composer’s Voice in
Chapter 4. the Late-Medieval Song: Four Case Studies’, in
53 See ‘Performing Practice’, section I, 2–3, Philippe Vendrix, ed., Johannes Ciconia:
New Grove. musicien de la transition (Turnhout: Brepols,
54 See the summary in Daniel 2003); and Stone, ‘Music Writing and Poetic
Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Voice in Machaut: Some Remarks on B12 and
Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, B14’, in Elizabeth Eva Leach, ed., Machaut’s
Performance (Cambridge University Press, Music: New Interpretations (Woodbridge:
2002). Boydell and Brewer, 2003).
68 See Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘Death of a Lover (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1974); for
and the Birth of the Polyphonic Balade: vernacular motet tenors, see Peter M. Lefferts,
Machaut’s Notated Balades 1–5’, Journal of The Motet in England in the Fourteenth Century
Musicology 19 (2002); Robertson, Guillaume de (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1986).
Machaut and Reims. 4 For the polyphonic songs, see Ernest H.
69 Reinhard Strohm, The Rise of European Sanders, ed., English Music of the Thirteenth and
Music 1380–1500 (Cambridge University Press, Early Fourteenth Centuries, Polyphonic Music of
1993). the Fourteenth Century 14 (Paris and Monaco:
70 Daniel Poirion, Le poète et le prince: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1979). For the dances,
l’évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de see Timothy J. McGee, ed., Medieval Instumental
Machaut à Charles d’Orléans (Grenoble: Allier, Dances (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1965). 1989).
71 See the arguments about Soiez liez in Earp, 5 See Peter M. Lefferts and David Fallows,
‘Lyrics for Reading and Lyrics for Singing’, pp. ‘Songs’, in Medieval England: An Encyclopedia,
106–9. and David Fallows, A Catalogue of Polyphonic
72 Wathey, ‘The Motets of Philippe de Vitry Songs, 1415–1480 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
and the Fourteenth-Century Renaissance’. 1999).
73 See Lawrence Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: 6 For more on narrative melodies, see John
A Guide to Research (New York and London: Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages:
Garland, 1995), Chapter 2. Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, 1050–1350
74 Christopher Page, Discarding Images: (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval 7 See Peter M. Lefferts and Richard Rastall,
France (Oxford University Press, 1993), 200. ‘Minstrels and Minstrelsy’, in Medieval England:
75 Jessie Ann Owens, ‘Music Historiography An Encyclopedia, and John Southworth, The
and the Definition of “Renaissance”’, Notes 47 English Medieval Minstrel (Woodbridge:
(1990). Boydell, 1989).
8 The extant later medieval English-language
6 England songs have been edited by Eric J. Dobson and
1 Recommended surveys and general resources Frank Ll. Harrison in Medieval English Songs
include John Caldwell, The Oxford History of (London: Faber, 1979). The Anglo-Norman
English Music, vol. I, From the Beginnings to songs are anticipated in a forthcoming edition
c.1715 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Frank from the estate of the late John Stevens; for now,
Ll. Harrison, Music in Medieval Britain see John Stevens, ‘Alphabetical Check-list of
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958; 2nd Anglo-Norman Songs’, Plainsong and Medieval
edn 1963, repr. Buren: Fritz Knuf, 1980); Peter Music 3 (1994), pp. 1–22.
M. Lefferts, ‘Medieval England, 950–1450’, in 9 For an overview of these later songs, see
James McKinnon, ed., Antiquity and the Middle Fallows, Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs. On the
Ages: From Ancient Greece to the Fifteenth carols see Richard L. Greene, The Early English
Century, Music and Society 1 (London: Carols, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
Macmillan, 1990), pp. 170–96; Christopher 1977), John Stevens, ed., Mediaeval Carols,
Page, ‘Music’, in Boris Ford, ed., The Cambridge Musica Britannica 4 (London: Stainer & Bell,
Guide to the Arts in Britain, vol. I, Prehistoric, 1958) and Stevens, ed., Early Tudor Songs and
Roman, and Early Medieval (Cambridge Carols, Musica Britannica 36 (London: Stainer
University Press, 1988), pp. 247–53; Nick & Bell, 1952; 2nd rev. edn, 1975).
Sandon and Christopher Page, ‘Music’, in Boris 10 The best short survey of the medieval
Ford, ed., The Cambridge Guide to the Arts in church and its music in England is Nick Sandon,
Britain, vol. II, The Middle Ages (Cambridge ‘Liturgy and Church Music, History of ’, in
University Press, 1988), pp. 214–50; and Paul Medieval England: An Encyclopedia.
Szarmach, M. Teresa Tavormina and Joel T. 11 Alejandro E. Planchart, The Repertory of
Rosenthal, eds., Medieval England: An Tropes at Winchester, 2 vols. (Princeton
Encyclopedia (London: Garland, 1998). University Press, 1977).
2 The album An English Ladymass (Harmonia 12 See Richard W. Pfaff, New Liturgical
Mundi France HMU 907080), recorded by the Feasts in Later Medieval England (Oxford:
singing ensemble Anonymous 4, was at or near Clarendon Press, 1970), and Andrew Hughes,
the top of the classical music charts for the ‘British Rhymed Offices: A Catalogue and
better part of two years in 1993–4. Commentary’, in Susan Rankin and David Hiley,
3 On Ledrede’s lyrics, see Edmund Colledge, eds., Music in the Medieval English Liturgy;
The Latin Poems of Richard Ledrede, OFM Plainsong and Medieval Music Centennial
Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 3 Cattin, ‘“Secundare” e “succinere”’, p. 119.
239–84. 4 The two important sources are quoted in B.
13 See Susan Rankin, ‘Winchester Polyphony: Baroffio and C. Antonelli, ‘La passione nella
The Early Theory and Practice of Organum’, in liturgia della Chiesa cattolica fino all’epoca di
Rankin and Hiley, eds., Music in the Medieval Johann Sebastian Bach’, in E. Povellato, ed.,
English Liturgy, pp. 59–99, and Susan Rankin, Ritorno a Bach. Dramma e ritualità delle passioni
ed., The Winchester Troper: Facsimile Edition, (Venice: Marsilio, 1986), p. 16, and in Giacomo
Early English Church Music 50 (London: Baroffio, ‘Le polifonie primitive nella tradizione
Stainer & Bell, 2007). manoscritta italiana. Appunti di ricerca’, in
14 See Nick Sandon, ‘Salisbury (Sarum), Use Giulio Cattin and F. Alberto Gallo, eds., Un
of ’, in Medieval England: An Encyclopedia. millennio di polifonia liturgica tra oralità e
15 See Terence Bailey, The Processions of Sarum scrittura (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), pp. 201–5:
and the Western Church (Toronto: Pontifical 201.
Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1971), and Peter 5 See Guido Milanese, Paraphonia-
M. Lefferts, ‘Holy Week and Easter, Music for’, paraphonista dalla lessicografia greca alla tarda
in Medieval England: An Encyclopedia. antichità romana, in Enrico Menesto, Antonio
16 See Peter M. Lefferts, ‘Cantilena and Island, Alessandra Di Pilla and Ubaldo Pizzani
Antiphon: Music for Marian Services in Late Curiositas. Studi di cultura classica e medievale in
Medieval England’, in Studies in Medieval Music: onore di Ubaldo Pizzani (Naples: ESI, 2002), pp.
Festschrift for Ernest H. Sanders, ed. Peter M. 407–21.
Lefferts and Brian Seirup as Current Musicology 6 A first list of Italian sources of sacred
45–7 (1990), pp. 247–82, and Sally E. Roper, polyphony up to ca1300 is in Susan Rankin,
Medieval English Benedictine Liturgy: Studies in ‘Between Oral and Written: Thirteenth-Century
the Formation, Structure, and Content of the Italian Sources of Polyphony’, in G. Cattin and F.
Monastic Votive Office, c. 950–1540 (New York: A. Gallo, eds., Un millennio di polifonia liturgica
Garland, 1993). tra oralità e scrittura (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002),
17 See Roger D. Bowers, ‘Choirs, Choral pp. 75–98: 93–5.
Establishments’, in Medieval England: An 7 Adam de Salimbene, Cronica, ed. Giuseppe
Encyclopedia, and Andrew Wathey, Music in the Scalia, 2 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1966), vol. I, pp.
Royal and Noble Households in Late Medieval 264–5.
England: Studies of Sources and Patronage (New 8 F. Alberto Gallo, ‘The Practice of “Cantus
York: Garland, 1989). planus binatim” in Italy from the Beginning of
18 For all these repertories, see Sanders, ed., the Fourteenth to the Beginning of the Sixteenth
English Music of the Thirteenth and Early Century’, in C. Corsi and P. Petrobelli, eds., Le
Fourteenth Centuries. polifonie primitive in Friuli e in Europa (Rome:
19 For English notations of the thirteenth Torre d’Orfeo, 1989), pp. 13–30.
century, see Lefferts, The Motet in England, pp. 9 Tadeusz Miazga, Die Melodien des
104–24, and for the next century see also Peter einstimmigen Credo der römisch-katholischen
M. Lefferts, ‘Some Aspects of Musical Notation lateinischen Kirche: Eine Untersuchung der
in Fourteenth-Century England’, in Maria Melodien im den handschriftlichen
Caraci Vela, Daniele Sabaino and Stefano Aresi, Überlieferungen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung
eds., Le notazioni della polifonia vocale dei secoli der polnischen Handschriften (Graz:
ix–xvii, Antologia parte prima secoli ix–xiv (Pisa: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1976),
Edizioni ETS, 2007), pp. 263–75. p. 81, no. 319.
20 For the style, context, and influence of 10 Photographed by Romina Sani Brenelli for
English sacred music of the later fourteenth and the project Raphael.
fifteenth centuries, see Reinhard Strohm, The 11 Carla Vivarelli, ‘“Di una pretesa scuola
Rise of European Music 1380–1500 (Cambridge napoletana”: Sowing the Seeds of the Ars Nova
University Press, 1993). at the Court of Robert of Anjou’, Journal of
Musicology 24/2 (2007), pp. 272–96.
7 Italy to 1300 12 Arezzo, Museo Diocesano, s.n., C.216;
1 On this topic see the enlightening pages Cividale del Friuli, Museo Archeologico
of Varvaro: Alberto Varvaro, Letterature Nazionale, Biblioteca 35, fol. 202; Cividale del
romanze del medioevo (Bologna: Il Mulino, Fruili, Museo Archeologico Nazionale,
1985), pp. 9–82. Biblioteca 58, fol. 344r; Gorizia, Biblioteca
2 Giulio Cattin, ‘“Secundare” e “succinere”. Seminario Teologico Centrale H, c. 274; Gubbio,
Polifonia a Padova e Pistoia nel Duecento’, Archivio di Stato, Fondo S. Domenico, Corale
Musica e storia 3 (1995), pp. 41–120. O, fols. 109v–112r; Lucca, Biblioteca Statale
1061, fol. 19; Modena, Biblioteca Estense, Agostino Ziino in occasione del suo 65◦
α.R.I.6, fols. 193v–194v; Monza, Basilica di S. compleanno (Lucca: LIM, 2004), pp. 207–61:
Giovanni Battista, Biblioteca Capitolare e Tesoro 253.
L 12, fol. 3v; Monza, Basilica di S. Giovanni
Battista, Biblioteca Capitolare e Tesoro L 13, fol. 8 The trecento
141; Padua, Duomo, Biblioteca Capitolare E 46, 1 On fourteenth-century Italian motets, see
fols. 249v–253r; Padua, Biblioteca Capitolare, Margaret Bent, ‘The Fourteenth-Century Italian
Curia Vescovile A.20, fol. 83v; Parma, Duomo Motet’, in Giulio Cattin and Patrizia Dalla
Archivio Capitolare con Archivio della Vecchia, eds., L’ars nova italiana del Trecento VI:
Fabbriceria F-09, fols. 136v–140r; Piacenza, Atti del congresso internazionale ‘L’Europa e la
Biblioteca e Archivio Capitolare 65, fol. 449; musica del Trecento’, Certaldo, 19–21 luglio 1984
Piacenza, Biblioteca e Archivio Capitolare, D, (Certaldo: Polis, 1992), pp. 85–125. For
fol. 285; Piacenza, Biblioteca e Archivio liturgical music see Marco Gozzi, ‘Liturgia e
Capitolare, D, fol. 302; Rome, Bibl. Ap. musica mensurale nel Trecento italiano: i canti
Vaticana, Barb. lat. 657, fol. 419v; Rome, Bibl. dell’Ordinarium’, in Oliver Huck, ed.,
Ap. Vaticana, Vat. lat. 10654, fol. 29; Todi, Kontinuität und Transformation der italienischen
Biblioteca Comunale Lorenzo Leonj 73, fols. Vokalmusik zwischen Due- und Quattrocento
6v–8r; Trento, Biblioteca S. Bernardino 310, fol. (Hildesheim: Olms, 2006), pp. 53–98.
48r; Udine, Duomo, Archivio Capitolare 10, fol. 2 About the five pieces see Oliver Huck, Die
398; Udine, Duomo, Archivio Capitolare 27, fol. Musik des frühen Trecento (Hildesheim: Olms,
83. 2005), pp. 262–4; Billy Jim Layton, ‘Italian
13 For transcriptions of first and last of these Music for the Ordinary of the Mass 1300–1450’
see Kurt von Fischer and F. Alberto Gallo, (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1960), pp.
Italian Sacred Music, Polyphonic Music of the 77–115, and Kurt von Fischer, ‘Il ciclo
Fourteenth Century 12 (Monaco: Éditions de dell’Ordinarium missae del ms F-Pn568 (Pit)’,
l’Oiseau-Lyre 1976), nos. 11a and 11b. in Agostino Ziino, ed., L’ars nova italiana del
14 On the adaptation of books of chant to the Trecento V (Palermo: Enchiridion, 1985), pp.
official editions of the Breviary and of the 123–37.
Missal, see Marco Gozzi, ‘Le edizioni 3 Kurt von Fischer, ‘Musica e società nel
liturgico-musicali dopo il Concilio’, in Danilo Trecento Italiano’, in F. Alberto Gallo, ed., L’Ars
Curti and Marco Gozzi, eds., Musica e liturgia nova italiana del Trecento III (Certaldo: Centro
nella riforma tridentina (Trento: Provincia di Studi sull’Ars Nova Italiana del Trecento,
autonoma di Trento – Servizio Beni Librari e 1970), pp. 11–28 at 21–2.
Archivistici, 1995), pp. 39–55. 4 About the phenomenon of the composition
15 Giacomo Baroffio, ‘I libri con musica sono on cantus prius factus derived from Gregorian
libri di musica?’ in Giulio Cattin, Danilo Curti chant and with equal values, see Marco Gozzi,
and Marco Gozzi, eds., Il canto piano nell’era ‘“Cantus firmus per notulas plani cantus”:
della stampa (Trento: Provincia autonoma di alcune testimonianze quattrocentesche’, in
Trento, 1999), pp. 9–12. Francesco Facchin, ed., Il cantus firmus nella
16 Frank D’Accone, The Civic Muse: Music and polifonia: Atti del convegno internazionale di
Musicians in Siena during the Middle Ages and studi, Arezzo, 27–29 dicembre 2002 (Arezzo:
the Renaissance (Chicago and London: Fondazione Guido d’Arezzo, 2005), pp. 45–88;
University of Chicago Press, 1997). available on line at www.polifonico.
17 Giulio Cattin tackles the problem in his org/edizioni/QUADERNI/Quad 3.htm.
‘Studio sulle melodie cortonesi’, in Giorgio
Varanini, Luigi Banfi and Anna Ceruti Burgio,
eds., Laude cortonesi dal secolo 13◦ al 15◦ 9 The Iberian peninsula
(Florence: Olschki, 1981). 1 See I. Fernández de la Cuesta, Historia de la
18 Timothy McGee, ‘Dança amorosa: A música española, vol. I, Desde los orı́genes hasta el
Newly-Discovered Medieval Dance Pair’, in ‘ars nova’ (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1983), pp.
Brian Gillingham and Paul Merkley, eds., 15–84.
Beyond the Moon: Festschrift Luther Dittmer 2 W. M. Lindsay, ed., Isidori hispalensis episcopi
(Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1990), Etymologiarum sive originum libri xx, 2 vols.
pp. 295–306. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911); a new edition
19 Marco Gozzi, ‘La notazione del codice Add. is in progress (Étymologies, 20 vols., Paris: Les
29987 di Londra’, in Bianca Maria Antolini, Belles Lettres, 1981–).
Teresa M. Gialdroni and Annunziàto Pugliese, 3 C. M. Lawson, ed., Sancti Isidori episcopi
eds., ‘Et facciam dolçi canti’. Studi in onore di hispalensis De ecclesiasticis officiis, Corpus
Christianorum Series Latina 113 (Turnhout: Mittelalter: Überlieferung, Ästhetik,

Brepols, 1989). Ausstrahlung, Monumenta Monodica Medii
4 See L. Brou, ‘Liturgie “mozarabe” ou liturgie Aevi, Subsidia 4 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2004), pp.
“hispanique”?’ Ephemerides liturgicae 63 (1949), 215–43. An edition of this repertory is
pp. 66–70. forthcoming.
5 See S. Corbin, Essai sur la musique religieuse 13 L. Brou, ‘Séquences et tropes dans la liturgie
portugaise au Moyen Âge (1100–1385) (Paris: Les mozarabe’, Hispania sacra 4 (1951), pp. 27–41,
Belles Lettres, 1952), pp. 137–40; M. P. Ferreira, gives examples of tropes and sequences in
Antologia de música em Portugal na Idade Média Visigothic notation, but these were nevertheless
e no Renascimento, 2 vols (Lisbon: CESEM / Arte sung in the context of the Roman rite.
das Musas, 2008), vol. I, pp. 9–22: the two 14 M. S. Gros i Pujol, Els tropers prosers de la
surviving Portuguese fragments of Old Spanish Catedral de Vic: estudi i edició, Biblioteca
chant are reproduced as plates 1–3. litúrgica Catalana 2 (Barcelona: Institut
6 Now Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS 89. d’Estudis Catalans, 1999).
7 The major sources are described by J. M. 15 See E. Castro Caridad, Tropos y troparios
Pinell, ‘Los textos de la antigua liturgia hispánicos (Universidade de Santiago de
hispánica: fuentes para su estudio’, in J. F. Compostela, 1991); G. Iversen, ‘Osanna vox
Rivera, ed., Estudios sobre la liturgia mozárabe laudabilia: Vocabulary and Compositional
(Toledo: Diputación Provincial, 1965), pp. Forms in Sanctus Tropes in Iberian Liturgical
165–87. A list of all known chants is provided in Manuscripts’, in Zapke, Hispania Vetus, pp.
D. M. Randel, An Index to the Chant of the 141–57; A. Tello Ruiz-Pérez, ‘Transferencias del
Mozarabic Rite (Princeton University Press, canto medieval: los tropos del ordinarium
1973). All sources with musical notation are missae en los manuscritos españoles’, PhD diss.,
illustrated in colour and described in S. Zapke, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2006, 2
ed., Hispania Vetus: Musical-Liturgical vols. P. Peláez Bilbao is currently undertaking a
Manuscripts from Visigothic Origins to the complementary study of Iberian sequence
Franco-Roman Transition (9th–12th Centuries) repertories.
(Bilbao: Fundación BBVA, 2007). 16 R. B. Donovan, The Liturgical Drama in
8 L. Brou, ‘Notes de paléographie musicale Medieval Spain (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
mozarabe’, Anuario musical 7 (1952), pp. 51–77 Mediaeval Studies, 1958); see also H. Anglès, La
and 10 (1955), pp. 23–44; S. Zapke, música a Catalunya fins al segle XIII (Barcelona:
‘Notation Systems in the Iberian Peninsula: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1935), pp. 267–311,
From Spanish Notations to Aquitanian and M.-C. Gómez, ‘El drama litúrgico’, in
Notation (9th–12th Centuries)’, in Zapke, Gómez, ed., Historia de la música en España e
Hispania Vetus, pp. 189–243. Hispanoamérica, vol. I, De los orı́genes hasta c.
9 This Liber ordinum is preserved as Madrid, 1470 (Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica,
Real Academia de la Historia, Aemil. 56. 2009), pp. 77–124.
10 The first major study of this repertory 17 See H. Anglès, ‘Epistola farcida del martiri
was C. Rojo and G. Prado, El canto mozárabe de Sant Esteve’, Vida Cristiana 9 (1922), pp.
(Barcelona: Diputación provincial, 1929). A 69–75.
fuller understanding has been enabled by C. W. 18 See Anglès, La música a Catalunya,
Brockett, Antiphons, Responsories, and Other pp. 288–302 and tables 1–3; M.-C. Gómez,
Chants of the Mozarabic Rite (Brooklyn: El canto de la Sibila, 2 vols. (Madrid: Alpuerto,
Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1968) and D. M. 1996–7).
Randel, The Responsorial Psalm Tones for the 19 The manuscript remains in the cathedral
Mozarabic Office (Princeton University Press, archives at Santiago, without pressmark. A
1969). complete colour facsimile has been published:
11 For an example of the former, see S. Zapke, Iacobus: Codex Calixtinus de la Catedral de
Das Antiphonar von Sta. Cruz de la Serós, XII. Jh. Santiago de Compostela (Madrid: Kaydeda,
(Neuried: Ars Una, 1996); for the latter see I. 1993). The two principal studies and editions of
Fernández de la Cuesta, ed., Antiphonale silense: the polyphony are J. López-Calo, La música
British Library Mss. Add. 30.850 (Madrid: medieval en Galicia (La Coruña: Fundación
Sociedad Española de Musicologı́a, 1985). See Pedro Barrié de la Maza, 1982) and T. Karp, The
also Zapke, Hispania Vetus for all other sources Polyphony of Saint Martial and Santiago de
from the time of transition. Compostela, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
12 See C. J. Gutiérrez, ‘The Hymnodic 1992); see also J. Williams and A. Stones, eds.,
Tradition in Spain’, in A. Haug, C. März and L. The Codex Calixtinus and the Shrine of St James
Welker, eds., Der lateinische Hymnus im (Tübingen: Narr, 1992), and J. López-Calo and
C. Villanueva, eds., El Códice Calixtino y la Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad de Segovia,

música de su tiempo (La Coruña: Fundación 1977).
Pedro Barrié de la Maza, 2001). 26 The classic study of this period is R.
20 See M.-C. Gómez, ‘El ars antiqua en Stevenson, Spanish Music in the Age of Columbus
Cataluña’, Revista de musicologı́a 2 (1979), (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960); see also K. Kreitner,
pp. 197–255 and 3 (1980), pp. 279–84, and The Church Music of Fifteenth-Century Spain
K. Nelson, Medieval Liturgical Music of (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004).
Zamora (Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 27 Codex of Azagra, Madrid, Biblioteca
1996). Nacional, MS 10029. The texts are edited by L.
21 See L. Dittmer, ed., Faksimile-Ausgabe der Traube, Poetae Latini aevi Carolini, Monumenta
Handschrift Madrid 20486, Veröffentlichungen Germaniae Historica, Poetae III (Berlin:
mittelalterlicher Musikhandschriften 1 (New Weidmann, 1896), pp. 122–42; for an
York: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1957); the illustration, see M.-C. Gómez, La música
edition made by J. C. Asensio, J. Paz and V. medieval en España (Kassel: Reichenberger,
Puego, El códice de Madrid, Biblioteca nacional, 2001), p. 157.
MSS. 20486, Patrimonio musical español 3 28 On this later period see especially D.
(Madrid: Alpuerto, 1997); and the study of the Fallows, ‘A Glimpse of the Lost Years: Spanish
manuscript by J. Pumpe, Die Motetten der Polyphonic Song, 1450–1470’, in J. Wright and
Madrider Notre-Dame-Handschrift (Tutzing: S. A. Floyd, eds., New Perspectives in Music:
Schneider, 1991). Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern (Warren, MI:
22 MS 9. The principal study of this Harmonie Park Press, 1992), pp. 19–36.
manuscript, including a complete 29 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M979;
black-and-white facsimile and transcription, is the most recent of various editions and
H. Anglès, El còdex musical de Las Huelgas: facsimiles is M. P. Ferreira, O som de Martin
música a veus dels segles XIII–XIV, 3 vols. Codax (Lisbon: Unisys, 1986).
(Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1931). A 30 These are edited by M. P. Ferreira, Cantus
colour facsimile edition has been published coronatus: 7 cantigas d’El-Rei D. Dinis (Kassel:
more recently (Madrid: Testimonio, 1997; Reichenberger, 2005).
companion study by N. Bell, 2003), as well as 31 Facsimile, edition and commentary in H.
two further editions of the music: G. A. Anglès, La música de las cantigas de Santa Marı́a
Anderson, ed., The Las Huelgas Manuscript, 2 del rey Alfonso el Sabio, 3 vols. in 4 (Barcelona:
vols., Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 79 Biblioteca Central, 1943–65). The other
(Neuhausen: American Institute of Musicology, manuscripts are El Escorial, T.j.I (facsimile:
1982) and J. C. Asensio, El códice de las Huelgas, Cantigas de Santa Marı́a: edición facsı́mil del
Patrimonio musical español 8 (Madrid: códice rico T.I.1 de la Biblioteca de San Lorenzo el
Alpuerto, 2001). Real de El Escorial, siglo XIII, 2 vols. [Madrid:
23 A black-and-white facsimile and edition of Edilán, 1979]); Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional,
the musical pages of the Llibre Vermell is given 10069, a manuscript without illustrations from
in M.-C. Gómez, El Llibre Vermell de Montserrat: Toledo (facsimile: Cantigas de Santa Marı́a:
cantos y danzas s. XIV (Sant Cugat del Vallès: edición facsı́mil do códice de Toledo (To),
Los libros de la Frontera, 1990); for a colour Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid (ms. 10.069)
facsimile see F. X. Altés i Aguiló, Llibre Vermell [Santiago de Compostela: Consello da Cultura
de Montserrat: edició facsı́mil parcial del Galega, 2003]); and Florence, Biblioteca
manuscrit núm. 1 de la Biblioteca de l’Abadia de Nazionale Centrale, Banco rari 20, which lacks
Montserrat (Barcelona: Publicacions de l’Abadia musical notation (facsimile: Cantigas de Santa
de Montserrat, 1989). Marı́a: edición facsı́mil del códice B.R.20 de la
24 See M.-C. Gómez, La música en la casa real Biblioteca Nazionale de Florencia, siglo XIII, 2
catalano-aragonesa durante los años 1336–1432 vols. [Madrid: Edilán, 1989]).
(Barcelona: Bosch, 1979); J. Ruiz, La librerı́a de 32 Claims of an Arabic origin were first
canto de organo: creación y pervivencia del outlined by J. Ribera, La música de las cantigas:
repertorio del Renacimiento en la actividad estudio sobre su origen y naturaleza (Madrid:
musical de la catedral de Sevilla (Granada: Junta Tipografı́a de la Revista de Archivos, 1922); see
de Andalucı́a, Consejerı́a de Cultura, 2007), and also two articles by M. P. Ferreira: ‘Andalusian
both authors’ contributions to Gómez, Historia music and the Cantigas de Santa Maria’, in S.
de la música en España. Parkinson, ed., Cobras e son: Papers on the Text,
25 R. Perales de la Cal, ed., Cancionero de la Music and Manuscripts of the ‘Cantigas de Santa
Catedral de Segovia: edición facsimilar del Códice Maria’ (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), pp. 7–19 and
de la Santa Iglesia Catedral de Segovia (Segovia: ‘Rondeau and Virelai: The Music of Andalus
and the Cantigas de Santa Maria’, Plainsong and (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy,
Medieval Music, 13 (2004), pp. 127–40. 1984).
33 Many such accounts are surveyed in Ribera, 3 A History of Music in Poland, ed. Stefan
La música de las cantigas, pp. 53–85. See also R. Sutkowski, trans. John Comber, 7 vols.
de Zayas, ‘Musicology and the Cultural Heritage (Warsaw: Sutkowski Edition, 2001–4). The best
of the Spanish Moors’, in C. E. Robertson, ed., synoptic coverage of medieval music in
Musical Repercussions of 1492: Encounters in Text Bohemia is Jaromı́r Černý, ‘Středověk
and Performance (Washington: Smithsonian (800–1420)’, in Jaromı́r Černý et al., eds., Hudba
Institution Press, 1992), pp. 129–48, and v českých dějinách od středověku do nové doby
Gómez, La música medieval, pp. 325–43. (Prague: Editio Supraphon, 1983), pp. 11–77.
Attempts have also been made to recover Two articles by László Dobszay cover medieval
medieval songs from modern oral traditions in music in Hungary: ‘Plainchant in Medieval
northern Africa: see B. M. Liu and J. T. Monroe, Hungary’, Journal of the Plainsong & Mediaeval
Ten Hispano-Arabic Strophic Songs in the Music Society 13 (1990), pp. 49–78; and
Modern Tradition (Berkeley: University of ‘Liturgical Polyphony in Medieval Hungary’, in
California Press, 1989). Giulio Cattin and F. Alberto Gallo, eds., Un
34 These Arabic sources are catalogued in A. millennio di polifonia liturgica tra oralità e
Shiloah, The Theory of Music in Arabic Writings scrittura, Quaderni di ‘Musica e storia’ 3
(c. 900–1900), 2 vols., RISM B X (Munich: (Bologna and Venice: Società Editrice II Mulino
Henle, 1979, 2003). / Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi, 2002), pp.
35 For a discussion of a specific example, see D. 173–85. For Slovakia (northern Hungary in the
M. Randel, ‘Al-Fārābı̄ and the Role of Arabic Middle Ages) see also Ladislav Kačic, ‘From the
Music Theory in the Latin Middle Ages’, Journal Middle Ages to the Renaissance’, in Oskár
of the American Musicological Society 29 (1976), Elschek, ed., A History of Slovak Music From the
pp. 173–88. Earliest Time to the Present, trans. Martin Styan
36 A picture of the Iberian dissemination of (Bratislava: Veda, 2003), pp. 54–79.
music theory treatises may be gleaned from The 4 Velehrad (Staré Město) in Moravia was the
Theory of Music, RISM B III 5 (Munich: Henle, site of the first metropolitan. The first bishop
1997), pp. 57–134. A survey of fifteenth-century of Hungary was an Orthodox monk, Hierotheus,
Spanish music theory is provided in R. ordained by Patriarch Theophylactus
Stevenson, Spanish Music, pp. 50–101. (d. 956).
37 For a bibliography, see ‘Jewish Music’, The 5 Hieronim Feicht, ‘Św. Cyril i Methody w
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, polskich ksiegach
˛ chorałowych i śpiewnikach’, in
2nd edn, esp. Bibliography, C.iii, D.v. Studia nad muzyka˛ polskiego średniowiecza,
38 See I. J. Katz, ‘The Music of Sephardic Spain: Opera Musicologica Hieronymi Feicht 1
An Exploratory View’, in Robertson, ed., Musical (Cracow: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne,
Repercussions of 1492, pp. 97–128; S. G. 1975), pp. 244–9; Černý, ‘Středověk’, pp. 26–29,
Armistead, J. H. Silverman and I. J. Katz, 37.
Judeo-Spanish Ballads from Oral Tradition, 3 6 Jerzy Morawski, ed., Musica Medii
vols. to date (Berkeley: University of California Aevi, 8 vols. (Cracow: Polskie Wydawnictwo
Press; Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta; 1986–). Muzyczne, 1965–91); includes 250
black-and-white plates of Polish manuscripts.
10 Music east of the Rhine Eva Veselovská, Mittelalterliche liturgische
1 Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of East Kodizes mit Notation in den Archivbeständen von
Central Europe, A History of East Central Bratislava, Musaeum Musicum (Bratislava:
Europe 1 (Seattle and London: University of Slovenské národné múzeum – Hudobné
Washington Press, 1993), maps 7b, 8, 10 and 14. múzeum, 2002); Hana Vlhová-Wörner,
2 Jean W. Sedlar, East Central Europe in the ‘Středověké liturgické rukopisy z katedrály sv.
Middle Ages, 1000–1500, A History of East Vı́ta na Pražském hradě’ (PhD diss., Prague:
Central Europe 3 (Seattle and London: Univerzita Karlova, 2000).
University of Washington Press, 1994); Piotr 7 Recently discovered and now available in
Wandycz, The Price of Freedom: A History of East facsimile is The Istanbul Antiphonal c.1360
Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the (Topkapi Sarayi Müzesi. Deissmann 42),
Present (London and New York: Routledge, Musicalia Danubiana 18, ed. Janka Szendrei and
1992); Oscar Halecki, Borderlands of Western Mária Czigler (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó,
Civilization: A History of East Central Europe 2002). This is the most complete extant book of
(New York: Ronald Press, 1952); and Jerzy offices for Hungarian saints. See also Corpus
Kłoczowski, Europa słowiańska w XIV–XV wieku Antiphonarium Officii – Ecclesiarum Centralis
Europae. Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 15 On the offices of Ludmila and Procopius, see
Institute of Musicology. www.zti.hu/earlymusic/ Dominique Patier, ‘Les éléments locaux dans les
cao-ece.html. For Bohemian chant offices rythmiques composés en Bohême aux
manuscripts, see http://dig.vkol.cz XIIIème et XIVème siècles’, Studia Musicologica
(Digitálnı́ knihovna historických fondů Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 26, nos. 1–4
Vědecké knihovny v Olomouci), and (1985), pp. 109–15.
http://cantica.kh.cz/grad/muzeum/ 16 Hana Vlhová-Wörner, ‘Fama crescit eundo.
(Kutnohorské hudebnı́ rukopisy). Der Fall: Domazlaus predicator, der älteste
8 For Polish manuscripts, see Tadeusz bekannte böhmische Sequenzendichter’,
Maciejewski, ‘Elementy systemu menzuralnego Hudebnı́ věda 39, no. 4 (2002), pp. 311–
w monodii chorałowej XIII–XVI wieku’, in 30.
Elżbieta Witkowska-Zaremba, ed., Notae 17 Zsuzsa Czagány, ‘Bemerkungen zum Prager
musicae artis. Notacja muzyczna w źródłach Offizium’, Miscellanea Musicologica 37 (2003),
polskich XI–XVI wieku, (Cracow: Musica p. 105.
Iagellonica, 1999), pp. 283–347. For 18 László Dobszay, ‘The System of the
Bohemian manuscripts, see Charles E. Hungarian Plainsong Sources’, Studia
Brewer, ‘The Mensural Significance of Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae
Bohemian Chant Notation and Its Origins’, 27 (1985), pp. 44ff. Janka Szendrei, Medieval
in László Dobszay, Agnes Papp and Ferenc Notated Codex Fragments from Hungary, trans.
Sebő, eds., Cantus planus: IMS Study Erzsébet Mészáros (Budapest: Hungarian
Group, Papers Read at the Fourth Meeting, Academy of Sciences, 2000).
Pécs, Hungary, 3–8 September 1990 19 Janka Szendrei, ‘Gibt es ein ungarisches
(Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Gregorianum? Über das Problem des
Science, Institute of Musicology, 1992), pp. 55– Nationalcharakters der Gregorianik im Licht der
68. ungarischen Choralquellen’, in Stefan Fricke
9 Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of et al. eds., Zwischen Volks- und Kunstmusik:
Western Music, vol. I, The Earliest Notations to Aspekte der ungarischen Musik (Saarbrücken:
the Sixteenth Century (Oxford University Press, Pfau-Verlag, 1999), pp. 28–42.
2005), p. 62. 20 Henryk Kowalewicz and Jerzy Morawski,
10 Jerzy Morawski, ‘Recherches sur les eds., ‘Hymny polskie’, Musica Medii Aevi 8
variantes régionales dans le chant grégorien’, (1991), pp. 10–138; Henryk Kowalewicz,
Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Cantica Medii Aevi Polono-Latina, vol. I,
Hungaricae 30 (1988), pp. 412–13. Sequentiae, Biblioteca Latina Medii et
11 Barbara Haggh, Two Offices for St Elizabeth Recentioris Aevi 14 (Warsaw: Państwowe
of Hungary: Gaudeat Hungaria and Letare Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1964); Jerzy Pikulik,
Germania (Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval ‘Sekwencje polskie’, Musica Medii Aevi 4 (1973),
Music, 1995); Jerzy Morawski, ed., Historia pp. 7–126.
rymowana o św. Wojciechu (Cracow: Polskie 21 Pikulik, ‘Sekwencje polskie’, pp. 63–4.
Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1979). 22 Antoni Reginek, ‘Repertuar hymnów
12 Jerzy Morawski, The Middle Ages, Part 1: Up diecezji krakowskiej’, Musica Medii Aevi 8
to 1320, trans. John Comber, Historia muzyki (1991), p. 321. Paul Crossley, ‘“Ara Patriae”
polskiej, I/1 (Warsaw: Edition Sutkowski, 2003), Saint Stanislaus, the Jagiellonians and the
p. 564. Idem, Historia rymowana o św. Jadwidze Coronation Ordinal for Cracow Cathedral’,
(Cracow: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, in Jiřı́ Fajt and Markus Hörsch, eds.,
1977). Kunstlerische Wechselwirkungen in Mitteleuropa,
13 Zoltán Falvy, ‘Die Weisen des König Studia Jagiellonica Lipsiensia 1 (Ostfildern: Jan
Stephan-Reimoffiziums’, Studia Musicologica Thorbecke Verlag, 2006), pp. 103–21.
Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 6 (1964), 23 Arnold Geering, Die Organa und
pp. 207–69. Jerzy Pikulik, ‘Polskie oficja mehrstimmigen Conductus in den Handschriften
rymowane o św. Wojciechu / Les offices polonais des deutschen Sprachgebietes vom 13. bis 16.
de saint Adalbert’, in Pikulik, ed., Stan badań nad Jahrhundert, Publikationen der Schweizerischen
muzyka˛ religijna˛ w kulturze polskiej (Warsaw: Musikforschenden Gesellschaft, II/1 (Bern:
Akademia Teologii Katolickiej, 1973), pp. 279– Verlag Paul Haupt, 1952); Theodor Göllner, Die
341. mehrstimmigen liturgischen Lesungen, Münchner
14 Andrew Hughes, ‘Chants in the Offices Veröffentlichungen zur Musikgeschichte 15
of Thomas of Canterbury and Stanislaus (Tutzing: Hans Schneider Verlag, 1969). More
of Poland’, Musica Antiqua Europae Orientalis 6 recent studies include Paweł Gancarczyk,
(1982), pp. 267–77. ‘Cantus planus multiplex in Polen: von einer
mündlichen Tradition zur Notenschrift’, in (Cracow: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne,

László Dobszay, ed., The Past in the Present: 1990).
Papers Read at the IMS Intercongressional 32 Jaromı́r Černý, ‘Cantio’, in Ludwig Finscher,
Symposium and the 10th Meeting of the Cantus ed., Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart:
Planus, Budapest and Visegrád, 2000 (Budapest: allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik (Kassel
Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, 2003), pp. and Stuttgart: Bärenreiter & Metzler, 1994),
483–95; and Giulio Cattin and F. Alberto Gallo, pp. 392–3.
eds., Un millennio di polifonia liturgica tra 33 CZ-VB 42 (Hohenfurt Cantionale)
oralità e scrittura (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002). 34 Reinhard Strohm, The Rise of European
24 Jaromı́r Černý, ‘Das retrospektive Organum Music 1380–1500 (Cambridge University Press,
oder Neo-organum’, Hudebnı́ věda 38, nos. 1–2 1993), pp. 331–2.
(2001), pp. 3–31. Paweł Gancarczyk, ‘Polifonia 35 Paweł Gancarczyk, ‘Petrus Wilhelm de
w Polsce do około 1500 roku: źródła i problemy Grudencz (b. 1392) – A Central European
ich interpretacji’, Muzyka 51, nos. 1–2 (2006), Composer’, De musica disserenda 2, no. 1 (2006),
pp. 85–103. pp. 103–12. Jaromı́r Černý, ed., Petrus Wilhelmi
25 The Philip de Vitry fragment, PL-WRu de Grudencz Magister Cracoviensis Opera
Akc.1955/195, is described in Fritz Feldmann, Musica, music score with introduction and
Musik und Musikpflege in mittelalterlichen critical commentary, foreword by Mirosław Perz
Schlesien, Darstellungen und Quellen zur (Cracow: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne,
schlesischen Geschichte 37 (Breslau: Trewendt & 1993).
Granier, 1938), pp. 126–7. It was lost during the 36 Martin Staehelin, ‘Uwagi o wzajemnych
Second World War and rediscovered in 1970 by zwiazkach
˛ biografii, twórczości i dokumentacji
Mirosław Perz. For a colour plate, see Elżbieta dzieł Piotra Wilhelmiego z Grudziadza’ ˛ , Muzyka
Zwolińska, ‘Musica mensuralis w polskich 49, no. 2 (2004), pp. 9–18. The composer
źródłach muzycznych do 1600 roku’, in Elżbieta identified his compositions using an acrostic of
Witkowska-Zaremba, ed., Notae musicae artis. his name: for example, in his cantio:
Notacja muzyczna w źródłach polskich XI–XVI Presidiorum erogatrix tutris rei virens satrix.
wieku (Cracow: Musica Iagellonica, 1999), pp. 37 Martin Horyna, ‘Utwory Piotra
428. Wilhelmiego z Grudziadza ˛ w tradycji polifonii
26 Guillaume de Machaut, La Prise d’Alexandre późnośredniowiecznej w Europie Środkowej, a
– ou Chronique de Roi Pierre I de Lusignan, ed. zwłaszcza w Czechach XV i XVI wieku’, Muzyka
M. L. de Mas Latrie (Geneva, 1877), lines 49 (2004), pp. 21–54. Horyna draws on
1268–88. unpublished sections of the treatise by Paulus
27 Charles E. Brewer, ‘The Introduction of the Paulirini (Pavel Žı́dek), Liber viginti artium
“ars nova” into East Central Europe: A Study of (Plzeň, ca1460 [PL-Kj 257, fols.153–62]), where
the Late Medieval Polish Sources’ (PhD diss., Paulus recommends what type and how many
City University of New York, 1984), pp. pieces befit specific liturgical occasions.
163–232. 38 Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance, rev.
28 Robert Curry, ‘Fragments of Ars antiqua edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959), p. 732.
Music at Stary Sacz ˛ and the Evolution of the 39 Jistebnický Kancionál, CZ-Pnm II C 7. A
Clarist Order in Central Europe in the new edition of the gradual has recently
Thirteenth Century’ (PhD diss., Monash appeared, Jistebnický kancionál. 1. svazek –
University, Melbourne, 2003). Graduale, edited by Jaroslav Kolár, Anežka
29 Robert Curry, ‘Lost and Found in Stary Vidmanová and Hana Vlhová-Wörner,
Sacz’
˛ , in Tomasz Jeż, ed., Complexus effectuum Monumenta Liturgica Bohemica 2 (Brno: Luboš
musicologiae. Studia Miroslao Perz septuagenario Marek, 2005).
dedicata, Studia et Dissertationes Instituti 40 The royal chapel did not follow the
Musicologiae Universitatis Varsoviensis, B/13 Esztergom rite, the most characteristic feature of
(Cracow: Rabid, 2003), pp. 31–42. Catholic liturgy in Hungary.
30 Katarzyna Morawska, The Middle Ages, Part 41 Corvinus’s library, second only to the
2: 1320–1500, trans. John Comber, Historia Vatican’s, numbered some 3,000 volumes. Csaba
muzyki polskiej, I/2 (Warsaw: Sutkowski Csapodi, et al., comps., Biblioteca Corviniana:
Edition, 2001), pp. 117–21. The Library of King Matthias Corvinus of
31 Charles E. Brewer, ed., Collectio Hungary, trans. Zsuzsanna Horn (New York:
cantilenarum saeculi XV: r˛ekopis Biblioteki Praeger, 1969).
Jagiellońskiej Kj 2464, music score and 42 Dobszay, ‘Liturgical Polyphony’,
facsimiles, Latin poetry revised by Anna pp. 173–85. Dobszay concludes that major
Sobańska, Źródła do historii muzyki polskiej 30 churches, unlike in the West, seem to have
played little role in the cultivation of liturgical 11 Music and liturgy

polyphony above the level of cantus planus 1 J. McKinnon, ed., Music in Early Christian
binatim. See also Charles E. Brewer, ‘The Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1987),
Historical Context of Polyphony in Medieval no. 25, p. 20.
Hungary: An Examination of Four Fragmentary 2 E. G. C. F. Atchley, ed. and trans., Ordo
Sources’, Studia Musicologica Academiae Romanus primus (London: Moring, 1905), pp.
Scientiarum Hungariae 32 (1990), pp. 5–21. 127–9. For the Latin texts of the Ordines romani
43 Leeman L. Perkins and Howard Garey, as a whole, see M. Andrieu, Les Ordines romani
eds., The Mellon Chansonnier: vol. I, The du haut moyen âge, 5 vols. (Louvain:
Edition; vol. II, Commentary (New Haven and Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 1931–61); an
London: Yale University Press, 1979), vol. I, introduction to this resource is provided in C.
p. 30. Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the
44 Košice Fragments (Fragmenty koszyckie, Sources, trans. W. Storey and N. Rasmussen,
Kassa-Fragmente), ca1465, SK-Brm 33, SK-Bru assisted by J. Brooks-Leonard (Washington, DC:
318. Pastoral Press, 1986), pp. 135–224.
45 Glogauer Liederbuch (Śpiewnik głogowski), 3 On the problems of reading early
1475–85, PL-Kj 40098. documents concerning Christian liturgy, see P.
46 By 1469 Hungary had acquired Moravia, Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian
Silesia, Upper and Lower Lusatia and Habsburg Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of
Lower Austria including Vienna. Early Liturgy (London: SPCK, 2002; rev. edn.);
47 Paweł Gancarczyk, Musica scripto. Kodeksy for a summary introduction to the era that pays
menzuralne II połowy XV wieku na wschodzie due attention to these problems, see P.
Europy Łacińskiej (Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki PAN, Bradshaw, Early Christian Worship: A Basic
2001), pp. 71–110. Introduction to Ideas and Practice (London:
48 The archbishopric sided with the Catholic SPCK, 1996).
king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, against the 4 Given the concentration on select sources in
Utraquist king of Bohemia, George of this chapter, attention should be drawn at this
Poděbrady. Corvinus was symbolically crowned point to studies providing a more
king of Bohemia in Olomouc in 1469; he had to comprehensive overview. The most
wait another five years before he acceded in fact wide-ranging single-volume history of Christian
to the Bohemian throne. worship is now G. Wainwright and K. B.
49 Codex Speciálnı́k, CZ-HK II A 7. Westerfield Tucker, eds., The Oxford History of
50 Lenka Mráčková, ‘Kodex Speciálnı́k. Eine Christian Worship (hereafter, OHCW) (Oxford
kleine Folio-Handschrift böhmischer University Press, 2006), replacing the still useful
Provenenz’, Hudebnı́ věda 39, nos. 2–3 (2002), C. Jones, E. Yarnold, G. Wainwright and P.
pp. 163–84. Bradshaw, eds., The Study of the Liturgy
51 In large measure the same holds true for the (London: SPCK and New York: Oxford
important L’viv Fragments (Fragmenty University Press, 1992; rev. edn). The most
lwowskie), 1485–90, PL-Pu 7022. Lwów was the informative single-volume dictionary remains F.
seat of Poland’s second metropolitan. Primate L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford
Gregory of Sanok (1451–77) maintained Dictionary of the Christian Church, rev. edn
contacts with singers at the Florentine court of (Oxford University Press, 1983). As for liturgy
Pope Eugenius IV. in particular, T. Klauser, A Short History of the
52 Given Mikotaj Radomski’s up-to-date Western Liturgy: An Account and Some
musical style, it seems likely that he is the Reflections, trans. J. Halliburton (London:
musician Nicolai Geraldi de Radom whose name Oxford University Press, 1969), is still usable,
appears in documents from the Roman curia of but needs to be read in the light of more recent
Pope Boniface IX (r. 1389–1404). His music is specialist studies. The best introduction to
found in two manuscripts both of unknown medieval liturgical sources is Vogel, Medieval
provenance: PL-Wn 8054 and PL-Wn 378. Liturgy; a less dense introduction to this area is
53 Strohm, Rise of European Music, p. 262; provided by E. Palazzo, A History of Liturgical
Katarzyna Grochowska, ‘Motet as Propaganda: Books from the Beginning to the Thirteenth
The Historigraphi aciem’s Embellishment of the Century, trans. M. Beaumont (Collegeville:
Jagellonian Dynasty’, in Early Music – Context Liturgical Press, 1998). An eminently practical
and Ideas: International Conference in introduction to medieval liturgy for those with a
Musicology, Kraków, 18–21 September 2003 special interest in music is J. Harper, The Forms
(Cracow: Institute of Musicology, Jagellonian and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to
University, 2003), pp. 359–70. the Eighteenth Century: A Historical Introduction
and Guide for Students and Musicians (Oxford cantu: Studien zur Geschichte der Kirchenmusik
University Press, 1991). und der Oper. Helmut Hucke zum 60. Geburtstag
5 The column summarizing the account (Hildesheim: Olms, 1993), pp. 19–40 (at pp.
provided by Justin Martyr also draws on the 38–9); for the development of a cycle of mass
earlier description in his First Apology (ch. 65), propers in the seventh century, see McKinnon,
hence the inclusion of a kiss of greeting or peace; The Advent Project, pp. 101–91.
for the earlier account, see T. B. Falls, trans., 14 To appreciate this association on a broader
Saint Justin Martyr (Washington DC: Catholic canvas, recourse is needed to the classic study of
University of America Press, 1948), p. 105. The the mass, J. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman
prayer by the celebrant over the offerings after Rite, trans. F. A. Brunner, 2 vols. (New York:
their presentation is not mentioned in Ordo Benzinger Brothers, 1951–5); for a briefer
Romanus I, but it has been included since it is overview, see J. D. Crichton, A Short History of
found in the earliest sacramentaries. the Mass (London: Incorporated Catholic Truth
6 Here, I follow J. McKinnon, The Advent Society, 1983).
Project: The Later Seventh-Century Creation of 15 Paul the Deacon, Deeds of the Bishops of
the Roman Mass Proper (Berkeley and Los Metz, ed. G. H. Pertz, Monumenta Germaniae
Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), Historica, Scriptores II (Hanover: Hahn, 1829),
pp. 35–48. p. 268.
7 For further details, see R. Taft, ‘The Structural 16 On the achievements of Bishop Chrodegang,
Analysis of Liturgical Units: An Essay in and his successor Angilram with respect to the
Methodology’, Worship 52 (1978), introduction of Roman practices, see, most
pp. 314–29. recently, M. A. Claussen, The Reform of the
8 For further detail than can be presented here Frankish Church: Chrodegang of Metz and the
concerning the formalization of Christian ‘Regula canonicorum’ in the Eighth Century
worship focusing on the fourth through to the (Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp.
seventh centuries, see most recently J. Baldovin, Chapter 6 (‘Hagiopolis’).
‘The Empire Baptized’, OHCW, pp. 77–130. 17 For a facsimile of this manuscript, one of the
9 On the new basilican style of architecture in most highly decorated sacramentaries of the
Rome and related developments in liturgy, see J. Middle Ages, see F. Mütherich, ed.,
Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Drogo-Sakramentar: manuscrit latin 9428,
Worship: The Origins, Development, and Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, 2 vols. (Graz:
Meaning of Stational Liturgy (Rome: Pontifical Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1974).
Oriental Institute, 1987), pp. 106–18 and 18 Information about the early development of
147–66. the annual liturgical cycle is taken from the now
10 On the later-fourth-century psalmodic standard work on the subject: T. Talley, The
movement, see J. McKinnon, ‘Desert Origins of the Liturgical Year (Collegeville:
Monasticism and the Later Fourth-Century Liturgical Press, 1991; 2nd edn).
Psalmodic Movement’, Music and Letters 75 19 On the Metz stational list, see, with further
(1994), pp. 505–21, and J. Dyer, ‘The Desert, the references, Claussen, The Reform of the Frankish
City and Psalmody in the Late Fourth Century’, Church, pp. 276–89; for stational liturgy at
in S. Gallagher, J. Haar, J. Nádas and T. Striplin, Rome, see Baldovin, The Urban Character of
eds., Western Plainchant in the First Millennium: Christian Worship, pp. 106–66; on the
Studies in the Medieval Liturgy and Its Music adaptation of Roman stational liturgy to
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 11–43. Frankish cloisters in general, see A. A.
11 R. Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and Häussling, Mönchskonvent und Eucharistiefeier
West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its (Münster: Aschendorff, 1973).
Meaning for Today (Collegeville: Liturgical 20 For the contents of the Hadrianum and its
Press, 1993; rev. edn), p. 139. supplement, see J. Deshusses, Le sacramentaire
12 See J. McKinnon, ‘Lector Chant versus grégorien: Ses principales formes d’après les plus
Schola Chant: A Question of Historical anciens manuscrits, 2 vols. (Freiburg: Éditions
Plausibility’, in J. Szendrei and D. Hiley, eds., Universitaires Fribourg Suisse, vol. I, 1971 and
Laborare fratres in unum: Festschrift Lázló 1979 [2nd edn]; vol. II, 1979).
Dobszay zum 60. Geburtstag (Hildesheim: 21 For an overview of the history of the office
Weidmann, 1995); pp. 201–11. concentrating on its early history, see Taft, The
13 On the dating of the Roman schola Liturgy of the Hours in East and West; on the
cantorum, see J. Dyer, ‘The Schola Cantorum current state of research on the music of the
and Its Roman Milieu in the Early Middle Ages’, medieval office in particular, see most recently
in P. Cahn and A.-K. Heimer, eds., De musica et M. E. Fassler and R. A. Baltzer, eds., The Divine
Office in the Latin Middle Ages (Oxford Axis and Monastic Reforms: Towards the
University Press, 2000). Recovery of an Early Messine Trope Tradition’,
22 This fundamental distinction between Cantus Planus – Study Group of the International
‘cathedral’ and ‘monastic’ practice was first Musicological Society: Papers Read at the Twelfth
noted by Anton Baumstark; see A. Baumstark, Meeting, Lillafüred, Hungary. 23–28 August
Comparative Liturgy, rev. B. Botte, trans. 2004. Edited by L. Dobszay et al. (Budapest:
F. L. Cross, (London: A. R. Mowbray, 1958), Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2006), pp.
pp. 111–20. 723–52.
23 The structure of the offices can be abstracted 30 C. Maı̂tre, La réforme cistercienne du
from several chapters in Amalarius’s Liber plain-chant. Étude d’un traité théorique (Brecht:
officialis and Liber de ordine antiphonarii: see Commentarii Cistercienses, 1995), pp. 42–52.
J.-M. Hanssens, ed., Amalarii episcopi opera 31 On private masses, see Vogel, Medieval
liturgica omnia, 3 vols. (Rome: Bibliotheca Liturgy, pp. 156–9.
Apostolica Vaticana, 1948–50), vol. II, pp. 32 See, in general, C. W. Bynum, Jesus as
403–65, and vol. III, pp. 13–17. For discussion Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High
and summary see P. Salmon, L’office divin au Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California
moyen âge: histoire de la formation du bréviaire Press, 1982).
du IXe au XVIe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 33 Musica enchiriadis; see R. Erickson, Musica
1967), pp. 33–43; this provides additional enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis, trans. and ed.
information from Ordo Romanus XII. C. V. Palisca, (New Haven: Yale University Press,
24 Amalarius, Prologue to the Liber de ordine 1995).
antiphonarii: see Hanssens, ed., Amalarii 34 C. Wright, Music and Ceremony at Notre
episcopi opera, vol. I, pp. 361–2. Dame of Paris, 500–1550 (Cambridge University
25 With reference in particular to saints’ offices Press, 1989), p. 267.
in the Middle Ages, see A. Hughes, ‘Late 35 For full details, see S. J. P. van Dijk and J. H.
Medieval Plainchant for the Divine Office’, in R. Walker, The Origins of the Modern Roman
Strohm and B. J. Blackburn, eds. Music as Liturgy: The Liturgy of the Papal Court and the
Concept and Practice in the Late Middle Ages Franciscan Order in the Thirteenth Century
(Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 31–9; on (London: Darton, Longman & Todd and
festal offices, see most recently W. Arlt, ‘The Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1960); on the
Office for the Feast of the Circumcision from Le music of the Franciscan order, see H. Hüschen
Puy’, in Fassler and Baltzer, eds., The Divine (rev. H. Schmidt), ‘Franziskaner’, in MGG, vol.
Office, pp. 324–41. III, cols. 819–43.
26 For an introduction to tropes, see A. Haug, 36 See S. J. P van Dijk (completed by J. H.
‘Tropus’, Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart Walker), The Ordinal of the Papal Court from
(henceforth MGG), vol. IX, cols. 897–921; for a Innocent III to Boniface VIII, and Related
complementary introduction to sequences, see Documents (Fribourg University Press, 1975).
L. Kruckenberg, ‘Sequenz’, MGG, vol. VIII, cols. 37 William Durandus, Rationale divinorum
1254–86. officiorum (ca1292–6) as quoted and translated
27 On the significance of trope texts, see G. in T. Thibodeau, ‘Western Christendom’,
Iversen, ‘“Pax et sapientia”: A Thematic Study OHCW, p. 230.
on Tropes from Different Traditions’, in R. 38 For a brief and accessible introduction to the
Jacobsson, ed., Pax et Sapientia: Studies in Text sources and modern editions of Salisbury Use,
and Music of Liturgical Sequences in Memory of see Harper, Forms and Orders, pp. 202–16.
Gordon Anderson (Stockholm: Almquist & 39 The generalized description of Salisbury Use
Wiksell International, 1986), pp. 23–58. For is based on the summary provided in Harper,
medieval commentaries on sequence texts, see Forms and Orders, pp. 122–4, with additional
E. Kihlman, Expositiones sequentiarum: material from W. H. Frere, ed., The Use of Sarum
Medieval Sequence Commentaries and Prologues. I Consuetudinary and Customary (Cambridge
Editions with Introductions (Stockholm: University Press, 1898), pp. 52–68; the summary
Almquist & Wiksell International, 2006). of Sunday processions is provided in T. W.
28 D. Hiley, ‘Cluny, Sequences and Tropes’, in Bailey, The Processions of Sarum and the Western
C. Leonardi and E. Menestò eds., La tradizione Church (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
dei tropi liturgici (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Mediaeval Studies, 1971), pp. 13–16. The Use of
Studi sull’ Alto Medioevo, 1990), pp. 125–38. the Papal Chapel is reconstructed using the
29 On the role of Gorze in relation to the Franciscan order and ceremonial as edited by
dissemination of tropes, see L. Haymo of Faversham ca1250: for full details, see
Kruckenberg-Goldenstein, ‘The Lotharingian S. J. P. van Dijk, Sources of the Roman Liturgy, 2
vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1963), vol. I, pp. 50–67, 5 Aubrey gives 315 ‘discrete musical settings’
95–109, vol. II, pp. 3–14 and 352–5. Items in for 246 poems (Music of the Troubadours, p. xvi;
brackets are only alluded to in Haymo’s texts, Haines gives 322 ‘different melodic readings’
thus ‘the epistle, gradual and others’ are to be for 253 poems (Eight Centuries, pp. 20 and 41,
declaimed before the gospel (vol. II, p. 8). Clear n. 32).
directions for the performance of sung items are 6 Anglica Rieger, Trobairitz. Der Beitrag der
not given in Haymo’s instructions, but since a Frau in der altokzitanischen höfischen Lyrik:
choir is repeatedly mentioned it would seem Edition des Gesamtkorpus (Tübingen: Niemeyer,
safe to assume that all items customarily sung 1991), pp. 585–626.
were performed in this way. 7 Aubrey, Music of the Troubadours, pp. 15–16.
40 Bede, A History of the English Church and 8 See, for instance, the vidas of Giraut de
People, I. 27, trans. L. Sherley-Price, rev. R. E. Borneill, Gaucelm Faidit and Cadenet
Latham (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 73. (Margarita Egan, The Vidas of the Troubadours
41 For an introduction to Islamic and Jewish [New York and London: Garland, 1984], nos.
music in the Middle Ages, see A. Shiloah, 41, 37 and 22).
‘Muslim and Jewish Musical Traditions of the 9 Ardis Butterfield, ‘Le tradizioni della canzone
Middle Ages’, in R. Strohm and B. J. Blackburn cortese medievale’, in Jean-Jacques Nattiez, gen.
Music as Concept and Practice in the Late ed., Enciclopedia della musica (The Einaudi
Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 2001). Encyclopedia of Music), 4 vols, vol. IV, Storia
pp. 1–30. della musica europea (Turin: Einaudi, 2004),
42 For a recent revisionist account of early pp. 130–51.
medieval liturgy with reference to music, see Y. 10 See Gaston Paris’s two articles, ‘Études sur
Hen, The Royal Patronage of Liturgy in Frankish les romans de la Table Ronde: Lancelot du Lac, II:
Gaul to the Death of Charles the Bald (877) Le conte de la charrette’, Romania 10 (1881), pp.
(London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 2001). 465–96 and ‘Études sur les romans de la Table
43 On the word ‘liturgy’, see P.-M. Gy, ‘Rites et Ronde: Lancelot du Lac’, Romania 12 (1883),
cérémonies, liturgie, culte: Les noms de la pp. 459–534.
liturgie dans l’Occident moderne’, in P.-M. Gy, 11 Switten, Music and Poetry, p. xi.
La liturgie dans l’histoire (Paris: Éditions Saint 12 The term vers used before this date may have
Paul and Éditions du Cerf, 1990), pp. 177–84. referred to Aquitanian versus.
44 McKinnon, ed., Music in Early Christian 13 Christopher Page, The Owl and the
Literature, no. 352, p. 155. Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France
1100–1300 (London: Dent, 1989), Chapter 5;
12 Vernacular poetry and music Walter Salmen, ‘Dances and Dance Music,
1 For a useful, concise summary, see Elizabeth c.1300–1530’, in Reinhard Strohm and Bonnie J.
Aubrey, The Music of the Troubadours Blackburn, eds., Music as Concept and Practice in
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), the Late Middle Ages, vol. III, part I of The New
pp. 240–54, referred to henceforth in the text as Oxford History of Music (Oxford University
Aubrey. Press, 2001), pp. 162–90.
2 For discussion and facsimile reproductions of 14 Aubrey, Music of the Troubadours,
this song, see, respectively, Margaret L. Switten, pp. 136–7.
Music and Poetry in the Middle Ages: A Guide to 15 Text and translation taken from L. T.
Research on French and Occitan Song, 1100–1400 Topsfield, Troubadours and Love (Cambridge
(New York and London: Garland, 1995), pp. University Press, 1975), pp. 128–9; Topsfield is
4–5, and John Haines, Eight Centuries of using the edition by C. Appel, Bernart von
Troubadours and Trouvères: The Changing Ventadorn: seine Lieder mit Einleitung und
Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge Glossar (Halle: Niemeyer, 1915), pp. 1–24. It
University Press, 2004), p. 16. differs from the text in Example 12.1, which is
3 Aubrey, Music of the Troubadours, taken by van der Werf and Bond from Paris,
p. 26; William Burgwinkle, ‘The Chansonniers Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français
as Books’, in Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, eds., 1591.
The Troubadours: An Introduction (Cambridge 16 See, for instance, the arguments of Amelia E.
University Press, 1999), pp. 246–62 (p. 246). Van Vleck, Memory and Re-Creation in
4 See Switten, Music and Poetry; Aubrey, Music Troubadour Lyric (Berkeley: University of
of the Troubadours; Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and California Press, 1991).
Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to 17 This order is printed by Aubrey, Music of the
Guillaume de Machaut (Cambridge University Troubadours, pp. 90–92, with music from MS G
Press, 2002); Haines, Eight Centuries. (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, S.P.4).
18 Simon Gaunt, ‘Orality and Writing: The Manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fonds
Text of the Troubadour Poem’, in Simon Gaunt français 146 (New York: Broude Brothers, 1990).
and Sarah Kay, eds., The Troubadours: An 29 Mary Atchison, ed., The Chansonnier of
Introduction (Cambridge University Press, Oxford Bodleian MS Douce 308: Essays and
1999), pp. 228–45 (at 236). Complete Edition of Texts (Aldershot: Ashgate,
19 This is argued by Aubrey, Music of the 2005); Eglal Doss-Quinby and Samuel N.
Troubadours, p. 92. Rosenberg, eds., with Elizabeth Aubrey, The Old
20 The latter two terms are the modern editor’s French Ballette: Oxford Bodleian Library, MS
(F. Lecoy, ed., Le Roman de la Rose ou de Douce 308 (Geneva: Droz, 2006). See
Guillaume de Dole, CFMA 91 (Paris: Champion, Butterfield, Poetry and Music, Chapter 16; M.
1962). Everist, ‘Motets, French Tenors, and the
21 See Butterfield, Poetry and Music, Appendix, Polyphonic Chanson ca1300’, Journal of
pp. 303–13, where 231 manuscripts from Musicology 24 (2007), pp. 365–406 and
Renart’s Rose to the early fourteenth century are ‘ “Souspirant en terre estrainge”: The
listed. Polyphonic Rondeau from Adam de la
22 The canso as a style moved across Europe as Halle to Guillaume de Machaut’, Early Music
the Minnelied in German, the chanson in History 26 (2007), pp. 1–42.
Anglo-Norman, the cantio in Latin, the canzone 30 Butterfield, Poetry and Music, pp. 57–63,
in Italian and, without surviving music, the 87–102.
cantigas de amigo in Spain. It also prompted 31 Par ci va la mignotise / Par ci ou je vois!
religious rewriting in the chanson pieuse (of (‘Along here goes graciousness, along here
which the pioneer was Gautier de Coinci where I go’) (vdB, refr.1473).
[1177/8–1236]), certain monophonic 32 Jacques Boogaart, ‘Encompassing Past and
conductus, the Italian laude spirituali, and the Present: Quotations and Their Function in
Spanish Cantigas de Santa Maria (which do Machaut’s Motets, Early Music History 20
survive with music) (John Stevens, ‘Medieval (2001), pp. 1–86. A project entitled ‘Citation
Song’, in Richard Crocker and David Hiley, eds., and Allusion in Fourteenth-Century French
The Early Middle Ages to 1300, The New Oxford Lyric and Song’ led by Yolanda Plumley is
History of Music, vol. II, 2nd edn (Oxford currently under way at the Centre for Medieval
University Press, 1990), pp. 357–451). Studies at the University of Exeter (funded by
23 On the refrain, see Nico H. J. van den the Arts and Humanities Research Council).
Boogaard, ed., Rondeaux et refrains du
XIIe siècle au début du XIVe (Paris: Éditions 13 Latin poetry and music
Klincksieck, 1969), hereafter vdB; E. 1 See in general Dag Ludvig Norberg, An
Doss-Quinby, Les refrains chez les trouvères du Introduction to the Study of Medieval Latin
XIIe siècle au début du XIVe (New York: Peter Versification, trans. Grant C. Roti and Jacqueline
Lang, 1984); Butterfield, Poetry and Music, pp. de La Chapelle Skulby, ed. Jan Ziolkowski
75–102. (Washington DC: Catholic University of
24 For a convenient edition, see Samuel N. America Press, 2004).
Rosenberg and Hans Tischler, eds., with 2 Cf. Friedrich Leo, Venanti Honori
Marie-Geneviève Grossel, Chansons des Clementiani Fortunati presbyteri Italici opera
trouvères: Chanter m’estuet (Paris: Le Livre de poetica, Monumenta Germaniae Historica,
Poche, 1995), no. 97, pp. 388–92. Auctores antiquissimi IV/1 (Berlin: Weidmann,
25 Refrain no. 17 in the Tournoi. See Table 1. 1881), ‘Index rei metricae’, p. 326.
26 Hans Tischler, ed., The Montpellier Codex, 4 3 Analecta Hymnica medii aevi, ed. C. Blune
vols. (vol. IV ed. and trans. Susan Stakel and Joel and G. M. Dreves, 55 vols. (Leipzig: Fues’s
C. Relihan), Recent Researches in the Music of Verlag [R. Reisland], 1886–1922; repr. Frankfurt
the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance 2–8 am Main: Minerva, 1961), vol. XIX, pp. 260–1,
(Madison, WI: A. R. Editions, 1978–85), no. 472; pp. 146–7, no. 126; pp. 192–3, no. 171.
hereafter Mo. Henceforth AH.
27 F-Pn fonds fr. 847, R1700 (R = G. Raynauds 4 Jan M. Ziolkowski, Nota Bene: Reading
Bibliographie des altfranzösischen Liedes, neu Classics and Writing Melodies in the Early Middle
bearbeitet und ergänzt von Hans Spanke, I, ed. Ages, Publications of the Journal of Medieval
Hans Spanke [Leiden, 1955; repr. with index, Latin 7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007); Alma Colk
1980]). Santosuosso, ‘Music in Bede’s De temporum
28 Edward H. Roesner, ed., Le Roman de Fauvel ratione : An 11th-Century Addition to MS
in the Edition of Mesire Chaillou de Pesstain: A London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian B.
Reproduction in Facsimile of the Complete VI’, Scriptorium 43 (1989), pp. 255–9; Silvia
Wälli, Melodien aus mittelalterlichen 16 Knapp, Thirty-Five Conductus, pp. 40–1,

Horaz-Handschriften: Edition und Interpretation from F, fol. 230r–v, cf. Ma = MS Madrid,
der Quellen, Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi, Biblioteca Nacional 20846, fols. 139r–v, Hu =
Subsidia 3 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2002), p. 55. MS Burgos, Monasterio de Las Huelgas 9, fol.
5 See e.g. Wälli, Melodien, pp. 253–89; for 101v.
elision, contrast, for example, p. 189 (miserarum 17 AH, vol. L, pp. 602–16, no. 398.
est, lavere aut elided) with pp. 189, 200 18 Knapp, Thirty-Five Conductus, pp. 98–100,
(pulverem Olympicum, presidium et prised from F, fols. 327r–v; W1 = MS Wolfenbüttel,
apart). Herzog August Bibliothek 628 (677), fol.
6 AH, vol. L, pp. 317–18, no. 244; for one 111(102)r, Ma, fol. 101r.
version of the medieval chant see The Liber 19 Ed. Otto Schumann, in Alfons Hilka and
Usualis, with Introduction and Rubrics in English Otto Schumann, eds., Carmina Burana, 2 vols.
(Tournai and New York: Desclée, 1961), p. 273. in 4 (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuch-
7 Owen Rees, ed., Aires Fernandez (fl. ca. 1550): handlung, 1930–70), vol. I/2, pp. 298–301, no.
Alma Redemptoris Mater, Asperges me, Lumen ad 179, stanza 8, l. 1, from Munich, Bayerische
revelationem, Mapa Mundi Renaissance Staatsbibliothek, clm 4660, fol. 70v.
Performing Scores, Series A: Spanish and 20 Ibid., pp. 53–8, no. 77 (fols. 31v–33v),
Portuguese Church Music 182 (Lochs [Isle of stanzas 1. 1, 2. 1, 8. 1–4 = fols. 31v, 32r.
Lewis]: Mapa Mundi, 2002), pp. 2–4. 21 On the origins of the motet, and discussion
8 See Victorinus, Ars Palaemonis de metrica of some Latin texts, see Mark Everist, French
institutione, Grammatici Latini, ed. Heinrich Motets in the Thirteenth Century: Music, Poetry
Keil, 8 vols. (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1855–80; and Genre, Cambridge Studies in Medieval and
repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1961), vol. VI, p. 206 Renaissance Music (Cambridge University Press,
(henceforth GLK), and Audax, De metro, GLK, 1994), pp. 15–42.
vol. VII, p. 331, who are thought to draw on the 22 F, fols. 405r–v, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August
same fourth-century source. Bibliothek 1099 (1206) fols. 174v–175r, Hu MS,
9 AH, vol. LI, pp. 340–6, no. 252. Fifteen lines fols. 92r–93r; Higini Anglès, ed., fols. El còdex
in this verse-form are found appended to the musical de Las Huelgas (música a veus dels segles
trochaic tetrameters of Venantius’s Pange lingua; XIII–XIV): introducció, facsı́mil i transcripció, 3
see AH, vol. XXVII, p. 96. vols., Biblioteca de Catalunya, Publicacions del
10 AH, vol. LI, pp. 140–2, no. 123, stanza 4, v. 1. Departament de Música 6 (Barcelona Institut
11 For sources see Christopher Page, Latin d’Estudis Catalans, 1931), no. 90: vol. I; pp.
Poetry and Conductus Rhythm in Medieval 249–50, vol. III, pp. 151–5.
France, RMA Monographs 8 (London: Royal 23 Anglès’s edition includes the clausula (from
Musical Association, 1997), pp. 49–53. F, fol. 174v) and the vernacular texts.
12 Janet Knapp, ed., Thirty-Five Conductus for 24 MS Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Lit. 115
Two and Three Voices, Collegium Musicum 6 (olim Ed. IV. 6), fol. 8r–v (no. 14 in the editions
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Department of of Aubry and Anderson), triplum, vv. 4–5.
Music Graduate School, 1965), p. 46, verses 4, 25 Text ed. Emile Dahnk, L’Hérésie de Fauvel,
10 = bars 8–10, 21–3, from F (= MS Florence, Leipziger romanische Studien II, Literatur-
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 29. 1), wissenschaftliche Reihe 4 (Leipzig and Paris:
fols. 239v–240r. C. & E. Vogel, 1935), pp. 67–8, pièce musicale
13 AH, vol. LI, pp. 61–3, no. 61; for stress on 33, triplum, vv. 15–16, from MS Bibliothèque
the second syllable see stanza 7, l. 1 tu nobis nationale de France, f. fr. 146, fol. 10r. On the
dona fontem lacrimarum. dispute over whether this or the version
14 For a (?)sixth-century approximation to the addressed to ‘Ludowice’ in MS f. fr. 571, fol.
rhythm, though without rhyme or stanzaic 144r is the original see contributions to
form, see David Howlett, Cambro-Latin Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey, Fauvel
Compositions: Their Competence and Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in
Cratfsmanship (Dublin: Four Courts Press, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS
1998), pp. 26–7. français 146 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
15 See Paul Gerhard Schmidt, ‘The Quotation 26 Primum argumentum, vv. 5–6, ed. Heinrich
in Goliardic Poetry: The Feast of Fools and the Besseler, rev. David Fallows, Guillelmi Dufay
Goliardic Strophe cum auctoritate’, in Peter opera omnia, vol. VI, Cantiones, Corpus
Godman and Oswyn Murray, eds., Latin Poetry Mensurabilis Musicae 1 (Stuttgart: American
and the Classical Tradition: Essays in Medieval Institute of Musicology, 1995), no. 9.
and Renaissance Literature (Oxford University 27 Solutio primi argumenti, vv. 3–4; secundum
Press, 1990), pp. 39–55. argumentum, even lines.
28 Leo Schrade, ed., Guillaume de Machaut: 43 Magnanimae gentis / Nexus amicitiae / Haec
Œuvres complètes, vol. II, Les Motets (Monaco: est vera fraternitas, triplum, bars 77–88, in
Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1977), no. 23, pp. Heinrich Besseler, ed., Guillelmi Dufay Opera
82–9, triplum, bars 53–63, 194–8. In the omnia, vol. I, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 1
motetus génitrix rhymes with vı́ctrix (the c was (Rome: American Institute of Musicology,
probably silent), ı́ter with virı́liter (bars 16–17, 1966), no. 17, pp. xxii, 76–80 at 77–8, from
22–4; 113, 119–21). ModB = Modena, Biblioteca Estense, α. X. 1. 11
29 See Les Fleurs du mal, 67 (60), ‘Franciscae (Lat. 37, olim VI. H. 15), fols. 63v–64r.
meae laudes’. 44 But even the great humanist Politian can
30 Aosta, Biblioteca del Seminario Maggiore, write accentual Ambrosians (O virgo
Cod. 15 (olim A1 D 19), fols. 4v−7r; Kurt von prudentissima, Ecce ancilla Domini) and a
Fischer and F. Alberto Gallo, eds., Polyphonic lament for Lorenzo de’ Medici (Quis dabit capiti
Music of the Fourteenth Century, vol. XIII, meo) in pure syllabic verse (8, 8, 8, 5, 5) without
Italian Sacred and Ceremonial Music (Monaco: regard to accent; however, these poems are
Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1987), no. 49, pp. unrhymed and respect elision except in the
220–7, motetus, bars 152–61. phrase ecce | ancilla (Luke 1:38), heard in church
31 Ursula Günther, ed., The Motets of the with hiatus.
Manuscripts Chantilly, Musée Condé, 564 (olim
1047) and Modena, Biblioteca Estense, α. M. 5, 14 Compositional trajectories
25 (olim lat. 568), Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 1 The possibility of microtones in early chant is
39 (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, controversial, but is given less credence now
1965), no. 3, pp. xxiv–xxvii, 8–13. than formerly. See David Hiley, Western
32 Andrew Wathey, ‘The Motets of Philippe de Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford: Clarendon
Vitry and the Fourteenth-Century Renaissance’, Press, 1993), pp. 361 and 388.
Early Music History 12 (1993), 119–50. 2 Example 14.1, the anonymous respond
33 Frank Ll. Harrison, ed., Musicorum collegio: (refrain) of Exsurge domine, a Gregorian gradual
Fourteenth-Century Musicians’ Motets (Monaco: of ca800, is adapted from The Liber Usualis
Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1986), no. 2, pp. 7–10. (Tournai: Desclée, 1956), pp. 553–4.
34 Ibid., no. 1, pp. 1–6, bars 1–3. 3 On third- and fourth-mode graduals, see
35 Gordon A. Anderson, ed., Motets of the Willi Apel, Gregorian Chant (Bloomington:
Manuscript La Clayette, Paris, Bibliothèque Indiana University Press, 1958), pp. 351–4. On
nationale, nouv. acq. f. fr. 13521, Corpus third-mode graduals and Exsurge domine in
Scriptorum de Musica 68 (Rome: American particular, see Richard Crocker, ‘Chants of the
Institute of Musicology 1975), no. 11, pp. 14–15. Roman Mass,’ in Richard Crocker and David
36 Leo Schrade, ed., Philippe de Vitry: Complete Hiley, eds., The New Oxford History of Music,
Works (Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, vol. II, The Early Middle Ages to 1300, new edn
1984), no. 7, pp. 20–5, at p. 23, bars 102–4. (In (Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 174–222.
the triplum incipit qui is corrupt for quid.) 4 Psalms were sung in the liturgy by rising to,
37 Ibid., no. 14, pp. 50–3. encircling, and falling from a reciting tone (the
38 Günther, Motets, no. 2, pp. xxi–xxiii, 4–7. pitch to which most syllables were set), in a kind
39 Ibid., no. 15, pp. lxii–lxv, 66–70. of inflected monotone. As psalm singing
40 Margaret Bent and Anne Hallmark, eds., The became elaborated with refrains (the responds
Works of Johannes Ciconia (Monaco: Éditions de of responsorial psalmody and the antiphons of
l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1985), no. 19, pp. 103–7, 224–5. antiphonal psalmody), the refrains tended to
41 For detailed discussion see Leofranc retain the feature of an important and reiterated
Holford-Strevens, ‘Du Fay the Poet? Problems in secondary pitch above the final. This pitch
the Texts of His Motets’, Early Music History 16 correlated with mode; refrain melodies with
(1997), pp. 97–160. final on E in third mode, F in fifth mode and G
42 See Jeffrey Dean, ‘Okeghem’s Valediction? in eighth mode mostly feature a prominent
The Meaning of Intemerata Dei mater’, in secondary tone, or reciting tone, on the C above.
Philippe Vendrix, ed., Johannes Ockeghem: Actes 5 Example 14.2, the beginning of Hildegard’s
du XLe Colloque international d’études chorus In principio, is adapted from Claude
humanistes, Tours, 3–8 février 1997 (Paris: Palisca, ed., Norton Anthology of Western Music,
Klincksieck, 1998), pp. 521–70; cf. Heinz-Jürgen vol. I; Ancient to Baroque, 4th edn (New York:
Winkler, ‘Zur Vertonung von Mariendichtung Norton, 2001), pp. 35–7.
in antiken Versmaßen bei Johannes Ockeghem 6 Example 14.3, the sequence Fulgens preclara,
und Johannes Regis’, in Vendrix, Ockeghem, pp. is adapted from W. Thomas Marrocco and
571–93. Nicholas Sandon, Medieval Music, Oxford
Anthology of Music I (London: Oxford example is adapted from Archibald Davison and
University Press, 1977), pp. 34–5, no. 11h. They Willi Apel, eds., Historical Anthology of Music,
transcribe it from London, British Library, rev. edn, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Lansdowne 462, fols. 50v–51v. Another version University Press, 1964), vol. I, p. 22, no. 25c.
is available in Sarah Fuller, The European Musical Example 14.6b, Laudes deo, is from London,
Heritage 800–1750 (New York: Knopf, 1987), pp. British Library, Harley 3965, fol. 137; this
11–13, no. 1g, which has been transcribed from example is adapted from Frank Ll. Harrison,
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fonds latin 1112, Ernest H. Sanders and Peter M. Lefferts, eds.,
fols. 11v–12; it differs significantly in the level of English Music for Mass and Offices, vol. I,
transposition of individual phrases. Neither Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century 16
version fits comfortably into the eight-mode (Paris and Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre,
scheme (see the comment in Fuller, p. 22). 1983), pp. 191–4, no. 82.
7 Example 14.4, the versus Ortum floris, is Example 14.6c, Ave celi regina virginum, is
edited here from Cambridge, University Library, from Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College,
Hh.vi.11, fols. 69v–70; for additional 512/543, fols. 258v–259; a three-voice
bibliography, see Gordon A. Anderson, ‘Notre concordance is edited in Frank Ll. Harrison,
Dame and Related Conductus – a Catalogue Ernest H. Sanders and Peter M. Lefferts, eds.,
Raisonné’, Miscellanea Musicologica 6 (1972), English Music for Mass and Offices, vol. II,
pp. 153–229 at p. 214, no. L81. Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century,
8 John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle vol. XVII (Paris and Monaco: Éditions de
Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and Drama, l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1986), pp. 82–6, no. 38.
1050–1350 (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 11 Discussed with example in Franchino
pp. 119–55. Gaffurio, Practica musice (Milan, 1496), Book
9 Contrary motion, rather than parallel III, Chapter 14.
motion, is championed in the theory and 12 Example 14.7, a clausula on Nostrum, is
practice of elite French polyphony of the later adapted from Rebecca A. Baltzer, ed., Les
Middle Ages. But a quotidian style of discanting clausulas à deux voix du manuscrit de Florence,
in parallel perfect fifths above the given part Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Pluteus 29.1,
(fifthing, also referred to as diapentizare, fascicule V, Le Magnus liber organi de
quintare, quintizans) is still in evidence in both Notre-Dame de Paris 5 (Monaco: Éditions de
theory and practice; see Sarah Fuller, ‘Discant l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1995), p. 78, no. 97.
and the Theory of Fifthing’, Acta Musicologica 50 13 See Peter M. Lefferts, ‘Signature-systems and
(1978), pp. 241–75. tonal types in the fourteenth-century French
Example 14.5a, Ipsi soli, an organum from chanson’, Plainsong and Medieval Music 4
Guido’s Micrologus, Chapter XIX, ca1025, is (1995), pp. 117–47, and Lefferts, ‘Machaut’s
adapted from Fuller, The European Musical B-flat Balade Honte, Paour (B25)’, in Elizabeth
Heritage, p. 33. Eva Leach, ed., Machaut’s Music: New
Example 14.5b is an anonymous polyphonic Interpretations (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer,
version of a Christmas Matins lesson tone from 2003), pp. 161–74.
London, British Library, Additional 28598, fol. 14 Example 14.8, from Machaut’s virelai Se je
14v; the present example is adapted from souspir, is adapted from Leo Schrade, ed., The
Theodor Göllner, Die mehrstimmigen Works of Guillaume de Machaut, Polyphonic
liturgischen Lesungen, 2 vols. (Tutzing: Hans Music of the Fourteenth Century, vol. III
Schneider, 1969), vol. I, p. 11, no. A4. (Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1956),
Example 14.5c is from a polyphonic setting of p. 189.
the sequence Victime paschali laudes in Burgos, 15 Machaut ballades B2, B5, B9 and B24 (using
Monasterio de Las Huelgas 9, fol. 54v; it is Leo Schrade’s numeration) are excellent
adapted from the edition in Higini Anglès, ed., examples of such underfifth harmonization. For
El còdex musical de Las Huelgas, 3 vols. a fuller discussion and more examples, see
(Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans and Lefferts, ‘Signature-systems and tonal types’,
Biblioteca de Catalunya, 1931), vol. III, p. 92, pp. 118–22 and Table 1.
no. 63. 16 Example 14.9, from Giovanni da Firenze’s
Example 14.5d is from a polyphonic setting of madrigal Nel meço, is adapted from the edition
the hymn Conditor alme siderum in London, by W. Thomas Marrocco in Italian Secular Music
British Library, Additional 16975, fol. 166r. by Magister Piero, Giovanni da Firenze, Jacopo da
10 Example 14.6a is from a polyphonic hymn Bologna, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth
for Saint Magnus, Nobilis humilis, from Uppsala, Century, vol. VI (Monaco: Éditions de
Universitetsbiblioteket, C.233, fols. 19v–20r; this l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1967), pp. 48–9.
17 Example 14.10, the versus Soli nitorem, is 10 For a good overview see Giles Brown,
found in Florence, Biblioteca Medicea ‘Introduction: The Carolingian Renaissance’, in
Laurenziana, Plut.29.1, fols. 327v–328v and Rosamond McKitterick, ed., Carolingian
Burgos, Monasterio de Las Huelgas 9, fols. Culture: Emulation and Innovation (Cambridge
138r–193v. For other modern editions, see University Press, 1994), pp. 1–51.
Anglès, ed., El còdex musical de Las Huelgas, vol. 11 Hartmut Möller, ‘Zur Frage der
III, pp. 324–7, no. 149; Richard H. Hoppin, ed., musikgeschichtlichen Bedeutung der Academia
Anthology of Medieval Music (New York: am Hofe Karls des Grossen: Die Musica Albini’,
Norton, 1978), pp. 69–71, no. 37; and Gordon in Wolf Frobenius, et al., eds., Akademie und
A. Anderson, ed. Notre Dame and Related Musik: Erscheinungsweisen und Wirkungen des
Conductus: Opera Omnia, vol. V (Henryville, Akademiegedankens in Kultur- und
Ottawa and Binningen: Institute of Mediaeval Musikgeschichte – Institutionen, Veranstaltungen,
Music, 1979), pp. xi, 23–5, 114, no. J15. Schriften. Festschrift für Werner Braun zum 65.
Geburtstag (Saarbrücken: Saarbrücken
Druckerei und Verlag, 1993), pp. 269–88.
15 Ecclesiastical foundations and secular 12 The Latin text is accessible online through
institutions the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML)
1 Rosamond McKitterick, by a careful and housed at the Indiana University School of
judicious sifting of the evidence, finds support Music. (Go to 6th–8th-century files, ALCMUS.)
for a somewhat broader literacy than my 13 See Michel Huglo, ‘Un tonaire du Graduel
statement might imply; see her The Carolingians de la fin du VIIIe siècle (Bibliothèque Nationale
and the Written Word (Cambridge University lat.13159)’, Revue grégorienne 31 (1952), pp.
Press, 1989), especially pp. 211–70 on the 176–86, 224–33, and his Les tonaires: inventaire,
literacy of the laity. analyse, comparaison (Paris: Société française de
2 A significant anticipation of and impetus for musicologie, 1971), pp. 26–8.
the Carolingian reforms came from Bishop 14 The Latin edition of Charlemagne’s
Chrodegang of Metz, who took office in the Admonitio generalis is in Monumenta
740s and died in 766. For an excellent discussion Germaniae Historica, Capitularia I/22
of his role see M. A. Claussen, The Reform of the (Hanover: Hahn, 1883), pp. 52–62; an English
Frankish Church: Chrodegang of Metz and the translation in P. D. King, Charlemagne:
‘Regula canonicorum’ in the Eighth Century Translated Sources (Kendal, Cumbria: author,
(Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also the 1987); see the discussion in Rosamond
comprehensive study by Yitzhak Hen, The Royal McKitterick, The Frankish Church and the
Patronage of Liturgy in Frankish Gaul to the Carolingian Reforms, 789–895 (London: Royal
Death of Charles the Bald (877) (London: Henry Historical Society, 1977), and Brown,
Bradshaw Society, 2001). ‘Carolingian Renaissance’, pp. 17–21.
3 Excerpts quoted in English are from Einhard: 15 A useful collection of essays is James C. King
The Life of Charlemagne, trans. Samuel Epes and Werner Vogler, eds., The Culture of the
Turner (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1880.) Abbey of St Gall: An Overview, translated from
For a more recent translation, see Paul Edward the German (Die Kultur der Abtei Sankt Gallen)
Dutton, ed. and trans., Charlemagne’s Courtier: by James C. King (Stuttgart: Belser, 1991).
The Complete Einhard (Peterborough, Ont.: 16 St Gall codices can be found at CESG
Broadview Press, 1998). (Codices Electronici Sangallenses),
4 The Latin word here translated as ‘music’ is www.cesg.unifr.ch/de/index.htm.
acroama –atis, a noun meaning an 17 A facsimile of Stiftsbibliothek MS 359 is in
entertainment, especially musical, or an Paléographie Musicale, 2nd series, vol. II,
entertainer, that is, reader, actor, or singer. Cantatorium, IXe siècle: no. 359 de la
5 Einhard, Chapter 24. Bibliothèque de Saint-Gall (Solesmes: Atelier de
6 Ibid., Chapter 29. Paléographie Musicale de Solesmes, 1924).
7 Ibid., Chapter 25. 18 See the following Publications by Susan
8 Charlemagne’s two-storey octagonal church Rankin: ‘Notker und Tuotilo: Schöpferische
at Aachen took as its model the two-storey Gestalter in einer neuen Zeit’, Schweizer Jahrbuch
octagonal church of San Vitale in Ravenna, built für Musikwissenschaft 11 (1991), pp. 17–42; ‘The
by the powerful Emperor Justinian two Earliest Sources of Notker’s Sequences: St Gallen
centuries earlier. This was a conscious Vadiana 317, and Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale
Carolingian attempt to connect with past lat. 10587’, Early Music History 10 (1991), pp.
imperial splendour. 201–33; and ‘From Tuotilo to the First
9 Einhard, Chapter 26. Manuscripts: The Shaping of a Trope Repertory
at Saint Gall’, in Wulf Arlt and Gunilla Björkvall, 27 Chansonniers that begin with a collection of
eds., Recherches nouvelles sur les tropes Thibaut’s songs include Paris, Bibliothèque de
liturgiques, Studia Latina Stockholmiensia 36, l’Arsenal 5198 (the Chansonnier de l’Arsenal,
(Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, MS K); Paris, F-Pn fonds fr. 845 (MS N): Paris,
1993), pp. 395–413. MS 381 is available in F-Pn fonds fr. 12615 (the Chansonnier de
facsimile in Wulf Arlt and Susan Rankin, eds., Noailles, MS T); and Paris, F-Pn n.a.f. 1050
Stiftsbibliothek Sankt Gallen Codices 484 & 381, (Chansonnier de Clairambault, MS X). See
(Winterthur: Amadeus, 1996). Kathleen J. Brahney, ed. and trans., The Lyrics of
19 The Old Minster was replaced by the current Thibaut de Champagne (New York: Garland,
cathedral after the Norman conquest of 1066. 1989), and Hendrik van der Werf, ed.,
Winchester was one of many English cathedrals Trouvères-Melodien, II, Monumenta Monodica
run by monastics rather than secular canons, but Medii Aevi 12 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1979).
this form of monastic organization was almost 28 A colour facsimile is in El ‘Códice Rico’ de las
unknown among cathedrals on the Continent. Cantigas de Alfonso el Sabio: Ms. T.I.1 de la
20 The English translation of Ethelwold’s Biblioteca de El Escorial (Madrid, 1979); there is
account by E. K. Chambers in The Medieval also a sepia facsimile and edition with
Stage, vol. II (1903), pp. 14ff., is widely commentary of El Escorial, Biblioteca del Real
reprinted – for example, in Music and Letters 27 Monasterio, b.I.2 (also known as j.b.2) by Higini
(1946), pp. 5–6. Anglès, ed., La música de las cantigas de Santa
21 Useful are Richard L. Crocker, The Early Marı́a del rey Alfonso el Sabio, 3 vols. in 4
Medieval Sequence (Berkeley and Los Angeles: (Barcelona: Biblioteca Central, 1943–64).
University of California Press, 1977), and 29 See Barbara Newman, ed., Saint Hildegard of
Alejandro E. Planchart, The Repertory of Tropes Bingen: Symphonia: A Critical Edition of the
at Winchester (Princeton University Press, 1977). ‘Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum’
22 See Andreas Holschneider, Die Organa von (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, vol. I
Winchester (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968), 1988, vol. II 1998), with translations but only
and Susan Rankin, ‘Winchester Polyphony: The four musical transcriptions; W. Berschin and H.
Early Theory and Practice of Organum’, in Schipperges, eds., Hildegard von Bingen:
Susan Rankin and David Hiley, eds., Music in Symphonia: Gedichte und Gesänge (Gerlingen:
the Medieval English Liturgy (Oxford: Clarendon Lambert Schneider, 1995). Both manuscripts,
Press, 1993), pp. 59–99. Dendermonde (Sint-Pieter- en Paulusabdij
23 See, most recently, the essays in Bonnie Codex 9, and Wiesbaden, Hessische
Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons, eds., Eleanor Landesbibliothek, MS 2 (‘Riesenkodex’), have
of Aquitaine, Lord and Lady (New York: Palgrave been issued in facsimile.
Macmillan, 2002), and, with specific reference 30 Audrey E. Davidson, ed., The ‘Ordo
to music, Rebecca A. Baltzer, ‘Music in the Life virtutum’ of Hildegard of Bingen (Kalamazoo:
and Times of Eleanor of Aquitaine’, in William Western Michigan University, 1985;
W. Kibler, ed., Eleanor of Aquitaine: Patron and performance edition); see also Peter Dronke, ed.
Politician (Austin: University of Texas Press, and trans. ‘Play of the Virtues’, in Dronke, ed.
1976), pp. 61–80. and trans. Nine Medieval Plays (Cambridge
24 See Margarita Egan, trans., The Vidas of the University Press, 1994), pp. 161–81.
Troubadours (New York and London: Garland, 31 See Benjamin Guérard, ed., Cartulaire de
1984). l’église Notre-Dame de Paris (4 vols., Paris:
25 Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, in Mario Crapelet, 1850), introduction to vol. I, pp.
Roques, ed., Les romans de Chrétien de Troyes, xcix–cviii.
vol. I (Paris: Champion, 1953), lines 1983–2000. 32 Craig Wright, Music and Ceremony at Notre
The translation is my adaptation of W. W. Dame of Paris 500–1550 (Cambridge University
Comfort, Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Press, 1989), pp. 18–27.
Romances (London: Everyman’s Library, 1914), 33 The medieval Parisian monetary system was
p. 27. based on 12 deniers to a sou and 20 sous to a
26 Erec et Enide, lines 6330–33; compare the livre, or pound; thus, it was the ultimate
translation in Comfort, Crétien de Troyes, p. 82. ancestor of the former British system of pence,
It quickly becomes a topos in medieval romances shillings, and pounds that lasted through much
to list as many musical instruments as the of the twentieth century.
author can name when he wishes to show the 34 See Patricia Stirnemann, ‘Les bibliothèques
importance of an occasion and indicate that no princières et privées au XIIe et XIIIe siècles’, in
expense was spared. Such lists should not imply André Vernet, ed., Les bibliothèques médiévales:
a sort of twelfth-century Poitou Philharmonic. Du VIe siècle à 1530, Histoire des bibliothèques
françaises 1 (Paris: Éditions du Cercle de la 2 G. Friedlein, ed., Anicii Manlii Torquati

Librairie / Promodès, 1989), pp. 173–91. Severini Boetii De institutione arithmetica libri
35 Barbara Haggh and Michel Huglo, ‘Magnus duo. De institutione musica libri quinque. Accedit
liber – Maius munus: Origine et destinée du Geometria quae fertur Boetii (Leipzig: B. G.
manuscrit F’, Revue de musicologie 90 (2004), pp. Teubner, 1867/R); Boethius, Fundamentals of
193–230. Music, trans., C. M. Bower (New Haven: Yale
36 Catherine Parsoneault, ‘The Montpellier University Press, 1989); M. Bernhard and C. M.
Codex: Royal Influence and Musical Taste in Bower, eds., Glossa maior in institutionem
Late Thirteenth-Century Paris’, PhD diss., musicam Boethii (Munich: Verlag der
University of Texas at Austin, 2001, especially Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaft,
pp. 153–226. 1993–6); G. Marzi, ed., An.M.T. Severini Boethii
37 See Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey, de institutione musica (Rome: Istituto italiano
eds., Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, per la storia della musica, 1990).
and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de 3 J. Willis, ed., Martianus Capella: De nuptiis
France, MS français 146 (Oxford: Clarendon Philologiae et Mercurii (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner,
Press, 1998). 1983).
38 An edition and translation of the Remede, 4 R. A. B. Mynors, ed., Cassiodori Senatoris
including the music and photographs of all the Institutiones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937);
miniatures from MS ‘C’, is in James I. Wimsatt partial English translation in Oliver Strunk,
and William W. Kibler, eds., Guillaume de Source Readings in Music History (New York: W.
Machaut: Le Jugement du roy de Behaigne and W. Norton & Co., 1950) (henceforth,
Remede de Fortune, music edited by Rebecca A. StrunkSR1), pp. 87–92, and O. Strunk, Source
Baltzer (Athens, GA, University of Georgia Readings in Music History, rev. edn, ed. Leo
Press, 1988). Treitler (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998)
39 For the most important material concerning (henceforth, StrunkSR2), pp. 143–8; M.
Machaut, see the indispensable Guillaume de Adriaen, ed., Cassiodorus: Expositio psalmorum
Machaut: A Guide to Research, by Lawrence Earp (Turnhout: Brepols, 1958).
(New York and London: Garland, 1995), and 5 F. Arévalo, ed., S. Isidori hispalensis episcopi
Anne Walters Robertson, Guillaume de Machaut opera omnia (Rome: Typis A. Fulgonii,
and Reims: Context and Meaning in His Musical 1797–1803); also in Patrologiae cursus completus,
Works (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols. (Paris:
40 See Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, passim. Garnier, 1844–1864), vols. LXXXI–LXXXIV;
41 See Pierre Tucoo-Chala, Gaston Fébus, un Isidore of Seville, Isidori hispalensis episcopi
grand prince d’occident au XIVe siècle (Pau: Etymologiarum sive originum libri xx, ed. W. M.
Marrimpouey, 1976); Jean-Jacques Casteret, Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
‘Musique et musiciens à la cour de Gaston 1911); English translation of book III, chapters
Fébus’, PhD diss., Université de Paris IV, 1992; 15–23 in StrunkSR1, pp. 93–100, SR2, pp.
and Alice V. Clark, ‘Vernacular Dedicatory 149–55; J. Oroz Reta and M.-A. Marcos
Motets in Fourteenth-Century France’, Journal Casquero, eds., Etimologı́as, 2 vols. (Madrid:
of Musicological Research 20 (2000), pp. 41–69. Editorial Católica, vol. I 1982–3, vol. II 1993–4)
42 See Beth Anne Lee-De Amici, ‘Ad (parallel Latin and Spanish trans.); P. K.
Sustentacionem Fidei Christiani: Sacred Music Marshall, ed., Etymologies, book II (Paris: Les
and Ceremony in Medieval Oxford’, PhD diss., Belles Lettres, 1983); C. M. Lawson, ed., Sancti
University of Pennsylvania, 1999. Isidori episcopi hispalensis De ecclesiasticis officiis,
43 Anne Bagnall Yardley, ‘“Ful weel she soong Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 113
the service dyvyne”: The Cloistered Musician in (Turnhout: Brepols, 1989).
the Middle Ages’, in Jane Bowers and Judith 6 Scholars generally refer to the chant that is
Tick, eds., Women Making Music: The Western transmitted in early manuscripts as
Art Tradition, 1150–1950 (Urbana: University of Frankish-Roman chant since it most likely
Illinois, 1986), pp. 26–7, for a table of polyphony represents an amalgamation of what had been
in Continental nunneries. For the evidence in sung in the Frankish kingdom before
English nunneries, see Yardley, Performing Piety: Charlemagne’s reforms and the Roman version.
Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries See L. Treitler, ‘Homer and Gregory: The
(New York: Palgrave Press, 2006), pp. 109–11. Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant’,
Musical Quarterly 60, (1974), pp. 333–72; H.
16 Theory and notation Hucke, ‘Toward a New Historical View of
1 C. V. Palisca, ‘Theory, theorists’, Grove Music Gregorian Chant’, Journal of the American
Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com. Musicological Society 33 (1980), pp. 437–67; H.
van der Werf, The Emergence of Gregorian Chant American Institute of Musicology, 1955);
(Rochester, NY: author, 1983); D. Hughes, Palisca, ed., Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music,
‘Evidence for the Traditional View of the pp. 57–83; D. Pesce, Guido d’Arezzo’s ‘Regulae
Transmission of Gregorian Chant’, Journal of the rhythmicae’, ‘Prologus in antiphonarium’, and
American Musicological Society 40 (1987), pp. ‘Epistola ad Michaelem’: A Critical Text and
377–404; K. Levy, ‘Charlemagne’s Archetype of Translation with an Introduction, Annotations,
Gregorian Chant’, Journal of the American Indices and New Manuscript Inventories (Ottawa:
Musicological Society 40 (1987), pp. 1–30; J. Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1999).
McKinnon, ‘The Emergence of Gregorian Chant 13 See D. Pesce, The Affinities and Medieval
in the Carolingian Era’, in J. McKinnon, ed., Transposition (Bloomington: Indiana University
Antiquity and the Middle Ages (London: Press, 1987), Chapter 3, ‘Hexachords: Seats of
Macmillan, 1990), pp. 88–119; D. Hiley, Western the Modes’.
Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford: Clarendon 14 L. Ellinwood, ed., Musica Hermanni
Press, 1993). Contracti (Rochester, NY: Eastman School of
7 L. Gushee, ed., Aurelianus Reomensis: Musica Music, 1936) (ed. and Eng. trans.).
disciplina, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 15 J. Smits van Waesberghe, ed., Johannes
(henceforth CSM) 21 ([Rome]: American Afflighemensis: De musica cum tonario, CSM 1
Institute of Musicology, 1975); The Discipline of (Rome: American Institute of Musicology,
Music (ca. 843) by Aurelian of Réôme, trans. J. 1950); Palisca, ed., Hucbald, Guido, and John on
Ponte (Colorado Springs: Colorado College Music, pp. 101–87.
Music Press, 1968). 16 W1 = Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August
8 J. Chailley, ed., Alia musica: traité de musique Bibliothek 628; F = Florence, Biblioteca
du IXe siècle (Paris: Centre de Documentation Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 29.1; W2 =
Universitaire et Société d’Édition Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek 1099.
d’Enseignement Supérieur Réunis, 1965); Edward H. Roesner has undertaken the
E. B. Heard, ‘“Alia musica”: A Chapter in the supervision of an edition of the Notre Dame
History of Music Theory’ (PhD diss., University repertory: Le Magnus liber organi de
of Wisconsin, 1966) (edn and Eng. trans.); Notre-Dame de Paris (Monaco: Éditions de
partial English translation in StrunkSR2, l’Oiseau-Lyre, ca1993–).
pp. 196–8. 17 De plana musica exists in four versions: no. 1
9 A. Traub, ed. and trans.,‘Hucbald von is in G. Reaney, A. Gilles and J. Maillard, eds.,
Saint-Amand: De harmonica institutione’, Philippi de Vitriaco Ars nova, CSM 8 ([Rome]:
Beiträge zur Gregorianik 7 (1989), pp. 3–101; Y. American Institute of Musicology, 1964), pp.
Chartier, ed., L’oeuvre musicale d’Hucbald de 13–21; English translation in L. Plantinga,
Saint-Amand: les compositions et le traité de ‘Philippe de Vitry’s Ars Nova: A Translation’,
musique ([Saint-Laurent, Québec]: Bellarmin, Journal of Music Theory 5 (1961), pp. 204–23; all
1995) (critical edition of musical works and the four are in C. Meyer, ed., Musica plana Johannis
Musica, with French translation and de Garlandia (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1998),
commentary); C. V. Palisca, ed., Hucbald, Guido, pp. 3–62. De mensurabili musica is in Charles
and John on Music: Three Medieval Treatises, Edmond Henri de Coussemaker, Scriptorum de
trans. W. Babb (New Haven, CT: Yale University musica medii aevi novam seriem a Gerbertina
Press, 1978), pp. 13–44. alteram, 4 vols. (Paris: Durand, 1864–76; repr.
10 H. Schmid, ed., Musica et Scolica Enchiriadis, Hildesheim: Olms, 1963) (henceforth
una cum aliquibus tractatulis adjunctis (Munich: CoussemakerS), vol. I, pp. 175–82, and E.
Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Reimer, ed., Johannes de Garlandia: De
Wissenschaften, 1981); C. V. Palisca, ed., Musica mensurabili musica (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner,
enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis, trans. R. 1972); Eng. trans. S. Birnbaum, Johannes de
Erickson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, Garlandia: Concerning Measured Music (De
1995). mensurabili musica), Colorado College Music
11 M. Gerbert, Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica Press Translations 9 (Colorado Springs:
sacra potissimum, 3 vols. (Sankt Blasien: Typis Colorado College Music Press, 1978); partial
San-Blasianis 1784; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, English translation in StrunkSR2, pp. 223–6.
1963), vol. I, pp. 251–64; K.-W. Gümpel, ed., 18 See summary by R. A. Baltzer, ‘Johannes de
Pseudo-Odo: Dialogus de musica (forthcoming); Garlandia,’ in Grove Music Online.
partial English translation in StrunkSR1, pp. 19 The tendency to propose modal schemata
103–16, SR2, pp. 198–210. that reached beyond practice continued into the
12 Joseph Smits van Waesberghe, ed., Guidonis third quarter of the century: Magister
Aretini Micrologus, CSM 4 ([Nijmegen]: Lambertus, writing circa 1265–75, advocated a
system of nine rhythmic modes instead of six. Part VI, Musicological Studies and Documents
See Lambertus, Tractatus de musica, ed. in 31 ([Rome]: American Institute of Musicology,
CoussemakerS, vol. I, pp. 251–81; ed. in CSM, 1973).
forthcoming. 29 R. Bragard, ed., Speculum musice, CSM 3
20 1=single note; 2=2-note ligature; 3=3-note [Rome]: American Institute of Musicology,
ligature. 1955–73); partial English translation in
21 G. Reaney and A. Gilles, eds., Franconis de StrunkSR1, pp. 180–90, SR2, pp. 269–78.
Colonia Ars cantus mensurabilis, CSM 18 30 E. Rohloff, ed., Die Quellenhandschriften
([Rome]: American Institute of Musicology, zum Musiktraktat des Johannes de Grocheio
1974); StrunkSR1, pp. 139–59. SR2, pp. 226–45. (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik,1972); A.
22 Montpellier, Bibliothèque Seay, ed. and trans., Johannes de Grocheo:
Inter-Universitaire, Section Médecine, H.196: Concerning Music (De musica), Colorado
H. Tischler, ed., The Montpellier Codex, 4 vols. College Music Press Translations 1 (Colorado
(Madison, WI: A. R. Editions, 1978–85); Springs: Colorado College Music Press, 1967;
Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, lit.115 (formerly 2nd edn 1973).
Ed.IV.6): Compositions of the Bamberg 31 C. Page, ‘Johannes de Grocheio’, Grove Music
Manuscript: Bamberg Staatsbibliothek, lit. 115 Online.
(olim Ed.IV, 6), ed. Gordon A. Anderson, 32 Lucidarium in arte musice plane: Gerbert,
Corpus mensurabilis musicae (henceforth Scriptores, vol. III, pp. 64–121; J. Herlinger, ed.
CMM) 75. (Neuhausen-stuttgart: American and trans., The Lucidarium of Marchetto of
Institute of Musicology, 1977); Paris, Padua (University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, n.a.fr.13521: Pomerium in arte musice mensurate: Gerbert,
Motets of the manuscript La Clayette: Paris, Scriptores, vol. III, pp. 121–87; J. Vecchi,
Bibliothèque nationale, nouv. acq. f. fr. 13521, ed. Marcheti de Padua Pomerium, CSM 6 ([Rome]:
Gordon A. Anderson, CMM 68 ([Rome]: American Institute of Musicology, 1961); partial
American Institute of Musicology, 1975); English trans. in StrunkSR1, pp. 160–71, SR2,
Burgos, Monasterio de Las Huelgas: The Las pp. 251–61.
Huelgas manuscript: Burgos, Monasterio de Las 33 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,
Huelgas, ed. Gordon A. Anderson, CMM 79 Rossi 215 [Rs; R; VR] and Ostiglia, Opera Pia G.
(Neuhausen-Stuttgart: American Institute of Greggiati, Biblioteca Musicale, s.s. (‘Ostiglia
Musicology, 1982). fragment’): two fragments belonging to one
23 J. Yudkin, ed., De musica mensurata: The source (dated mid to late fourteenth century);
Anonymous of St Emmeram (Bloomington: editions: Nino Pirrotta, ed., The Music of
Indiana University Press, 1990) (complete Fourteenth-Century Italy, CMM 8/2
critical edn, trans., and commentary). (Amsterdam: American Institute of Musicology,
24 Petrus is likely to have studied at the 1960), pp. 15–46 (excluding OS); G. Vecchi, ed.,
University of Paris as a member of the Picard Il canzoniere musicale del codice Vaticano Rossi
nation, earning there the title Magister. No 215, Monumenta Lyrica Medii Aevi Italica 3/2
major treatise by Petrus survives, but he is cited (Università degli Studi di Bologna, 1966) (facs.
by later theorists for his innovations. See E. H. of the two sources together); V. Guaitamacchi,
Sanders and P. M. Lefferts, ‘Petrus de Cruce’, ed., Madrigali trecenteschi del frammento
Grove Music Online. ‘Greggiati’ di Ostiglia (Bologna: [s.n.], 1970);
25 CoussemakerS, i, pp. 1–155; S. M. Cserba, Italian Secular Music: Anonymous Madrigals and
ed., Der Musiktraktat des Hieronymus Moravia Cacce and the Works of Niccolò da Perugia, ed. W.
OP (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 1935). Thomas Marrocco, Polyphonic Music of the
26 Reaney et al., eds., Philippi de Vitriaco Ars Fourteenth Century (henceforth PMFC) 8
nova, CSM 8; Plantinga, ‘Philippe de Vitry’s Ars (Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1972);
Nova’. Italian Secular Music: Bartolino da Padova,
27 U. Michels, ed., Johannis de Muris Notitia Egidius de Francia, Guilielmus de Francia, Don
artis musicae et Compendium musicae practicae: Paolo da Firenze, ed. W. Thomas Marrocco,
Tractatus de musica, CSM 17 ([Rome]: PMFC 9 (Monaco: Éditions de
American Institute of Musicology, 1972), pp. l’Oiseau-Lyre,1975); N. Pirrotta, ed., Il codice
47–107; partial English translation in Rossi 215 (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana,
StrunkSR1, pp. 172–9, SR2, pp. 261–9. 1992) (facs. with introduction). Florence,
28 F. F. Hammond, ed., Walteri Odington: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Panciatichiano
Summa de speculatione musicae, CSM 14 26 (main corpus dated 1380–90 by Fischer and
([Rome]: American Institute of Musicology, Campagnolo, ca1400 by Pirrotta and Nádas);
1970); J. A. Huff, trans., De speculatione musicae. editions: The works of Francesco Landini, ed. Leo
Schrade, PMFC 4 (Monaco: Éditions de (two songs by Hasprois); CMM 39 (nos. 3, 11,
l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1958), uses I-Fn 26 as primary 13); N. S. Josephson, AMw, xxvii (1970), 41–58,
source; F. A. Gallo, ed., Il Codice musicale esp. 56–8 (no. 30); CMM 53 (1970–72) (all
Panciatichi 26 della Biblioteca Nazionale di French and Latin songs); French Secular Music
Firenze (Florence: Olschki, 1981) (facs. with Ballads and Canons, ed. Gordon K. Greene,
introduction). literary texts by Terence Scully, PMFC 20
34 Tractatus figurarum (or Tractatus de diversis (Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1982) (23
figuris): CoussemakerS, III, pp. 118–24; P. E. ballades, 1 canon); The Works of Johannes
Schreur, ed., Tractatus figurarum: Treatise on Ciconia, ed. Margaret Bent and Anne Hallmark,
Noteshapes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Latin texts edited by M. J. Connolly, PMFC 24
Press, 1989). (Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1985) (nos.
35 CoussemakerS, III, pp. 124–8; partial 45–6); PMFC 24 (1987) (17 virelais); Rondeaux
critical edn in D. Leech-Wilkinson, and Miscellaneous Pieces, ed. Gordon K. Greene,
Compositional Techniques in the Four-Part literary texts by Terence Scully, PMFC 22
Isorhythmic Motets of Philippe de Vitry and His (Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1989) (12
Contemporaries, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, rondeaux).
1989), vol. I, pp. 18–20. 37 Liber de natura et proprietate tonorum; A.
36 Chantilly, Musée Condé, 564 (formerly Seay, ed., Opera theoretica Johannis Tinctoris, 2
1047); editions: The Motets of the Manuscripts vols. in 3, CSM 22 ([Rome]: American Institute
Chantilly, Musée Condé, 564 (olim 1047) and of Musicology, 1975–8); A. Seay, trans.,
Modena, Biblioteca Estense, α. M. 5, 24 (olim lat. Concerning the Nature and Propriety of Tones. De
568), ed. Ursula Günther, CMM 39 ([Rome]: natura et proprietate tonorum (Colorado
American Institute of Musicology, 1965) (all Springs: Colorado College Music Press, 1967,
motets); Motets of French Provenance, ed. Frank 2nd edn 1976).
Ll. Harrison, French texts edited by Elizabeth 38 D. Pesce, ‘A Case for Coherent Pitch
Rutson, notes on the Latin texts by A. G. Rigg, Organization in the Thirteenth-Century Double
PMFC 5 (Monaco, Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, Motet’, Music Analysis 9/3 (October 1990),
1968) (all motets); French Secular Compositions pp. 287–318.
of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Willi Apel, edition 39 S. Fuller, ‘Modal Tenors and Tonal
of the literary texts by Samuel N. Rosenberg, 3 Orientation in Motets of Guillaume de
vols., CMM 53 ([Rome]: American Institute of Machaut’, Current Musicology, 45–7 (1990),
Musicology, 1970–2) (all chansons of basic pp. 199–245 and S. Fuller, ‘Tendencies and
corpus); Early Fifteenth-Century Music, ed. Resolutions: The Directed Progression in Ars
Gilbert Reaney, CMM 11 ([Rome]: American Nova Music’, Journal of Music Theory 36 (1992),
Institute of Musicology, 1955–[83]), part 1 pp. 229–58.
(1955) (pieces by Cordier); part 2/2 (1959) 40 Despite the infrequent usage of these
(songs by Hasprois and Johannes Haucourt); expressions by medieval theorists, modern
Aus der Frühzeit der Motette, ed. Friedrich scholars use them because they encapsulate so
Gennrich, Musikwissenschaftliche well the reasons for ficta.
Studien-Bibliothek 22–3 (Frankfurt: Langen, 41 A major study that summarizes and
1963) (16 facs. pages); Manuscript Chantilly, elaborates the points just made is K. Berger,
Musée Condé 564, ed. Gordon K. Greene, Musica ficta: Theories of Accidental Inflections in
literary texts by Terence Scully, PMFC 18–19 Vocal Polyphony from Marchetto da Padova to
(Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1981–2) Gioseffo Zarlino (Cambridge University Press,
(all chansons); Virelais, ed. Gordon K. Greene, 1987).
literary texts by Terence Scully, PMFC 21 42 A summary of currently held viewpoints
(Monaco: Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1987) regarding application of ficta is given by M. Bent
(appendix with new four-voice version of no. in ‘Music ficta’ in Grove Music Online.
100); Codex Chantilly: Bibliothèque du château 43 O. Ellsworth, ed., The Berkeley Manuscript:
de Chantilly, Ms. 564: Fac-similé, ed. Yolanda University of California Music Library, ms. 744
Plumley and Anne Stone (Turnhout: Brepols, (olim Phillipps 4450) (Lincoln: University of
2008). Modena, Biblioteca Estense e Nebraska Press, ca1984) (critical text and
Universitaria, α.M.5.24 (olim lat.568); editions: trans.).
F. Fano, ed., La cappella musicale del Duomo di 44 An overview of solmization is found in
Milano: le origini e il primo maestro di cappella, A. Hughes, ‘Solmisation’ in Grove Music
Matteo da Perugia (Milan: Ricordi, 1956) (all Online. Bent in ‘Musica ficta’, section 1.i,
mass movts and most songs by Matteo, incl. discusses musica ficta as having its basis in
some doubtful works and facs.); CMM 11/2 solmization.
17 Music manuscripts 12 For an example of the significant role sheets

1 ‘Nisi enim ab homine memoria teneantur and libelli can play in the transmission of
soni, pereunt, quia scribi non possunt’. W. M. polyphony, see A. Wathey, ‘The Production of
Lindsay, ed. Isidori hispalensis episcopi. Books of Liturgical Polyphony’, in J. Griffiths
Etymologiarum sive Originum libri xx (Oxford: and D. Pearsall, eds., Book Production and
Clarendon Press, 1911), lib. III, xv, p. 2. Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475 (Cambridge
2 Manuscripts are referred to by their sigla University Press, 1989), pp. 143–61,
throughout this chapter. A complete list of esp. 146–8.
manuscripts and their sigla is given on pages 13 W. Arlt and S. Rankin, eds., Stiftsbibliothek
xxii–xxxii. Sankt Gallen Codices 484 & 381 (Winterthur:
3 N. Pirrotta, ‘The Oral and Written Traditions Amadeus, 1996).
of Music’, in his Music and Culture in Italy from 14 GB-BER select roll 55 is described in A.
the Middle Ages to the Baroque: A Collection of Wathey, ed., Manuscripts of Polyphonic Music:
Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University The British Isles, 1100–1400. Supplement to
Press, 1984), pp. 72–9, at p. 72. RISM B IV 1–2 (Munich: G. Henle, 1993),
4 P. Stallybrass in the first of his 2006 pp. 8–10.
Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography, ‘Writing 15 T. Forrest Kelly, The Exultet in Southern Italy
after Printing, or How Printing Invents (Oxford University Press, 1996).
Manuscript’, University of Pennsylvania, 16 J. Haines, Eight Centuries of the Troubadours
forthcoming with University of Pennsylvania and Trouvères: The Changing Identity of
Press. Medieval Music (Cambridge University Press,
5 D. McKenzie, The Panizzi Lectures 1985: 2004), pp. 34–5, 104–6, 299–304.
Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: 17 E. Dillon, Medieval Music-Making and the
British Library, 1986), p. 4. Roman de Fauvel (Cambridge University Press,
6 R. McKitterick, The Carolingians and the 2002), pp. 113–19.
Written Word (Cambridge University Press, 18 The compilatio–ordinatio distinction
1989), p. 139. articulated by Bonaventure is now
7 Richard of Bury, The Love of Books: The commonplace among medievalists, in part
Philobiblon of Richard of Bury, trans. E. C. owing to the seminal article of M. Parkes, ‘The
Thomas, ed. with a foreword by Michael Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and
Maclagan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), Compilatio on the Development of the Book’, in
p. 56. J. Alexander and M. Gibson, eds., Medieval
8 R. Rouse and M. Rouse, Manuscripts and Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to
Their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Richard William Hunt (Oxford: Clarendon
Medieval Paris, 1200–1500, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Press, 1976), pp. 115–41. A recent example of
Harvey Miller Publishers, 2000). how the differentiation has been applied by
9 The terminology associated with books is musicologists is M. Everist, ‘Le fonti della
notoriously complex and often inconsistent. musica polifonica, ca. 1170–1330’, in C. Fiore,
Here, I follow the oldest (antique) definition of ed., Il Libro di musica: per una storia materiale
liber, which includes both codex and book roll, delle fonti musicali in Europa (Palermo: L’Epos,
but which could also be used in the sense of 2004), pp. 43–64.
‘opus’, or to mark sections of a large work. For a 19 For sample plates of Aquitanian notation,
helpful and comprehensive account of the see Pal. Mus. 1st ser., ii., plates 83–103.
terminology of manuscripts, see B. Bischoff, 20 S. Rankin, ‘Winchester Polyphony: The
Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Early Theory and Practice of Organum’, in S.
Ages, trans. D. Ó Cróinı́n and D. Ganz Rankin and D. Hiley, eds., Music in the Medieval
(Cambridge University Press, 1991). My thanks English Liturgy (Oxford University Press, 1993),
to Shane Butler for help on the classical context pp. 55–99.
for terminology associated with the book. 21 H. van der Werf, ‘Early Western Polyphony’,
10 A helpful account of the process of making a in T. Knighton and D. Fallows, eds., Companion
book, from parchment preparation through to to Medieval and Renaissance Music (London:
binding, occurs in C. de Hamel, Medieval Dent, 1992), p. 107.
Craftsmen: Scribes and Illuminators (London: 22 M. Everist, Polyphonic Music in
British Museum Press, 1992), quoting from Thirteenth-Century France: Aspects of Sources
p. 18. and Distribution (New York: Garland, 1989),
11 P. Siffrin, ‘Eine Schwesterhandschrift des p. 170.
Graduale von Monza’, Ephemerides liturgicae 64 23 Two excellent introductions to troubadour
(1950), pp. 53–80. manuscripts are W. Burgwinkle, ‘The
Chansonniers as Books’, in S. Gaunt and S. Kay, 36 P. Jeffery, ‘Notre Dame Polyphony in the
eds., The Troubadours: An Introduction Library of Pope Boniface VIII’, Journal of the
(Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 246–62, American Musicological Society 32 (1979), pp.
and W. Paden, ‘Manuscripts’, in F. Akehurst and 118–24, and R. A. Baltzer, ‘Notre Dame
J. Butler, eds., A Handbook of the Troubadours Manuscripts and Their Owners: Lost and
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), Found’, Journal of Musicology 5 (1987), pp.
pp. 307–33. 380–99.
24 See M. O’Neill, Courtly Love Songs of 37 Baltzer, ‘Notre Dame Manuscripts’, p. 383.
Medieval France: Transmission and Style in the 38 Ibid., 392–5, quoting from p. 394.
Trouvère Repertoire (Oxford University Press, 39 C. Wright, Music and Ceremony at Notre
2006), esp. pp. 13–52 which gives a Dame of Paris 500–1500 (Cambridge University
comprehensive overview of the sources. Press, 1989), pp. 329–35.
25 Amelia E. Van Vleck, Memory and 40 A. Taylor, Textual Situations: Three Medieval
Re-Creation in Troubadour Lyric (Berkeley: Manuscripts and Their Readers (Philadelphia:
University of California Press, 1991), pp. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 197.
56–68. 41 http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Scriptorium.
26 Burgwinkle, ‘The Chansonniers’, p. 247. 42 www.diamm.ac.uk. See, too, A. Wathey, M.
27 For an excellent account of these paratextual Bent and J. Craig-McFeely, ‘The Art of Virtual
components, see O. Holmes, Assembling the Restoration: Creating the Digital Image Archive
Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to of Medieval Music (DIAMM)’, in The Virtual
Italian Poetry Book (Minneapolis: University of Score: Representation, Retrieval, Restoration,
Minnesota Press, 2000). special volume of Computing in Musicology 12
28 See K. Kügle, The Manuscript Ivrea, (1999–2000), pp. 227–40.
Biblioteca Capitolare 115: Studies in the 43 B. Sullivan, ‘The Unwritable Sound of
Transmission and Composition of Ars Nova Music: The Origins and Implications of Isidore’s
Polyphony (Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Memorial Metaphor’, Viator 30 (1999),
Music, 1997) and A. Tomasello, ‘Scribal Design pp. 1–13.
in the compilation of Ivrea Ms. 115’, Musica
Disciplina 42 (1988), pp. 73–100. 18 The geography of medieval music
29 One example of such confusion occurs in the 1 For the missal, see S. Schein, Fideles Crucis:
layout of Machaut’s De toute flors on folio 99v. The Papacy, the West and the Recovery of the Holy
30 Wathey, B IV 1–2 Suppl. I. Land 1274–1314 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
31 See M. Bent, ‘The Progeny of Old Hall: 1991), p. 125, and for the psalmody vanished
More Leaves from a Royal English Choirbook’, from the Holy Land, see C. Kohler, ‘Traité du
Gordon Athol Anderson (1929–1981): In recouvrement de la Terre Sainte adressé, vers
Memoriam von seinen Studenten, Freunden und l’an 1295, à Philippe le Bel par Galvano de
Kollegen, Musicological Studies 49, 2 vols. Levanto, médécin génois’, Revue de l’orient latin,
(Henryville: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 6 (1898), pp. 367–8: ‘ubi cultus Jhesu Christi
1984), vol. I, pp. 1–54. deberet et psalmodia, ibi fit a Saracenis
32 M. Bent, ‘A Contemporary Perception of abominabilis melodia’. Foundational works for
Early Fifteenth-Century Style: Bologna Q 15 as a the concerns of this chapter include J. L.
Document of Scribal Editorial Initiative’, Musica Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The
Disciplina 41 (1987), pp. 183–201. World System AD 1250–1350 (Oxford University
33 A. Wathey, ‘Lost Books of Polyphony in Press, 1989); R. Bartlett, The Making of Europe:
Medieval England: A List to 1500’, Royal Musical Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change
Association: Research Chronicle 21 (1988), 950–1350 (Princeton University Press, 1993); M.
pp. 1–19. McCormick, Origins of the European Economy:
34 See the Introduction to E. Roesner, F. Avril Communications and Commerce AD 300–900
and N. Freeman Regalado, eds., Le Roman de (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and C.
Fauvel in the Edition of Mesire Chaillou de Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages:
Pesstain: A Reproduction in Facsimile of the Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800 (Oxford
Complete Manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque University Press, 2005).
Nationale, fonds français 146 (New York: Broude 2 For the fore-mass psalm in Tertullian, see De
Brothers, 1990), pp. 4–5. anima, 9:4. James McKinnon (The Temple, the
35 M. Meneghetti, ‘Il Manuscritto fr. 146 della Church Fathers and Early-Western Chant
Bibliothèque Nationale di Parigi, Tommaso di [Aldershot: Variorum, 1998], Essay IX) makes
Saluzzo e gli affreschi della Manta’, Romania 110 an admirably balanced, but in my view
(1989), pp. 511–35. unsuccessful, attempt to limit the implications
of Tertullian’s evidence. For a survey of Christian 7 For an example of work by a modernus from
Africa, see C. Briand-Ponsart and C. Hugoniot, St Emmeram, see D. Hiley, ed., Historia Sancti
L’Afrique romaine (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005), Emmerammi Arnoldi Vohburgensis circa 1030
and for the ecology of the littoral where it lay, W. (Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1996).
M. Adams, A. S. Goudie and A. R. Orme, eds., 8 The fundamental study in English on
The Physical Geography of Africa (Oxford Hungary is now N. Berend, At the Gate of
University Press, 1996), pp. 169–70 and 307–25. Christendom: Jews, Muslims and ‘Pagans’ in
3 On culture and territory in Visigothic Spain, Medieval Hungary c.1000–c.1300 (Cambridge
see C. Martin, La géographie du pouvoir dans University Press, 2001). For some of the
l’Espagne visigothique (Lille: Presses longer-term musical consequences of Hungary’s
Universitaires du Septentrion, 2003), and westward leanings (still evident in the title of the
Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, article about to be cited) see J. Szendrei, ‘The
passim. Most of the crucial documents for the Introduction of Staff Notation into Middle
liturgical reform of the 600s are conciliar and Europe’, Studia Musicologica 28 (1986), pp.
edited (with Spanish translation) in J. Vives, ed., 303–319. The primary sources for Livonia are
Concilios Visigóticos y Hispano-romanos available as J. A. Brundage, The Chronicle of
(Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Henry of Livonia (Madison: Columbia
Cientificas, 1963). University Press, 1961) and J. C. Smith and W.
4 For Olbert, see Sigebert of Gembloux, Gesta C. Urban, The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle
abbatum Gemblacensium, in Patrologiae cursus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
completus, Series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 1977).
vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1844–64), vol. CLX, p. 25. 9 For courtliness in circuit II the outstanding
5 Spanish developments from the eleventh studies are both by C. Stephen Jaeger: The
century on, including relations with the north, Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the
are neatly summarized and discussed in A. Formation of Courtly Ideals 939–1210
MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier (Pennsylvania University Press, 1985) and
to Empire 1000–1500 (London: Macmillan, Stephen Jaeger, Scholars and Courtiers:
1977). The Frankish-Roman liturgy began to Intellectuals and Society in the Medieval West
make headway in Spain as Alfonso VI of Castile (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
and León strove to expand and repopulate the 10 The ninth-century move to the land route is
territories of his kingdom. Gregory VII, in his discussed in McCormick, Origins of the
letters to the king, presented a sweeping vision European Economy, 79.
of Spain’s Christian history from apostolic 11 For Stephen IX and chant, there is full
times, a profound expression of Gregory’s own discussion and context in T. F. Kelly, The
convictions but also very well calculated to Beneventan Chant (Cambridge University Press,
accord with the more fervent and long-term 1989), p. 39, et passim.
aspirations of the king. See H. E. J. Cowdrey, 12 For Guido’s papal visit, see D. Pesce, ed.,
The Register of Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085: An Guido d’Arezzo’s ‘Regulae Rhythmicae’, ‘Prologus
English Translation (Oxford University Press, in Antiphonarium’ and ‘Epistola ad Michaelem’:
2002), pp. 67–9, a letter of 19 March 1074, and A Critical Text and Translation (Ottawa:
for the king, A. Gambra, Alfonso VI: Cancillerı́a, Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1999), pp. 448–55.
Curia e Imperio, 2 vols. (León: Cajade Ahorros y See also the essays in A. Rusconi, ed., Guido
Monte de Piedad, 1997–8), especially the king’s d’Arezzo monaco pomposiano: atti dei convegni di
letter of July 1077 (vol. II, document 47). See studio, Codigoro (Ferrara), Abbazia di Pomposa,
also R. Walker, Views of Transition: Liturgy and 3 ottobre 1997 (Florence: Olschk: 2000).
Illumination in Medieval Spain (London: British 13 Salimbene’s material is readily accessible in
Library and University of Toronto Press, 1998). J. L. Baird, G. Baglivi and J. R. Kane, The
6 For the Parisian milieu, A. Murray, Reason Chronicle of Salimbene de Adam (Binghamton:
and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance
Clarendon Press, 1985) and J. Baldwin, Masters, Studies, University Center at Binghamton,
Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter 1986), pp. 172–5.
the Chanter and His Circle, 2 vols. (Princeton 14 For Raimon Vidal, see J. H. Marshall,
University Press, 1970), have yet to be bettered. The ‘Razos de Trobar’ and Associated Texts
On the book trade, R. Rouse and M. Rouse, (Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 6 and 7.
Manuscripts and Their Makers: Commercial Book For Dante’s comments, S. Botterill, Dante: De
Production in Medieval Paris, 1200–1500 Vulgari Eloquentia (Cambridge University
(Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2000) also Press, 1996), pp. 22–3, gives Latin text and
remains unsurpassed. translation.
15 The standard edition of the Leys is still M. Present (4 vols., London, 1776–89; 2nd edn with
Gatien-Arnoult, Monumens de la littérature notes by F. Mercer, 2 vols., New York: Harcourt
romane, 3 vols. (Toulouse: J.-B. Paya, 1841–3), I, Brace, 1935; repr. New York: Dover, 1957), vol.
pp. 342 and 350. I, p. 430. Gevaert also assumed notation, though
16 R. Strohm, The Rise of European Music he had removed the composition of the chant to
1380–1500 (Cambridge University Press, the late seventh century.
1993). 10 H. Hucke, ‘Die Einführung des
gregorianischen Gesangs im Frankenreich’,
Römische Quartalschrift 49 (1954), pp. 172–87,
19 Reception and H. Hucke, ‘Gregorianischer Gesang in
1 For a fully documented survey of all aspects altrömischer und fränkischer Überlieferung’,
of medieval chant, see D. Hiley, Western Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 12 (1955), pp.
Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford: Clarendon 74–87.
Press, 1993). 11 McKinnon (The Advent Project, p. 377)
2 Ibid., p. 364. proposed that what was known as Gregorian
3 See ibid., pp. 361–73 and 520–1 for a chant is actually very close to what the Roman
bibliography. singers came with, because there was not much
4 See ibid., pp. 503–18 for details and a time to alter it, but Hiley (Western Plainchant,
bibliography. p. 549) noted that other Old Italian chant
5 An image in the Gradual of Monza (I-MZ repertories (Ambrosian and Beneventan) share
CIX) from the mid ninth century probably the essentially florid profile seen in what we
conveys the same intent, but it is not clear that know as Old Roman chant.
Gregory is dictating music. An oft-reproduced 12 L. Treitler, ‘Homer and Gregory: The
Gregory leaf by the Master of the Registrum Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant’,
Gregorii, an Ottonian illuminator (984), depicts Musical Quarterly 60 (1974), pp. 333–72. A. M.
Gregory dictating theological tracts. Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of
6 On anonymous editors of printed editions, Memory (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London:
see T. Karp, An Introduction to the Post- University of California Press, 2005), has
Tridentine Mass Proper, 2 vols. (Middleton, WI: recently broadened the study of oral practice
American Institute of Musicology, 2005, vol. I, and memory in medieval music, including
p. 3. aspects of polyphony.
7 F.-A. Gevaert, Les origines du chant liturgique 13 K. Levy, ‘Charlemagne’s Archetype of
de l’église latine: étude d’histoire musicale Gregorian Chant’, Journal of the American
(Ghent: Hoste, 1890; repr. Hildesheim and New Musicological Society 40 (1987), pp. 1–30, and K.
York: Olms, 1971); and F.-A. Gevaert, La Levy, ‘On the Origin of Neumes’, Early Music
melopée antique dans le chant de l’église latine History 7 (1987), pp. 59–90. Both articles are
(Ghent: Hoste, 1895; repr. Osnabrück: Zeller, reprinted in K. Levy, Gregorian Chant and the
1967), pp. ix–xxxvi. Gevaert supported a thesis Carolingians (Princeton University Press, 1998),
that put the composition of the chant in the pp. 82–108 and 109–40.
Roman schola cantorum especially under Sergius 14 Hiley, Western Plainchant, pp. 520–1.
I (r. 687–701), a project brought to completion 15 Ibid., pp. 608–13.
under Gregory II (r. 715–31). J. McKinnon 16 For example, there is no mention of
fleshed out Gevaert’s thesis in The Advent Hildegard in G. Reese, Music in the Middle Ages,
Project: The Later-Seventh-Century Creation of with an Introduction on the Music of Ancient
the Roman Mass Proper (Berkeley and Los Times (New York: Norton, 1940); or in R. H.
Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). Hoppin, Medieval Music (New York: Norton,
8 F. X. Haberl, ‘Die römische “schola 1978).
cantorum” und die päpstlichen Kapellsänger bis 17 O. Strunk, ed., Source Readings in Music
zur Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts’, Vierteljahrschrift History. rev. edn L. Treitler (New York: Norton,
für Musikwissenschaft 3 (1887), p. 199 n. 1. Dom 1998), p. 375.
Mocquereau independently discovered the Old 18 Karp, An Introduction, vol. I, 202.
Roman graduals in 1890; see Dom P. Combe, 19 J. Pasler outlines the political aspect in her
The Restoration of Gregorian Chant: Solesmes review of Bergeron (see note 20) in Journal of
and the Vatican Edition, trans. T. N. Marier and the American Musicological Society 52 (1999),
W. Skinner (Washington, DC: Catholic pp. 370–83.
University of America Press, 2003), pp. 132–3. 20 For an illustration of Lambillotte’s facsimile
9 See, for example, C. Burney, A General compared with that in Paléographie musicale, see
History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the K. Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The
Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkeley: Mittelalters – Ein Werkstattbericht’, Basler

University of California Press, 1998), pp. 78–9. Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis 1 (1977),
21 See facsimiles and discussion in P. M. Pfaff, pp. 19–76.
‘Die liturgische Einstimmigkeit in ihren 33 A. Kreutziger-Herr, Ein Traum vom
Editionen nach 1600’, in T. G. Georgiades, ed., Mittelalter: Die Wiederentdeckung
Musikalische Edition im Wandel des historischen mittelalterlicher Musik in der Neuzeit (Cologne,
Bewusstseins (Kassel, Basel, Tours and London: Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 2003), pp. 105–10.
Bärenreiter, 1971), pp. 50–61, and Bergeron, 34 Ibid., p. 55 n. 91.
Decadent Enchantments, pp. 25–62. 35 Ibid., pp. 19–41 and 66–77.
22 Combe, The Restoration of Gregorian Chant, 36 E. Emery, ‘The “Truth” about the Middle
p. 106. Ages: La Revue des Deux Mondes and Late
23 R. F. Hayburn, Papal Legislation on Sacred Nineteenth-Century French Medievalism’, in C.
Music 95 AD to 1977 AD (Collegeville, MN: A. Simmons, ed., Medievalism and the Quest for
Liturgical Press, 1979), p. 224. the ‘Real’ Middle Ages (London and Portland,
24 P. Jeffery, ‘The New Vatican Chant Editions’, OR: Cass, 2001), p. 109.
Notes, 2nd ser., 47/4 (1991), pp. 1039–63. 37 Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and
25 On the term antiquité françoise, see J. Trouvères, pp. 108–25.
Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and 38 The edition forms an appendix to F. Michel,
Trouvères: The Changing Identity of Medieval Chansons du Châtelain de Coucy: Revues sur tous
Music, Musical Performance and Reception les manuscrits (Paris: Crapelet, 1830).
(Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 49–52. 39 Coussemaker, L’art harmonique aux XIIe et
Haines covers all aspects of the reception of the XIIIe siècles (Paris: Durand, 1865; repr.
art of the troubadours and trouvères to the Hildesheim: Olms, 1964), pp. 180–208. Haines,
present day. See also the historiographical Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères,
overview in M. L. Switten, Music and Poetry in pp. 174–8, includes a list of Coussemaker’s
the Middle Ages: A Guide to Research on French thirteen trouvères-harmonistes with discussion.
and Occitan Song, 1100–1400, Garland Medieval 40 H. Riemann, Handbuch der Musikgeschichte,
Bibliographies 19 (New York and London: vol. I, part 2, Die Musik des Mittelalters (bis
Garland, 1995), pp. 1–59. 1450), 2nd edn (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel,
26 L. Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies 1920), pp. 224–93.
of the Enlightenment: The World and Work of La 41 More details on the application of the
Curne de Sainte-Palaye (Baltimore, MD: Johns rhythmic modes to songs are found in G. Reese,
Hopkins University Press, 1968). Music in the Middle Ages, pp. 206–10.
27 Burney, A General History, vol. I, pp. 574–7; 42 Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and
see Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères, pp. 210–34 and the bibliography cited
Trouvères, pp. 89–91 and 118–19. there.
28 J. Hawkins, A General History of the Science 43 J. Handschin, ‘Die Modaltheorie und Carl
and Practice of Music (London: Novello 1776; Appels Ausgabe der Gesaenge von Bernart de
2nd edn, London: Novello, 1853), vol. I, Ventadorn’, Medium Ævum 4 (1955), 69–82,
p. 186. discussed in Reese, Music in the Middle Ages,
29 E. Aubrey, ‘Medieval Melodies in the Hands pp. 210–11.
of Bibliophiles of the Ancien Régime’, in Barbara 44 H. van der Werf, The Chansons of the
Haggh, ed., Essays on Music and Culture in Troubadours and Trouvères: A Study of the
Honor of Herbert Kellman, Collection Epitome Melodies and Their Relation to the Poems
musicale 8 (Paris: Minerve, 2001), pp. 17–34; (Utrecht: Oosthoek, 1972); H. van der Werf,
and Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and review of S. N. Rosenberg and H. Tischler, eds.,
Trouvères, pp. 120–5. Chanter m’estuet: Songs of the Trouvères, in
30 On eighteenth-century editions, see Haines, Journal of the American Musicological Society 35
Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouvères, (1982), pp. 539–54; see also the overview of
pp. 108–18. research in E. Aubrey, The Music of the
31 Ibid., pp. 125–41. Troubadours (Bloomington: Indiana University
32 On arrangements of troubadour and Press, 1996), pp. 240–54.
trouvère song from the eighteenth century to 45 P. Bec, La lyrique française au Moyen Âge
the present, see Haines, Eight Centuries of (XIIe–XIIIe siècles): Contribution à une typologie
Troubadours and Trouvères, passim; concerning des genres poétiques médiévaux, 2 vols. (Paris:
techniques of a practising musician in the late Picard, 1977–8); J. Stevens, Words and Music in
twentieth century, see T. Binkley, ‘Zur the Middle Ages: Song, Narrative, Dance and
Aufführungspraxis der einstimmigen Musik des Drama, 1050–1350, Cambridge Studies in Music
(Cambridge University Press, 1986); C. Page, of hearing and the Musica enchiriadis, see ibid.,
Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: pp. 18–19 and 72.
Instrumental Practice and Songs in France 53 H. L. F. Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone
1100–1300 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music,
University of California Press, 1986); there is a trans. A. J. Ellis, with a new introduction by H.
helpful overview of research in Switten, Music Margenau (New York: Dover, 1954). For
and Poetry in the Middle Ages, pp. 59–152. context, see L. Botstein, ‘Time and Memory:
46 H. Tischler, ed., Trouvère Lyrics with Concert Life, Science, and Music in Brahms’s
Melodies: Complete Comparative Edition, Vienna’, in Walter Frisch, ed., Brahms and His
Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 107 (Neuhausen: World (Princeton University Press, 1990), pp.
American Institute of Musicology, 1997), and H. 3–22. For Fétis, see Earp, ‘Machaut’s Music in
Tischler, ed., Trouvère Lyrics with Melodies: the Early Nineteenth Century: The Work of
Complete Comparative Edition, Revisited Perne, Bottée de Toulmon, and Fétis’, in J.
(Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, Cerquiglini-Toulet and N. Wilkins, eds.,
2006). Guillaume de Machaut 1300–2000 (Paris: Presses
47 B. Kippenberg, ‘Die Melodien des de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2002), pp.
Minnesangs’, in T. G. Georgiades, ed., 23–4.
Musikalische Edition im Wandel des historischen 54 Riemann, Handbuch der Musikgeschichte,
Bewusstseins (Kassel, Basel, Tours and London: cited in Kreutziger-Herr, Ein Traum vom
Bärenreiter, 1971), p. 92. Here and elsewhere, Mittelalter, pp. 86 and 154–5; and R. C.
translation is by the author of this chapter, Wegman, ‘“Das musikalische Hören” in the
unless otherwise noted. Middle Ages and Renaissance: Perspectives from
48 For a consideration of this question in light Pre-War Germany’, Musical Quarterly 82 (1998),
of the French sources, see A. Butterfield, Poetry p. 438.
and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart 55 See Kreutziger-Herr, Ein Traum vom
to Guillaume de Machaut, Cambridge Studies in Mittelalter, pp. 154–5 and 197–9; and Wegman,
Medieval Literature (Cambridge University ‘“Das musikalische Hören”’.
Press, 2002), pp. 171–90. 56 K. Dèzes, review of van den Borren, Dufay
49 M. Gerbert, De cantu et musica sacra (1927), quoted in Kreutziger-Herr, Ein Traum
a prima ecclesiae aetate usque ad praesens vom Mittelalter, p. 198.
tempus, 2 vols. (Sankt Blasien: Typis 57 E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Alte und neue
San-Blasianis, 1774; repr. O. Wessely, ed., Die Kirchenmusik’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
grossen Darstellungen der Musikgeschichte in 16 (1814), cols. 577–84, 593–603 and 611–19; cf.
Barok und Aufklärung 4, Graz: Akademische E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings:
Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1968), vol. II, pp. ‘Kreisleriana’, ‘The Poet and the Composer’,
112–16. Music Criticism, ed. D. Charlton, trans. M.
50 R. G. Kiesewetter, History of the Modern Clarke (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp.
Music of Western Europe from the First Century of 351–76. For further discussion, see J. Garratt,
the Christian Era to the Present Day, trans. Palestrina and the German Romantic
Robert Müller (London: Newby, 1848), repr. Imagination, Musical Performance and
with new introduction by F. Harrison (New Reception (Cambridge University Press, 2002),
York: Da Capo, 1973), pp. 45–6. It would be Chapter 2.
very easy to multiply such quotations; see D. 58 The myth dates at least to Agazzari (1607);
Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of see L. Lockwood, ed., Palestrina: Pope Marcellus
Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Mass: An Authoritative Score, Backgrounds and
Performance, Musical Performance and Sources, History and Analysis, Views and
Reception (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Comments (New York: Norton, 1975), pp. 28–9.
pp. 158–61, and Kreutziger-Herr, Ein Traum 59 Hoffmann, ‘Alte und neue Kirchenmusik’,
vom Mittelalter, pp. 103–5. cols. 583 and 582 (cf. the translation in
51 R. G. Kiesewetter, Die Verdienste der Hoffmann, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings,
Niederländer um die Tonkunst (Amsterdam: pp. 358 and 357).
Muller, 1829), p. 48. Riemann expressed 60 Garratt, Palestrina, pp. 52–7.
essentially the same view as late as 1888; see 61 L. Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to
Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention, p. 265 Research, Garland Composer Resource Manuals
n. 50. 36 (New York and London: Garland, 1995), p.
52 E. de Coussemaker, Histoire de l’harmonie au 344. For the following, see also Earp, ‘Machaut’s
Moyen Âge (Paris: Didron, 1852; repr. Music’, pp. 14–23 and Kreutziger-Herr, Ein
Hildesheim: Olms, 1966), p. x. On the question Traum vom Mittelalter, pp. 122–6.
62 For a facsimile of some pages of Bottée’s 72 Ibid., p. 45.

transcription, see B. Gagnepain, ‘A la recherche 73 Ibid., pp. 61–2.
du temps passé: du rôle de quelques précurseurs 74 Ibid., p. 67.
dans la renaissance du patrimoine musical 75 Such traditions are treated in context in R.
français’, in M.-C. Mussat, J. Mongrédien and Strohm, The Rise of European Music 1380–1500
J.-M. Nectous, eds., Échos de France et d’Italie: (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp.
Liber amicorum Yves Gérard (Paris: 267–374.
Buchet/Chastel Société française de 76 For some background on Geistesgeschichte,
musicologie, 1997), pp. 119–28. see P. Potter, Most German of the Arts:
63 F.-J. Fétis, ‘De la nécessité de considérer la Musicology and Society from the Weimar
musique dans son histoire, soit pour en étudier Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven
les principes, soit pour ajouter à ses progrès’, and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp.
Revue musicale, 5e année (1831), p. 278. 166–72; and Kreutziger-Herr, Ein Traum vom
64 F.-J. Fétis, ‘Découverte de plusieurs Mittelalter, pp. 196–7.
manuscrits intéressans pour l’histoire de la 77 R. Ficker, ‘Die Musik des Mittelalters und
musique’, Revue musicale 1, prospectus (1827), ihre Beziehungen zum Geistesleben’, Deutsche
pp. 3–11; see Earp, ‘Machaut’s Music’, p. 26; and Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und
Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Geistesgeschichte 3 (1925), pp. 501–35. Parts of
Trouvères, pp. 168–73. this and another of Ficker’s early essays are
65 F.-J. Fétis, ‘Découverte de manuscrits discussed in Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern
intéressans pour l’histoire de la musique Invention, pp. 167–9 and 248. An essay in
(deuxième article)’, Revue musicale 1 (1827), pp. English has some similar points; see R. Ficker,
106–13; see Earp, ‘Machaut’s Music’, ‘Polyphonic Music of the Gothic Period’, trans.
pp. 26–7. T. Baker, Musical Quarterly 15 (1929),
66 See Earp, ‘Machaut’s Music’, pp. 27–30 for pp. 483–505.
details of this last stage. 78 Ficker, ‘Die Musik des Mittelalters’, p. 503;
67 On Zelter and Thibaut, see Garratt, discussed in Kreutziger-Herr, Ein Traum vom
Palestrina, pp. 62–8; on Kiesewetter, see H. Kier, Mittelalter, p. 197.
‘Kiesewetters historische Hauskonzerte: zur 79 For more on this Oriental hypothesis and its
Geschichte der kirchenmusikalische later ramifications for instrumental
Restauration in Wien’, Kirchenmusikalisches performance, see Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern
Jahrbuch 52 (1968), pp. 95–119; on Choron, see Invention, pp. 64–6 and 98; and J. Haines, ‘The
W. Kahl, ‘Zur musikalischen Arabic Style of Performing Medieval Music’,
Renaissancebewegung in Frankreich während Early Music 29 (2001), pp. 369–78.
der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in D. 80 See A. Rehding, ‘The Quest for the Origins
Weise, ed., Festschrift Joseph Schmidt-Görg zum of Music in Germany circa 1900’, Journal of the
60. Geburtstag (Bonn: Beethovenhaus, 1957), American Musicological Society 53 (2000), pp.
pp. 156–74; on Fétis, see Earp, ‘Machaut’s 345–85. For further discussion of nationalist
Music’, pp. 33–4. sentiments circa 1900, see Leech-Wilkinson, The
68 See Garratt, Palestrina, Chapter 1. Modern Invention, pp. 28–35.
69 F.-J. Fétis, ‘Du sort futur de la musique’, 81 Ficker, ‘Die Musik des Mittelalters’,
Revue musicale 9 (1830), pp. 225–9, at pp. p. 511.
228–9; for more on Fétis’s eclecticism, see K. 82 Ficker’s example, the two-voice alleluia
Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Pascha nostrum, had been performed in 1922
France: ‘La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris’, by Gurlitt at Karlsruhe from an edition supplied
1834–80 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), by Ludwig. See F. Ludwig, ‘Musik des
pp. 33–45. Mittelalters in der Badischen Kunsthalle
70 Cf. Garratt, Palestrina, p. 33, and the Karlsruhe, 24.–26. September
discussion, pp. 28–35. 1922’, Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 5
71 F. Ludwig, ‘Die mehrstimmige Musik des 14. (1922–3), pp. 434–60. Kreutziger-Herr,
Jahrhunderts’, Sammelbände der Internationalen Ein Traum vom Mittelalter, pp. 355–66, prints
Musik-Gesellschaft 4 (1902–3), pp. 16–69. At this the complete programme booklet.
stage, Ludwig knew fewer English sources than 83 Ficker, ‘Die Musik des Mittelalters’, pp.
he later would; nor had he examined the 516–23. Ludwig had identified Ficker’s example,
trecento source GB-LBl add. 29987. The account Homo luge / Homo miserabilis / Brumas e mors,
of sacred music would expand in later surveys in as a motet possibly composed in Germany. It
light of the subsequent discovery of the Ivrea had already been performed on two occasions,
Codex (I-IV 115) and Spanish fragments. at a 1921 Dante celebration in Freiburg and in
Gurlitt’s 1922 concert at Karlsruhe; see Ludwig, 100 C. Page, ‘Machaut’s “Pupil” Deschamps on
‘Musik des Mittelalters’, pp. 438–40. the Performance of Music’, Early Music 5 (1977),
84 Ficker, ‘Die Musik des Mittelalters’, p. 524. pp. 484–91.
85 Note the allusions to J. Huizinga, Herbst des 101 Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention,
Mittelalters: Studien über Lebens- und p. 225.
Geistesformen des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts in 102 Translation taken from ibid., p. 165.
Frankreich und in den Niederlanden (Munich: 103 Ibid., pp. 182–4.
Drei Masken, 1924 [original Dutch edn 1919]; 104 On interpretations of the term ‘res
published in English as The Autumn of the d’Alemangne’, see the works cited in Earp,
Middle Ages, trans. R. J. Payton and U. Guillaume de Machaut, p. 350; and J. Bain,
Mammitzsch (University of Chicago Press, ‘Balades 32 and 33 and the “Res Dalemangne” ’,
1996). in E. E. Leach, ed., Machaut’s Music: New
86 Ficker, ‘Die Musik des Mittelalters’, p. 531. Interpretations, Studies in Medieval and
87 Ibid., p. 532. Renaissance Music (Woodbridge: Boydell &
88 Ibid., p. 533. A colour reproduction of the Brewer, 2003), pp. 205–19.
Ghent altarpiece is in R. Wangermée, Flemish 105 G. de Machaut, Le Livre dou Voir Dit (The
Music and Society in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Book of the True Poem), ed. D. Leech-Wilkinson,
Centuries, trans. R. E. Wolf (New York, trans. R. B. Palmer, Garland Library of Medieval
Washington and London: Praeger, 1968), Pl. 3. Literature (New York and London: Garland,
89 Cf. C. Page, Discarding Images: Reflections of 1998), p. 125.
Music and Culture in Medieval France (Oxford 106 Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention,
University Press, 1993); see also pp. 70–6.
Kreutziger-Herr, Ein Traum vom Mittelalter, 107 J. I. Wimsatt, W. W. Kibler, and R. A.
pp. 19–25, 161–2 and 268–74. Baltzer, eds., G. de Machaut, Le Jugement du roy
90 Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention, p. de Behaigne and Remede de Fortune (Athens,
251; see also Kreutziger-Herr, Ein Traum vom GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), ll.
Mittelalter, pp. 163–7. On a Nordic Leoninus 3962–88; and R. B. Palmer, ed. and trans. G. de
and Perotinus, see Potter, Most German of the Machaut, La Prise d’Alexandre (The Taking of
Arts, p. 179; and Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Alexandria) (New York: Routledge, 2002), ll.
Invention, pp. 168, 249 and 270 n. 163. 1139–67. See references in Earp, Guillaume de
91 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. Machaut, pp. 214 and 233. On the Ghent
edn by Jan van der Dussen (Oxford University altarpiece, see n. 88 above. On Memling’s Najera
Press, 1993), p. 92. Triptych, see the colour reproduction in
92 P. H. Lang, Music in Western Civilization Wangermée, Flemish Music, Plates 68 and 69.
(New York: Norton, 1941), p. 150; see especially 108 On Bottée, see Leech-Wilkinson, The
pp. 122–81. Modern Invention, p. 263 n. 18. For the
93 E. E. Lowinsky, ‘Music in the Culture of the Beethoven conference performances, see
Renaissance’, in B. J. Blackburn, ed., Music in the Kreutziger-Herr, Ein Traum vom Mittelalter, pp.
Culture of the Renaissance and Other Essays, 2 177–8. On Huizinga in Ficker, Schering and
vols. (University of Chicago Press, 1989), vol. I, Pirro, see Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern
pp. 19–39, with some footnote additions. First Invention, p. 72. Page considered Huizinga a
published in Journal of the History of Ideas, 15 deleterious influence on performance practice;
(1954), pp. 509–53. see Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention, pp.
94 Lowinsky, ‘Music in the Culture of the 55–8, 99, 106 and 122; and as a deleterious
Renaissance’, vol. I, p. 31. influence on late medieval historiography; see
95 Ibid., p. 35. Page, Discarding Images, Chapter 5.
96 Collingwood, Idea of History, pp. 49–52. 109 See works cited in n. 45, and Earp,
97 Strohm, The Rise of European Music, with Guillaume de Machaut, pp. 389–92.
comments on periodization, pp. 540–42; see 110 See C. Wright, ‘Voices and Instruments in
also R. Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western the Art Music of Northern France during the
Music, vol. I, The Earliest Notations to the 15th Century: A Conspectus’, in D. Heartz and
Sixteenth Century (Oxford University Press, B. Wade, eds., International Musicological
2005), pp. 380–5. Society: Report of the Twelfth Congress Berkeley
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111 Among these are Margaret Bent’s Invention, p. 164; and K. Moll, ed. and trans.,
dissertation on Old Hall (1969), with material Counterpoint and Compositional Process in the
on texting in M. Bent, ‘Text Setting in Sacred Time of Dufay: Perspectives from German
Music of the Early 15th Century: Evidence and Musicology, Criticism and Analysis of Early
Implications’, in U. Günther and L. Finscher, Music (New York and London: Garland, 1997),
eds., Musik und Text in der Mehrstimmigkeit des p. 9.
14. und 15. Jahrhunderts: Vorträge des 115 Moll, Counterpoint and Compositional
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Wolfenbüttel, 8. bis 12. September 1980, overview and explication of terminologies; see
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(Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1984), pp. 291–326; my pp. 174–7.
dissertation on Machaut (1983), with material 116 See M. Bent, ‘The Grammar of Early
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French Chansons: A Look Ahead from the 14th ed., Tonal Structures in Early Music, Criticism
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and Dennis Slavin’s dissertation on Binchois London: Garland, 1998), pp. 15–59.
(1988), with material on texting in D. Slavin, 117 R. Taruskin, Oxford History, pp. 277–
‘In Support of “Heresy”: Manuscript Evidence 81.
for the a cappella Performance of Early 118 This is not the only musical aspect of this
15th-Century Songs’, Early Music 19 (1991), motet that was received well; see J. M. Allsen,
pp. 179–90. ‘Style and Intertextuality in the Isorhythmic
112 C. Page, ‘Polyphony before 1400’, in H. M. Motet 1400–1440’, PhD diss., University of
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pp. 79–84. 119 C. Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History,
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Index
Aachen, 265, 325, 327, 338, 402 Arnulf of Metz, Saint, 191
Adalbero, 196 Arras, 223, 326
Adalbert, St, Bishop of Prague, 174 Ars Nova, 98, 119, 144, 146–9, 152, 154, 166,
Adler, Guido, 359, 365 167, 176, 200, 310, 315, 364
adonic, 227, 231 Ars Subtilior, 102, 146, 288, 289, 361
Ad organum faciendum, 53–5 Aubry, Pierre, 349–50
Affligemensis, Johannes Aucassin et Nicolette, 346
De musica cum Tonario, 48, 55, 60, 124 Augustine, Saint, 9, 40, 98, 230, 264, 322, 337
Agricola, Alexander, 181 De musica, 279
Aires, Fernandez, 229 Augustine, of Canterbury, Saint, 113, 337
Alberic, 330 Aurenga, Raimbaut d’, 207
Albertet, 208 Aures ad nostra deitatis preces, 231
Alcuin of York, 264, 337–8 Auto de los Reyes Magos, see drama, vernacular
Alfanus, 330 auto-citation, 224
Alfonso VIII, 166 Auvergne, 207, 332
Alfonso X (el Sabio) of Castile and León, see Auxerre, 326
cantiga Ave, mundi spes, Maria, 125
Alfred, King, 114 Avignon, 87, 95, 126, 136, 145, 201, 236, 275,
alleluia, 15, 17, 27, 28, 32, 33, 34, 44, 49, 63, 64, 289, 327
186
Alleluia. Ascendens Christus, 15, 51–2 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 72, 93, 352, 357
Alleluia. Christus resurgens, 28 Balbulus, Notker, 33, 234, 266, 336, 338
Alleluia. Justus ut palma, 53 Deeds of Charlemagne, 338
Alma redemptoris mater, 229 ballade, 100, 101, 102, 113, 142, 154, 221, 222,
Alvernhe, Peire d’, 207 274, 314, 327, 366
Amalarius of Metz, 28, 193 En la maison Dedalus, 100
Ambros, August Wilhelm, 352, 354 ballade-virelai, 92
Ambrose, Saint, 19, 197, 227, 229, 338 ballata, 92, 93, 94, 129, 130, 138, 141, 147, 154,
amour courtois, 209 155, 156, 159, 333, 354, 355
amplification, 46, 48, 124, 125, 187 Bangor, 202
anceps, 226 Baralle, Godefroy de, 238
Anchieta, Juan de, 167 Barberino, Francesco da, 94
al-Andalus, 169 Barbigant, Jacques, 181
Anerio, Felice, 342 Baroffio, Giacomo
Angevin saints, 116 Iter liturgicum Italicum, 128
Anglo-Norman French, 111 Baudelaire, Charles, 236
Anonymous IV, 72, 86, 300 Bec, Pierre, 209, 350
antiphon, 11, 12, 17, 19, 45, 48, 50, 115, 116, Beck, Jean, 349–50
119, 123, 203, 239 Bede, the Venerable, 228, 337
Celeste beneficium, 123 Bedingham, John, 113
Marian, 117 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 2, 100, 354, 357, 367
Antony of Padua, Saint, 130 Benedicamus Domino, 56, 63, 69, 72, 74, 123,
Apfel, Ernst, 368 124, 125, 158, 165, 193, 272, 299
Appel, Carl, 350 Benedict, Saint, 12, 193
Aquitaine, 23, 26, 56, 63, 207, 268, 324, Benedict of Aniane, 192
332 Benedict of Peterborough, abbot, 116
Arabic music, 161 Benedictus, 123, 203
Aragon, 88, 289, 327 Benet, 120
Aristotle Bent, Margaret, 96, 368
Politics, 89, 98 Beowulf, 110
Arnestus of Pardubice, 174 Bernard de Cluny, 237
[465]
466 Index
Bernart de Ventadorn cantus, 48, 53–6, 63–4

Can vei la lauzeta, see canso firmus, 120, 158, 253, 360, 361, 362, 363
Bertran de Born, 207 fractus, 122, 126, 128, 159, 174
Un sirventes on motz no falh, 210 planus binatim, 122, 125
Besseler, Heinrich, 352, 363, 368 canzone, 131, 398
Black Death, 88, 275, 383 Capella, Martianus, 228, 277
Black Madonna, 167 Cardenal, Peire, 212
Boethius, 89, 228, 238, 243, 276, 277, 278, 284, Cardine, Eugène, 345
286, 287 Carmen Saeculare, 225
Bohemia, 23, 24, 171, 173, 174–5, 178–80, 274 Carmina Burana, 232, 233, 329
Bona Sforza, Queen of Poland, 171, 182 Carolingian
Bonaventure, Saint, 232 archetype, 340
Boniface, Saint, 336 empire, 26
books of hours, 201 period, 11, 18
Boopstein, Barbara Ann, 67 renaissance, 192, 324
Bornelh, Giraut de, 210 carols, 113, 201
Bottée de Toulmon, Auguste, 347, 354, Carthage, 3, 322
367 Cassiodorus, 9, 161, 277
bouche, art de, 93 Castel del Monte, 121
Bourges, 326 Castile, 67, 88, 166, 269
Bratislava Breviary, 173 Catalonia, 162, 164, 166, 167, 207, 327,
breviary, 122 332
of Pius V, 128 Catherine of Alexandria, Saint, 130
brevis, 74, 119, 156 Catullus, 226
Brulé, Gace, 216, 326 cauda, 69, 71, 211, 261, 262
Brumel, Antoine, 181 Celts, 113
Brussels, 24, 347, 355 Cercamon, 208
Buigne, Gace de la, 98 ceremonial, 122
Burgos, 162, 166, 324, 325, 330 chace, 98, 151
Burgundy, 63, 196, 325, 326, 361, 362 Challoner, Richard, 239
Burney, Charles, 346, 353, 354 chanson, 112, 215, 398, see song
Bury St Edmunds, 45 à refrain, 82
Busnois, Antoine, 181 baladée, 92
Byzantine music, 172–3 d’amour, 216
d’éloge, 215
caccia, 93, 139, 140, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, de femme, 216
154, 333 de mal mariée, 216
Cosı̀ pensoso, 142 de toile, 215, 216
cadence, 10, 99, 128, 244, 245, 250, 251 jeu-parti, 216
caesura, 38, 40, 226, 227, 230, 231, 232 Jolietement m’en vois, 216, 217
calendar La Chastelaine de Saint Gille, 216
Egyptian, 239 Li nouviaus tanz et mai et violette, 217
Cambridge, 51, 118, 292 pieuse, 398
canon, 102, 108, 119, 140, 149, 150, 289 rotrouenge, 216
Austin, 1, 2, 4 Sotte chanson, 216
Victorine, 40 chant, 23, 46–7, 49–51, 53, 56, 63, 64
canonica musica, 85, 287 Ambrosian, 338
canso, 130, 210, 211 Anglo-Saxon, 20
Kalenda maya, 134 Beneventan, 20, 330, 338
Canterbury, 115, 337 Byzantine, 172-3
cantica, 225 Christian liturgical, 121, 122, 126
cantiga, 130, 168 Compostelan, 72
de amigo, 168, 398 Eastern European, 172-5
de loor, 168 Gallican, 19, 241, 336, 337, 372
de Santa Maria, 269 grand, 215, 216
cantilena, 120 Gregorian, 17–20, 23, 26, 27, 45, 114, 126,
cantilena romana, 189 130, 160, 241–3, 250, 266, 277, 320, 324,
cantio, 177–8, 398 326–9, 336–42, 344, 347, 350, 352, 364, 372
467 Index
Hispanic, 19 conductus, 32, 49, 63, 67–72, 74, 76, 80, 85, 86,
Messine, 197 93, 118, 119, 148, 165, 166, 199, 231, 232,
Mozarabic, 338 236, 250, 252, 256, 259, 261, 262, 284, 300,
Old Roman, 372 301, 310, 379, 380, 398
Old Spanish, 161, 163 Consequens antecedente, 232–3
Charlemagne, 18, 26, 173, 189, 192, 195, cum caudis, 69, 76, 86
263–6, 277, 323, 325, 327, 329, 336–8, cum littera, 69, 71, 74, 86, 380
402 Gratulantes celebremus festum, 379
Charles I, King of France (the Bald), 27, Luget Rachel iterum, 69–71
266 Mundus vergens, 231
Charles V, King of France, 316, 354 Novus miles sequitur, 232
Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor/I of Bohemia, sine caudis, 69
171, 173, 178 sine littera, 69, 71, 76, 86
Charles Martel, 263, 336 Sursum corda, 69
Chartres, 199, 324, 326 Virtus moritur, 69, 380
Chateaubriand, François-René de confraternity, 129, 327
Génie du christianisme, 347 Battuti, 129
Châtre de Cangé, 346 Disciplinati, 129
Choralis Constantinus, 72 Laudesi, 129
Choron, Alexandre, 355 of Santa Maria, 130
Chrétien de Troyes, 222 Constance, Council of, 182
Christianity Constantine, 187
Romano-British, 113 Constantinople, 3
spread of, 172–3 Consueta, 164
see also worship, Christian Contarini, Andrea, 141
Chrodegang, 189, 195, 196, 336, 341, contracantum, 125
402 copula, 54, 66, 74, 76, 283, 381
Chroniques de France, 295 Corbie, 114, 195, 292, 324, 326
church fathers, 188 Cornysh, 110
writings, 9 Couci, Châtelain de, 216, 349
Church of England, 114 council
Ciconia, Johannes, 137, 138, 145, 158 of Constance, 88
Doctorem principem / Melodia suavissima, of Meaux, 33, 45
368 of Trent, 32, 201, 342–3
Cı̂teaux, 197 Second Vatican, 25, 345
clausula Courson, Robert, 85
Alleluia. V. Pascha nostrum immolatus est Coussemaker, Charles-Edmond-Henri de, 347,
Christus, 80 349, 351, 352, 354, 358
Clement VII, anti-pope, 88 Couvin, Watriquet de, 222
Cluny, 24, 35, 114, 196, 199, 325, 326 Cracow, 173, 175
coblas, 211 Crescimbeni, Mario Giovanni, 346
capfinidas, 211 crusades, 208
doblas, 211 Cumming, Julie, 368
ternas, 211 cursus, 33, 74, 381
unissonans, 211 Cyril, St, 173
Codax, Martin, 168 Czech texts, 24
Codex Albensis, 173
Codex Calixtinus, 63, 65 D’Accone, Frank, 144
Codex Speciálnı́k, 181 The Civic Muse, 128
Coimbra, 229 Dahlhaus, Carl, 370
Coinci, Gautier de, 398 Dandolo, Francesco, 137
Miracles de Notre Dame, 223 Daniel, prophet, 123
Collingwood, Robin George, 362–3, 364 Danjou, Félix, 343
Cologne, 282, 283, 284, 286, 348 Dante Alighieri, 103, 121, 151, 156, 332, 345
colour, 90, 286, 290 De vulgari eloquentia, 211
commune Sanctorum, 28 Per una ghirlandetta, 129
Compère, Loyset, 237 danza amarosa, 134
Compostela, Compostelan, 47–9, 63–5 Day of Judgement, 88, 165
468 Index
Denis, Saint, 114 Faidit, Gaucelm, 346

Denmark, 88, 360 Fasani, Rainerio, 129
Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 348 Fauvel, Roman de, 91, 96, 221, 237, 239, 273,
Deschamps, Eustache 310, 316, 325, 333
L’Art de Dictier, 224 Federico II, 121, 136
descort, 93 Ferdinand of Aragón, 167
Dèzes, Karl, 352 Fétis, François-Joseph, 347, 351, 354, 355, 357,
diaphony, 46–51 358
dictamen, 231 Biographie universelle, 355
Dijon, 197, 281 Ficker, Rudolf, 352, 359–63, 364, 367–8
discantus, 74, 75, 77, 86, 126, 148, 155, 252 Fleury, 43, 114, 199, 324, 326
English, 120, 255 Florence, 24, 94, 125, 129, 130, 133, 134, 136,
disciplina, 129 138, 139, 140–2, 144, 146, 152, 154, 158,
Dobszay, Laszlo, 175 273, 381
Dom Dinis, King, 168 Santo Spirito, 130
Domaslav, 174 Fontaine, Huitace de, 221
Doonesbury, 67 Dex trop demeure, 221
Douay, 239 Forest, 120
drama Forkel, Johann Nikolaus, 346, 354
liturgical, 114, 116 formes fixes, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 222
vernacular, 116, 164 Fortunatus, Venantius, 227
Drogo, 189, 190, 191, 192 Pange lingua, 227
Du Fay, Guillaume, 24, 182, 365, 368 fractio, 69
Iuvenis qui puellam, 236 France, 20, 23, 32, 34, 56, 87–9, 93, 107, 110,
ductia, 93 112, 114, 119, 126, 136, 140, 145, 161, 165,
ductus, 163, 340 166, 199, 207, 215, 230, 252, 262, 268, 269,
Dunstan, 114 273, 274, 283, 285, 289, 305, 306, 310, 323,
Dunstaple, John, 3, 113, 120 325, 333, 343, 345, 347, 348, 350, 357, 360,
duplum, 69, 74, 77, 137, 237, 239, 311 361
Durandus, William, bishop, 201 Francis, Saint, 24, 130
Cantico delle creature, 129
Early Music movement Frankish kingdom, 18, 26, 27, 277, 323, 327
Ecce advenit Dominator Dominus, 45 Frankish traditions, 34
Edward III, 112 frons, 211
Egidius, 96 Frye, Walter, 113, 181
Courtois et sages, 87 Fuller, Sarah, 99, 100, 289, 368
Franchois sunt nobles, 143
El mois de mai, see chanson; pastourelle Gaffurio, Franchino, 125
Eleanor, queen of Castile, 166 Practica musicae, 125
Eleanor of Aquitaine, 112, 268 Gallicanism, 114
Elizabeth of Hungary, 24 Gallo, F. Alberto, 125
Elizabeth of Thurinigia, St, 174 garip, 93
Emperor Garrat, James, 354
Holy Roman, 171, 200, 328, 330 Garzo, 130
England, 3, 20, 34, 88, 90, 95, 107–19, 122, 202, Gascony, 207
234, 262, 267, 268, 285, 315, 316, 328, 333, Gaul, 19, 113, 114, 162, 338
337 Geering, Arnold, 176
London, 109, 134, 135, 143, 144, 316 Geistesgeschichte, 359, 363
English, Middle, 109, 110, 111, 116 Gembloux, 326
Enlightenment, 343, 345, 346, 347, 353, Gennrich, Friedrich, 209
364 Gerard of Liège, 82
Erythraean pythoness, 165 Gerbert, Martin, 351, 359
estampida, 133 Germany, 23, 88, 110, 281, 305, 323, 329, 347,
estampie, 93, 133 348
Esztergom, 328 German chant dialect, 174
Ethelwold, 42, 114, 267 Gevaert, François-Auguste, 339, 347
exemplum, 33, 49 Ghent, 27, 327, 362, 367
Exultet, 20 altarpiece, 362, 367
469 Index
Giovanni da Cascia, 94 Henry II, 112, 208, 268

Girona, 164 Henry VIII, 114
Gleoman, 110 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 346, 347, 348, 351,
Gluck, Christoph Willibald. Ritter von, 357 353, 357, 358, 362
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 348 Volkslieder, 347
Göllner, Theodor, 176 Hereford, 202
Gorze, 196 Hesdin, Jehan Acart de
Gospel, 17, 116, 186, 198, 203 La prise amoureuse, 222
gradual, 15, 128, 199, 244, 343 Hieronymus de Moravia, 284
Editio Medicaea, 342–3, 344 Hildegard of Bingen, 268, 269, 342
Editio Vaticana, 343, 345 Histoire littéraire des troubadours, 346
Pustet, 344 hocket, 93, 126, 274, 275
Sederunt principles, 166 Hoffman, E. T. A., 352–4, 356–7, 358
Viderunt omnes, 166, 300, 343 Holy Cross, 73, 117
great mortality, 88 Holy See, 18, 136, 145, 271
Great Schism, the, 145, 173, 289 Horace, 225, 227, 228
Gregory VII, pope, 325 Hospodine, pomiluj ny, 173
Gregory XI, pope, 88 Hucbald of Saint-Amand, 278, 351
Gregory XIII, pope, 342 Hucke, Helmut, 340
Gregory the Great, pope, 18, 113, 202, 277, 337, Hugh of St Victor, 40
339, 353 Hugo, Victor, 347
Grétry, André-Erneste-Modest, 346 Huizinga, Johan, 361, 362, 367
Grimm’s Märchen, 348 Hungary, 171, 175, 180–2, 320, 328
Grocheo, Johannes de, 85, 135, 382 Hus, Jan/Hussitism, 179, 182
De musica, 310 hymn
ductus, 135 Audite omnes amantes Deum, 230
stantipes, 135 Ave maris stella, 41, 230
Grudencz, Petrus de, 179-80, 181
Guarin, 238 Iberia, 114
Guido d’Arezzo, 1, 21, 267, 280, 297, 330 Incisa di Valdarno, 130
Guidonian Hand, 1 Innocent III, pope, 200
Micrologus, 46, 48, 49, 50, 53, 124, 280, 281, interval-progression treatise, 55–6,
298 60, 64
Guillaume IX, Duke of Aquitaine, 207, 268, introit
305 Puer natus est, 343
Gunbad-i-Qabus, 67 Ipsi soli, 50
Iraq, 320
Haberl, Franz Xaver, 344 Ireland, 109, 202, 322
Hadrian, pope, 192, 195, 338 Isaac, Heinrich, 181
Haines, John, 349 Isabella of Castile, 167, 170
Halle, Adam de la, 351, 354 Isidore, Metropolitan of Kiev, 173
Le Jeu de la Feuillé, 223 Isidore of Seville, 98, 161, 163, 277, 291, 318,
Le Jeu du Pelerin, 223 322, 385
Le Roi du Sicile, 223 De ecclesiasticis officiis, 161
Robin et Marion, 223 isorhythm, 361–2
strophic congé, 223 pan-isorhythm, 90
Tant con je vivray, 355 istampita, 133
Handel, George Frideric, 357, 358 Belica, 134
Handschin, Jaques, 350, 365 Gaetta, 134
Harrison, Frank Ll, 365 In pro, 134
Hartker Antiphoner, 338 Isabella, 134
Hawkins, John, 346 La manfredina, 134, 135
Haydn, Franz Joseph, 2, 365 Lamento di Tristano, 134, 135
Hedwig, St, 174 Parlamento, 134
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 358 Principio di virtù, 134
Heidelberg, 347, 355, 363 Saltarello, 134
Helmholz, Hermann von, 351 Tre Fontane, 134
Henri d’Hélène, 238 Trotto, 134
470 Index
István I, King of Poland, 173 Ave donna santissima, 133

Iustus ut palma minor, 34 Ave vergene gaudente, 132, 133
Cristo è nato, 133
Jacopo da Bologna De la crudel morte di Cristo, 132
Fenice fu, 139 Edizioni Ernetti, 133
Jadwiga, St see Hedwig Edizioni Terni, 133
Jakemès Madonna Santa Maria, 132
Roman du castelain de Couci, 223 Martin Dürre, 133
James, Saint, 63, 325 O divina Virgo flore, 132
Jan of Jenštejn, Archbishop, 174-5 O Maria d’omelia, 132
Jaufre, Rudel, 207 Regina sovrana, 132, 133
Jean de Berry, 96 ripresa, 93, 130, 132, 154–7
Jean of Luxembourg, 88 spirituale, 201
Jerusalem, 19, 71, 320 Venite a laudare, 131
Jews, 161, 170 Lavardin, Hildebert of, 231
Johannes de Garlandia, 282, 284, 290, Le Grant, Denis, 238
366 Se je chant, see chace
John XXII, pope, 236 Leander, 162
John the Baptist, Saint, 73, 190 Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel, 362, 365
John the Deacon, 336, 338 Lefferts, Peter M., 368
John the Evangelist, Saint, 28, 190 Leich, 93
Jommelli, Niccolo, 357 Leo, Leonardo, 357
Jonah (Biblical character) Leo I, pope, 9
and the whale, 80 Leo III, pope, 338
Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, 180 Leo XIII, pope, 344
Josquin des Prez, 167, 327, 352, 364 León, 163
jubilus, 15, 27, 52 Leoninus, 72, 73, 300
Jumièges, abbey of, 33 Levy, Kenneth, 340, 372
Liber antiphonarius, 344
karoles, 110 Liber gradualis, 344
Karp, Theodore, 343 Liber Ordinarius, 123
Kazimierz Jagiello, Prince, 182 Liège, 326
Kent, 113 Limousin, 207, 332
Kiesewetter, Raphael Georg, 347, 351, 353, 354, Lincoln, 202
355, 358 liturgy
Kippenberg, Burkhard, 350 Jerusalem, 9
Košice monastery, 180 Latin, 10, 45, 110, 130, 328
Kreutziger-Herr, Annette, 348 Mozarabic rite, 162
Kroyer, Theodor, 365, 368 Ordo, 44, 45, 74, 189
Ordo Romanus I, 14
La neve e ’l ghiaccio, 142 practice, 9, 186, 192, 315
Ladislaus, St, 174 liturgy, feasts, 190
Lady Chapel, 118 Advent, 17, 191
lai, 93, 97, 250, 274, 384 Annuale, 73
loı̂d (or laı̂d), 93 Ascension, 44, 73, 137, 190, 191, 266
Lambillotte, Louis, 343 Assumption, 73, 165, 190, 266, 272
Landini, Francesco, 138, 140–4, 147, 156, 354, Christmas, 11, 28, 42, 45, 72, 73, 113, 165,
355, 361 189, 190, 266, 272, 343
‘Musica son’, 94, 148 Circumcision, 191, 378
Non avrà ma’ pietà, 355 Communion, 80, 187
Lanfranc Corpus Christi, 116
decretals, 45 Easter, 20, 42, 73, 80, 116, 123, 129, 164, 189,
Lang, Paul Henry, 363 190, 248, 266, 272, 295
Languedoc, 207, 332 Easter Vigil, 20
Lateran, 190, 201 Epiphany, 45, 190, 191, 266, 272
lauda, 128, 131 Eucharist, 10, 185, 186, 187, 192
Altissima luce, 132, 133 Exaltation of the Cross, 190
Ave dei genitrix, 133 ferial, 191
471 Index
Good Friday, 116 Magister Frater, 142

Holy Saturday, 19, 20, 190 maı̂trises, 347
Holy Week, 116, 201 Majo, Giuseppe de, 357
Lent, 17, 244 Maraschi, Bartolomeo de, Bishop, 180
Maundy Thursday, 163, 190 Marcabru, 207
Octave, 191 Marchetto da Padova, 134, 137,
Palm Sunday, 11, 116, 190 288
Pentecost, 34, 41, 73, 190, 191, 266, 272 Pomerium, 134, 137, 146, 287
St Stephen, 72 Margival, Nicole de, 222, 223
Transfiguration, 116 Dit de la panthère d’amours, 222
liturgy, genres Marian, 41, 95, 114, 159
antiphonaries, 122 Martial, St, 26, 299
chant, 24, 34, 63, 128, 300, 328, 335 Martial de Limoges, Saint, 206
communion, 186, 203 Martin V, Pope, 88
gradual, 64, 122 Martyr, Justin, 185, 186, 187
introit, 42, 164, 186, 187, 343 Mary Magdalene, Saint, 130
Marian antiphon, 11, 117, 118 mass, 12, 17, 44, 49, 63, 64, 72, 73, 80, 95, 96,
orationale, 162 114, 118–20, 123, 126–8, 138, 140, 144–6,
ordinary, 114, 117, 267, 268, 270, 273 158, 159, 163, 185–90, 192, 196, 197,
processional, 122 201–3, 244, 248, 278, 287, 294, 297, 298,
sanctorale, 189, 191, 193, 328 320, 324, 327, 328, 339, 342, 343, 349, 354,
temporale, 189, 192, 193 369
Llibre Vermell, 167 Agnus Dei, 17, 123, 158, 186
Lo lume vostro, 139 Barcelona, 95, 164
Lombardy, 136, 207 Credo IV, 126
Lotharingia, 197, 323 Credo Apostolorum, 126, 128
Louis of Anjou, 24 Credo Cardinalis, 126, 128
Louis the Pious, 18 Credo Regis, 126
Lowinsky, Edward, 363–65, 368 Credo Vatican I, 128
Lucca, 125, 138, 139, 387 fore-mass, 187, 195, 322
Ludmila, St, 174 Gloria, 10, 12, 15, 27, 95, 138, 144, 145, 158,
Ludwig, Friedrich, 349, 350, 352, 358–59, 363, 159, 186, 187, 193, 354
364 gradual, 63
lur, 360 high, 116, 202
Ite Missa Est, 95
Machaut, Guillaume de, 1, 88, 90–3, 95–7, 100, Kyrie, 14, 15, 30, 44, 49, 63, 72, 95, 123, 125,
102, 103, 112, 117, 145, 148, 151, 176, 158, 159, 186, 187, 193, 270
222–4, 236, 238, 253, 257, 273–5, 289, 313, Kyrie Cunctipotens genitor, 30
314, 318, 326, 328, 349, 351, 358, 365–7, Kyrie Fons bonitatis, 44
384 Kyrie Te Christe, 30
Bone pastor / Bone pastor / Bone Pastor, 97 Lady mass, 117, 118
Dame a vous, virelai, 97 Missal, 116, 122, 294
Felix virgo / Inviolata genitrix / Ad te ordinary, 10, 14, 17, 95, 117
suspiramus gementes et flentes, 236 proper, 115, 164, 193, 196, 343
Le Voir Dit, 224, 366–67 Proprium, 125
Ma fin est mon commencement, 102 Roman Missal, 196
Mass, 349, 354 Sanctus, 17, 95, 117, 123, 125, 158, 159, 186,
Nes qu’on porroit (ballade), 102 203
Remede de Fortune, 93, 97, 224, 274, 367 Toulouse, 95, 332
Se je souspir, virelai, 257 Tournai, 95, 117
Tous corps / De souspirant / Suspiro, 361 Mátyás Corvinus, King of Hungary, 171,
Trop de peinne, 102 180-1
Mâcon, 196 al-Mawsil, 320
madrigal, 94, 139, 140, 142, 143, 146, 147, 148, Meaux, 27
149, 150, 158, 258 Medicaea, Editio, 342
Deh dimmi tu, 142 Memling, Hans
La neve e ’l ghiaccio, 143 Najera Triptych, 367
Una colomba candida e gentile, 141 Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie, 346
472 Index
Methodius, St, 173 Benigna celi regina / Beata es, Maria /In
metra, 225, 228–32, 240 veritate, 236
metre contrafactum, 40, 63, 81, 129, 210, 212
dactylic hexameter, 226 Degentis vita / Cum vix artidici / Vera pudicia,
dactylic pentameter, 226 240
iambic dimeter, 227 Flos virginum, 236
Metz, 44, 45, 189, 192, 195–7, 200, 202, 323, French double, 81
324, 326, 336, 338, 341, 382 Inter densas deserti meditans / Imbribus
Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 357–8 irriguis / Admirabile est nomen Domini,
Michael, Saint, 73 240; isorhythmic, 85, 119, 120, 274,
Michel, Francisque, 349 361–2
Miesko I, King of Poland, 173 Quant florist la violete, 235, 384
Milan, 19, 136, 139, 141, 192, 197, 279, Quinque incitamenta, 82
338 Servant regem / O Philippe / Rex regum,
Minnelied, 398 236
Minnesang, 305, 307, 328, 349, 350 talea, 90
minor asclepiad caalectic, 228 Moulu, Pierre, 237
Minotaur, 101 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 357, 364
minstrel, 108, 111, 268, see also troubadour; Murino, Egidius de
trouvère Tractatus cantus mensurabilis, 288
Missal Muris, Johannes de, 87, 89, 237, 285, 290
Barberiniano Latino 560, 123 Musica euchiriadis, 46, 48–50
Mocquereau, André, 344 musica ficta, 99, 101, 289
mode Muslim, 161, 169, 170
1, 23 invasion, 162, 169
2, 23 rule, 161, 162, 163, 170
recitation tones, 11, 12, 48
tritus, 50, 280, 281, 289 Naples, 2, 126, 134, 136, 145, 146, 223
tropological, 40 naqqāra (nakers), 169
modulamina, psalle, 28 Narbonne, 162, 207
modus Narcissus, 214
ponens, 233 narrative, Arthurian, 223
tollens, 233 Navarre, 88, 308
Moll, Kevin, 368 Netherlands, 23
Moncrif, 346 New Testament, 11, 42, 116
Choix de chansons, 346 New York, 168
Moniot d’ Arras, 82 Nicholas of Radom see Radomski
monophony Nisard, Théodore, 343
in vernacular, 67, 342, 347 Non a Narcisso, 141
Mont-Blandin, abbey of, 27 Normans, 20, 33, 109, 110, 111, 115, 116, 118,
Monte Cassino, 330, 338 267, 333
Montier-en-Der, 326 North America, 107
Montpellier, 4, 82, 90, 217, 218, 222, 273, 283, Norway, 88
302, 349, 382 nota/notula, 93
Montpellier Codex, 349 notation, 20, 119, 162, 276, 295
Morales, Cristóbal, 168 adiastematic neumes, 19
Moravia, 284 Aquitanian, 21, 56, 163
Morawski, Jerzy, 174 Ars Nova, 119
Morton, Robert, 113 black mensural, 349
motet, 47, 67, 77, 79–90, 95, 97, 98, 103, 119, longa, 74, 83, 84
141, 158, 206, 215, 217, 218, 220, 221, mensural system, 119
225, 234–40, 255, 262, 273, 283, 284, 285, neumatic style, 71, 306
287, 300, 301, 311, 315, 349, 360–3, 368, semibrevis minima, 100
382 semiduplex, 73
Amis, vostre demoree /Pro patribus, 82 Notre Dame, Paris, 40, 47, 259, 260, 282, 283,
Apta caro, 236 284, 292, 300, 301, 305, 316, 325, see also
Argi vices Poliphemus / Cum Pilemon rebus Paris
paucis, 236 polyphony, 47, 282, 284, 300
473 Index
O in Italia felice Liguria, 139 vox principalis, 48–9, 51–2, 66, 122, 124, 127,
‘O sing unto the Lord a new song’, 1 279, 298, 299, see also Winchester
Obrecht, Jacob, 167, 352 Orologio, Giovanni Dondi dall’, 138
Occitane, 206, 305, 306, 331, 332 Orthodox Church, 172-5
literature, 206 Ostia, Leo of, 330
text, 206 Otmar, Saint, 372
occursus, 48, 50, 51, 53, 66 Otto I, 200
Ockeghem, Johannes, 240 Ottoman Empire, 170
Intemerata Dei mater, 240 Ottonians, 197
Odilo, 35 oultrepasse, 93
office, 10, 17, 48, 114, 122, 137, 161, 163, 192, Ovid, 227, 228, 230
193, 195, 198, 201, 277, 278, 324, 327, 338, Oxford, 118, 292
339, 342
Benedictus, 11, 123 Padua, 125, 136–40, 144, 146, 158
compline, 12, 117, 195 Page, Christopher, 3, 92, 103, 209, 350, 365,
introit, 185 368
Little Hours of the Virgin, 117 Paléographie musicale, 344
Magnificat, 11, 123 Palestrina, Pierluigi da, 347, 357
Matins, 10, 11, 12, 42, 43, 63, 116, 165, 202, Paolo, Abbot da Firenze, 143, 144, 158
324 Paris, 27, 39, 40, 143, 144, 148, 158, 199, 200,
matins responsories, 63 202, 209, 215, 223, 270, 273, 282, 284, 286,
nones, 195 292, 300, 301, 310, 316, 323, 325, 326, 331,
Officium peregrinorum, 116 332, 334, 347, 355, 412, see also Notre
prime, 195 Dame, Paris
sext, 195 repertory, 47, 72, 199, 316
terce, 195 Paris, Gaston, 348
vespers, 10, 11, 116, 195 partsong, 109
Vigil, 193, 195 Tappster, drinker, fille another ale, 109
Oleśnicki, Bishop, 173 paschal candle, 20
Omnia beneficia, 176–7 pastourelle, 220
Or qua compagni, 140 ‘Hier main quant je chevauchoie’, see Robin
Ora pro nobis sancta Dei genitrix, et Marian, 221
123 Patier, Dominique, 174-5
orders, Monastic Patrick, Saint, 230
Benedictine Rule, Paul the Deacon, 189, 227
Carmelite, 24 Pecham, John, 232
Cistercian, 341 Philomena praevia temporis amoeni, 232
Dominican, 24, 129, 200, 284, 341 Peguilhan, Aimeric de, 208
Franciscan, 24, 200, 201, 331 Peñalosa, Francisco de, 168
Regula Benedicti, 372 Pépin, 18, 263, 323, 327, 336, 337,
Servant of Mary, 129, 142 341
Ordinal of the Papal Court, 201 performance, 4, 11, 14, 23, 43, 46, 51, 99, 198,
ordines, 74 211, 224, 242, 253, 291, 296, 306, 350, 354,
Oresme, Nicole, see Aristotle, Politics 355, 365, 367, 368, 383
organ, 53, 99, 141, 142, 160, 365, a cappella, 365
366 alternatim, 44, 99, 203
organum, 46–50, 51, 53, 55, 56, 60, 66, 67, 72–5, before 1980s, 367
77, 80, 85, 86, 113, 115, 118, 123, 166, 234, biscantare, 125
235, 252, 253, 255, 256, 262, 267, 272, 279, cantatur iuxta, 44
280, 282–4, 300, 301, 305, 316, 351, 355, discantare, 125
360, 362, 379, 382 extempore, 46, 49, 55, 61
flexible, 49, 50, 51, 53 instruments, 365
per se, 74, 75, 77, 86, 283, 381 memory and, 319
purum, 199, 299 modern, 367
quadrupla, 72, 77 neume, 280
strict, 49–51, 53 organizare, 125
vox organalis, 48, 50–5, 66, 122, 124, 128, 279, polyphonic, 159, 275, 342
298, 299 public, 110
474 Index
performance (cont.) prophetia, 123

solo, 294 prosa, 56, 164, 297
succinere, 123, 125 prosari, 128
super librum, 125 proses, 35, 49, 56–7, 114
tenere organum, 125 prosula, 29, 234
unison, 252 Provence, 207, 332, 346
Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 357 Psalm, 9
Perne, François Louis, 347, 349, 354 94, Venite exultemus, 11
Perotinus, 72 132, 28
quadrupla, 73, 166, 300 contra partem Donati, 230
Petrarch, 103, 130, 236 Laudate, 192
Petrus de Cruce, 284, 382, 406 Psalterius, 122
Philip, Duke of Burgundy, 274 tone, 10, 11, 129, 198
Philip the Chancellor, 176, 231, Puer natus est, see liturgy, genre: Introit
236 Pythagoras, 90, 238, 239
Philippus de Caserta
Par les bons, 87 quadrivium, 161, 265
Phoebus, 239 quadruplum, 81, 239
Phoebus, Gaston, 275 Quem queritis, 42
Piedmont, 207
Piero, Magister, 94 rabāb, 169
Pierre de Bruges, 238 Radomski, Mikolaj, 182
Pikulik, Jerzy, 175 razos, 208, 306
Pisani, Enrico Reaney, Gilbert, 365
Christe deus, 129 Reformation, 2, 202, 315
sequence, Natus, passus, Dominus refrain, 82, 91, 92, 93, 102, 107, 116, 147, 165,
resurrexit hodie, 125 188, 216, 222, 300, 331
Pistoia, 123, 125, 142, 146 refrain citation, 222, 223
Pius IX, pope, 344 Regensburg, 28, 328, 344
Pius X, pope, 344 Reginek, Antoni, 175
plainchant see chant Regularis Concordia, 42
plainsong, 25 Remedius, Bishop of Rouen, 336
planctus, 167, 250 Remigius, Saint, 191
Plantagenets, 112 Renaissance, 2, 226, 229, 231, 240, 275, 352,
Plato, 98, 277 354, 359, 361–4
Plummer, John, 181 Renart, Jean, 215, 223, 310
Poitiers, 207 Le roman de la Rose, 215
Poland, 171, 175 repertory
Politian, 400 Aquitanian, 49, 55, 56, 72, 199
polyphony Compostelan, 49, 63, 72
Aquitanian, 48, 56 Parisian, 47
Compostelan, 47–8, 63, 65 Winchester, 48–9, 53
Continental, 109 responsorial
early, 46–7, 49, 298 prose, 63
Eastern European, 176–81 Regali ex progenie, 123
parallel, 48 responsory
Parisian, 47, 49, 65 O adjutor, 64–5, 379
pre-Parisian, 47 Revolution, French, 343, 347
primitive, 122 Reims, 95, 239, 274, 275
simple, 122–7, 158, 252, 253 Rhine, 3, 26, 33, 35, 267, 269, 323
Pontifical rhythmus, 225, 230, 231, 234, 236,
Romano-German, 200 240
Portugal, 88, 115, 161, 162, 170, 192 syllabo-clausular, 229
Galicia, 168 Riccardo, count of Caserta, 121
Pothier, Joseph, 344 Richard I, King of England (‘the Lionheart’),
prime, 117 112, 346
Procopius, St, 174 Riemann, Hugo, 349–52, 354, 355, 365, 366,
prophecy, Sibylline, 165 368
475 Index
Rinkenberg, Martin, 180 sapphic stanza, 227

Rioja, 163 Savoy, 88
Riquier, Guiraut, 207 Saxony, 26, 327
rite Scandinavia, 115, 255, 320
Ambrosian, 19, 192 Scarlatti, Alessandro, 357
Gallican, 114 Schering, Arnold, 365, 366
Salisbury/Sarum, 20, 115, 116, schola cantorum, 18, 188, 189, 336, 338
201 Schumann, Robert, 358
rituals, 122 scop, 111
Robert of Aix, 238 Scotland, 88, 325, 334
Robertson, Anne Walters, 318 Sechnall, Saint
Robertus de Anglia, 113 Sederunt principes, 72
Robin, 110, 218 Sens, 326
Robin et Marion, 220 Sephardi, 170
Rogation, 11 sequence, 17, 26–8, 32, 33, 34, 39–41, 43–5, 57,
Roman de la Rose, 310 74, 80, 93, 94, 115, 119, 125, 130, 175, 187,
Rome, 18–20, 87, 114, 136, 145, 146, 185, 189, 193, 209, 211, 218, 224, 234, 248, 250, 267,
191, 195, 200, 202, 228, 263, 265, 277, 289, 301, 305, 313, 330, 342
322, 331, 332, 336–41, 345, 372 Alleluia Christus resurgens, 44
Romans, 113 Ave, mundi spes, Maria, 125
rondeau, 91, 146, 216, 223, 274, 287, Dilecte deo Galle perenni, 34
355 Hac clara die, 44
dance, 221 Nato canunt, 45
rondellus, 68, 119 Rex omnipotens, 44
rondet de carole, 216 Templum cordis, 39, 41, 43
rota, 119, 134 Verbum bonum et suave, 130
Rouen, 323, 334, 336 Victimae paschali laudes, 80
Royal Household Chapel, 118 service
Royllart Salve, 117
Rex Karole / Leticie, pacis / Virgo prius ac Sicily, 320
posterius, 369 Siena, 125, 128
Rudel, Jaufre, 215 Sigismund I, King of Poland, 171, 182
Rue, Pierre de la, 352 Société des Anciens Textes Français, 348
Socrates, 233
Sacerdotes tui domine, 28 Soissons, 238, 325, 326
Sacramentary Solesmes, 317, 339, 342, 343, 344, 345
Gregorian, 192 song, 45–6, 51, 56, 61, 66, 112, 211, 215, 287,
Saint-Palaye, Jean-Baptiste de Lacurne de, 294, 300, 305, 306, 308, 309, 332, 333, 346,
346 347, 348, see also chanson; troubadour;
St Gall, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 330 trouvère
St Gall Cantatorium, 343 A definement d’este lerray, 109
St Mary’s Abbey, 45 Angelus ad virginem, 109
St Maur-des-Fossés, 199 Ars Nova, 87
St Victor, abbey of, 40 art, 110
St Victor, Adam de, 40 books of, 112
St-Martin-du-Ré, Arnaud de, 238 ceremonial offices, 56
St-Riquier, 326 collection, 310
saints, cult of, 174–5 Compostela repertory, 63
Salieri, Antonio, 205 courtly, 112
Salimbene of Parma, 125, 129 dance, 93, 244, 349
Cronica, 125 devotional, 305
Salzburg, 327, 328 Dou way Robin, 109
Monk of, 328 drinking, 111
San Millán de la Cogolla, 163 duet, 258
Sancti Spiritus assit nobis gratia, 34 ecclesiastical, 46
Sante Johanne, Matteus de English art, 111
Inclite flos, 87 French refrain, 257
Santiago de Compostela, 63, 165 in Anglo-Norman, 112
476 Index
song (cont.) theory, see also treatise

in honour of the Virgin, 167 gradus, 119
in Middle English, 112 pentachord, 24
Jewish, 170 Thérouanne, Gilles de la, 238
late medieval, 365 Thibaut, Anton Friedrich Justus, 347, 355
literate, 222 Thibaut de Champagne, 269, 295, 306, 310, 326
love, 128, 332 Je me cuidoie partir, 346
Minnesinger, 349 Thomas of Canterbury, 116, 174
monophonic, 253, 325, 326 Tieck, Ludwig, 355
notation, 310 tierce, 93
old rude, 264 Tinctoris, Johannes, 181, 289
oral tradition, 121 Liber de arte contrapuncti, 125
orality, 350 Tirlemont, Regnaud de, 238
performance, 99 Tischler, Hans, 350
polyphonic, 109 Toledo, 24, 161, 162, 163, 166, 192, 322, 324
popular, 110 tonary, 11, 26, 242
Provençal, 136 St Bénigne of Dijon, 343
reconstruction of in nineteenth century, 205 St Riquier, 337
religious, 201 Toul, 326
secular, 83, 107, 108, 120, 252 Touront, Johannes, 181
strophic, 209 tract, 10, 17
Sumer is icumen in, 109, 119 treatise
vernacular, 82, 109, 111, 205–10, 215, 221, Ad organum faciendum, 53–5, 124, 377
222, 306, 326, 331, 332, 335 Arts de seconde rhétorique, 224
Wynter, 109 De Temporum ratione, 228
Soriano, Francesco, 342 Dialogus de musica, 280
Spain, 122, 161–3, 165, 167–70, 192, 320, 322, Expositiones tractatus, 125
332, 338, 398 Micrologus, 46, 48, 49, 56, 53, 124, 280, 281,
Granada, 170 298
Spanke, Hans, 209 Musica, 48, 55, 60, 352
Stanislaus, St, 175 Musica Albini, 265
Stefan Batory, King of Poland, 171 Musica disciplina, 278
Stephen, Saint, 44, 73, 164, 174, 190, Musica enchiriadis, 46–50, 279, 298,
191 351–3
Stephen II, pope, 18, 336 Scolica enchiriadis, 279
Stephen IX, pope, 330 Vatican Organum, 64, 379
Stephen of Liège, 23 Trebor, 96
Stevens, John, 350 Treitler, Leo, 340
Stone Age, 161 Trier, 326
Strahov Codex, 181 Trinity, 188
Strohm, Reinhard, 365 triplum, 80, 81, 84, 90, 158, 220, 235, 236, 238,
summa, 286 239, 240, 311
Switten, Margaret, 210 trobairitz, 89, 107, 206, 208–11, 213–15, 268,
Symmachus, pope, 15 305, 306, 310
symphonia, 46, 49, 53 trope, 114
symphony, 2, 95 Angelorum glorie, 124
system Cuius stellam, 45
durus, 50 Hodie sanctissimi, 30, 43
mollis, 50 Nos respectu gratie, 45
Szendrei, Janka, 175 Stella fulget, 124
Tropier, 44
Tarragona, 162 troubadour
Taruskin, Richard, 368 canso, 210
Te Christe supplices exoramus, 44 dansa, 210, 333
Te Deum, 195, 198, 225 descort, 210
temperament, 121, 288, 331 enueg, 210
Tempo, Antonio da, 94 gap, 48, 189, 210
tetrachord, 24, 53, 278, 280 joc-partie, 210
477 Index
joglars, 208 virelai, 92, 93, 97, 113, 154, 155, 167, 168, 221,
laisse, 209 274
partimen, 210 Adiu, adiu, 142
pastorela, 210 Virgin Mary, 28, 123
planh, 210 Visigoth, 19, 161, 165, 322
rondet de carole, 215 Visitatio sepulchri, 267
tenso, 210 Vita, Brother 125
tornadas, 211 Vitry, Philippe de, 87, 91, 100, 141, 176, 236,
tornoi de dames, 215 238, 274, 285, 326, 333
trouvère, 85, 89, 107, 131, 205, 207, 216, 221–4, motet, O canenda / Rex quem / Contratenor /
268, 269, 295, 305–7, 310, 313, 326, 333, Rex regum, 240
346–50 volta, 93, 134, 154, 155, 156
authorship, 223 Voltaire, 345
chanson, citation, 222 Vos quid admiramini / Gratissima / Gaude
citation, 310 gloriosa, 240
grand chant courtois, 216 Vyššı́ Brod monastery, 178
Troyes, 326
Trudeau, Garry, 67 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 355
Tyniec Sacramentary, 173 Wagner, Richard, 358
Wala, Abbot, 195
Urban VI, pope, 88 Wales, 202
Ut queant laxis, 227, 281 Walter of Châtillon, 231
Weckerlin, Jean-Baptiste, 347
Vercelli, Bishop of, 33 Wenceslas, St, 174
Verdun, 26, 27 Wenceslas IV, King of Bohemia, 178
Treaty of, 26, 327 Werf, Hendrick van der, 350
Vergil, 228, 230 Winchester, 23, 42, 45, 47, 48, 51, 56, 115, 199,
vers, 210 256, 267, 298, 299, 403
verse pre-Conquest, 115
syllabic, 233 trope, 45
versus, 31, 32, 43, 49, 56–9, 60, 61, 63, 67, 68, Tropers, 298
93, 168, 250, 252, 260, 286, 288, 299, 317, Winckelmann, Johann, 353–4
324, 368, 378 Wolf, Johannes, 355, 359
Aquitanian, 56, 60, 63, 68, 69, worship
71 Christian, 9, 169, 186, 204, 320
cum auctoritate, 232 Wulfstan of Winchester, 115
Per partum virginis, 57–62
Vézelay, 326 York, 202
vidas, 208, 306
Viderunt omnes, 72 Żagań, 180–1
Vienna, 347, 355, 367 Zagial, 130, 180–1
Vigo, 168 Zamorei, Gabio de’, 126
Villancico, 168, 170 Sermone de fortitudine, 126
Vincent of Kielce, 175 Zell, Ulrich von, 35
Violante, 121 Zelter, Carl Friedrich, 355
Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène Emmanuel, Zoilo, Annibale, 342
348 Zygmunt see Sigismund

The Cambridge Companion To Medieval Music

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The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music

From the emergence of plainsong to the end of the fourteenth

mark everist is Professor of Music and Associate Dean in The

◦ Cambridge University Press 2011

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2011

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

ISBN 978-0-521-84619-6 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

List of illustrations [page ix]

Introduction Mark Everist [1]

Part I • Repertory, styles and techniques

Part III • Themes, topics and trajectories

18 The geography of medieval music Christopher Page [320]

1.1 Aquitanian neumes in a late-eleventh-century antiphoner

3.7b Codex Calixtinus, first part of verse, responsory O adjutor (E-SC,

Rebecca A. Baltzer is Professor emerita at the University of Texas at Austin. Her

ca150 Justin Martyr’s account of a Sunday

ca800 Earliest unnotated mass antiphoners.

after 933 Revival of the abbey of Gorze by Bishop

1098 Foundation of Cı̂teaux, the mother house of

1213–16 Pope Innocent III’s revision of mass and

after 1272 Anonymous 4, an English witness to Parisian

ca1370 Philippus de Caserta, Tractatus de diversis

Aosta, Biblioteca del Seminario Maggiore 13 I-AO 13

Cracow, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Biblioteka Jagiellońska PL-Kj 40098

Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Tesoro della Basilica di I-Ma Cod. CIX

Perugia, Biblioteca Comunale Augusta 3065 I-PEc 3065

Vyššı́ Brod, Knihovna cisterciackého klaštera 42 CZ-VB 42

E-Mn 10069 Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España 10069 (Cantigas de

GB-Lbl Harley 3965 London, British Library, Harley 3965

I-MDAegidi Montefiore dell’Aso, Francesco Egidi, private collection

Mach B Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 1585

a companion to a body of music that spans the best part of a millennium,

to the giants on whose shoulders we sit. I am however personally grateful

Repertory, styles and techniques

Chant in the office

The performance practice of psalms in the monastic office changed over

after compline that concluded with the performance of a Marian antiphon

Chant in the mass

Example 1.1 (cont.)

entrance of the clergy; apparently its length would be extended by perform-

Table 1.1 Outline of the mass in the

Example 1.2 Alleluia. Ascendens Christus, in a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Parisian gradual

The origins of Gregorian chant

of a longer manuscript tradition, they may represent vestiges of earlier writ-

Notation and performance

enables us to transcribe chant melodies and to compare them with the

chant manuscripts gradually gave way, in many places, to a more uniform

Late chant composition

onwards, composers of chant consciously deployed the eight modes as they

when commemorations founded by individuals created numerous services

New music in Francia

About a generation after the Mont-Blandin gradual was copied, Amalarius

[Introit:] Sacerdotes tui domine, induant iustitiam, et sancti tui exsultent:

The monks at the monastery of St Gall composed two sets of melismatic

text is known as a prosula.10 The St Emmeram copy of the Psalle modulamina

The early sequence: Notker’s Liber hymnorum