Ars antiqua: Organum, Conductus, Motet (Music in Medieval Europe) [1 ed.] 9780754626664, 0754626660

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Ars antiqua

Music in Medieval Europe Series Editor: Thomas Forrest Kelly Titles in the Series: Chant and its Origins Thomas Forrest Kelly Oral and Written Transmission in Chant Thomas Forrest Kelly Embellishing the Liturgy Alejandro Enrique Planchart Poets and Singers Elizabeth Aubrey Ars antiqua Edward H. Roesner Ars nova John L. Nadas and Michael Scott Cuthbert Instruments and their Music in the Middle Ages Timothy J. McGee

Ars antiqua Organum, Conductus, Motet

Edited by

Edward H. Roesner New York University, USA

~~ ~~o~;~~n~~:up LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2009 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint ofthe Taylor & Francis Group, an iriforma business Copyright 'L: Edward H, Roesner 2009. For copyright of indiYidual articles please refer to the

Acknowledgements. All rights reserved. No pm1 of this publication may be reproduced. stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means. electronic, mechanical. photocopying. recording or otherwise \\ithout the prior permission of the publisher. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Wherever possible. these reprints are made from a copy of the original printing. but these can themselves be of very variable quality. Whilst the publisher has made eYery effort to ensure the quality ofthe reprint. some variability may inevitably remain. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Ars antiqua : organum. conductus. motet. - (Music in medieval Europe) 1. Organa- History and criticism 2. Conductus - Histor~ and criticism 3. Motets- History and criticism I. Roesner. Edward H. 781'.0902 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Ars antiqua : organum. conductus. motet I edited by Edward Roesner. p. em.- (Music in medieval Europe) Includes index. ISBN: 978 0 7546 2666 4 (alk. paper) 1. Organa-History and criticism. 2. Conductus-Histor~ and criticism. 3. Motets-History and criticism. I. Roesner. Edward H. ML174.A77 2008 780.9'02--dc22 2008005038 ISBN 9780754626664 (hbk)

Contents Acknowledgements Series Preface Introduction PART I

POLYPHONY AT NOTRE DAME OF PARIS

Craig Wright (1986), 'Leoninus, Poet and Musician', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 39, pp. 1-35. 2 Heinrich Husmann (1963 ), 'The Origin and Destination of the Magnus fiber organi', The Musical Quarterly, 49, pp. 311-30 (translated by Gilbert Reaney). 3 Rebecca A. Baltzer (1992), 'The Geography of the Liturgy at Notre-Dame of Paris', in Thomas Forrest Kelly (ed.), Plainsong in the Age of Polyphony: Cambridge Studies in Performance Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 45-64. PART II 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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3 39

59

ORGANUM, GENRE, RHYTHM

Edward H. Roesner (1982), 'Johannes de Garlandia on Organum in speciali', Early Music History, 2, pp. 129-60. Jeremy Yudkin (1980), 'The Copula According to Johannes de Garlandia', Musica disciplina, 34, pp. 67-84. Ernest H. Sanders (1980), 'Consonance and Rhythm in the Organum of the 12th and 13th Centuries', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 33, pp. 264-86. Edward H. Roesner (2001), 'Who "Made" the Magnus fiber?', Early Music History, 20, pp. 227-66. Steven C. Immel (2001), 'The Vatican Organum Treatise Re-examined', Early Music History, 20, pp. 121-72. Norman E. Smith (1972), 'Interrelationships Among the Alleluias of the Magnus fiber organi', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 25, pp. 175-202. William G. Waite (1961), 'The Abbreviation of the Magnus fiber', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 14, pp. 147-58.

81 113 131 155 195 24 7 275

PART III CONDUCTUS, GENRE, FUNCTION, RHYTHM II Janet Knapp (1979), 'Musical Declamation and Poetic Rhythm in an Early Layer

of Notre Dame Conductus', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 32, pp. 383--407.

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12 Ernest H. Sanders (1985), 'Conductus and Modal Rhythm', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 38, pp. 439-69. 13 Thomas B. Payne (2000), 'Aurelianis civitas: Student Unrest in Medieval France and a Con ductus by Philip the Chancellor', Speculum, 75, pp. 589-614.

315 347

PART IV MOTET, CHRONOLOGY, STYLE

14 Rebecca A. Baltzer (1990), 'Aspects of Trope in the Earliest Motets for the Assumption ofthe Virgin', in Peter M. Lefferts and Brian Seirup (eds), Studies in Medieval Music: Festschrift for Ernest H. Sanders, New York: Department of Music, Columbia University, pp. 5--42. [Also published in Current Musicology ( 1990), 45--47.] 375 15 Ernest H. Sanders (1967), 'The Question of Perotin's Oeuvre and Dates', in Ludwig Finscher and Christoph-Hellmut Mahling (eds), Festschrift fur Walter Wiora zum 30. Dezember 1966, Kassel: Barenreiter Verlag, pp. 241--49. 413 16 Gordon A. Anderson (1967), 'A Small Collection of Notre Dame Motets ca. 1215-1235', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 22, pp. 157-96. 423 17 Mark Everist (1988), 'The Rondeau Motet: Paris and Artois in the Thirteenth Century', Music and Letters, 69, pp. 1-22. 463 18 Dolores Pesce (1997), 'Beyond Glossing: The Old Made New in Mout mefu griefl Robin m 'aime/ Portare', in Dolores Pesce (ed.), Hearing the Motet: Essays on the Motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 28-51. 485 Index

509

Acknowledgements The editor and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material. American Institute of Musicology for the essay: Jeremy Yudkin (1980), 'The Copula According to Johannes de Garlandia', Musica disciplina, 34, pp. 67-84. Copyright © 1980 American Institute of Musicology. Barenreiter Verlag, Kassel for the essay: Ernest H. Sanders ( 1967), 'The Question of Perotin 's Oeuvre and Dates', in Ludwig Finscher and Christoph-Hellmut Mahling (eds), Festschrift fur Walter Wiora zum 30. Dezember 1966, Kassel: Barenreiter Verlag, pp. 241--49. Cambridge University Press for the essays: Rebecca A. Baltzer (1992), 'The Geography of the Liturgy at Notre-Dame of Paris', in Thomas Forrest Kelly (ed.), Plainsong in the Age of Polyphony: Cambridge Studies in Performance Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 45-64; Edward H. Roesner (1982), 'Johannes de Garlandia on Organum in speciali', Early Music History, 2, pp. 129-60; Edward H. Roesner (2001), 'Who "Made" the Magnus fiber?', Early Music History, 20, pp. 227-66; Steven C. Immel (200 1), 'The Vatican Organum Treatise Re-examined', Early Music History, 20, pp. 121-72. All copyright© Cambridge University Press. Columbia University for the essay: Rebecca A. Baltzer (1990), 'Aspects of Trope in the Earliest Motets for the Assumption of the Virgin', in Peter M. Lefferts and Brian Seirup (eds), Studies in Medieval Music: Festschrift for Ernest H. Sanders, New York: Department of Music, Columbia University, pp. 5--42. [Also published in Current Musicology (1990), 45-47.] Copyright© 1990 Columbia University. Medieval Academy of America for the essay: Thomas B. Payne (2000), 'Aurelianis civitas: Student Unrest in Medieval France and a Conductus by Philip the Chancellor', Speculum, 75, pp. 589-614. Oxford University Press for the essays: Heinrich Husmann ( 1963), 'The Origin and Destination of the Magnus fiber organi', The Musical Quarterly, 49, pp. 311-30 (translated by Gilbert Reaney); Mark Everist (1988), 'The Rondeau Motet: Paris and Artois in the Thirteenth Century', Music and Letters, 69, pp. 1-22; Dolores Pesce (1997), 'Beyond Glossing: The Old Made New in Mout mefu grief! Robin m 'aime/Portare', in Dolores Pesce (ed.), Hearing the Motet: Essays on the Motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 28-51. University of California Press for the essays: Craig Wright (1986), 'Leoninus, Poet and Musician', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 39, pp. 1-35; Ernest H. Sanders (1980), 'Consonance and Rhythm in the Organum ofthe 12th and 13th Centuries', Journal ofthe

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American Musicological Society, 33, pp. 264-86; Norman E. Smith (1972), 'Interrelationships Among the Alleluias of the Magnus tiber organi', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 25, pp. 175-202; William G. Waite (1961 ), 'The Abbreviation of the Magnus tiber', Journal ofthe American Musicological Society, 14, pp. 147-58; Janet Knapp (1979), 'Musical Declamation and Poetic Rhythm in an Early Layer of Notre Dame Con ductus', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 32, pp. 383--407; Ernest H. Sanders (1985), 'Conductus and Modal Rhythm', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 38, pp. 439-69; Gordon A. Anderson (1967), 'A Small Collection ofNotre Dame Motets ca. 1215-1235', Journal ofthe American Musicological Society, 22, pp. 157-96. All published by University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological Society. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

Series Preface This series of volumes provides an overview of the best current scholarship in the study of medieval music. Each volume is edited by a ranking expert, and each presents a selection of writings, mostly in English which, taken together, sketch a picture of the shape of the field and of the nature of current inquiry. The volumes are organized in such a way that readers may go directly to an area that interests them, or they may provide themselves a substantial introduction to the wider field by reading through the entire volume. There is of course no such thing as the Middle Ages, at least with respect to the history of music. The Middle Ages- if they are plural at all -get their name as the temporal space between the decline of classical antiquity and its rediscovery in the Renaissance. Such a definition might once have been useful in literature and the fine arts, but it makes little sense in music. The history of Western music begins, not with the music of Greece and Rome (about which we know far too little) but with the music of the Latin Christian church. The body of music known as Gregorian chant, and other similar repertories, are the first music that survives to us in Western culture, and is the foundation on which much later music is built, and the basis for describing music in its time and forever after. We continue to use the term 'medieval' for this music, even though it is the beginning of it all; there is some convenience in this, because historians in other fields continue to find the term useful; what musicians are doing in the twelfth century, however non-medieval it appears to us, is likely to be considered medieval by colleagues in other fields. The chronological period in question is far from being a single thing. If we consider the Middle Ages as extending from the fall of the Roman Empire, perhaps in 476 when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustus, into the fifteenth century, we have defined a period of about a millenium, far longer than all subsequent style-periods ('Renaissance', 'Baroque', 'Classical', 'Romantic' etc.) put together; and yet we tend to think of it as one thing. This is the fallacy of historical parallax, and it owes its existence to two facts; first that things that are nearer to us appear to be larger, so that the history of the twentieth century looms enormous while the distant Middle Ages appear comparatively insignificant. Second, the progressive loss of historical materials over time means that more information survives from recent periods than from more distant ones, leading to the temptation to gauge importance by sheer volume. There may be those who would have organized these volumes in other ways. One could have presented geographical volumes, for example: Medieval Music in the British Isles, in France, and so on. Or there might have been volumes focused on particular source materials, or individuals. Such materials can be found within some of these volumes, but our organization here is based on the way in which scholars seem in the main to organize and conceptualize the surviving materials. The approach here is largely chronological, with an admixture of stylistic considerations. The result is that changing styles of composition result in volumes focused on different genres- tropes, polyphony, lyric- that are not of course entirely separate in time, or discontinuous in style and usage. There are also volumes- notably those on chant

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and on instrumental music- that focus on certain aspects of music through the whole period. Instrumental music, of which very little survives from the Middle Ages, is often neglected in favour of music that does survive - for very good reason; but we do wish to consider what we can know about instruments and their music. And liturgical chant, especially the repertory known as Gregorian chant, is present right through our period, and indeed is the only music in Western culture to have been in continuous use from the beginnings of Western music (indeed it could be said to define its beginnings) right through until the present. The seven volumes collected here, then, have the challenge of introducing readers to an enormous swathe of musical history and style, and of presenting the best of recent musical scholarship. We trust that, taken together, they will increase access to this rich body of music, and provide scholars and students with an authoritative guide to the best of current thinking about the music of the Middle Ages.

THOMAS FORREST KELLY Series Editor

Introduction The ars antiqua, the 'ancient' or old 'art', began to be mentioned in writings about music in the early decades of the fourteenth century, where it was cited along with references to a more modern 'art', an ars nova. It is a distinction that was in large measure new in medieval thinking about music, but music was not the only aspect of expressive culture at the time to exhibit a sensitivity to 'newness' or to the fact that significant changes were taking place in how people experienced their world- Dante's 'dolce stil nuovo' and his treatise La vita nuova are contemporaneous cases in point. By ars we should not understand 'art' in the modern sense, of course, but rather 'practice' or 'method', in the manner of 'industrial arts' and 'culinary arts'. Some writers of the early fourteenth century regarded the two artes, antiqua and nova, as virtually antithetical: thus Jacques of Liege, the theorist who discussed the ars antiqua more extensively than any other writer, considered the nova practice a corruption of the earlier ars, an ill-considered, indeed arbitrary debasement of it that limited the flexibility and capacity for expression inherent in the ars antiqua. Other writers, in particular the theorists associated with the composer Philippe de Vitry, understood the ars antiqua, or ars vetus, as some of them called it, differently, as a foundation or platform to be built upon, expanded or enlarged by the nova practice, one writer describing that expansion as magis subtilior, 'much more intricate'. As framed in the music theory of the fourteenth century, the concepts of ars antiqua and ars nova were understood to pertain to musical notation first and foremost, to the kinds of figures used to write down nuances of rhythm and melody, and hence to the rhythmic and other possibilities that the notation conveyed or permitted. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the terms are used more broadly, having come to connote the totality ofthe musical cultures conceived and transmitted by means of these respective artes -that is, the overall musical practice and aesthetics of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries on the one hand, and those of the fourteenth century on the other-their genres, idioms, musical sources, expressive aims and theoretical presentations alike. The ars antiqua was understood by those who coined the notion to be rooted in the musical practices outlined in the Ars musica of Lambertus and, especially, the Ars cantus mensurabilis of Franco of Cologne, both treatises probably written in the third quarter of the thirteenth century. Franco in particular is concerned almost exclusively with polyphony, teaching how to read, compose and think about the various kinds of polyphonic music that had begun to appear in the second half of the twelfth century, and that by the middle of the following century had grown into a very large and imposing body of work. This polyphony was associated above all with the ecclesiastical and intellectual life of Paris, with its cathedral of Notre Dame and with the schools attendant to it that would coalesce into the University, with the ritual practice of the Cathedral and the modes of thinking and teaching cultivated in the schools. It is music of great brilliance and sophistication, much of it conceived on an unprecedented scale, and it quickly became the dominant polyphonic tradition of the high Middle Ages.

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Polyphony at Notre Dame of Paris Two factors above all made possible the rise to prominence of Parisian polyphony: the creation and preservation of the music in writing and the emergence of a body of didactic texts to teach the tradition. Whatever local ritual customs and performance practices first brought it into existence, by the beginning of the thirteenth century Parisian polyphony circulated widely and primarily in written form. As written down, 'composed' music, it represented a fundamental shift away from earlier traditions, which had used polyphony primarily as an ex tempore, improvised embellishment of liturgical texts, the practice varying widely from place to place and singer to singer. Circulating in writing, the polyphony originating at Notre Dame stood as a coherent musical corpus. It served as a basis for the stabilization and systematization of the musical language in all its aspects, melodic, harmonic and rhythmic, and of the different genres in which the language was deployed. It was a codification that laid the foundation of the Western musical language for the next several centuries. And it offered a springboard for stylistic developments in many directions and for experimentation of all sorts, changing the nature of what musical creativity might be from a performance art to composition as understood today. In writing, too, it could be taken up more or less intact elsewhere in France and also in other countries, the British Isles, Spain, Italy and northern and eastern Europe. Outside of Paris it served as a model for the creation of local repertories, some of which took the Parisian idiom in striking new directions. The impulse to preserve Parisian polyphony in writing also sparked, indeed required, the development of a musical notation that would more adequately communicate the polyphonic idiom than the orthography of Gregorian chant, in which it had originally been committed to parchment, could possibly do. That notation served two purposes, to record the music as the scribe 'heard' it in his mind and, radically new, to permit musicians to recreate the work from the written record. And, it made the practice available in a tangible form that could be studied, analysed, synthesized into a didactic system and taught, stimulating the appearance of a body of didactic writing beginning with the treatise of Johannes de Garlandia towards the middle of the thirteenth century and culminating in the writings of Franco and, later, Jacques of Liege. This ars antiqua thus became a 'classical' practice, a force for both stability and change in the labile intellectual world of the period. It was the first classical tradition in European music since the codification and widespread adoption of Gregorian chant in the Carolingian Empire some four centuries earlier. There are other respects in which the musical practice taking shape in Paris was ground-breaking. For the first time polyphonic compositions were associated with specific composers identified as such (Leoninus and Perotinus; the attributions of polyphonic works in the somewhat earlier Codex Calixtinus probably connote something different, identifying donors or patrons rather than composers.) For the first time polyphony was used for works in the vernacular, both religious and decidedly secular ones: 'composition' along with the conventions attendant upon literate culture would now be practised not only in the 'learned' music of the Church and the schools, but also in the courtly song of the troubadours and trouveres, formerly largely a performance art, as polyphony had been, and the province of the 'unlettered' jongleur. For the first time polyphony could involve not just two, but also three or even four independent voices (the multiple voices in the polyphony of the earlier Musica enchiriadis tradition merely replicated other parts). Some of the genres that emerged in the

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Paris tradition were not 'new', forms of them having been practised extemporaneously for a century or more, but their treatment in Paris most certainly was; others were brand new. Some did not outlast the ars antiqua; others, however, continued to flourish for centuries. The corpus of ars antiqua polyphony survives in a substantial number of manuscripts or manuscript fragments, most of them dating from the second half of the thirteenth century. (Why there exist no sources from the twelfth century or the first two decades of the thirteenth has yet to be satisfactorily explained.) Most are (or once were) large and comprehensive anthologies, carefully organized collections. Many are luxury books that testify to the esteem in which this music was held. The manuscripts and the discussions of idiom and genre by contemporaneous theorists both group the repertory into three broad generic categories: organum, conductus and motet. Considered in general terms, the earlier the manuscript, the fewer the number of motets, if any; the later the book, the smaller the collections of organa and conductus. This is consistent with other evidence suggesting that the creation of organa and conductus had more or less run its course by the middle of the thirteenth century while the motet, coming into existence somewhat later than the other genres, became the dominant outlet for musical creativity and experimentation in the later decades of the ars antiqua. The three genres are distinct from each other in many ways, and each had its own line of development and change. Each poses its own questions and challenges to scholars, and for that reason, perhaps, research has tended to focus on one or another of these genres. For the most part the essays in this volume do so as well. It is important to keep in mind, however, that organum, conductus and motet have a common polyphonic language and notation, as a careful reading of the theoretical literature of the time will make clear. They deploy that language in different ways in response to the particular forces at work in each genre, and they may exhibit earlier or later aspects of it, but in the end all three genres were cut from the same cloth, and there is much to be learned from studying them together.

Organum, Genre, Rhythm Organum is the genre of ars antiqua polyphony most immediately associated with Notre Dame de Paris. Although the term, a verbum aequivocum, 'ambiguous word', as one theorist characterized it, can also refer to all polyphony or to a specific kind of contrapuntal relationship between voices, in its generic sense 'organum' is a purely liturgical music, a polyphonic treatment for the most part of the solo portions of the responsorial plain chants sung in the mass and office, those chants that follow and comment on the readings of Scripture that are focal points in the service. Functioning as virtuoso musical meditations on the readings, they were sung at those points in the liturgy when nothing else was going on, and consequently they would have been heard in special relief. They embellished the great festivals of the ecclesiastical year at Notre Dame - Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, the Assumption of the Virgin, St Denis and so on - and thus the choice of chants to receive organal treatment was inextricably bound up with the particularities of the ritual as practised at Notre Dame, the details of its calendar, the numbers and kinds of singers assigned to particular chants on a given day, nuances in performance practice and in the melodies found in the Cathedral's library of chant books, and so on . A substantial amount of the research on this music has concerned itself with the issues of how (and when) organum was used at Notre Dame and at the other churches in Paris and elsewhere that adopted the Cathedral's music.

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The corpus of organum preserved in the so-called 'Notre Dame' manuscripts (none can be conclusively shown to have been written for Notre Dame itself) is very large. It includes multiple two-voice settings of some chants and alternative versions in three or four parts of several. In some cases, different manuscripts transmit completely different settings of a given chant; in most, however, different copies of the 'same' organum reveal a greater or lesser degree of relatedness- some parts of a work will be the same, others will be entirely different; still other parts bear a certain resemblance from manuscript to manuscript. Beyond this, the 'same' music may recur from organum to organum, sometimes as self-sufficient segments, 'clausulae' as they are called, of a larger musical mosaic, often as smaller groups of phrases or as single melodic gestures. Some manuscripts include collections devoted entirely to these self-standing clausulae, these bits and pieces pulled out oftheir parent organa or intended for insertion into larger, complete works as replacements or additions. And finally, the 'same' music might be notated in a very different manner in one manuscript than in another, suggesting a different rhythm or a different kind of rhythmic measure altogether. All of this adds up to a bibliographical and analytical tangle of staggering proportions for the student and editor of this music. It is not surprising, then, that another primary concern of scholarship has been the sorting out of the organum repertory, identifying concordances and interrelationships, and looking for signs of direction, of which version came first and which later, and, from that, seeking to understand how the idiom developed and changed. Remarkably, it is only in some of the most recent work that the question has been posed of how the written, 'composed' body of organum that we know from the manuscripts emerged from what was surely an oral, performance-driven background, whether at Notre Dame or before- and of how much of that background is still discernable in the written copies. Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the Notre Dame tradition from the technical standpoint is the introduction of rhythm as a consciously manipulated and regulated element of the musical fabric. For the first time in the history of Western music how the music flows through time was something that was controlled and systematized, not something that happened because music perforce exists in time. A coherent, consistent way of thinking about rhythm and a system for controlling and measuring the flow through time, along with a notation for communicating that measured flow to the reader or singer emerged, each of these aspects influencing the other. The significance of this development was recognized at the time: the music theorists called the polyphonic tradition of Paris musica mensurabilis, 'measurable music'. The result is the inception of the Western system of musical rhythm and rhythmic notation in use to the present day. The new rhythmic idiom- 'modal rhythm', it is called -infused all forms of Parisian polyphony, but it is likely that its rationalization into a system and its manifestations in tangible form in notation first occurred within the stylistic crucible of organum. How that happened, what external factors contributed to its formation, how the system is to be understood and how the notation in the surviving manuscripts is to be read, these questions have been the most hotly debated of all aspects of ars antiqua scholarship.

Conductus, Genre, Function, Rhythm Conductus, by comparison with organum, has received but scant attention from musicologists. The primary reason for this relative neglect may have to do with the somewhat anomalous nature of the genre itself: it is difficult to pin down exactly what a conductus is. The theorists

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called it 'conductus' (pl. 'conducti', but most medievalists today follow classical usage and give the plural as 'conductus'), possibly because examples ofthe genre cited by them were indeed intended to accompany liturgical movement. For reasons that will become clear presently, however, a better label might be 'Latin lyric' or even, simply, 'song'. Unlike organum, the function of which is precisely defined by liturgical circumstance, no single function can be ascribed to the conductus, and most appear to have served no definite purpose at all. A relatively small number do have ties of a sort to the liturgy, if only rarely to a specific liturgical occasion: they might have provided an 'unofficial', interpolated musical accompaniment while a cathedral dignitary proceeded to the lectern to deliver a Scripture reading in the mass or office, or they might have glossed the formal dismissal of the participants at the close of an office service. In some cases, a work with no clear liturgical ties in one source appears in another manuscript with a refrain that effectively converts it into an accompanying or dismissal piece (these refrains have the character of stock formulas that could be moved from conductus to con ductus, inserted in the manner of an organum clausula, and several manuscripts group them together in separate collections for ready access). Some conductus incorporate bits of ritual text or plainchant, or their content relates them loosely to a ritual event, but one finds similar kinds of borrowings from ecclesiastical culture in other genres, musical and literary, that have nothing to do with any 'official' or even informal religious ceremonial. Many conductus appear to be hymn-like songs or paraphrases of Scripture or devotional commonplaces; others are songs with moralizing or admonitory content, resembling sermons; some celebrate or comment on historical events, such as a death or a crusade. A number are distinctly secular, occasionally whimsical, even erotic. Large collections of con ductus are included in the same manuscripts as the organa originating at Notre Dame, and one can conclude that many are the work of the same musicians, were performed by the same singers and were received by the same audiences. Unlike the organa, however, the conductus are often found in sources produced outside the orbit of the ars antiqua. Many may have originated outside the tradition as well. That is, if the genre of Parisian organum owes its inception to Notre Dame specifically, the genre of conductus may have been more widespread from the outset, the musicians of Notre Dame being only part of a much larger picture. This could account in part for the diversity of the genre. Consistent with the preceding observation is the fact that conductus do not always fit comfortably within the stylistic norms of the ars antiqua as we understand it. Other factors besides the widespread cultivation of the genre contributed to the individual character of the conductus. A substantial part of the repertory is monophonic, and evidently was conceived as such; these conductus include some of the largest and most complex works in the repertory. They follow musical principles that are only incidentally related to the practices shaped by polyphony. But many of the polyphonic conductus also seem somewhat different in kind from the organa and motets. The underlying reason for this has to do with the nature of the conductus itself. The primary factor shaping the composition is not musical, as in organa and motets, both of which build their polyphony above a melodic foundation drawn from plainchant, but verbal. The conductus is a poem first and foremost, conceived in rhyming, rhythmic, often strophic verse. It is this text that determines the design and the disposition of musical elements. This is reflected in the fact that a conductus might be transmitted as a standalone text (in a number of instances, the text-alone copy is the only one to transmit the poem complete) or as monophony (both those conceived monophonically and those originating in

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polyphony), or with two, three or in a small number of cases even four voices, all singing the text simultaneously. All of these are sufficient transmissions of the 'piece': the important element is the text; the music is there as a way to project it forward in time and space (it could just as easily be spoken with no loss of intrinsic content). With a verbal foundation instead of a musical one the ars antiqua conventions of consonance and dissonance, of the style of melodic movement, of how the piece flows rhythmically through time and of how that flow is communicated in notation - all of these interrelated elements are looser than in the other genres and less easy to relate to the theoretical doctrines. Consequently, the conductus is less amenable to musical analysis than the other genres- or, rather, it requires a different analytical approach. And it has proved more intractable to editors than organum or motet: the musical flow of the con ductus lies somewhere between the melodic/ rhythmic idiom ofplainchant and that of measured polyphony; it is musica mensurabilis, but the mensura derives primarily from the design of the text and from its content and rhetorical delivery, not from musical forces as such. Modern musical notation does not easily convey its text-driven rhythmic elasticity. Although much of the musicological attention paid to the conductus has focused on issues of rhythmic interpretation, the questions that it poses have remained challenging. If the music of the conductus has proved difficult to talk about, its texts have not. The poems have stimulated what is probably the most interesting and important work on the genre, engaging some of the best minds in the fields of Classics and medieval literature, and, more recently, in music. The most important poets of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are among the authors of these poems - Philip the Chancellor, to cite one prominent example - but many of the anonymous poems are also of extraordinary interest. Much of the research has been undertaken in the course of editing the poetry, while collating, evaluating variant readings, parsing the versification and rhetorical content of individual passages, identifying links to other poems and literary traditions, and puzzling out the intent of the poem overall. (The edition of the Carmina burana is an outstanding case in point.) Philological and critical work has revealed a literary culture of exceptional inventiveness, refinement and learning. An open question, avoided by most scholars, concerns whether poet and composer were the same individual. In some cases, at least, they appear to have been different people. This would represent something of a departure from earlier practice, and its implications have yet to be fully explored.

Motet, Chronology, Style The motet is the youngest of the three primary genres of ars antiqua polyphony, and the one that would become the most prestigious form of ars nova composition a century after its first appearance. The genre evidently emerged directly out of organum, beginning life as one of the myriad ways in which an organum might be worked over by successive generations of musicians. In this case, however, the reworking was as much verbal as it was musical, if not entirely so. The largest of the organa, the four-voice works ascribed to Perotinus, survive in some manuscripts with not only the original liturgical text in the voice carrying the underlying plain chant, the tenor, but also new text added to the upper voices, text that effectively turned a highly melismatic setting into a syllabic one, on a superficial level the three upper voices resembling a conductus. These organa became not only syllabic but also polytextual, since the

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original text and the new one would have been sung at the same time. A large number of the independently transmitted clausulae are found in separate collections with new text in their upper voice or voices as well, and constitute the nucleus of the early motet repertory. The new texts tend to incorporate the words of the original chant, surrounding them with material that expounds upon their theological content or the significance of the feast on which the underlying chant was used. Some motet texts are ironic, standing in dialectical opposition to the thought conveyed by the chant. Thus the motet can be seen as part and parcel of the scholastic tradition then flourishing in the emerging University, a tradition of debate and dispute posing and then reconciling seemingly contradictory views. At the same time the addition of texts to create motets represents a clear-cut outgrowth of the somewhat earlier practice of adding interpretive texts, 'prosulae', to melismatic plainchants such as the Kyrie, Sanctus and, significantly for the motet, the responsorial chants of the mass and office. ('Prosula' is a diminutive form; 'motet', a French word, interestingly enough, is also a diminutive, connoting a little 'word', text or strophe, perhaps a text of lesser importance, subsidiary, added to a primary one, the 'authoritative' ritual or Scriptural text in the underlying chant.) Some of the motet poets were apparently the same authors responsible for the con ductus being created alongside them - Philip the Chancellor's role in the emergence of the motet seems well established (he may even have written the motet texts for Perotinus' two fourvoice organa) . In any event the expressive and creative potential inherent in the motet idiom was quickly seized upon by poets and musicians alike. The process of reworking continued unabated, with one text replacing another, exploiting the possibilities for irony or satire, and with their content ranging over as wide a palate of themes as the poetry of contemporaneous conductus. Not only were texts added and replaced, but additional voices were also provided to earlier two- and occasionally three-voice clausulae, each part carrying its own, independent text. These newly added voices and texts could themselves be replaced or interchanged, leading to an often bewildering variety of closely and distantly related compositions. The variety expanded still further when French texts began to be included alongside or in place of Latin ones. Some are vernacular paraphrases of Latin originals; others are secular with close ties to courtly song. Thus, a clausula intended for an Easter organum might carry a prayer to the Virgin in its upper voice; a third voice might be added with an amorous pastourelle text in French, thus contrasting sacred and profane love in springtime, the period of resurrection and rebirth; and the Marian text might be replaced by a love song in Occitan. Or the prayer might be replaced by a text praising good clergy, and the pastourelle by one condemning false priests; other Marion texts might replace any of these. Different copies of 'this' motet might use various combinations of these texts or might add yet another voice or take one or more away. Since the added musical lines were composed at a later period in the development of the polyphonic language, they might exhibit features of melodic and rhythmic usage quite different from those in the original piece. Once the motet was established as distinct genre, many such works were composed without recourse to an already existing clausula, were conceived as motets from the outset. A very large body of motets survives from the thirteenth century, some of it preserved in the same manuscripts as the organa and con ductus, some, including most of the later works, in books devoted primarily or exclusively to motets. Disentangling the bibliographical morass represented by this repertory has been one of the busiest activities of scholars of the genre. Making sense of the repertory, sorting out the development of the genre, deducing when and

xviii

Ars antiqua

in what sequence texts were replaced and voices added or taken away has generated a large body of research, much of it, some would argue, based on shaky assumptions. Indeed the many issues raised by the motet are far from settled. Even the most fundamental one- did the motet begin life as text added to an already existing clausula, or does the clausula represent an alternative transmission of it, fashioned to provide musical clarity at a time when notation could not adequately communicate how the voices in a motet fit together - has yet to be satisfactorily addressed, let alone answered. The motet rapidly became a medium for musical experiments of all sorts, yielding works of remarkable technical complexity. The idiom encouraged the musical lines to become increasingly independent of one another, and probably changed how composers went about the task of creating polyphony. Since the motet idiom made it impossible for a reader or singer to deduce the intended rhythm from the musical context, as one could do in the other genres, the motet also prompted a series of reforms of the musical notation, synthesized in the Ars cantus mensurabilis of Franco of Cologne. This in tum opened the door to still further experimentation. One experiment effectively transformed the genre into something else: a single upper voice singing a courtly text in the vernacular over a supporting tenor can be seen as leading to the great polyphonic song repertories ofthe following two centuries. Most motets of the ars antiqua are small works, lasting no more than a minute or two. Once freed from deployment in a larger composition sung in the liturgy, they circulated as independent works. How they were used, how their content was grasped and by whom remains unclear. Whatever their function or functions, one thing is evident: the driving force in the motet is its tenor, customarily taken from plainchant. The musical content of the tenor and its formal disposition by the composer shaped the polyphonic fabric in all its dimensions, from its overall length to the placement of consonance and dissonance. The tenor text, the Scriptural, theological and ritual context it conjured, is key to understanding the text or texts in the upper voices. Tenor text and tenor music combine to inform and suffuse every aspect of the motet. Examined with this in mind, the motet affords rare opportunities for inquiry into the creative mentality of the high Middle Ages. This exploration has scarcely begun. Directly or indirectly the essays collected in this volume all address one or more of the issues we have raised or implied regarding ars antiqua polyphony - questions relating to the nature and definition of genre, the evolution of the polyphonic idiom, the workings of the creative process, including the role of oral process on one side and notation on the other, and the continuum between these extremes, questions about how this music was used and understood, and of how it fit into the intellectual life of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Some of the essays ask new questions or approach long-standing ones from fresh perspectives. All, however, are rooted in a line of scholarship that has produced a body of writing of containing relevance. Serious inquiry into the corpus of ars antiqua polyphony began with Edmond de Coussemaker's study of the motet and his edition of most of the crucial theoretical texts in the 1850s and 1860s. For the remainder of the nineteenth century most research was done by students of medieval literature, most importantly Gaston Raynaud, Guido Maria Dreves and Wilhelm Meyer. Literary scholars have figured prominently in this field ever since, from Hans Spanke and Otto Schumann to Bernhard Bischoff, Peter Dronke, Sylvia Huot and Jan Ziolkowski. The path-breaking musicological work was published in the early decades of the twentieth century by Friedrich Ludwig and Jacques Handschin, and continued by Ludwig's

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students Pierre Aubry, Higini Angles, Heinrich Besseler and Friedrich Gennrich, and by Ludwig's successor at Strasbourg, Yvonne Rokseth. Gennan-language scholarship has been of the greatest importance to the present day, in particular the work of Heinrich Husmann, his student Rudolf Flotzinger, Fritz Reckow and Wulf Arlt. Research of comparable distinction in English started to appear only in the 1950s, beginning above all with that by students of another Ludwig pupil, Leo Schrade, Hans Tischler, William Waite, Janet Knapp and Nonnan Smith, as well as by Luther Dittmer, trained by Handschin, and Ernest Sanders. Some of these scholars are represented in this volume; others have had to be omitted owing to limitations of space and the plan of the series overall. Those with an interest in this music should seek out their work and that of their distinguished forerunners, from Coussemaker, Ludwig and Handschin on. The footnote references in the essays collected here will serve as an effective guide.

Part I Polyphony at Notre Dame of Paris

[1] Leoninus, Poet and Musician* Bv CRAIG WRIGHT COMPOSER LEONINUS is a pivotal figure in the history of T HEWestern art music, yet to the moment almost nothing is known of his life. Leoninus claims a special place in musical historiography on several counts. First, prior to his arrival on the intellectual scene of twelfth-century Paris, liturgical polyphony was characterized by an almost wholesale anonymity. Aside from a handful of compositions in the Codex Calixtinus, 1 few previous polyphonic works can be attributed to specific individuals. Undoubtedly there are many reasons for the namelessness of earlier music, not least among them the fact that polyphony in this era most often came into being during the celebration of the liturgy, as a spontaneous creation fashioned by clerics singing within the parameters of the accepted rules of music theory, and not as a fully prescriptive artifact conceived outside of and, indeed, well before the moment of execution. That contemporary observers, henceforth, often felt compelled to associate a person with a particular polyphonic work may imply a new, more modern notion of what a composer and a composition was. Secondly, the amount of music Leoninus has left us is impressive by the standards of any age. His "Great Book of Organum," as Anonymous IV calls it, contains forty-two compositions in its smallest extant form and no

* Portions of this article were read at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Philadelphia, 1984, and at the symposium Das Ereignis "Notre-Dame," Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbiittel, April 1985. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Barbara Shailor of Bucknell University, Ralph Hexter of Yale University, and John W. Baldwin of The Johns Hopkins University. 1 Compostela, Biblioteca de Ia Catedral, without shelf mark. A description of this manuscript along with a list of relevant bibliographical studies is given in Repertoire international des sources musicales, BIV 1 , Manuscripts of Polyphonic Music, IIth-Early 14Jh Century, ed. Gilbert Reaney (Munich-Duisburg, 1966), 238-41. Color facsimiles of the polyphonic compositions are given in Jose L6pez Calo, La musica medieval en Galicia (La Coruiia, 1982), pp. 46-51.

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JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

fewer than ninety-three in its largest. 2 And finally, and perhaps most important, all of these works were conceived and notated, in varying degrees, according to a rudimentary system of musical meter and rhythm, the rhythmic modes. Exactly how much Leoninus contributed to the development of modal rhythm and how extensively he applied the modes to his own compositions is difficult to assess, owing, in part, to the many revisions to which his works were subject. 3 Nevertheless, it is certain that his Magnus tiber organi preserves the first written evidence of a system of musical meter and rhythm applied to polyphonic music on a massive scale. Given the magnitude of Leoninus's works and his contribution to the development of musical rhythm, it is incumbent upon us to know something of his life so as better to chart the course of the development of musical style in the so-called Notre Dame era and during the High Middle Ages in general. To this end it will be useful to construct a profile of the typical composer of polyphonic church music in this period, an approach not inharmonious with the medieval penchant for classifying, systematizing, and cataloguing all things and concepts. First of all, a composer of the High Middle Ages most often was an ecclesiastic, a cleric in holy orders working, if not continually, at least primarily in the service of the Church. The biographies of many musicians tell us this is so-Philip, chancellor of Paris, Philippe de Vi try, bishop of Meaux, Guillaume de Machaut, canon of Rheims, Guillaume Dufay, canon of Cambrai, to name a few. 4 Sacred 2 The basic catalogue for the organa of the Magnus liber organi remains Friedrich Ludwig's magistral Repertorium organorum recentioris et motetorum vetustissimi stili, 1nd ed., ed. Luther A. Dittmer, 1 vols., Musicological Studies, 7, 17 (Brooklyn, 10

tv \,0

I "" '-l

v,

Do

Magnus liber organi Vespers

Additions in F and W2

Date

Feast

Mass

Sept. 8

Nativitas BMV

Sept. 29

Michael arch.

Nov. II

Martin

All. Hie Martinus

Nov. 30

Andreas

All. Dilexit

Dec. 6

Nikolaus

Vespers

All. In conspectu

Unius martyris Plur. mart.

....,

::r n> ~

s::f!l,

R. T erribilis

("')

e:..

Gr. Constitues

R. Concede

Unius conf. epi Unius conf. non epi Virgin urn

0

R. Te sanctum

R. Ex eius tumba

Apostolorum

R. Sint lumbi R. Regnum m.undi

All. Per manus AI~.

Gr. Ecce sacerdos

Gr. Propter veritaten

I

R. Ad nutum

(Gr. Benedicta)

Dedicatio eccl. Comm.

Mass

t..;;l t..;;l

Judica-

bunt All. Posui

All. Veni electa

tO s::

R. Qui sunt isti

""

:4 n> ::L

Gr. Glorio sus

"
dicitur, quid quid profertur per < aliquam> rectam mensuram, ut dictum est superius. Et eius aequipollentia tantum se tenet in unisono usque ad finem alicuius puncti, ut secum convenit secundum aliquam concordantiam.41

The phrase "ut hie sumitur" in the copula passage shows that Garlandia is abandoning the previous meaning of the word (a single note) for a new meaning. And this new meaning (a section) is maintained, with no explanation now necessary, in the following chapter. 42 Finally, if Garlandia had wanted to describe the copula as a species of music that contains a number of ligatures (which, as mentioned above, is not very likely), he could have used a term he had already defined earlier in the treatise: Figura ligata est, ubicumque fit multitudo punctorum simul iunctorum per suos tractus.43

41 Reimer 1, p. 89: XIII, 8-9. 42 Klaus-Jlirgen Sachs argued for this interpretation in his Der Contrapunctus im 14. and 15. Jahrhundert (Ph. D. dissertation, Freiburg, 1967). Reckow dismisses his suggestions (Die Copula, p. 14, fn. 1) by means of a quotation from the Anonymous of St. Emmeram, where punctus is said to represent a "pluralitas." However this treatise is about forty years later than Garlandia's, and "pluralitas" does not necessarily imply a ligature. In the revised edition of his work (published as Vol. XIII of the Beihefte zum Archiv flir Musikwissenschaft, 1974) Sachs changed his views and agreed with Reckow: " ... im fraglichen Satz bedeutet punctus nicht 'Abschnitt' . . . . . . , sondern 'Notengruppe' (Ligatur)?' (p. 14). Neither Reckow nor Sachs appears to have noticed the clearly defined new usage of punctus in Garlandia's next chapter. But for the establishment of this usage among later thirteenth-century authors, see Sachs (Beihefte XIII), pp. 11-16. Anonymous IV uses punctus synonymously with clausula (see Handworterbuch, entry "punctus," p. I 0). 43 Reimer 1, p. 45: II, 8. Here punctus is clearly used in the sense of a single note.

Ars antiqua

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78

MUSICA DISCIPLINA

The word tractus is certainly used in Garlandia's treatise to mean the line connecting notes in a ligature, as can be seen from the above quotation. However, there is another completely different meaning also: Sequitur de figuris pausationum. Unde figura pausationis est signum vel tractus significans dimissionem soni factam in debita quantitate. Pausationum vel tractuum quaedam dicitur recta brevis, quae dam longa, quaedam finis punctorum, quaedam divisio modorum, quaedam divisio sillabarum, quaedam suspiratio_44

These are the small vertical lines that divide off groups of notes from one another, and they can be found in all the manuscripts. It seems clear that it is in this sense that Garlandia uses the word tractus in the copula passage. For, again, if punctus means section, Garlandia would not have written: "A punctus (section), as used here, is wherever there occurs a number of lines that connect notes in a ligature." These two sentences can therefore be interpreted as follows: Copula est id, ubicumque fit multitudo punctorum. Punctus, ut hie sumitur, est, ubicumque fit multitudo tractuum. "A copula is that, wherever there occurs a number of puncti (sections). A punctus (section), as used here, is wherever there occurs a number of tractus (lines of division marking off groups of notes)."

There remains only_ the problem of the penultimate sentence of the passage - the sentence, it turns out, which provides the major clue for an understanding of the copula: Unde tractus fit, ubicumque fit multitudo specierum univoce, ut unisoni aut toni secundum numerum ordinatum ordine debito.

The word species is used in Garlandia for the classification of modes, ligatures and types of discant, but especially for the classification of intervals:

44 Reimer 1, p. 66: VIII, 1-3. The term 'finis punctorum' in this quotation must mean 'the end of the notes' since 'punctorum' is plural, and a single tractus cannot denote the end of more than one section. Cf. Sachs (Beihefte XIII) pp. 13-15. This would be in keeping with the suggestion that Garlandia is using a new meaning for punctus in the copula passage and thereafter.

Ars antiqua

THE COPULA

125

79

..... sunt duae species, scilicet ditonus et semiditonus. 45 ..... duae sunt species, scilicet diapente et diatesseron.46 ..... sex sunt species concordantiae ..... 47 Iste species dissonantiae sunt septem .....48

etc. The phrase "ut unisoni aut toni" confirms this meaning here. The words"secundum numerum ordinatum ordine debito" can also be explained by parallel usages within the treatise. In the discussion on discant, Garlandia writes: Et sciendum est, quod a parte primi tria sunt consideranda, scilicet sonus, ordinatio et modus ...... ordinatio sumitur pro numero punctorum ante pausationem ..... 49

The word ordo is used in Garlandia either in the sense of the arrangement of modal quantities50 or simply in the non-technical sense of "order": Sciendum est ergo, quod ipsius organi generaliter accepti tres sunt species, scilicet discantus, copula et organum, de quibus dicendum est per ordinem. 5 1

The adjective "debitus" suggests that it is this normal sense that is intended here. The sentence can therefore be translated as follows: Whence a tractus (line of division) occurs, wherever there occurs a number of intervals in a uniform manner, for example unisons or whole steps, according to an arranged number in a fixed order.

Again there is confirmation of the interpretation of tractus as 'line of division,' for it would make no sense (pace Reckow) to have a 'line connecting notes to a ligature' described in this way. Also the sentence begins with the words "tractus fit" - "a tractus occurs," not 45 Reimer 46 Reimer 47 Reimer 48 Reimer 49 Reimer

1, p. 68: IX, 8. 1, p. 69: IX, 10. 1, p. 69: IX, 12. 1, p. 72: IX, 34. 1, p. 75: XI, 7. SO See Reimer 1, p. 77: XI, 20 ff. 5 1 Reimer 1, p. 3 5 : I, 3 .

Ars antiqua

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80

MUSICA DISCIPLINA

"tractus est" "a tractus is", as had the descriptions of the copula ("Copula est id ..... ") and the punctus ("Punctus, ut hie sumitur, est ..... "). One further point: the addition of a comma to Reimer's text after the words "ut unisoni aut toni" ("ubicumque fit multitudo specierum univoce, ut unisoni aut toni, secundum ..... ")would serve to clarify the point that unisoni and toni are examples of intervals, not requirements ("ut" means· "for example," not "namely"), that they are mentioned to elucidate "specierum," and also that the phrase "secundum numerum ordinatum ordine debito" qualifies "multitudo specierum univoce," and not "unisoni aut toni. " 52 With this investigation into the terminology of the copula passage completed, an interpretation of Garlandia's description is made possible. The following are the features of copula: I. It is between discant and organum. 2. It is performed in modal rhythm over a held tenor-tone. 3. It contains a number of sections. 4. A section contains a number of groups of notes separated by division lines .. 5. The copula is divided into two paralle 1 (but not necessarily equal) parts. 6. The first part is called the antecedent, the second the consequent, and each part contains a number of groups of notes separated by division lines. 7. A division line occurs wherever there are a number of intervals uniformly in an arranged number and in a fixed order. Feature l may be interpreted either stylistically or factually. As mentioned before, the copula may be shown to be "inter discantum et organum" stylistically because of Feature 2: it has the modal rhythm of discant and the held tenor-tone of organum. But it can be demonstrated that in fact the copula is not found at the beginning of any of the pieces in the Magnus Liber (the majority of which start with

52 Reckow's musical example and discussion of this sentence (Die Copula, pp. 17 -19) suggest that he has misunderstood this. Significantly, his reprinting of the text omits even the first comma.

Ars antiqua

127

THE COPULA

81

organum), and may therefore be said to be factually "inter discantum et organum" as well. 53

Feature 2 shows why the musical copula is the analogue of the copula in Logic. It is the link between organum, with its held tenor, and discant, with its modal rhythm. Features 3-6 may be schematized as follows: COPULA

-~ PUNCTUS

I I I

PUNCTUS

,'\(\'

A',,

I \ I

', '-I

,A',,,A',

PUNCTUS

PUNCTUS

I \ I

\ \I

I \

I

\

\

\ I

\

TRACTUS TR. TR. TR. TR. TR. TR. TR. TR. TR. TR. TR. TR. TR. TR. TR.

prima pars (antecedens)

secunda pars ( consequens)

The copula contains a number (two or more, but otherwise undefined) of puncti (sections). A punctus contains a number of tractus (lines marking off note-groups). The copula is divided into two parallel parts, and each part contains a number of tractus. It is Feature 7 that provides the finest details of the definition and the key to the ultimate understanding of the copula. "A number of intervals uniformly in an arranged number and in a fixed order" can only be a description of a technique of musical writing found frequently in the music of Notre Dame: the technique of melodic sequence. The intervals appear in an arranged number and in a fixed order each time, and, though they may be on a different pitch level, they are uniform and convey the same sense ("univoce") each time. It is these sequences that are set off by tractus and form the smallest, but the most distinctive, unit of the copula.

53 Cf.Reckow, Handworterbuch, "Copula," p. 4.

128

Ars antiqua

82

MUSICA DISCIPLINA

All the features of the copula as described by Garlandia may be seen in Judea et Jerusalem, the opening piece of the Magnus Liber. Beginning on the second syllable of the 'II '(Con-) stan- (tes)' at the end of the third accolade on folio 65 of the Florence manuscript 54 is a short phrase that is set off from the previous passage by its skip of a fifth, that falls squarely into the first mode, that is immediately sequenced, and that is marked off by a tractus. This phrase opens the copula, which continues through to the end of the setting of (esto-) te (beginning of the fifth accolade) and is rounded off by a brief phrase in sixth mode. The next (discant) section is introduced by a change of clef and range, which also serve to mark the end of the copula.

+~-=--t- I'

itT

II

54 Firenze, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Pluteo 29, 1. The piece may also be found in W 1 (Wolfenbiitte1, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, codex 628 He1mstadiensis) on folio 17, and in W2 (Wolfenbiitte1, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, codex 1099 He1mstadiensis) on folio 4 7.

Ars antiqua

129

THE COPULA

83

In the facsimile above, the sequences are marked by letters. There are two statements of A, followed by three statements of B. Then follows a short discant setting ('esto-'). A returns in varied form (A') and is repeated with a changed final note. B is stated once more and the copula ends with the sixth-mode phrase that is not unrelated to B. The copula appears after an organa! setting ('Con-') and before a discant setting ('Videbitis')- it is therefore "inter discantum et organum." It has a number of sections (a section may be said to be each series of sequences: A+A, B+B+B, etc.) - "multitudo punctorum." Each section contains a number of tractus - "multitudo tractuum." The copula is divided into two parallel or equivalent parts: A+A+B+B+B is parallel or equivalent to A' + A' + B - "ista pars dividitur in duo aeq ualia." Each part contains a number of tractus - "multitudinem tractuum." And each tractus occurs after a phrase that has the same number of intervals uniformly each time, and in the same order - "multitudo specierum univoce . . . . . secundum numerum ordinatum ordine debito." This kind of sequential writing occurs frequently in the Magnus Liber. Often the passage consists only of one or two sequences of a phrase, in which case not all the levels of Garlandia's description of the copula may obtain. In the case of the copula, either all the levels of sectionalization do not always appear, or these levels may be conflated. In the following example :55

'L. !L~~~ ,-fi'!Z!ii=-:---~~~: nm~ ~nr

,1 -r=::!! Li

the copula contains the units A+A+B. In this case, the first punctus is made up of A+A and forms the prima pars, the second punctus (B) is not subdivided and is in itself the secunda pars. 5 5 Florence, folio 82, ace. 1.

130

Ars antiqua

84

MUSICA DISCIPLINA

The most important facts about the copula according to Johannes de Garlandia have thus been established. It is characterized by modal rhythm over a held tenore-tone, by sectionalization, and by melodic sequence. Thus all three species of music in the Notre Dame repertoire, as described by Johannes de Garlandia, and not just discantus and organum, can be recognized in their original notation and distinguished from one another.

Stanford University

[6] Consonance and Rhythm in the Organum of the I 2 th and I 3th Centuries BvERNESTH. SANDERS

of medieval music usually make a sharp disM tinction between monophony and polyphony, between chant ODERN OBSERVERS

and its accretions, on the one hand, and organum, on the other. One must remember, however, that certainly in the first several centuries of Western Mehrstimmigkeit an "organized" melody, whether it was a chant or a paraliturgical versus, was not thought of as a musical opus of distinct stylistic specificity, but as an elaborated version of that melody. An Alleluia was an Alleluia, whether it was rendered simply as a plainchant, with tropes, or with a vox organalis. This is borne out by the fact that, at least to the mid thirteenth century, those writers who described polyphonic techniques dealt with them at the end of their treatises as an aspect of the main topic, which was chant, together with all its appropriate subtopics such as intervals, modes, and so on. Generally, the authors were interested not so much in composition as in modes of rendition. Since I am concerned with certain aspects of musical thought in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, I begin with a lengthy quotation from the treatise by the so-called De-La-Fage Anonymous of the twelfth century. Concluding his thirteenth chapter, "Since, therefore, we have at length, with God's help, fully expounded the proper manner of producing a chant, it behooves us to hasten to put together a guide for the properly constituted production of discant," he proceeds to the discussion of polyphony: Discant must be set against chant as a counterpart, because it should not sound in unison with the chant, but higher and lower. For when the chant ascends, the discant must descend, and when the chant descends, the discant, on the other hand, must ascend, so as to be true to its nature. Thus, whoever of you wishes to put together (componere) a discant well and fittingly, you should strive always to be aware and secure in your knowledge of the consonances-to wit, fourth, fifth, and octave-as absolutely indispensable; for all discant that is made properly is put together with these, and if it is truly supposed to be a discant, it can in no way be constructed without them.

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In fact, either a discant will concord with a chant by means of any of these, namely fourth, fifth or octave, or it will form a unison with it; otherwise it absolutely will not be a discant. And one must beware with all care and the greatest caution that the discant have no more notes than the chant, because both must proceed with an equal number of notes. But if by chance, in order to have a more beautiful and elegant discant as well as for the greater pleasure of the listeners, you should want to mix in some organal passages at the end of a period or section at the last or penultimate syllable of the text, that is permissible, even though the nature of the thing does not allow its inclusion; for it is beyond dispute that discant is one thing and organum another. Thus, when you wish to ornament the end of a period or section, make sure that you don't all too frequently give the discant excessive melismatic passages, lest in the mistaken belief that you are making a discant you actually construct an organum and destroy the discant. . . . Now, to make an organum it is necessary to know three things, that is, how it should be begun, by what method it should proceed, and in what manner it effects a cadence. It is equally necessary for the organizator to have knowledge and awareness of the consonances, because without them organum can in no way be put together by anybody. Thus you have to know that organum begins with one of the consonances or with a unison, i.e., on the same pitch as the chant. . . . Discant and organum, however, are considered to differ in this way: while a discant corresponds to its cantus with an equal number of notes, which form consonances or unisons with it, an organum is joined with its cantus not note against note, but with an unlimited multiplicity and a kind of wondrous flexibility; it must begin, as has been said, with one of the consonances or in unison with the chant, and from there, by singing with much esprit, according as might seem appropriate and at the organizator's discretion, it must ascend above or descend below the chant, but at length it must place a division at an octave or unison. And indeed it may have a pause, which we call a clausa or clausula, only from the position of the octave or the unison, which, for the sake of clearer understanding, is demonstrated by the following organum: Be ne di ca mus Do mi no [the music is missing in the manuscripts]. See and recognize in this Benedicamus the way pauses are placed; also consider how it differs from discant and chant by its numerous notes and how, by ascending, descending and skittering about, it quickly gets away from the chant and quickly again glides back to the chant. Note, therefore, the pauses and the breathing spots, because in organum pauses and breathing spots have different effect. Now, pauses we call those halts which are made by the organizator at the unison or octave for the sake of resting or dividing the organum into segments. Breathing spots we call those interruptions that are made by the organizator when the organum [ascends or?] descends from the chant to the fourth, i.e., the diatesseron, or to the fifth, i.e., the diapente, and there, breathing a little bit, recovers his breath, that he might better proceed to the pause. 1 1 First published in Adrien de LaFage, Essais de diphthirographie musicale (Paris, 1864; reprinted Amsterdam, 1964), pp. 355 ff. The polyphonic part of the treatise was given by Jacques Handschin in "Zur Geschichte der Lehre vom Organum,"

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Jerome of Moravia begins his short twenty-sixth chapter with the formulation, "Now, however, we must deal with plainchant, that is to say, according as it is subjoined to discant, and indeed with all species of said discant." This presently leads to his redaction of several treatises, of which the first and earliest is the premodal Discantus positio vulgaris. I quote the following passages from the older portion of the tract: Now, a discant is a consonant counterpart [to chant] .... One must know what is mensurable and what beyond measurement; ... Mensurable is that which is measured with the measure of one or more [two?] time units. Beyond measurement is what is measured with less than one time unit or more than two .... It must be noted, moreover, that all notes of the plainchant are long and beyond measure, because they contain the quantity of three time units. All notes of the discant, however, are measurable by means of the proper breve and the proper long. Hence, it follows that against any given note of the cantus firmus at least two notes-it goes without saying, a long and a short or something equivalent to them, such as four shorts or three with a short plica-must be presented; and furthermore they [i.e., the notes of the plainchant and of the discant] must arrive together on any one of the said three consonances. 2

Though a fundamental novelty, the precise mensuration of two notes, generally more and less consonant, respectively, as long and short is still understood by the author as an attribute of a special way of singing cantus ecclesiasticus. It seems reasonable to infer from his exclusive concern with measured discant, including its notation, and with consonance, that the stylistic conditions of organum had reZeitschrift for Musikwissenscbaft, VIII ( 1926), pp. 3 33 ff., and again in "A us der alten Musiktheorie," Acta musicologica, XIV (1942), pp. 24-5. The entire treatise was published by Albert Seay, "An Anonymous Treatise from St. Martial," Annates musicologiques, V (1957), pp. 7-42. (There is no evidence for provenance from St. Martial.) My reading corresponds most closely to that given by Handschin in 1942. 2 Hieronymus de Moravia, Tractatus de musica, ed. Simon Cserba, Freiburger Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, II (Regensburg, 1935), pp. 189-91; Edmond de Coussemaker, ed., Scriptorum de musica medii aevi nova series, 4 vols. (Paris, 1864; rprt. Hildesheim, 1963), I, pp. 94-5. The entire treatise has been translated by Janet Knapp, "Two XIII-Century Treatises on Modal Rhythm and the Discant,"]ournal of Music Theory, VI (1962), pp. 200 ff. As to the chronological layers of the treatise, see Fritz Reckow, "Proprietas und Perfectio," Acta musicologica, XXXIX (1967), p. 137, n. 81. The fact that parts of it must be recognized as inorganic later additions does not, however, justify the conclusion that its essential parts were written after Garlandia's treatise (Reckow, Die Copula, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Abhandlungen der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, XIII (Mainz, 1972), p. 7, n. 1). On the contrary, significant portions of it bear out Jerome of Moravia's remark that "antiquior est omnibus" (Cserba, p. 194; Coussemaker, p. 97).

133

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mained unchanged and were therefore in no need of comment. The question whether a style later designated as copula already existed would with all due caution best be answered in the negative. My third and final witness is Johannes de Garlandia, whose treatise begins with the following three sentences: Having dealt with plain music [i.e., monophony], which is described as unmeasurable, we now hasten to concern ourselves with measurable music, which is called organum in this treatise, since organum is the term generally used for all measurable music. Now, organum is both a species of all measurable music, and yet in a different way it is also a genus, as has been said above. It should be understood, therefore, that generally there are acknowledged to be three species of organum [i.e., polyphony], viz. discantus, copula, and organum, which will be dealt with in turn. 3 Mensuration has by now become important enough that mensurabilis musica, equated with organum, is recognized as one of two genera, the other being immensurabilis musica, which is equated with plainchant. To our knowledge, both terms were first used by Garlandia. 4 Unlike the author of the Discantus positio vulgaris, he promises to deal with organum as a species, subsuming it under the genus organum (mensurable music). The first eleven chapters, constituting roughly ninety-six percent of the treatise, deal with discant (and consonance), while most of the thirteenth and final chapter is devoted to organum duplum. 5 Although the relevant sentences have been cited and translated before, 6 another such attempt seems justified by Erich Reimer's new edition, published eight years ago. The meaning of organum varies, according as it is used in a general or in a particular sense. Organum in general has been dealt with above; but now we must deal with it in its particular meaning. Organum in particular is practised in two ways: either by itself or with another part. Organum by itself is said to be whatever is performed not in accordance with the regular, but in a sort of irregular way. "Regular way" is here taken to mean that in which discant is performed. The irregular way is so called to 3 Erich Reimer,Johannes de Garlandia: De mensurabi/i musica, 2 vols., Beihefte zum Archiv fiir Musikwissenschaft, X-XI (Wiesbaden, I972), vol. I, p. 35. 4 Fritz Reckow, Der Musiktraktat des Anonymus 4, 2 vols., Beihefte zum Archiv fiir Musikwissenschaft, IV- V (Wiesbaden, I967), vol. II, p. 48, n. 29; Reimer, I, p. viii. 5 The twelfth describes the copula. 6 Willi Apel, "From St. Martial to Notre Dame," this JouRNAL, II (I949), p. I49; William G. Waite, "Discantus, Copula, Organum," this JouRNAL, V (I952), p. 82. See also Apel's and Waite's Communications in the same volume, pp. 272-6; Waite, The Rhythm of Twelfth-Century Polyphony (New Haven and London, I954), pp. I I 2 and I20.

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differentiate it from the regular, because the longs and shorts of the latter are first and foremost taken in the proper way. In the irregular type, however, long and breve is [,ric] not taken in that first manner [i.e., regular], but is understood from the context .... [The paragraph dealing with organum for three voices is omitted here.] Longs and shorts in organum are distinguished as follows: through consonance; through a note symbol; by way of the penultimate. Hence the rule: everything that anywhere comes together by virtue of consonance is said to be long. Another rule: anything that is notated as long according to organa! practice before a pause, that is to say, in lieu of a consonance, is said to be long. Another rule: whatever is recognized as preceding a long pause or a perfect consonance is said to be long. 7

In 1949 Willi Apel, and three years later William Waite, addressed the problem of rhythm in organal passages in the Magnus tiber. 8 As is well known, Waite also dealt with this subject in the last chapter of his book, which was anticipated by his article. 9 Both scholars based their interpretations on Coussemaker's flawed text, involving in one case the omission of the word non, 10 in another the crucially misleading insertion of a comma. Apel understood Garlandia, who was the first to describe the rhythmic modes, as reporting non-modal rhythm (modus non rectus) for organal style, with longs and breves to be determined by the rule of consonance. Finding it "cryptic," however, he buttressed it with the rule of consonance given by Anonymous IV, although the latter's formulation differs significantly from Garlandia's.11 Waite, on the other hand, was firmly convinced of the applicability of first-mode rhythms to organal passages, regarding the rule of consonance as a supplementary tool to be used in cases of ambiguous notation.t2 Most recently Fritz Reckow, who, as Sir Jack Westrup once so Reimer, I, pp. 88-9. To the dates I proposed in 1967 ("The Question ofPerotin's Oeuvre and Dates," Festschrift for Walter Wiora (Kassel, 1967), pp. 244-8), I add here the suggestion that Leoninus "made" the Magnus tiber around 1 1 So, since the choir of the new cathedral of Paris was finished in 1177 -except for the roofing-and the high altar was consecrated in 1182. It is difficult to imagine suitably stimulating conditions prior to that time. 9 See n. 6 above. 10 Manfred F. Bukofzer, Review of Waite, The Rhythm of Twelfth-Century Polyphony (seen. 6 above), Notes, XII (1955), p. 234. 11 Apel, "From St. Martial," pp. 149-52. 12 Waite, Communication, p. 275. (It should be added parenthetically that the modi irregulares of Anonymous IV are by no means identical with Garlandia's modi non recti, as Waite assumed in "Discantus," p. 83.) For a comprehensive synopsis of the history of modern scholarly approaches to the matter of rhythm and consonance in the organa! passages of the Magnus liber, see Reckow, Anonymus 4, II, pp. 73 ff., and, 7

8

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nicely put it, "has a mind like a needle," 13 has come to grips with these problems. On the basis of his careful reading of Garlandia he rightly asserted that "the ligature combinations of the organal melismas [have] no modal significance whatever" and that organum per se continues to have its "original freedom from modal rhythm." 14 Like his two predecessors, he adduced the rule of consonance, following Apel in his interpretation "that the value of each duplum note derives its measurement from its consonance or dissonance [Konsonanzgrad] with the tenor. " 15 He also followed A pel in essentially equating Garlandia's rule with that of Anonymous IV, repeatedly noting the contradiction between it and the irregular modes, which, according to the English author, were supposed to govern the rhythmic rendition of organal dupla. Despite several attempts he found himself unable to resolve the contradiction. And, in any case, he recognized that application of the rule produces musically indefensible results. 16 He therefore concluded in his essay on organum that Garlandia's "rule of consonance probably should not be taken too literally" and that the singer of the duplum was entitled to a certain discretionary latitude ("Ermessensspielraum") in the rhythmic shaping of his part. 17 For what I hope is a more accurate and less problematic understanding of Garlandia's rule it will be useful not to interpret him in the light of the writings of a later author, but to revert briefly to the DeLa-Fage Anonymous. His definition of discant constitutes what in effect since the sixteenth century has come to be known as first-species counterpoint. His wording suggests the impulse toward cadential ornamentation in discant as the origin of organum. 18 The performance

more comprehensively, Hans H. Eggebrecht, "Organum purum," Musikalische Edition im Wandel des historischen Bewusstseins, ed. Thrasybulos G. Georgiades (Basel, 197 1), PP·93-II2. 13 Music & Letters, LIV (1973), p. 239· 14 Reckow, Anonymus4, II, p. 45· IS P. 44· 16 Pp. 34, 64, 68, 78-89. 17 Reckow, "Organum," Gattungen der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenkschrift Leo Schrade, I (Bern and Munich, 1973), pp. 457-8. The difference seems not very great between this conclusion and Waite's, which Reckow criticized as a devaluation of the rule of consonance to an aid for the use ad libitum by medieval and modern performers in their choice of rhythms (Reckow, Anonymus 4, II, p. 74). With characteristic caution Eggebrecht thought that even in 197I the rule of consonance might still not have been properly understood (Eggebrecht, p. 107). 18 For more direct evidence of the existence of this practice by c. I I oo see Hans H. Eggebrecht and Frieder Zaminer, Ad organum faciendum. Lehrschriften der Mehrstimmigkeit in nachguidonischer Zeit, Neue Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, III (Mainz, I970), pp. 47-8, 79 ff.

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of the latter, he points out, is marked by "unlimited multiplicity and a kind of wondrous flexibility." Inftnitus means "not finite, boundless, innumerable, not measurable"; one is justified in wondering how many more than one constitute an infinite multiplicity. In any case, the consequence of inftnita multiplicitas for performance is jlexibilitas; the technique is characterized by the words volvere, modulari, lascivire. In a word, the performance is free and evidently quite fast, rather in the manner of cadenzas. This unbridled "non-species" counterpoint is articulated by rests, which must be preceded by a unison or an octave, and by breathing spots at the fourth and fifth below-and presumably above-the cantus firmus. As regards articulation, Johannes de Garlandia, writing about a hundred years later, nonetheless turns out to be not a great deal more informative, except that he injects the terms "long" and "short," which, he says, are to be understood from the context. His first rule, the rule of consonance, has always been understood to mean that any pitch in the duplum of an organal passage forming a consonance with a held note in the tenor is considered long. And this is, indeed, the impression conveyed by the relevant passage in the treatise by Anonymous IV. 19 It seems, however, that both he and modern scholars have expanded or misunderstood Garlandia's rule, "everything that anywhere comes together by virtue of consonance (or: by force of the consonances) is said to be long." Taken together with the other two rules this is no more than a modernization of the earlier writer's comments on pauses and breathing spots. The twelfthcentury author had pointed out that, depending on specified contrapuntal circumstances, phrases were articulated by either pausationes or respirationes. Garlandia says, in effect, that any note of an organal passage consonantly coinciding with a note in the tenor is long; in most cases this would be the last note of a phrase, followed by a rest. In addition, he designates as long the last note of an organal phrase over a continuing note in the tenor (at least of any phrase whose last note is separated from the preceding ligature), and the penultimate note before what the De-La-Fage Anonymous had called a pausatio. (This probably refers to sectional endings, since he calls the subsequent rest long and, like his predecessor, identifies the final consonance as perfect.) All those notes are long; he does not say how long, since he does not define "short." He cannot, since, as he puts it, organal passages are performed "in an irregular way"; only in regular or proper mensuration is there precise measurement of long and short. 20 I !I 20

Reckow, Anonym us 4, II, p. 31. See Reimer, II, pp. 37-8.

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271

But the implication is surely that, while in specified circumstances certain notes must be performed rather as if they were marked with a fermata or at least designated as tenuto, all other notes are simply shorter and presumably still quite fast. In support of this reading of Garlandia' s rule I call attention to his formulation ("omne id quod accidit"), containing the significant word accidit with its cadential implications (reminiscent of Guido's term occursus). There is, furthermore, the wording of the final sentence in the passage from the Discantus positio vulgaris cited above: "que etiam convenire debent in aliqua dictarum trium consonantiarum. " 21 Most important in this connection is Garlandia's own definition of consonance: Some of the vertical intervals are called consonances, some dissonances. A consonance is said to exist when two pitches are conjoined at the same time in such a way that one pitch can be aurally compatible with the other. Dissonance is defined conversely. 22

Consonance, then, is the result of the simultaneous articulation of two compatible pitches (both in discant and in organum). For the remainder of the time that a pitch is sustained in an organal tenor, the condition of organ point (or pedal point) obtains-what both Anonymous IV and the St.-Emmeram Anonymous referred to as burdo. 23 It is an essential aspect of what medieval commentators might have called the "natura" of burdo that the rules of counterpoint are inapplicable (just as in pedal points of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries the strict rules of harmony are suspended). Therefore, the contrapuntal raison d'etre for recta mensura does not exist in organum. Leoninian discant, on the other hand, demonstrates that species counterpoint and mensuration go together as much as do tonal harmony and meter. 24 Thus, as regards organal rhythm, one cannot expect our Cartesian propensities to be satisfied by the "theorists. " 25 Apparently it con tinSeep. 266 above. Reimer, I, p. 67. 23 Reckow, Anonym us 4, I, p. So; Heinrich Sowa, ed., Ein anonymer glossierter Mensuraltraktat 117g, Konigsberger Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, IX (Kassel, 1930), pp. 53, 129, qo. Regarding its performance, see the valuable remarks in Edward Roesner, "The Performance of Parisian Organum," Early Music, VII (1979), pp. 1 74-5· 24 See lngmar Bengtsson, "On Relationships between Tonal and Rhythmic Structures in Western Multipart Music," Studier: Tilliignade Carl-Allan Moberg (Svensk Tidskrift for Musikforskning, XLIII (1961)), pp. 49-76. 25 A better term would be "teacher-reporters". Cf. also Reckow, Anonymus 4, II, P· '4• n. 54· 21 22

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ued to be viewed as essentially free and flexible. These writers do, however, evince a concept of phrases, since they present information about phrase endings. That all such phrases should have been linked together with scant regard for any sort of balance, order or design seems too capricious an assumption to be compatible with the artistic attitudes of the later twelfth century. Even the examples in the Vatican organum treatise 26 already consist, often enough, of rather clearly defined components. 2 7 Insights and conclusions concerning the music of the Magnus tiber are inhibited by uncertainty as to the historical stages that our sources represent, not to mention our ignorance of Garlandia's copy or Leoninus's autograph. 28 But not only in copulae, but in organum, i.e., passages not notated in the preserved sources to indicate rectus modus precisely, certain ligature constellations as well as slight ornamental differences between concordances often enable us to read organa! phrases with a fair degree of confidence as to their probable rhythm; frequently such readings produce a rational phrase design, with the phrases quite often containing the equivalent of four beats each (Ex. 1). It seems that the composer's (or the adapter's) intent must have included some latitude for the performer and his "agrements. " 29 But

Example

I

Excerpts from organal passages 0 13 F

0 29

r---

26 Frieder Zaminer, ed., Der Vatikanische Organum-Traktat (Ottob. lat. 3025), Munchner VerOffentlichungen zur Musikgeschichte, II (Tutzing, I959). 27 For an example see Frederick W. Sternfeld, ed., Music from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (London and New York, I973), p. IOO. 28 Perhaps we can assume that we are reasonably close to the Leoninian original in those cases where (I) all three manuscript versions agree except for minor ornamental variants (such passages are generally conservative in rhythmic style), (2) at least two versions agree in preserving an older style, (3) W t. the manuscript reflecting an earlier stage of the Notre-Dame repertoire, presents an older version than the other two sources. 29 Eggebrecht, pp. 95 and I 07 ff.

139

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Example

1,

2 73

continued

r---.,

MI

0 29 F

w1 r--, .-------:2

w2-r-.----------~,

Mz w1

~~

r-

Benedicamus No.3

w

1

r-----1 r----1 r-----1

Benedicamus No.3

w1r----...,

0 29 w1r----,

F

W2r-----,

r--

-.,

141

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even the three sources of the Magnus liber available to us all still contain passages whose notation is so unpatterned, so truly organa}, as to make it inadvisable-indeed, virtually impossible-to transcribe them with unequivocal indication of durational values or of any definite time frame for the constituent phrases. To a limited extent variant transcriptions could be equally legitimate. The transition from such a passage to a copula and, in turn, to a discant section might be likened to the change from recitative to cavata and, in turn, to aria. If the Magnus liber contained more or less numerous passages that were intended to be performed with rhythmic freedom and flexibility and were still sung-probably to a lesser degree-in some such manner in Garlandia's time, why did he include organum per se in a work that concerns mensurable music? To arrive at an answer to this question it may be useful to discuss four other ambiguities, which occur in his treatment of the sixth mode, the third mode, rests, and the copula. In his fourth chapter, dealing with the ligature notation of rhythmic modes, Garlandia reports that sixth mode is written "in this way: a quaternaria with propriety and plica and thereafter two ligated notes and two with plica etc., as follows: "3°

'

J J

u r Fr r r Fr --=-

j

Fiat

~

co»

.-----,

£9 3

['

The next chapter, which concerns the ligature notation of imperfect modes, presents practically identical specifications for imperfect sixth mode: "first a quaternaria with plica, thereafter with two and two with propriety and with plica, if it be reduced to first mode, as follows:"31

';

j Fiat

J

j

r--=-- F r 4---J

; c-=r

J

!

o~ s:;;;J

But, "if this mode is understood in the sense of reduction of [i.e., to] the second [mode], the rule is this: two ligated notes and two, two, etc., with propriety and perfect and with plica-all are called short, as is shown in this example:" 32 30 31

32

Reimer, I, p. 56. Reimer, I, p. 61. Reimer, I, p. 62.

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CONSONANCE AND RHYTHM IN ORGANUM

';

J J J r F....--..r J J...........J -==-

I

Fiat

I

'

r

.....--•

2 75

r~

;J

Since the affinity of sixth mode to second is not mentioned in the fourth chapter, which deals with the normal and traditional perfect modes, it may be fair to assume that early modal theory viewed sixth mode only as an elaborated or ornamented first mode (plicated quaternaria followed by plicated binariae, in lieu of ternaria followed by binariae). 33 There was, however, a third way of notating sixth mode, which Garlandia explains immediately after the example in chapter four (see above): "Another rule concerning the same, but not approved by this teaching, though thoroughly approved by the example found in the triplum of Alleluia Posui adiutorium, i.e., a quaternaria with propriety and thereafter three and three and three with propriety etc., and this is the example that appears in the above-mentioned Alleluia:"34

Even though he here describes this notation of sixth mode as irregular, he had used it without any apology to give examples of both the perfect and the imperfect sixth mode in his first chapter. More significantly, five of the seven examples of sixth mode given in the eleventh chapter are notated in the theoretically disapproved way. 35 Though frowned upon, it was apparently so conventional a way of notating sixth mode that Garlandia used it for more than half of his thirteen examples. A cursory glance at the W 1 version of the Magnus tiber shows that fast (short-note) passages in premodal rhythmic polyphony were often written in this manner; several of them appear in the more modern (plicated first-mode) notation in one or both of the other sources. Only when these rhythms were integrated into the newly See the quote from Garlandia's eleventh chapter given below, p. 280. Reimer points out (II, p. 17 and n. 14) that the excerpt is actually taken from the duplum, which at that point, however, lies above the triplum. As to the translation of ars as "teaching," I quote from the Tractatus quidam de philosophia et partibus eius by an anonymous author (presumably of the later twelfth century): "ars est collectio preceptorum, quibus ad aliquid faciendum facilius quam per naturam informamur" (Martin Grabmann, Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode, II (Freiburg, 1911; reprinted Berlin, 1957), p. 47). Ars, then, is a craft and its precepts. 35 Admittedly, in a few, but by no means all cases, repeated notes would have made plicated notation difficult or impossible; yet these examples were evidently invented by Garlandia. 33

34

Ars antiqua 2 76

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JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

codified modal system, 36 therefore, did they come to be understood as related to either first or second mode, and only then could the effort have been made to change their notation accordingly. 36 That the modal system was fully developed by c. I I 8o has been asserted repeatedly, most recently by Rudolf Flotzinger ("Zur Frage der Modalrhythmik als AntikeRezeption," Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft, XXIX (I972), p. 204). No evidence has ever been presented to support this view, which I have tried to demonstrate as untenable; cf. Ernest H. Sanders, "Duple Rhythm and Alternate Third Mode in the I 3th Century," this JouRNAL, XV (I962), pp. 283-4, and Sanders, "Perotin's Oeuvre and Dates," pp. 243 ff. In the latter essay I suggested that it was in the years around I 2 IO, when concentrating on the composition of clausulae, that Perotinus must have experimented with the increasing variety of rhythm that came to be codified into the modal system. In his review of Music from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Frederick W. Sternfeld, in The Musical Quarterly, LX (I974), pp. 646-54, Alejandro Planchart claimed "that the Magnus tiber already shows a rhythmic system ... which includes what would later be known as the first, second, fifth, and sixth modes" (p. 648). The presence in the Magnus tiber of rhythms later categorized as belonging to the first, fifth, and sixth modes is evident. It is important to stress, however, that, to my knowledge, theW 1 version of the Magnus tiber contains no second-mode rhythms. The two instances that might be cited strike me as very doubtful: the settings of the first and of the last two syllables of the verse of 0 2, and of In Bethleem in M 8, look like second mode at the beginning, but like first mode at the end, especially in the tenor. I suggest that they are premodal upbeat phrases (see Ex. 2). Example 2

0 2, fol. I8r(WJ

,.---,

de

tha

mo

Ia

su

0

M 8, fol. 28v (W J

In

Beth

le

em

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In the case of the third mode Reimer has pointed out that Garlandia notated it in the traditional modal manner, even though he therefore used the perfect ternary ligature with propriety in conflict with the exclusive meaning-long-breve-long-it had in his notational system. In contrast to his treatment of the sixth mode, he nowhere acknowledged this inconsistency. 37 Apparently the pattern I, 3, 3, etc., which had originally stood for LLBLLBL, etc., 38 was simply carried along into the modal system, even though its rhythms became those known since that time as third mode. The stray bits of evidence suggest how this may have come about. In describing discant, the author of the Discantus positio vulgaris has no rules for ligatures containing more than four notes: "Should there, however, be more than four notes, then they are not really subject to rules, but are performed at pleasure; these pertain particularly to organum and conductus. "39 Garlandia's rules are considerably more complex: "[In] every ligature written perfect and with propriety the penultimate is said to be short and the last long. Should these be preceded by one or more notes [within the ligature], they are all taken for one long." In spite of the word "all" (omnes) this probably refers to ligatures of three, four or five notes, since he also gives the following rule: "The rule is that two or three or four breves never take the place of a breve where they can take the place of a long. " 40 This presumably means that a ligature or coniunctura of six or more notes should, where possible, be spread over more than one beat. A sentence in that part of chapter I dealing with the term ultra mensuram (beyond measurement) seems to convey the same meaning: "Should there be a multitude of breves somewhere, we must always contrive to make them equivalent to long notes. " 41 This is further explained by the subsequent rule: "Should there be a multitude of breves somewhere, the closer a breve is to the end, the longer it must be rendered in performance." 42 This may be exemplified as follows:

& •

I

- -

r r r p J

-

J.

-

...,

-

u

I

r ::::J

~

•h

J

--,

J.

Reimer, II, p. 58; in contrast also to his discussion of the fifth mode (I, p. 55). Waite, The Rhythm of Twelfth-Century Polyphony, p. 78; Sanders, "Duple Rhythm," especially pp. 278 ff. 39 Cserba, p. 190; Coussemaker, I, p. 95. 40 Reimer, I, p. 50. 41 Reimer, I, p. 38. 42 Reimer, I, p. 39· 37

38

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Reimer has argued that Garlandia's expression multitudo brevium in chapter 1 must refer to the pair of breves in the third and fourth modes, since he gave his definitions of ultra mensuram right after he had set up the category of those modes he called ultramensurabiles (third, fourth, and fifth). 43 Yet, it seems quite possible to understand the latter as pegs on which he hung the subsequent rules and definitions, just as in the preceding paragraph of the chapter his mention of the other modal category may be seen as having given rise to explanations of such terms as recta mensura, tempus, and vox amissa, not all necessarily essential. Moreover, Dr. Reimer was forced to interpret Garlandia's use of ultra in a purely temporal sense (longer than), rather than in the actual terminological context, i.e., ultra mensuram, which the author of the Discantus positio vulgaris had already defined as less than one time unit or more than two. (Reimer therefore had to assume that this definition is later than Garlandia's.) Inaddition, we would have to disregard Garlandia's plural (longis), since two breves can only be equivalent to one long. (It is impossible that he should have thought of different multitudes in the two sentences.) Finally, one wonders why Garlandia would have written "si multitudo brevium fuerit in ali quo loco," the more so as a few sentences earlier he had defined the third mode as consisting of "una longa et duabus brevi bus et altera longa" and in the sixth chapter used multitudo brevium for what Anonymous IV called currentes (coniunctura in modern terminology). Instead of designating two as a crowd, why not simply say "duarum brevium inter duas longas ultra mensuram positarum secunda debet longior esse" or, even more straightforwardly, " ... prima est unius temporis, reliqua vero duorum," as Anonymous VII put it? Admittedly, the latter preceded that rule with this sentence: "In this third mode the following rule is given: when we have a multitude of short notes, that which comes closer to the end is said to be rendered longer in performance. " 44 This need not, however, be seen as proof of Reimer's assertion. It seems that a rule that Garlandia apparently formulated to apply to cu"entes was misunderstood and applied to the third and fourth modes, precisely because he had raised the concept of ultra mensuram which it concerns in the context of the modi ultramensurabiles. How did this misunderstanding come about? One may reasonably hypothesize that it arose in consequence of the invention of the rhythms of the second mode and the resultant setting up of the modal system. To Reimer, II, p. 47· Coussemaker, I, p. 379· Anonymous IV already reverses the order of those two sentences (see Reckow, Anonymus 4, I, p. 26). 43

44

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2 79

identify two fundamental rhythmic patterns and their notation as first and second mode was an obvious procedure. On the other hand, the Perotinian pattern LLBLLBL (with the first long of each pair of longs being one third longer than the second) would certainly have seemed troublesome to accommodate within a rational system, especially in the context of musica cum littera, i.e., the motet. 45 But no objection of irrationality could be raised against the labeling of this pattern as LBBLBBL. 46 Except for the sentence in the eleventh chapter quoted below, Garlandia's treatise could be seen to reflect that stage in the evolution of the third mode. To be sure, there could be and there evidently were objections to the designation of a value as a breve that had been known as a recta longa. 47 If, however, the values of the two notes between the two ternary longs were reversed, they could be thought of as two breves, of which the second was twice as long as the first. In fact, they would have had to be considered as two breves, since a long before a long had always had a ternary value. That a rhythmic pattern of that sort had become attractive to composers is proved by the presumably prior emergence of the second mode; a purely theoretical fiat seems unthinkable. (Perhaps the situation demonstrated by the example on p. 277 produced awareness of the new rhythm.) The notation of the new third mode, however, must have been something of an embarrassment for Garlandia, since his system did not provide for a ternaria specifically shaped to designate two breves and a long. These considerations, complicated though they may be, would help to explain the formulation in the Paris version of the first chapter of Garlandia's treatise. The third mode consists of a long and two breves; and two breves are equivalent to a long, and a long before a long has the value of a long and a breve, and 45 It is less certain than Reimer asserts (II, p. 5 I, n. 30) that Garlandia meant only the caudae of (polyphonic) conductus when he described caudae and conductus as sine

littera.

46 This hypothesis is strongly supported by the instant and lasting (for three centuries) fame of Alexander de Villa-Dei's Doctrinale (written in Paris, presumably in I Igg), to which Rudolf Flotzinger recently drew attention (Flotzinger, pp. 203-8). The crucial verses (I 56I-4) of this hexametric Latin grammar inform the reader that "while ancient poetry distinguished many feet [i.e., meters], a division into six modes (modi) is enough for us, [since] dactyl, spondee, trochee, anapest, iamb and tribrach are able to lead the way in metric poetry." These are, of course, the analogues of-one is tempted to say, the models for-Garlandia's modal taxonomy, and Flotzinger's conclusion that there was doubtless a connection seems clearly justified. His persistence in the traditional dating of the rise of the rhythmic modes (see n. 36 above) is the more puzzling therefore. 47 For evidence of this curious identification of a value of two time units (following

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thus of three time units. Hence, a long before two breves has the value of three time units, and thus of a long and a breve or a breve and a long. Moreover, two breves are equivalent to a long; therefore, should they be placed before a long, they have the value of three time units, thus of a long and a breve or vice-versa. Now, there is the rule: should there be numerous breves in the oblique (divergent) modes [modi obliqui, i.e., the third, fourth and fifth modes], the one that is set closer to the end must be rendered longer; therefore those two amount to a breve and a long and not to a long and a breve. Wherefore the third and fourth modes are preferably reduced to the second, rather than to the first. 48

They may also explain Garlandia's justification of the contrapuntal combination of the first and third modes in his endlessly elaborate eleventh chapter. This is possible, he says, "because the first mode is in its appropriate arrangement [of ligatures] equivalent to the sixth, and the sixth to the third by way of the second, and thus the first is taken against the third, but this is done (dicitur) not properly, but by means of [this] reduction." 49 The last clause is particularly significant as a reflection of the conversion of the older to the newer third mode, as is also the absence of any such construct to serve as apologia for his listing of the contrapuntal combination of the first and second modes, 50 which were traditionally incompatible. The notational inconsistency of the third mode was recognized by Anonymous IV and the St.-Emmeram Anonymous. 51 Understandably, there seem to have been arguments about the proper rendition of its ligature pattern up to Franco's time. He eliminated all ambiguities by instituting a system of ligatures that no longer reflected modal tradition, while at the same time reordering the modal system so as to classify the older Perotinian rhythms as belonging to the first mode. 52 Only when the traditions of the modal system had begun to lose their conceptual force did it become possible to reassociate the older rhythms with the environment in which they had arisen in premodal times, and Franco's logical mind took the necessary consequences. The first to treat rests extensively was Garlandia, dividing his discussion into two chapters, of which one (7) deals with the concept of pausa, the other (8) with the notation of various pausae. Actually, howa longa ultra mensuram and preceding a brevis recta) as a breve -in England as well as on the Continent-see Sanders, "Duple Rhythm," pp. 2.63 ff. 48 Reimer, I, p. 92. 49 Reimer, I, p. 85. 50 Reimer, I, p. 79· 51 Reimer, II, p. 58. 52 Cf. Sanders, "Duple Rhythm," pp. 284-5·

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ever, it turns out that the author found himself unable to exclude from chapter 7 certain notational features that cannot be reconciled with those he introduced in the next chapter. The significance of these factors is that Garlandia's methodological division of his explication of rests into two chapters implicitly seems also to reflect different historical stages, which may be associated with the terms divisio and pausa, respectively. Different durational valuations of rests are defined only in connection with the discussion of the different ways of writing such rests (chapter 8). The earlier chapter, however, deals with pausae in modal contexts, the salient point being the equivalence of a rest to the penultimate note preceding it, whether the mode be perfect or imperfect. In contrast to chapter 8, rests are here treated as undifferentiated graphically. But even chapter 7 seems to reflect two evolutionary stages. In his discussion of composite or double rests in a perfect mode, Garlandia observes that not only the two divisiones, which he calls tractus, but also the space between them must be taken to represent the mensural values that compose the silence. His meaning may be illustrated as follows: I

7 )

In the case of imperfect double rests, however, only the two tractus are to be counted as rests. This case can be represented similarly:

Two considerations compel the conclusion that Garlandia's cannot have been the original conception of this sort of rest. That nothing (empty space) should signify something seems as impossible a notion in this case as it surely was two hundred years earlier when clefs were invented to signify lines, not the spaces between them. The rationale for a composer's adoption of such a procedure would be unfathomable and unthinkable. Secondly, both the practical and the theoretical sources, as well as the terminology, make it clear that perfect modes and rests preceded imperfect modes and rests. 53 That the more artificial reading of rests should from the beginning have applied to the 53 Anonymous VII discusses only the former, without even applying "perfect" as a label; Coussemaker, I, pp. 378-9.

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less complex and less advanced "perfect" situation seems improbable and irrational. What Johannes de Garlandia called a rest was originally a line of demarcation separating two musical entities, mostly phrases (ordines).54 By the time of Leoninus it ordinarily assumed the mensural value of the penultimate note. I

' I

With the recognition of silence as an intrinsic component of polyphony, equivalent to sound as an element of counterpoint, an ordo might be extended by silence, say, from second to third: 7

l

In that case the second tractus would simply represent the withholding of the sound (amissio soni)- the binary ligature-normally necessary to raise the "ordinal number" from two to three. In other words, the constellation of a ternaria followed by a binaria and a tractus represents second ordo, while a constellation of a ternaria followed by a binaria and two tractus represents third ordo, with the ordinal increase effected not by sound, but by silence. Garlandia's view seems to be an early instance of the change from thinking in modal configurations to thinking in discrete mensural units. In order to account for the circumstance that a perfect double rest in fact signifies the omission of the sound of a breve plus a long plus a breve, he posits that the middle one of those three values is graphically unstated, but implied by the empty space between the two tractus. This unique attribution of intrinsic significance to the inevitable space between two symbols can be explained as a reinterpretation of a vanishing conceptual tradition. There is at least one case in the practical sources that reflects this change in thinking. The original double divisiones of fifth-mode ordines in the second part of the tenor of the Perotinian clausula Mors:

r· r· 54 Cf. Rudolf von Ficker, "Probleme der modalen Notation," Acta musicoiogica, XVIII-XIX (1946-7), p. 12.

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are written as triple divisiones in the "modal" manuscript Ma (like the triple rests in the later motet versions in such sources as Mo and Ba). 55 A mensural view of this pattern would be three longs plus three long rests plus one long plus one long rest. A modal view presumably would be: a first ordo of fifth mode, extended by amissio soni to second ordo, plus one single long plus rest; or a first ordo of fifth mode extended by a succession of amissio soni and one son us to third ordo. Garlandia's short twelfth chapter, dealing with the copula, would seem to contain another significant instance of his efforts to homogenize different teachings. Having discussed discant we must now discuss copula, which is very useful for discant, because a discant is never known completely except through the intervention of a copula [or: because one does not have complete expertise in discant except by means of copula]. Hence, copula is said to be what is between discant and organum. Copula is defined in another way as follows: copula is what is performed in the regular way (recto modo, i.e., properly measured rhythm) over a coextensive single pitch. In another way it is described thus: copula is that wherever a multitude of note symbols occurs; as it is understood here, a note symbol is that wherever there occurs a multitude of lines [i.e., those connecting lines making groups of notes into ligatures]. And that particular section is divided into two equal parts. Hence, its first and second parts are called antecedent and consequent, and each contains a multitude of lines. Hence, a line [like that?] occurs wherever there occurs a multitude of intervals of one kind, such as unisons or whole tones, in accordance with the predetermined number of their incidences and with the proper arrangement [of ligatures]. This should do with respect to the copula. 5 6

Fritz Reckow's insistence on periodicity as an essential characteristic of the copula 5 7 seems to be an unnecessarily rigid interpretation of the last several sentences of the chapter, which, in any case, are hardly models of clarity. Reimer hesitated to accept them as genuine because (1) unlike the rest of the short chapter they were not adopted or adapted by Garlandia's successors and (2) their content was irrelevant to and inconsistent with the musical thinking and methodological approach in the rest of the treatise. 58 Once again, however, it seems that Garlandia has forged together two disparate aspects of a particular musical technique, of which the first-modus rectus in the duplum ss For manuscript references see Friedrich Gennrich, Bibliographie der Altesten franzosischen und lateinischen Motetten, Summa musicae medii aevi, II (Darmstadt, 1 957), P· 24. S6 Reimer, I, p. 88. 51 Reckow, Die Copula, pp. 13 ff. and passim. 58 Reimer, II, pp. 35-7.

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over a sustained note in the tenor-is the most basic, while the second-periodicity-may have been added to account for another view, which might be regarded as less fundamental and perhaps later. Dr. Reckow, in order to bolster his argument that periodicity is the essence of the copula, contends that what Garlandia terms organum cum alio (organum for three voices) would doubtless have been called "copula" if all that was involved was sustained notes in the tenor and rhythmic precision in the upper voices. 59 This argument seems untenable for three reasons: (1) For Garlandia the term organum cum alio denotes primarily a particular category of polyphony, and the name of the category as a whole is organum, regardless of the discant style of the upper voices that must account for his use of the phrase organum quantum ad discantum; (2) there is in these compositions nothing "(medium) inter discantum et organum," there being no mensura non recta; (3) even though periodicity and Korrespondenzmelodik are very common-one might nearly say, endemic-in organum cum alio, no one ever called it copula. On the other hand, passages in the W 1 version of the Magnus fiber that simply have modus rectus over sustained tenor notes are more common than those that, in addition, consist of corresponding phrase components, quite apart from the fact, stated parenthetically by Reckow himself, 60 that in those cases that do exhibit periodicity there often are successions of more than two phrase components analogous in melodic content and equal in length. It seems inappropriate, therefore, to make phrase structure consisting of antecedent and consequent an essential (much less the essential) ingredient of the definition of copula, the more so as Garlandia appears to have treated it as something of an afterthought. It is particularly significant in this connection that the examples of copulae with periodicity cited by Reckow 61 are all relatively late. Finally, Reckow's interpretation of the first two sentences of Garlandia's twelfth chapter 62 seems wrong. They are said to mean that discant polyphony is not really first-rate, unless it also displays the sort of periodicity Reckow considers essential for the copula. Garlandia's treatise, however, appears to be addressing singers and choirmasters more than composers; his frequent use of "profertur" in the explanations of discantus, copula, and organum in speciali may be cited in support of this statement. The first two sentences of the twelfth chapter presumably mean that for performers the shift from the Reckow, Die Copula, p. 27. Ibid., p. 19. 6 1 Ibid., p. 19 and n. 2. 62 Ibid., pp. 22-3. 59

60

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rhythmic freedom of organum to the modal strictness of discantus or vice versa is greatly facilitated by the intervention of a copula. More specifically, they could also be understood to imply that, in addition to strictly modal notation, discant exhibits remnants of rhythmically significant premodal configurations characteristic of copula passages, where, he says in the next sentence, there is rectus modus, quite possibly meaning that it consists of properly but not yet always modally differentiated longs and breves. Finally, they may be taken to mean that melodic thrust and phrase structure may often continue from discant into copula. These procedures are easily documented by reference to the various versions of the Magnus fiber. Composers may have adopted periodicity in discantus from copula models, as Reckow suggests, though the necessity of such a process is debatable. But in any case, Garlandia's sentence describing the formal design of copulae is so far removed from his lead sentences as to make an effort to relate them to one another seem forced. His wording suggests the probability that he is reporting two interpretive and didactic strands. Reimer has described Garlandia's treatise as "the final codification" of the thinking that had evolved in his predecessors, but also as "the immediate precursor ofF ranconian notation. " 63 He based this generalization on the author's largely successful modernization of traditional thinking. But the Janus face of Garlandia is even more tellingly revealed by the few little ambiguities and inconsistencies lurking in the treatise. It is in this context that not only his treatment of sixth mode, third mode, rests, and copula must be understood, but also his inclusion of organum per se in a treatise on measured music, even though proper mensuration is inapplicable to it. In his explanation of the articulation of organum the De-La-Fage Anonymous had described pauses and breathing spots without trying to define the cadential retardation of the rapid melismatic flow of the vox organa/is. His use of the word mora ("halt" or "lingering") is as indefinite as that of the term flexibilitas. Only a mensural consciousness would view that as a phenomenon requiring comment. Garlandia, in his effort to stamp all polyphony as mensurabilis musica, elevated such retardations in organa! style to the level of mensurability, though he had to resort to such an oxymoron as mensura non recta. 64 Reimer, II, p. 43· Thus, the tendency to subsume all polyphony under the concept of mensurable music, which Reckow attributes to "the later 13th century" (Die Copula, p. 65), presumably originated before the middle of the century. 63

64

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Unlike his successors, however, he left the organa} tradition intact. 65 Anonymous IV attempted to strait-jacket organum with an elaborate system of irregular modes as well as a seventh mode. The growing hegemony of the clausula and especially of the motet with its declamatory individualization of nearly every note had caused the flow of music to be retarded and had engendered new perceptual habits. They prompted Anonymous IV's bewildering Procrustean operation, his elaborate reformulation of Garlandia's rule of consonance, as well as the sort of thinking reflected in Franco's recommendation that the performer of an organa} tenor should either interrupt or feign consonance when his part, according to Franco's rules, would otherwise form a long dissonance with the duplum. Thus, clausula and motet robbed chant and its elaborations of primacy in the thinking of French musicians and caused the increasing corrosion of organum as a living tradition. An inevitable last step in this evolution was the recognition of musical genres as principal categories, such as motet, cantilena, conductus-and organum or organum purum (Odington's "genus antiquissimum"). 66 In this respect, too, Garlandia's novel classification of music into mensurable polyphony and immensurable monophony represents a significant turning point. Columbia University This paper is a somewhat expanded version of one delivered at the Minneapolis meeting of the American Musicological Society in October 1978. Several of its ideas were generated in a Ph. D. Seminar at Columbia University in the Spring of 1978; I am indebted to its members, especially Mr. James Bergin and Mr. Peter Lefferts.

65 In relation to the time when the Magnus tiber may be presumed to have been written, Garlandia's statements are "relatively late" (Eggebrecht, p. 105), but not so late as to be of questionable reliability and pertinence. 66 Coussemaker, I, p. 245; Corpus scriptorum musicae, XIV, p. 139. Among other authors to describe the genres of polyphony are Jerome of Moravia (as presumable author of the additions to the Discantus positic vulgaris) and Jacobus of Liege; see Reckow, "Organum," pp. 436 ff.

153

[7] WHO 'MADE' THE MAGNUS LIBER? EDWARD

H. ROESNER

Without question, one of the most familiar texts to students of medieval music is the often-cited passage in the treatise of Anonymous IV that offers an account of the historical development of the Notre-Dame tradition. I introduce my own discussion of the 'making' of the Parisian tiber organi with a brief consideration of this famous text.' Every figure in ligature with propriety and perfection is understood thus: the penultimate note is a breve but the final a long; the preceding note or notes, if there be any, are read as equivalent to a long. Secondly, every figure without propriety and [with] perfection is read in the opposite way: the penultimate a long and the final a breve. These rules are used in many books of the antiqui, and this from the time of Perotinus Magnus (and in his own time), but they did not know how to formulate them and certain others given below, and similarly from the time of Leo to a certain extent, since at that time two in ligature were used to express breve-long and, in like manner, in many places three in ligature to express long-breve-long, etc. And note that Master Leoninus was an excellent organista, so it is said, who made the great book of organum [i.e., musica mensurabilis] on the gradual and antiphonary to enrich the Divine Service. It was in use up to the time of Perotinus Magnus, who produced a redaction of it [abbreviavit eundem] and made many better clausulae, that is, puncta, being an excellent discantor, and better [at discant] than Leoninus was. (This, however, is not to be

An early version of this paper was read at Cornell University in 1991 and subsequently at several other institutions. In a more developed form it was presented at a symposium honouring Leo Treitler at the City University of New York in March 1998. I am grateful to Professor Treitler for his comments and suggestions. Both he and I have drawn on an earlier form of this paper for our contributions to the volume La musica en Ia ipoca del Maestro Mateo: el C6dice Calixtino y su tiempo, ed. J. L6pez-Calo and C. Villanueva (La Corufia, in press). In addition to Leo Treitler I am indebted to Anna Maria Busse Berger, with whom I shared a preliminary draft of this study in 1995, and, most recently, Susan Rankin, David Chadd and David Ganz; all have helped to shape the final state of the text. 1

The Latin is, with minor adjustments, that of F. Reckow, Der Musiktraktat des Anonymus 4, 2 vols. (Beihefte zum Archiv fiir Musikwissenschaft, 4-5; Wiesbaden, 1967), i, pp. 45-6. The translation is my own, but it has benefited from suggestions by Leofranc Holford-Strevens (most important among them, the readings of 'optimus organista' and 'optimus discantor' as 'an excellent organista' and 'an excellent discantor').

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Edward H. Roesner asserted regarding the subtlety of organum [purum], etc.) Now, this same Master Perotinus made the best quadrupla, such as Viderunt and Sederunt, with an abundance of musical colores; likewise, the noblest tripla, such as Alleluya, Posui adiutorium and [Alleluya,] Nativitas, etc. He also made three-voice conductus, such as Salvatoris hodie, and two-voice conductus, such as Dum sigillum summi patris, and also, among many others, monophonic conductus, such as Beata viscera, etc. The book or, rather, books of Master Perotinus were in use up to the time of Master Robertus de Sabilone in the choir of the Paris cathedral of the Blessed Virgin, and from his time up to the present day. And the others [et ceteri] in like manner according as Petrus, the best nota tor, and Johannes, called Primarius, along with certain others in large measure [used to notate] in their books, up to the time of the first Master Franco and the other Master Franco, from Cologne, who to some extent began to notate differently in their books. (Omnis figura ligata cum proprietate et perfectione sic est intelligenda: paenultima eius brevis est, ultima vero longa; praecedens vel praecedentes, si fuerint, pro longa habentur vel habeantur. Iterato omnis figura sine proprietate et perfectione opposito modo se habet sicut paenultima longa, ultima vero brevis. Istae regulae utuntur in pluribus libris antiquorum, et hoc a tempore et in suo tempore Perotini Magni, sed nesciebant narrare ipsas cum quibusdam aliis postpositis, et similiter a tempore Leonis pro parte, quoniam duae ligatae tunc temporis pro brevi longa ponebantur, et tres ligatae simili modo in pluribus locis pro longa brevi longa etc. Et nota, quod magister Leoninus, secundum quod dicebatur, fuit optimus organista, qui fecit magnum librum organi de gradali et antifonario pro servitio divino multiplicando. Et fuit in usu usque ad tempus Perotini Magni, qui abbreviavit eundem et fecit clausulas sive puncta plurima meliora, quoniam optimus discantor erat, et melior quam Leoninus erat. Sed hoc non [est] dicendum de subtilitate organi etc. Ipse vero magister Perotinus fecit quadrupla optima sicut Viderunt, Sederunt cum habundantia colorum armonicae artis; similiter et tripla plurima nobilissima sicut Alleluya Posui adiutorium, Nativitas etc. Fecit etiam triplices conductus ut Salvatoris hodie et duplices conductus sicut Dum sigillum summi patris ac etiam simplices conductus cum pluribus aliis sicut Beata viscera etc. Liber vel libri magistri Perotini erant in usu usque ad tempus magistri Roberti de Sabilone et in coro Beatae Virginis maioris ecclesiae Parisiensis et a suo tempore usque in hodiernum diem. Simili modo etc., prout Petrus notator optimus et Iohannes dictus Primarius cum quibusdam aliis in maiori parte [notabant] usque in tempus magistri Franconis primi et alterius magistri Franconis de Colonia, qui inceperant in suis libris aliter pro parte notare.)

Threading one's way through this passage is not without its challenges. The clumsy if fussy Latin, which seems almost perverse in its search for precision, occasionally introduces more ambiguity than it avoids. Does 'organum' have the same meaning throughout? Modern scholars understand one thing by 'clausula', but what are 'clausulae sive puncta' in the context of this passage? What is the difference between an organista and a discantor? Why is 'abbreviare' used to mean 'make a redaction', 'edit' or 'compile' when there were more conventional terms available for that

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Who 'Made' the Magnus Liber?

purpose? 2 And what is the qualitative difference between the liber 'made' by Leoninus and the new passages 'made' for it by Perotinus, on the one hand, and, on the other, Perotinus' abbreviatio of that liber, in which those new passages appeared? Suggestive with regard to the nature of Perotinus' abbreviatio (as Anonymous IV thought of it, at least) is the fact that most of the individuals who were involved like Perotinus and perhaps Leoninus ('simili modo etc.') in developing the notational usage of the liber are figures whom we associate with the formulation of mens ural theory rather than with musical practice as such: 'Petrus notator optimus' (Petrus Picardus? Petrus de Cruce? it is unlikely that this is a reference back to Perotinus Magnus), 'Johannes dictus Primarius' (in all probability,Johannes de Garlandia), 'magister Franco primus', and Master Franco of Cologne, among others ('cum quibusdam aliis'). 3 Furthermore, the frequent use of 'etc.', a trait Anonymous IV shares with much other scholarly writing of the time, suggests that the text as transmitted may not be entirely complete, that in the minds of the author and/or the scribe the thought was to be further developed. Continued how?4 It should be kept in mind, 2

3

4

Regarding my (evidently still controversial) reading of 'abbreviare', cf. later in the same passage: 'Ea quae dicuntur cum proprietate et sine perfectione, erant primo confuse quoad nomen. Sed per modum aequivocationis accipiebantur, quod quidem modo non est, quoniam in antiquis libris habebant puncta aequivoca nimis, quia simplicia materialia fuerunt aequalia .... Sed abbreviatio erat facta per signa materialia a tempore Perotini Magni et parum ante, et brevius docebant, et adhuc brevius [a tempore] magistri Roberti de Sabilone, quamvis spatiose docebat'; Reckow, Musiktraktat, i, pp. 49-50. 'They [the figures of notation] which are said to be with propriety and without perfection were initially veiled as to their identity. In point of fact, they were interpreted through the method of equivocation, that which is not a method, since [the antiqui] had overly equivocal notes in the old books owing to the fact that the signs for single notes were alike .... However, an edition was made in [mensuralised] notationfrom the time of Perotinus Magnus and a bit bf!fore that, and they taught [the type of notation used there] concisely, and concisely moreover up to the time of Master Robertus de Sabilone (he, however, taught at length)'. Emphasis added. Further regarding 'Petrus notator optimus', see Reckow, Musiktraktat, i, p. 50 (where Anonymous IV also provides more information on the shadowy Robertus de Sabilone). For the most comprehensive examination of these and related writers, see S. Pinegar, 'Textual and Contextual Relationships among Theoretical Writings on Measurable Music of the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries' (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1991). In late medieval school texts, 'etc.' usually occurs at the end of a quotation, whether or not the text that follows the quoted passage in the original is relevant to the point being made. In some cases, 'etc.' functions as little more than a full stop. (I am grateful to Martin Camargo for his thoughts on the use of 'etc.') Recovering (in general terms only, of course) the material included in the first 'etc.' in this passage is relatively straightforward, since it surely refers to the other elementary rules of mens ural notation, which

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moreover, that the historical narrative presented in this passage does not stand by itself: it is an aside prompted by the theorist's explanation of the basic premises of early mens ural notation. That is, it was intended as a kind of rhetorical gesture, a throwaway anecdote that relates the doctrine being presented to something the reader might be expected to know already. Putting this in a more complex light, however, is the fact that Anonymous IV produced the text as we have it in England late in the thirteenth century or early in the fourteenth, a century and more after much of the history he recounts unfolded. 5 What would his audience have been likely to know of this music? How secure was Anonymous IV's own knowledge of it at such a chronological and geographical remove? He himself notes that what he reports is hearsay: 'secundum quod dicebatur' is how he introduces the narrative. 6 This is a thorny document, then; to interpret it properly would are easily retrievable from other treatises of the period - most importantly, that of Johannes de Garlandia. Some idea of what Anonymous IV may have had in mind by the second 'etc.', regarding the subtilitas of organum, can be achieved from elsewhere in the treatise (e.g., Reckow, Musiktraktat, i, pp. 78-9 and 85) and from the St Emmeram Anonymous, who alludes to the subtleties of the sustained-note idiom; see De musica mensurata: The Anonymous if St. Emmeram, ed. and trans. J. Yudkin (Music: Scholarship and Performance; Bloomington, Ind., 1990), pp. 276 and 280. The text describing the contents of Perotinus' tiber can be fleshed out somewhat from remarks later in the treatise (Musiktraktat, i, pp. 82-3). In all these cases, 'etc.' can be expanded to etcetera, 'and the remainder'. 'Simili modo etc.' is more ambiguous, since it is not clear whether this refers back to Leoninus' and Perotinus' work of 'making', compiling, revising and editing or to the circulation of the liber after Perotinus, 'up to the present day'. Following a suggestion by Professor Camargo I have rendered this 'etc.' as et ceteri, 'and the others', since it occurs in a passage linking one group of musicians with another. In the primary manuscript source for the treatise, London, British Library, Royal 12 C. VI, as in most writing of the thirteenth century, there is no palaeographical distinction made between the two forms of the word. The text dates from after the death of Henry III in 1272; see Reckow, Musiktraktat, i, p. 50. This fact alone is sufficient to invalidate the suggestion that the treatise is the work of the scholar and theologian Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253); for this hypothesis see N. van Deus en, Theology and Music at the Early University: The Case if Robert Grosseteste and Anonymous IV (Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 57; Leiden, 1995), pp. 200-4. (For an assessment of van Deusen's argument, see esp. the review by J. Ginther and R. Rosenfeld in The Medieval Review, on line: 95.06.01.) A hint that the treatise may be later than 1272 by a few decades is provided by Anonymous IV's allusion to a 'semibrevis vel minima', implying some acquaintance at least with theoretical writing of the early fourteenth century; see Reckow, Musiktraktat, i, p. 84. Be that as it may, whatever Anonymous IV's immediate source(s) may have been, his text appears to be a developed version of the treatise of Johannes de Garlandia as presented in the compilation of Jerome of Moravia. This is one of several strands of evidence suggesting a Dominican aspect to the treatise and its transmission that needs further exploration.

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entail considering what sort of a text it is and who, if anyone, its intended audience was to have been (is it a finished treatise, a group of well-organised extracts, or a set of lecture notes, and, if that, made by whom and intended for what use?). 7 In any event, Anonymous IV has provided an answer to the question posed at the beginning of this paper, at least on one level. Craig Wright has suggested that Leoninus is to be identified with a known historical personage, a canon at Notre-Dame active between the 1150s and 1201. 8 Perotinus has proved to be a more elusive figure, but, assuming as I think we should that he too is a historical figure rather than a legend, we can infer that his career stretched between 1190, at least, to perhaps as late as 1230 or 1240- early enough for his compositions to have played a role in the liturgical reforms of the Parisian Bishop Eudes de Sully at the end of the twelfth century, and late enough for him to have collaborated with another official of Notre-Dame, the poet Philip the Chancellor. 9 Master Robertus de Sabilone is otherwise unknown. The 'great book' that Leoninus is said to have 'made', the so-called magnus tiber organi, is, of course, the great collection of liturgical polyphony and monophonic conductus prepared for Notre-Dame, as Anonymous IV seems to say, and circulated throughout Europe in a variety of forms. 10

7

8

9

10

Without taking such issues seriously into account, some scholars have questioned the value of Anonymous IV as evidence; see, for example, H. van der Werf, 'Anonymous IV as Chronicler' (Rochester, the Author, 1990), repr. in Musicology Australia, 15 (1992), pp. 3-21 (with commentary by this writer and others). C. Wright, 'Leoninus, Poet and Musician',journal rifthe American Musicological Society, 39 (1986), pp. 1-35. For the most recent reviews of the evidence relating to the career of Perotinus, see C. Wright, Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame rif Paris, 500-1550 (Cambridge Studies in Music; Cambridge, 1989), pp. 288-94; this writer's article on Perotinus in The New Grove Dictionary rif Music and Musicians, 2nd edn; R. Flotzinger, Perotinus musicus: Wegbereiter abendliindischen Komponierens (Mainz, 2000); and H.-K. Metzger and R. Riehn (eds.), Perotinus magnus (Musik-Konzepte, 107; Munich, 2000). On Philip see T. B. Payne II, 'Poetry, Politics, and Polyphony: Philip the Chancellor's Contribution to the Music of the Notre Dame School', 5 vols. (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1991). Regarding the contents of the magnus tiber, see Les Quadrupla et Trip/a de Paris, ed. E. H. Roesner (Musica gallica/Le Magnus liber organi de Notre-Dame de Paris, I; Monaco, 1993), General Preface. That the fiber was compiled for Notre-Dame itself can scarcely be doubted, whatever the origins of the various states in which the compilation has come down to us, and of the manuscripts that transmit it. Cf., however, N. Losseff, The Best Concords: Polyphonic Music in Thirteenth-Century Britain (Outstanding Dissertations in Music from British Universities; New York, 1994), § 1: 'The Myth of Notre Dame'.

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As we can surmise from the words of Anonymous N, with their careful distinction between 'facere' and 'abbreviare', the question of 'who' made the magnus liber and the question of 'how' it was made are essentially one and the same. How this music came into being and circulated is a critical issue. Writing when he did, Anonymous N in effect reports that the magnus tiber was still being used in Paris (and elsewhere) more than a century after the earliest parts of its repertory had been created and first collected into a 'great' liber. This observation, modest enough on its face, bears witness to one of the most significant developments in the history of medieval music, one matched in importance only by the establishment of Gregorian chant as the central corpus of liturgical song in the Carolingian domains some four centuries earlier. To overstate the matter for emphasis: before the advent of the Parisian tradition in the latter half of the twelfth century, polyphony was ordinarily created ex tempore in performance according to a variety of flexible practices, some of which may have been as old as Gregorian chant itself. Most of these creations were not 'compositions' strictly speaking, but rather enhanced, embellished performances of the ritual plainsongs that were their reasons for existence in the first place. Polyphony was seldom written down, and the majority of the written musical sources we do possess seem to preserve not compositions intended for performance but rather didactic examples or models of what a performance might be like, perhaps even records qf performance. 11 It is generally accepted that the Parisian repertory created by Leoninus and Perotinus represents the beginning of polyphonic composition in the modern sense, and indeed of the European polyphonic language itself: the musical material is manipulated and adjusted according to musical criteria first and foremost. Specifically, the music follows a well-defined system of consonance and dissonance, and, inseparable from that usage, evinces a rhythmic language that for the first time in medieval music was communicated by its notation. It is a repertory generally assumed to have been conceived and disseminated in writing, not ad hoc in performance, and to have had a stable transmission. This is an epoch-making development. 11

On the relationship of notation to musical practice in the earlier Middle Ages, see, among others, L. Treitler, 'Oral, Written, and Literate Process in the Transmission of Medieval Music', Speculum, 56 (1981), pp. 471-91; and id., 'The "Unwritten" and "Written Transmission" of Chant and the Start-Up of Musical Notation', Journal qf Musicology, I 0 (1992), pp. 131-91.

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Now to state that the Notre-Dame repertory enjoyed a stable transmission is not to say that it circulated without significant variation. Anonymous IV reports that Perotinus 'revised' Leoninus' fiber, and suggests that other musicians also left their marks on this material as we know it. The manuscript sources, all late, dating from the 1230s to the early fourteenth century, bear eloquent witness to this activity, above all, if in different sorts of ways, in the organa dupla and motets, but also to some extent in the trip/a and quadrupla, and in the conductus. Among the organa, there are alternative polyphonic realisations of the same plainchant; or, often, one section was replaced by a different clausula in another source. 12 The 'same' polyphonic line may appear in different notations or systems of notation, suggesting different rhythms or a different approach to rhythm altogether. Intonations and cadential gestures may differ from source to source, independently of the compositions they articulate. And the alignment of the voices can differ from manuscript to manuscript. 13 In a manuscript culture, one expects to find variation, even substantial variation, among different copies of the 'same' text, but the degree of variance exhibited by the organa in particular is without parallel among ostensibly stable musical repertories. And yet, side by side with these examples of fluid variability are numerous passages in both organum purum and discant that recur from manuscript to manuscript with virtually no variation. This juxtaposition of stability and instability within the same repertory and even within the same piece is itself remarkable. The textual situation exhibited by the magnus fiber, however one interprets it, makes it difficult if not meaningless to attempt to 12

The most recent catalogue of these alternative settings and clausulae is H. van der Werf,

Integrated Directory if Organa, Clausulae, and Motets if the Thirteenth Century (Rochester, 1989). This supplements, but does not replace, F. Ludwig, Repertorium organorum recentioris et moteforum vetustissimi stili, val. i/1 (Halle, 1910), and complete edn, by L.A. Dittmer, 2 vols.

13

in 3 (Institute of Mediaeval Music, Musicological Studies, 7, 17 and 26; New York, 1964--78); and N. E. Smith, 'The Clausulae of the Notre Dame School: A Repertorial Study', 3 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1964). See also the commentary sections in vols. 2-7 of Le Magnus tiber organi de Notre-Dame de Paris (Monaco and Paris, 1995- ). See E. H. Roesner, 'The Problem of Chronology in the Transmission of Organum Duplum', in I. Fenlon (ed.), Music in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Patronage, Sources and Texts (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 365-99. Many, but not all, of the sorts of variations mentioned here can be observed in The Parisian Two-Part Organa: The Complete Comparative Edition, ed. H. Tischler, 2 vols. (Stuyvesant, NY, 1988); and in Le Magnus liber organi de Notre-Dame de Paris, vols. 2-7.

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162

Edward H. Roesner draw a comprehensive picture of the evolution of this repertory based on the premise that this music underwent some sort of progressive linear development. The repertory is dynamic in a different way, yet to be understood. At the very least, any effort to come to terms with it must involve a reassessment, and perhaps a reformulation, of the notions of 'stable transmission', 'conceived and disseminated in writing', and even 'composition in the modern sense' as they apply to the magnus tiber. In what form was the music in the 'books' 'made' by Leoninus and Perotinus written down? How did singers use the material in those tibri in the choirs of Notre-Dame and the other ecclesiastical establishments that cultivated the Parisian tradition? And through what process did the variations found in the surviving manuscripts arise? That is, how did the 'making' and 'editing' of the magnus tiber by the doubtless many musicians who were involved in its creation and transmission contribute to bring about the transformation of musical practice from an essentially extemporised one to one that we would understand as composed? In this article I shall explore only a few aspects of these questions, and those in only preliminary fashion. Two interrelated hypotheses will emerge over the course of my discussion. One suggests that the act of writing the music down, of copying it, may have been tantamount to the act of composition itself. The other suggests that in fact performance traditions played a significant part in shaping the substance of the music in the magnus tiber, that performance practices not only served a recreative function but also played a creative role in moulding the musical fabric as it appears in the surviving copies of the repertory. That is, the relationship between the composer, the work, and the performer, between the text and its transmission, may have been a less linear one - or a less compartmentalised one - than we are often wont to suppose. In this regard, the music of Notre-Dame may have more in common with earlier polyphonic idioms and with much of the retrospective and peripheral polyphonic practice contemporaneous with the Parisian tradition than generally thought. 14 To 14

For an important discussion of the relationship of the Parisian tradition to musical practices at other centres, see the contributions of W. Arlt and F. Reckow to the symposium '"Peripherie" und "Zentrum" in der Geschichte der ein- und mehrstimmigen Musik des 12. bis 14. Jahrhunderts', Bericht iiber den internationalen musikwissenschoftlichen Kongress, Berlin 1974, ed. H. Kuhn and P. Nitsche (Kassel, 1980), pp. 15-170.

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launch this discussion, I shall analyse the musical variations found in two groups of works, two sets of organa dupla, to see what avenues of enquiry they might open up.

Alleluya, Adorabo ad templum (M 12) was sung on the feast of the Purification of the Virgin, 2 February, a feast of duplex rank in Paris (as at other churches, it was also assigned to the Dedication of the Church). 15 Alleluya, Posui adiutorium (M 51) is a chant from the Commune sanctorum sung on feasts of a Confessor Bishop, services mostly celebrated at semiduplex rank at Notre-Dame (the 15

Throughout this article, references to M[ass] and O[ffice] follow the cataloguing system established in Ludwig, Repertorium, and maintained in all subsequent literature on this repertory. For the ranking of this and other feasts mentioned in this article, I have used the calendars in the missals Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France lat. 1112 and 9441, from the early and mid-thirteenth century respectively. The date on which the Dedication was commemorated at Notre-Dame is uncertain, since it is not indicated in Parisian calendars or in the formularies for the feast included in any liturgical book known to me. H. Husmann pointed out that the high altar of the cathedral was consecrated on 19 May 1182 (in that year, Wednesday within the Octave of Pentecost), and suggested, among other hypotheses, that the Dedication organa could have been used to celebrate the anniversary of that event; see 'The Origin and Destination of the Magnus liberorgani',MusicalQuarterly, 49 (1963), pp. 311-30, at pp. 317-18, n. 15. M. Huglo speculates that the Dedication may have been commemorated concurrently with the feast of the Assumption, 15 August; 'Principes de l'ordonnence des repons organises a NotreDame de Paris', Revue de Musicologie, 83 (1997), pp. 81-92, at p. 89, n. 2. Wright (Music and Ceremony, pp. 127-8), noting that the cathedral was never formally dedicated, hypothesises that a Dedication feast was not actually celebrated. Unlike the situation with regard to the function of Alleluya, Adorabo, organum exists that is intended specifically and exclusively for the Dedication; as a consequence, Wright's suggestion implies that the magnus tiber was conceived as a cycle for the major feasts of the church year from the outset, regardless of whether or not all those feasts were actually observed. Since there are organa not only for the main feast but also for its Octave, and since the organa intended only for the Dedication show signs of having been reworked, none of these hypotheses is entirely convincing. Of the other explanations that come to mind for the presence of Dedication provisions in the Parisian liturgical books and in the magnus tiber, none is anything other than speculative. (The appearance of Dedication organa in the surviving copies of the tiber is another matter, of course, since the feast for which they were intended would not be that of Notre-Dame but rather that of the institution for which the manuscript was made. None of the 'Notre-Dame' sources can be shown to have been copied for the cathedral of Paris.) Some additional evidence bearing on this question may be offered by the unique version of the Dedication responsory Terribilis est locus isle (0 31; the verse alone survives) preserved in the recently discovered organum triplum fragment, Stockholm, Riksarkivet Fr 535 (Wulf Arlt and I are preparing a study of this source and of another manuscript of ars antiqua polyphony discovered in the Riksarkivet; I am grateful to Andreas Haug for drawing my attention to it, and to Gunilla Bjiirkvall, Jan Brunius and Anna Wolodarski for facilitating our work with it and for generously sharing their expertise with us.)

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one exception is the feast of St Nicholas, 6 December, which had duplex rank). Organum duplum settings of both alleluias are found in all three of the principal 'Notre-Dame' manuscripts, F, W 1 and W 2 • 16 In addition, Alleluya, Posui survives in a fourth source, MiiA, where, however, it is preserved in so fragmentary a state that we can do little more than mention it here; 17 and a substantial portion of Alleluya, Adorabo is found in the Copenhagen fragment, K. 18 The two alleluia chants have nearly identical melodies; typical of organum settings of alleluias, the two-voice Parisian settings of those chants, four versions each of Alleluya, Adorabo and Alleluya, Posui, are interrelated through a complex network of shared polyphony, summarised in Table 1. 19 16

F: Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, plut. 29.1; facs. inAntiphonarium seu magnus liber organi de gradali et antiphonario: Color Microfiche Edition of the Manuscript Firen;:e, Biblioteca Medicea Lauren;:iana, pluteus 29.1, Introduction by E. H. Roesner (Codices illuminati medii aevi, 45; Munich, 1996), and Faksimile-Ausgabe der Handschrifl Firen;:e, Biblioteca MediceoLauren;:iana, Pluteo 29,1, ed. L. Dittmer, 2 vols. (Veriiffentlichungen mittelalterlichen Musikhandschriften, 10-11; Brooklyn, 1966-[7]). W 1: Wolfenbiittel, Herzog August Bibliothek, cod. Guelf. 628 Helmstad. (Heinemann no. 677); facs. in Die mittelalterliche

Musik-Handschrifl Wr· Vollstiindige Reproduktion des 'Notre Dame'-Manuskripts der Herzog August Bibliothek Woljimbuttel, Cod. Guelf 628 Helmst., ed. M. Staehelin (Wolfenbiitteler Mittelalter-Studien, 9; Wiesbaden, 1995), and An Old St. Andrews Music Book (Cod. Helms!. 628), ed. J. H. Baxter (St Andrews University Publications, 30; London, 1931).

17

18

19

W 2 : Wolfenbiittel, Herzog August Bibliothek, cod. Guelf. 1099 Helmstad. (Heinemann no. 1206); facs. in Facsimile Reproduction of the Manuscript Wo!ftnbilttel 1099 (1206), ed. L. Dittmer (Publications of Mediaeval Musical Manuscripts, 2; Brooklyn, i960).Alleluya, Adorabo ad templum: F, fols. 107'-108'; WI' fols. 30'-31'; W 2, fols. 70'-71'. Alleluya, Posui adiutorium: F, fols. 139'-140'; W 1, fols. 46v-47'; W 2, fols. 83'-84'. MiiA: Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Musikabteilung 55 MS 14 (olim Bibliothek Johannes Wolf, fragm. s.n., long thought to have been destroyed); facs. in L.A. Dittmer, 'The Lost Fragments of a Notre Dame Manuscript in Johannes Wolfs Library', in J. LaRue (ed.), Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Birthday Offiring to Gustave Reese (New York, 1966), pp. 122-33, pis. 6-17; and in M. Staehelin, 'Kieiniiberlieferung mehrstimmiger Musik vor 1550 in deutschem Sprachgebiet, 1: Die Notre-DameFragmente aus dem Besitz von Johannes Wolf, Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Gottingen, I. Philologisch-historische Klasse, ]g. 1999, no. 6 (Giittingen, 1999), pp. 1-35. K: Copenhagen, Det kongelige Bibliotek, MS 1810 4", fol. 3H. See J. Bergsagel, 'The Transmission of Notre Dame Organa in Some Newly-Discovered "Magnus liber organi" Fragments in Copenhagen', inAtti del XIV congresso della Societii Interna;:ionale di Musicologia: transmissione e rece;:ione delle forme di cultura musicale, Bologna, 27 agosto-1 settembre 1987, ed. A. Pompilio et al., 3 vols. (Turin, 1990), iii, pp. 629-36. This table does not take notice of independently transmitted clausulae in W 1 and F, or of interrelationships with the three-voice setting of Alleluya, Posui ascribed to Perotinus by Anonymous IV, found in F, fols. 36'-37', and in Montpellier, Bibliotheque interuniversitaire, Section de Medecine, H 196, fols. 16v-20' (facs. in Po!yphonies du XIII' siecle: le manuscrit H 196 de la Faculti de Medecine de Montpellier, ed. Y. Rokseth, 3 vols. in 4 (Paris, 1935-9), i). For the clausulae, see Smith, 'Clausulae', i; and van der Werf, Directory. On the alleluia organa as a group see N. E. Smith, 'Interrelationships among the Alleluias of the Magnus liberorgani',Journal ofthe American Musicological Society, 25 (1972), pp. 175-202.

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Table I

Concordances among the settings of Alleluya, Adorabo ad templum and Alleluya, Posui adiutorium

Italic indicates organum purum. 'a', 'b' indicate repeats of the chant melody in the tenor of the setting. * indicates the beginning of the choral ending of the verse. Texts aligned horizontally are set to the same chant melody; manuscripts aligned horizontally have the same polyphonic settings of those texts and chant melodies. Alleluya, Adorabo

Alleluya, Posui

Alleluya W1 F W2 K

Alleluya W 1 FW2 Po sui W 1 FW2

AdoW1 F W2 K

adiuW 1 F W2

-rabo W 1 Fa Fb

torium wl

F

w2

K

w2

ad tenplum WI F W2 K

super

sanctum tuum WI F W 2a Ka W 2b Kb

potentem

et confitebor

et exaltavi

W 1 FW2

W 1 Fa W 2a Fb W 2b

wl

F W2 K

FW2 wl

*nomini w2

electum F W 2 MuA WI

tuo.

*de plebe mea.

Alleluya F

Alleluya F

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As this table shows, the W 1 version of Alleluya, Adorabo, unlike the other seven organa in this extended family of works, is primarily in sustained-note polyphony, organum purum. F includes several discant clausulae where W 1 has organum purum, in addition to some different sustained-note material. W 2 also has some different organum purum, including a substantially different treatment of the opening 'Alleluya', and still more discant. K, as far as its fragmentary copy goes, is textually close to w2, apart from their individual mensuralisations of the modal notation found in the other manuscripts, the two differing substantially only at '-rabo', where each has its own discant clausula. Apart from its rhythmic notation, the W 2 version of Alleluya, Adorabo is virtually identical with the F Alleluya, Posui organum. It is also close to W 2's own Alleluya. Posui, the two differing only at the discant clausulae on '-rabo' and '-torium', respectively. The state in K provides a link of sorts between the W 2 versions of Alleluya, Adorabo and Alleluya, Posui. Musically identical with W 2's Alleluya, Adorabo in most other respects, the K version of this organum presents a clausula on '-rabo' that is the same musically as the W 2 clausula on '-torium' in Alleluya, Posui. The W 1 Alleluya, Posui, finally, shares its 'Alleluya' with the other two states of this organum that still preserve it and with the W 2 and K versions of Alleluya, Adorabo, but not with W/s own Alleluya, Adorabo. It has much of its verse polyphony in common, not with the other Alleluya, Posui organa or with its own Alleluya, Adorabo music, but instead with the F, W 2 and K versions of Alleluya, Adorabo. Thus, unlike the states of these works in the other manuscripts, the W 1 organa for Alleluya, Adorabo and Alleluya, Posui have little significant polyphony in common. (One concordance between the two W 1 organa, not shown in Table 1, is a brief organum purum passage on '-lu-' of 'Alleluya'; this, however, is also shared with the other five surviving versions of this section.) The two W 1 organa are largely independent of each other, standing at opposite ends of the long and complex recension through which the texts of these eight organa descended. If Mark Everist is right in his conjecture that W 1 was compiled from exemplars originating in Paris near the beginning of the thirteenth century, 20 then these eight 20

M. Everist, 'From Paris to St. Andrews: The Origins of W/, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 43 (1990), pp. 1-42. The presence in W 1 of a distinctly local- British - polyphonic repertory (the tropes to the Ordinary of the Mass in fascicles 3 and 8-10,

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Who 'Made' the Magnus Liber?

organa bear witness to what would seem to have been an extraordinary amount of reworking very early on in the history of the NotreDame tradition. In fact, much of that reworking would of necessity have to have been accomplished well before the appearance of what is very likely our earliest source, W 1• Figure 1 summarises the interrelationships within this group of organa in a different way, showing the relative degrees of relatedness among the organa. The versions of the two organa that are musically identical appear within a box. The organa appearing to the left and right of the boxed settings are progressively less closely related musically to them; thus, the W 1 setting of Alleluya, Adorabo is less closely related to the version in W 2 than is the one in F. Manuscripts enclosed in a normal circle share the setting of 'Alleluya'; thus, there are two different polyphonic treatments of this section, one found in two sources, the other in five. Manuscripts enclosed in a broken circle have much of their verse polyphony in common; there are four of them. Figure 1 assumes that in fact these eight organa are genetically related, that one version derives directly or, more likely, indirectly from one of the others. 21 But neither Figure 1 nor the preceding table takes into consideration the question of direction- of which

Alleluya, Adorabo ad templum

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Alleluya, Posui ad adiutorium

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Interrelationships among the settings of Alleluya, Adorabo and Alleluya, Posui

the locally produced organa included among the Parisian works, the Marian collection in fascicle II) and of apparently late conductus (e.g., Crucifigat omnes) are among the factors that do not strengthen this hypothesis. This is a reasonable assumption in the case of groups of interrelated alleluias. It may, however, occasionally be problematic when applied to some other groups of organa that share duplum material, especially the verses of responsories based on the same tone; a different process may have been at work in such settings.

239

168

Ars antiqua

Edward H. Roesner version preceded the other, of which organum, Alleluya, Adorabo or Alleluya, Posui, came first, and in which of the extant states, if any, this complex of works had its genesis. In theory, at least, any one of the organa in Figure 1 (or MtiA, which was left out of consideration because so little of it has survived) could have been the progenitor of the family. It would seem reasonable to speculate, however, that a setting of Alleluya, Adorabo came first, since this alleluia is intended for a feast of higher rank than Alleluya, Posui, since it was sung on a Marian feast, surely a celebration that would have had priority in a liturgical cycle composed for a cathedral dedicated to the Virgin, and since the feast falls near the beginning of the sanctoral cycle, on 2 February. Furthermore, if one accepts the conventional wisdom that organum purum is historically earlier than discant, then the W 1 version of Alleluya, Adorabo, set primarily in organum purum, would be the most likely candidate to be the earliest among these eight pieces. But there are reasons to conclude otherwise. In the alleluia, the verse ends with a phrase sung by the chorus. Polyphony is not provided for this choral ending in the magnus tiber; with few exceptions, polyphony is restricted to the solo portions of the chant. The verse of Alleluya, Posui concludes with the words 'et exaltavi electum de plebe mea', with the solo portion - and consequently the polyphonic setting - ending with 'electum' (see Table 1, above). The verse of Alleluya, Adorabo ends 'et confitebor nomini tuo', with the break between the solo and choral portions falling between 'confitebor' and 'nomini', as the Paris plainchant sources make absolutely clear. 22 The chant melody for 'nomini' in Alleluya, Adorabo corresponds with that for 'electum' in Alleluya, Posui. That is, the solo-chorus break falls at different points in the melody shared by the two alleluia chants, and consequently the polyphonic settings of the two chants should end at different places in the melody as well. This is exactly what is found in most of the eight organa, as Table 1 shows. W 2, however, in its organum setting of Alleluya, Adorabo, does not end the verse with 'et confitebor' as it should, but instead carries the polyphony through 'nomini', the first word of the choral ending. The most straightforward expla22

Cf., for example, the two alleluias as transmitted in Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France lat. 1112, fols. 163' and 213v; lat. 15615, fols. 256v and 327'; lat. 9441, fols. 125' and 187v; and lat. 1337, fols. 233' and 306'-307'.

240

Ars antiqua

Who 'Made' the Magnus Liber?

nation for this state of affairs (indeed, the only one that is not hopelessly unwieldy) is that the W 2 Alleluya, Adorabo is an adaptation, a contrafactum, of an Alleluya, Posui organum, and, more specifically, of the version of Alleluya, Posui found in F, with which its music is in overall agreement. If this argument is accepted, it follows that the W 2 Alleluya, Adorabo must represent the earliest extant state of this alleluia organum - and indeed, the original one- in at least some respects, its extensive use of discant notwithstanding. By contrast, WP the earliest source to transmit Alleluya, Adorabo and the one preserving a version set primarily in organum purum, must present the state of this alleluia organum that is farthest removed textually from the original. There is no firm evidence to suggest which if any of the known states of Alleluya, Posui was the source of the others. It does, in any event, appear likely that some form this organum must have come into existence before the settings of Alleluya, Adorabo, and consequently that a work intended for the most part for feasts of lesser rank, in one sense more utilitarian in function, and with less immediate liturgical relevance to Notre-Dame, was created before one of higher rank and presumably great importance to the cathedral. We should be cautious about attempting to reconstruct the chronology of the magnus liber using liturgical or stylistic criteria as the basis of our thinking. There is more to be gleaned from the clausulae on 'nomini' and 'electum'. Example 1 compares the organum tenors and the chant melodies on which they are based. It is evident that the W 2 'nomini' in Alleluya, Adorabo is abbreviated, one of the plainchant notes, corresponding to the second a in 'electum', having been omitted from the tenor - along with its duplum polyphony (see Example 2, below, and the accompanying discussion). The reason for this truncated setting becomes evident from an examination of the way this material is presented in W 2 , shown in Figure 2. The scribe of W 2 did not have enough room on the staff for the whole 'nomini' clausula. He could not carry it over onto the next staff, since he wanted to begin the following piece flush left at the beginning of the next line, as was his practice. 23 Thus he was obliged to abridge 23

This is evident throughout the manuscript; see, for example, the very first page of the organum duplum collection in W 2, fol. 47', and also fols. 84"-85'.

241

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Ars antiqua

Edward H. Roesner

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and the omission of suspiratio marks. The VT scribe provided his typical bland coniunctura forms, a sharp contrast to the special notation employed by the F and W 2 scribes, the latter of which even introduced a sine proprietate ternaria. 39 The formula seems to VT fol. 49V,3 (Verse of Operibus)a

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What appears here in W 2 as a 'mensural' notational device is not, strictly speaking, mensural at all. In this particular instance- in which a nota simplex is followed by an altered ternaria beginning on the same pitch- the removal of the ternaria's stem suggests that the preceding nota simplex was elided with the first note of the ternaria, creating a lengthening of sorts, more or less equal to the value of a long. That the theorists could relate to something that might be described as 'more or less equal to' is reflected by such words as 'nimia', 'tarda', 'debita', 'parva' or 'mediocris' being attached to standard notational names (e.g. 'nimia longa', 'brevis parva', etc.). For a discussion of this see Roesner, 'The Performance', pp. 185 ff.

!50

Ars antiqua

The Vatican Organum Treatise Re-examined

have had a purely cadential function, since it always occurs at the end of a major section. Interestingly, the formula in the F setting of Sancte germane (0 27) is used as a kind of motto, first appearing near the beginning of the verse and then once again near the end, creating a reprise effect. Example 10 illustrates a concordance in which VT produces versions with two-note tenors (respectively C-D and C-C), while the Magnus liber transmits a version with a five-note tenor, C-B-A-C-D. (The VT examples occur in the treatise's example section, where two-note tenor progressions are the norm.) Besides these simpler tenors VT also employs a simpler notation in the duplum, i.e. with 'easy to draw' coniuncturas for the descending part of each sequential component, compared with the F scribe's, carefully notated with first-mode note constellations. Although such 'simplicity' on the VT side might suggest that its version is a more primitive state, let us not forget that the example section of the treatise consists of 343 melismas, many of which show clear signs of adaptation and manipulation. What appears there as a formula with a particular progression may have been adapted from a different progression altogether, and what may appear there now as a two-note progession could easily have been (in its 'original' state) a more complex formula, with three, four or even more tenor notes. This may be the case with Example 10. Since the VT author makes use of some rather complex Notre Dame formulae 40 and shows considerable competence in the area of transposition and adaptation (scribal accuracy is another story), the above proposal -that he may have freely changed or stripped the tenors of certain melismas as he saw fit- should be considered a serious possibility. 41 That two of the three chant tenors receiving polyphonic elaboration in VT are also set polyphonically in the Magnus liber should lead us to compare these settings closely. Besides the setting Petre amas me (0 15) transmitted in F, a piece from which we have already drawn several examples, there is the setting of Alleluia Hie martinus (M 44), found in one form or another in all three central sources. 42 Up to now, no one has pointed out any striking '" This is especially true of Examples 2, 3 and 6. Other potential candidates of tenor stripping are included in the Appendix. See especially examples 3, 6 and 8. +2 F and W 2 provide complete settings beginning respectively on fols. 134,5 and 79v,5. W 1 provides only a single discant clausula (on 'hympnis'), beginning on fol. 60,5. +t

151

225

Ars antiqua

226

Steven C. Immel

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parallels between the VT and Notre Dame versions. There are indeed correspondences, and although they may not be of a direct type, their nature and extensiveness show that the VT version is intimately related with Notre Dame. Examples 11, 12 and 13 can be offered as initial evidence (later, two additional examples will be considered). In the case of Example 11 -from Petre amas me - the concordance occurs between the Gloria of VT and verse ofF; in Examples 12 and 13, the concordance is somewhat more roundabout: the correspondences occur between the Alleluia Hie martin us of VT and the Alleluia Ora pro nobis (M 36), an unicum in F that happens to use the same tenor as Hie martinus. Of these three concordances, two involve a four-note tenor segment, and one a nine-note segment - indeed, substantial blocks of music. The characteristic differences that are reflected in the VT readings are of the kind that we have been witnessing all along: notational simplification, the omission or irregular use of suspiratio marks, and the preference of coniunctura over quadratic note forms. In Examples 11 and 12 a strong isoperiodic stamp can be seen (the VT version in Example 11 actually exceeds the Notre Dame version in this respect).

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