Polyphony In Medieval Paris

Redefines musical analysis for a period that marks the beginnings of composition as we know it now.

First published in 1998, this volume brings together the most part of the author’s work on medieval polyphony. The most significant advance in music during the period in the High Gothic was the development of a system of rhythm and of its notation, the modern understanding of which was to a considerable extent obscured by an undue emphasis on the so-called rhythmic modes. The investigation of this topic forms the centre of this book, and a related essay deals with rhythmic Latin poetry. Other pieces survey the accomplishments of Europe’s first great composer and the flourishing of the medieval motet, whose rise he stimulated, while several essays focus on English polyphony, and on what remains of the motets of Philippe de Vitry, a major figure in Parisian intellectual circles of the 14th century.

This book is a history of the early musical life of the Parisian cathedral of Notre Dame. All aspects of the musical establishment of Notre Dame are covered, from Merovingian times to the period of the wars of religion in France. Nine discrete essays discuss the history of Parisian chant and liturgy and the pattern and structure of the cathedral services in the late Middle Ages; Notre Dame polyphony and the composers most closely associated with the cathedral, among them Leoninus, Perotinus and Philippe de Vitry; the organ and its repertoire; the choir, the musical education and performing traditions; and the relationship of the cathedral to the court.

From its origins in the thirteenth century, the Latin-texted motet in England and France became the most significant and diverse polyphonic genre of the fourteenth, a body of music important both for its texts and its variety of musical structures. However, although the motet in England plays a vital role in the music-historical narrative of the first decades of the 1300s, it has too often been overlooked in modern scholarship, due largely to its preservation in numerous but almost entirely fragmentary sources.0In 2017, substantial new fragments of medieval polyphony came to light. They originated at the Benedictine monastery of Abbotsbury, a major institution located high above Chesil Beach on Dorset's Jurassic Coast. The two leaves once headed an imposing musical scroll, and preserve significant portions of four large-scale Latin-texted motets from early fourteenth-century England.0This book introduces the manuscript and its provenance in Abbotsbury, relates it to other scrolls of late medieval music, contextualizes its motets within the larger corpus of contemporary Latin-texted motets, and analyses and reconstructs each of the motets, providing complete performable transcriptions of three of these compositions as well as three of its large-scale comparands. Spurred by the Dorset discovery, this monograph, the first in thirty-five years devoted to the medieval motet in England, offers a new evaluation of the richness of the English repertory in its own terms.

This book presents together a number of path-breaking essays on different aspects of medieval music in France written by Manuel Pedro Ferreira, who is well known for his work on the medieval cantigas and Iberian liturgical sources. The first essay is a tour-de-force of detective work: an odd E-flat in two 16th-century antiphoners leads to the identification of a Gregorian responsory as a Gallican version of a seventh-century Hispanic melody. The second rediscovers a long-forgotten hypothesis concerning the microtonal character of some French 11th-century neumes. In the paper "Is it polyphony?" an even riskier hypothesis is arrived at: Do the origins of Aquitanian free organum lie on the instrumental accompaniment of newly composed devotional versus? The Cistercian attitude towards polyphonic singing, mirrored in musical sources kept in peripheral nunneries, is the subject of the following essay. The intellectual and sociological nature of the Parisian motet is the central concern of the following two essays, which, after a survey of concepts of temporality in the trouvère and polyphonic repertories, establish it as the conceptual foundation of subsequent European schools of composition. It is possible then to assess the real originality of Philippe de Vitry and his Ars nova, which is dealt with in the following chapter. A century later, the role of Guillaume Dufay in establishing a chord-based alternative to contrapuntal writing is laboriously put into evidence. Finally, an informative synthesis is offered concerning the mathematical underpinnings of musical composition in the Middle Ages.

Offering a significant contribution and interdisciplinary approach to medieval musical research, the author not only researches the music history of the time, but incorporates the political, social and cultural conditions that gave rise to the birth of polyphonic thought in Western music.

The first study focusing on the composition of new plainchant in northern-French confraternities for masses and offices in honor of saints thought to have healing powers

This edition, for the first time, presents a complete modern rendering of an extensive repertoire of works crucial to the development of polyphonic Western music, the organa at Notre Dame cathedral of Paris ca.1165-1225. The two chief composers, Leonin and Perotin, devised the first musical notation to indicate pitch and rhythm, and formulated several musical styles and types of composition which were sung throughout Europe for approximately two centuries. Hans Tischler's edition explores the evolution of compositional methods for both composers, examining the individual styles of organum purum, discant, copula, and pseudo-discant. A second evolutionary factor considered is the selected use of melodic formulae and the recurrence of whole phrases and sections which interrelate numerous organa. A third consideration of the analysis is the increasing complexity of the rhythmic treatment in the tenors of discant clausulae, from Leonin's creation of modal notation, to Perotin's invention of additional rhythmic patterns and their notational symbols. The repertoire comprises settings of well over one hundred chants, the majority of them in two or three versions; and each setting is comprised of several independent and exchangeable sections, totaling approximately 1,500. Only portions of this vast repertoire have been previously published, however, this edition includes all relevant extant material, drawn from sixteen manuscripts, several of which contain two or more collections of organal works . It also refers to related compositions in seven additional collections and to chant sources in eight medieval and eight modem codices.