The innovative expansion of music into polyphony forever changed the face of Western music and widened the horizon for composers of the future. Two major schools of free organum have had a lasting legacy which continues to influence music today in overt and hidden ways: the Parisian school at Notre-Dame, the great Gothic cathedral; and the manuscript tradition preserved at the abbey of St. Martial, at Limoges. These traditions date from an era when music was created largely in religious context and preserved in both functional memory and print; the ideas of “composer” and “genius” had
not yet come to their modern meaning, and so we do not always associate organum with a composer’s name. Paris had its Leonin and his successor Perotin, but St. Martial’s collection is highly anonymous and of mixed provenance; the monks of the abbey collected and preserved music for study and performance. Their adoption and care of these various pieces has given us a valuable legacy which we call Aquitanian or St. Martial polyphony in their honor.
Though both repertoires use similar musical style (two-voice free organum), the textual basis for the music is different: Notre-Dame (the later of the two schools) polyphony is mainly based on liturgical chants of the Divine Office or the Mass, whereas St. Martial’s texts are mainly sequences or tropes and therefore contain “extra” material. Overlaps exist between chants set at Notre-Dame and troped in Aquitaine: a fortuitous find (and personal favorite) is Viderunt Omnes, which is related in theme and possibly source to the Aquitanian piece, Viderunt Emmanuel. My analysis of the two repertoires will focus on the polyphony and style of these two complimentary pieces, while providing background about the larger repertoire available to us from Notre-Dame and St. Martial.
The Abbey and sources of St. Martial de Limoges
Aquitanian organum is of an earlier vintage than Notre-Dame polyphony, dating from approximately the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Music composed on new texts outnumbers that based on Gregorian chant, whether for the celebration of the Mass or the observance of the Divine Office. The predominance of extra-liturgical material may indicate a lacuna in surviving sources, or a different role for polyphony in religious observance. Since the majority of our sources for music of this region are contained in the St. Martial manuscripts, determining the significance of polyphony in the larger context of Aquitanian churches is difficult. What we do know is that the monks used some of the sources collected by the librarians in their liturgy and worship. The sources come to us more anonymously than those of Notre-Dame; here not only do we lack a Leonin, poet and choir-master, but the authors do not even necessarily hail from the same church or same musical tradition. Hence the Aquitanian repertoire is somewhat more diverse in style than its Parisian counterpart. Similarities of function (the predominance of tropes and sequences) outnumber settings of the same text (unlike for instance Notre-Dame’s three or more settings of Viderunt Omnes, or the later practice of discant clausulae) with the exception of the several settings of Benedicamus Domino. It is important to note that similar small phrases appear in different Aquitanian settings, a pattern which is consistent with the hypothesis of centonization in chant.
As an earlier repertoire than Notre-Dame, Aquitanian polyphony features different styles of text-setting and melodic writing. As far as we know, Aquitanian notation did not indicate meter, though it is tempting to look for meter in these works. The period between the rise of Aquitanian polyphony and that of Notre-Dame, with its modal rhythm, is tantalizingly short. “Within a relatively short span of time the style of rhythm changed into its very opposite, from the free, "Gregorian" rhythm of St. Martial into the rigid modal rhythm of Notre Dame.” (Apel, From St. Martial to Notre-Dame 1949)
The Cathedral and sources of Notre-Dame de Paris
Construction on the new Cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris (replacing a previous cathedral, St. Etienne) began in 1163, and continued into the 14th century. The growth of the school of Notre-Dame organum is therefore contemporaneous with the new cathedral’s growth and construction (Wright 1989). Our most vivid source from this period is the student’s account we know as Anonymous IV, who describes the polyphony composed in Paris and the two men most closely associated with its creation: Leonin and Perotin, two choirmasters. According to this English student, Leonin created the Magnus Liber Organi, a collection of the cathedral choir’s polyphonic repertoire. In great contrast to the collected sources at St. Martial, music was being written at Notre-Dame for the religious celebrations at the cathedral. Polyphonic music sung by soloists elaborated the chant repertoire for the high feasts of the Church year, a tradition which begins (in our sources) with Leonin’s organum duplum and continues with the triplum and quadruplum of Perotin in the next generation.
As a created repertoire, Notre-Dame organum displays a closer continuity of style than Aquitanian polyphony. We are able to observe, albeit with lacunae and blind spots imposed by our sources, the developing repertoire as a continuum of new music derived from old. Notre-Dame organum consciously incorporated chant (mostly graduals and alleluias) which had been in written form for more than a century and added rhythmic notation, whether to aid in performance synchronization or owing to influence from contemporary monophonic sequences. (Fassler 1987) The elaboration of organum and clausulae (Smith 1966) changes the presentation of the original chants, by rearranging them or obscuring them under layers of new music, but the emphasis at Paris was on the continued use of “original” chants as a base. The Parisian school’s focus on the Gregorian – Frankish – chant repertoire differs significantly from that of the Aquitanian sources, which largely draw on newly composed chant. This begs the question of why Paris, already establishing itself as a cultural center (Strohm 1992) by the time the new Cathedral was built, tended to create new music around centuries-old chant, and if perhaps the anonymous sources in the region of Aquitaine felt freer to compose new chants. In this peripheral region, the influence of new (though unfortunately unknown to us) composers with new ideas predominated; in the city of Paris, tradition met with innovation in the use of pre-existing material, a trend which continues through the styles of motet and Mass through the following centuries.
Analysis of Viderunt Omnes: the chant
Viderunt Omnes is the gradual for Christmas morning Mass, and as such, a jubilant chant, as seen in the opening line: “All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.” This text would also be heard on January 1, the Octave of Christmas. As a text, Viderunt Omnes seems unified due to the repetition of the ideas “all the ends of the earth/all nations” and “salvation of our Lord.”
The soloist begins the chant with a rising line spanning a major 7th, from F (the final) to E an octave above it. With the response, the chant hovers between C – the reciting tone – and A. Viderunt Omnes has a range of E-F (one step below the final and a fourth above the reciting tone) and is in the fifth mode, the Lydian. Long melismas occur on the words omnes, terrae, omnis, terra, Dominus (the longest of the melismas), and suam. Most of the chant is neumatic, with comparatively few syllabic sections of one to two notes per syllable.
Finally, the Graduale Romanum contains a second liturgical chant called Viderunt Omnes. Also used on the octave of Christmas, this shorter chant is a Communion in the Hypodorian mode (final D, reciting tone F). The text contains only the first line (Viderunt omnes fines terrae salutare Dei nostri) of the longer Gradual text. Interestingly, this version of Viderunt Omnes is very similar to the Old Roman Chant of the same text. (Hucke and Dyer n.d.)
Analysis of Viderunt Omnes: Leonin
Viderunt Omnes was set by Leonin as organum duplum, a polyphonic setting befitting its place in the church year. William Waite, in his transcription of Notre-Dame polyphony following the manuscript source W2, transcribed Viderunt Omnes in modal meter: in the first mode, and shown in modern notation as 6/8 meter (Waite 1954). As is characteristic of medieval polyphony of this vintage, the most important notes of the piece – the starts of new syllables, and cadence points in the chant (i.e. where we would naturally place punctuation in the Latin text, such as after the word suam in this text) – are set with perfect intervals between the duplum and tenor. Leonin sets up a dissonant interval between the parts and resolves it at these important junctures (see the two notes on “nes” of omnes,” which resolve a ninth 2-1, or the first two notes of the piece which resolve 7-1). This tension and release, even before our modern tonality, resolves our expectation for the melody.
Viderunt Omnes begins with the duplum at the interval of a seventh (E) from the opening note of the chant melody: when the duplum moves up to the F, our modern ears begin to hear F as the tonal center. The mode of the original chant is the 5th – Lydian, starting on F; though this mode is understood in basic theory to contain a raised 4th (B natural), in practice Bb was used more commonly than B in order to avoid dissonance with the final. The Graduale Romanum, in keeping with our understanding of musica ficta to avoid melodic dissonance, uses Bb when the melody moves downward to G and B when moving upward to C. The raised 7th of the mode, E, is used frequently in Viderunt Omnes leading to F, which reinforces the feeling of a strong leading note motion (our own modern imposition of tonality).
Viderunt Omnes contains several sections set in discant: the first is on the syllable “om” in omnes, and the second is on “do” of dominus (the longest), with further discant on “su” of suum, and “re-ve-la” of revelavit. Polyphony is only added to the solo portions of the original chant, and the responses remain in plainchant. These responses – unadorned plainchant – are not reproduced in the sources, suggesting that organum was performed by trained soloists who already knew these chants by heart (Roesner 1979). Where the original chant is melismatic, the polyphonic setting uses discant (for instance, revelavit in the original chant contains a total of 15 notes). Discant speeds up the harmonic rhythm of the polyphonic setting, and as such, evens out the discrepancy between the neumatic or syllabic portions of the original chant (here set with multiple new notes per original) and the sections which were melismatic (multiple notes per syllable) in the original. The original contour of the chant is more obvious here than in the florid organum, but it is nonetheless stretched and re-shaped in its new setting.
An analysis of Viderunt Emmanuel
Viderunt Emmanuel is a versus (Fuller 1987) or alternatively, a trope (Marshall 1962) on the same gradual chant as Leonin’s organum duplum: Viderunt Omnes[1]. Whether the composer of Viderunt Emmanuel based his work on the gradual text or not, the text relates to Viderunt Omnes through the first word – “they have seen” – and the theme of salvation. The music of the two settings shares less than the actual text. Viderunt Emmanuel is centered on G – Mixolydian mode – where Viderunt Omnes centers on F.
Fuller’s assessment of Viderunt Emmanuel as a versus is relevant because of the clear presence of rhyme in the text. Unlike the gradual Viderunt Omnes, the text rhymes in pairs (Fuller 1987) and has several internal rhymes, though the polyphonic setting renders the rhyme scheme somewhat obscure. The possible liturgical placement of this piece is unknown (van der Werf 1992), though the sacred nature of the work places it definitely within religious observance. Like most of the Aquitanian work we have today, Viderunt Emmanuel is of unknown authorship and unknown origin, though generally originating from the region from which St. Martial’s sources are collected.
Viderunt Emmanuel features free organum which sounds considerably different from Notre-Dame polyphony. One main difference derives from the dissonant intervals which occur most frequently between the vox organalis and the vox principalis: Viderunt Omnes, based on a fifth-mode chant, prominently features the raised seventh degree (E) of its mode, where Viderunt Emmanuel in the seventh mode has a lowered seventh degree (F). The interval of a seventh begins Viderunt Omnes, and is the second interval to be heard (after an octave) in Viderunt Emmanuel. Tritones are notably rare in Viderunt Omnes, where ficta is applied to avoid the dissonances Bb-E (using Eb against the Bb present in the original chant) and B-F (where Bb is used in the chant to avoid a melodic dissonance, as well as avoiding dissonance in the polyphony between the two voices). Viderunt Emmanuel features a tenor which rises in thirds from G to D (outlining a G major triad), and the B in this progression clashes clearly with the F written in the vox organalis. Unlike Viderunt Omnes, however, this tritone is not avoided though the use of Bb in the tenor, or F# in the duplum (though most often in these cases, F is leading to G – a clear instance where we might expect the use of ficta).
The Aquitanian polyphony also approaches organum itself – that is, consonance – in a different manner than the Parisian style. Perfect fifths and octaves are approached from other perfect intervals, and the largely stepwise motion of Viderunt Omnes is as likely to occur here as leaps of a third (sometimes consecutively). As with Notre-Dame polyphony, important points of arrival in the text are marked by perfect intervals between the voices, but these are not generally approached from a dissonant interval such as the major seventh which begins Viderunt Omnes. Voice crossing, a characteristic of the “early” expansion into free organum, is prominent in the Aquitanian piece. Another typically southern French characteristic is the small melodic phrases which are repeated, either immediately or later in the piece. In this, Aquitanian polyphony bears a passing resemblance to Old Roman chant with its recurring melismatic formulae. Passages of discant, note for note correspondence between the voices, occur in the second half of each verse of Viderunt Emmanuel; discant is a common feature between both Notre-Dame and St. Martial polyphony, but it is employed in different functions.
Comparisons and conclusions
One common conclusion about these two repertoires deals with intellectual descent: namely, the development of organum through the “stage” of St. Martial, where parallel organum grew free and florid, to the innovation of modal meter at Notre-Dame de Paris (Apel, From St. Martial to Notre-Dame 1949). Apel reminds us that the two repertoires (judging by the manuscripts’ ages) overlap, and that any continuity of ideas is likely to reflect a general shift towards a new polyphonic style rather than linear progress.
Overall, the style of Aquitanian polyphony differs from that of Notre-Dame in several important aspects. The Aquitanian style has its own approach to dissonance, and both melodic and poetic contours are shaped differently. Our understanding of Aquitanian polyphony is enhanced by the St. Martial sources, and indeed this understanding of the musical aesthetics and practice of an entire region is mainly drawn from these sources, whatever their provenance. Despite the shortcomings of the sources, the St. Martial sources are a valuable window into southern French musical and religious culture of the Middle Ages.
The different styles of medieval polyphony examined here did not originate in a complete vacuum of communication. Though the movement of men and ideas from Aquitaine and surroundings to Paris must have been slow, innovations were transmitted from church to church and ideas did travel around France. The overall growth of polyphony from the earliest sources we possess – the Winchester tropers and other scattered sources of their vintage – through the collections of St. Martial and the repertoire of Notre-Dame represent an organic development of an expanding style which incorporated or forgot works from different converging traditions.
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[1] David Hughes in his 1974 review of Ein Festoffizium des mittelalters aus Beauvais in seiner Liturgischen und musikalischen Bedeutung by Wulf Arlt disputes this connection.
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