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The theorists may or may not have been performers themselves, and we have to be a little careful when interpreting what they say (not least because they may not be speaking for anyone except themselves). But musicologists owe a great debt to those self-selecting surviving scholars who committed themselves to paper (or parchment, as it then was), because it is only through the works of writers such as the ninth- century Hucbald of St Armand and Regino of Prüm that we have any idea of how the earliest polyphony actually worked. They describe formulae for adding voices to the chant, a practice known as organum. It was a fairly strict process, with up to three voices moving in octaves, fifths and fourths, only departing from these intervals in order to avoid breaking the nascent rules of harmony. Over the next two hundred years or so more complex melismatic versions developed, with a freely composed solo line known as the duplum soaring over the original chant, which was still there but instead of being sung by the choir was performed by a soloist and broken down into very long notes. One chant extract might last several pages, while an elaborate descant was sung over the top of it. The chant line (generally the lower of the two) became known as the tenor, from the Latin ‘tenere’ to hold (either because the singer had to hold the notes for a long time, or because it was the line which held the whole piece together).
Scholars often draw parallels between medieval music and its contemporary architecture. One can think of parallel organum as a reflection of the Romanesque – fairly four square and based on ancient tradition – with the later, more free-flowing music representing the excitement and unpredictability of the Gothic. In 1163, Maurice de Sully, who had become Bishop of Paris three years earlier, laid the foundation stone of the new cathedral of Notre Dame. Like Abbot Suger at St Denis before him, he was replacing the Romanesque basilica with something much more grand. It took less than twenty years to complete the choir, after which the old church was demolished and the transept and nave begun. These were finished in about 1200, with the façade finally in place some fifty years after that. It was while this construction work was going on that the two greatest early polyphonists were composing their masterpieces. We know about them only through the slenderest of historical threads. Sometime around the end of the thirteenth century an English scholar living in Paris wrote a treatise on notation in which he happened to mention the names of two French composers of an earlier generation and the titles of some of the pieces they wrote. The Englishman is known to scholars as Anonymous IV – one of the many sources whose names have been lost to history but whose work has been assigned numbers for ease of reference. The composers he talks of are Leoninus and Perotinus, and the works he attributes to them are some of the earliest surviving polyphonic pieces that he claims were to be found in the Magnus Liber Organi – the Great Book of Organum. This book no longer exists, and there are no other contemporary references to Leonin (and only one other, Hieronymus de Moravia, mentions Perotin). By a wonderfully ironic twist of history, Anonymous IV’s remarks on notation have become a mere footnote in academic textbooks, but his aside about this mysterious book and its two otherwise unknown compilers is one of the single most important references in the whole of music history.
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