Anonymous IV
Anonymous IV tells us that the book, or the music in a later version of it, was in use at the cathedral of Notre Dame until his own time. He says that the Liber was first put together by Leoninus and then later edited by Perotinus, and he lists the pieces that Perotinus “improved”. Although we don’t have the book itself, the same pieces turn up in manuscripts in what are obviously later versions of it copied for ecclesiastical establishments in France, Italy, Scotland and Spain, confirming the accuracy of Anonymous IV’s remarks and the widespread use of the material. The music consists of two voice settings of responsorial chants for the major feast days of the church’s year that we assume to be by Leonin, plus the three and four voice re-workings by Perotin. These are not liturgically complete in themselves but are to be used with monophonic chants which the monks would either have known from memory or read from a separate book. The first performances must have taken place as the nave of the cathedral was being built.
Our interpretation of the surviving sources is conditioned by our own experience: we make sense of what we see and hear against a background of almost a thousand years of music history. When today’s singers see long notes or phrases their first concern is how to manage the breath. When twentieth-century singers first re-discovered the great organa of Leonin and Perotin, they based their interpretations on common sense: if you see a page of music with only one note on it, or a word takes several pages to complete with no rests, logic tells you that this must have been performed either by several singers (who could stagger the breathing) or perhaps by instrumentalists. It was thought that there was an organ in the cathedral (and the term organum seemed to suggest something to do with organs), but the nature of this beast was far from clear. So early twentieth-century performances tended to use quite large forces on the chant tenors or have an organ sustaining the line (or even both). Even as late as the 1970s performances were very speculative. David Munrow’s 1975 Music of the Gothic Era did a lot to bring the music to a wider public. The performances are assured, intelligent and at the time seemed completely convincing. James Bowman sings Leonin’s Viderunt with great charm, accompanied discreetly by several tenors who burst into life during the chant sections. In the polyphony the changes in the long tenor notes are marked by bells. The logic of this arrangement must have gone something like this: a) there are surviving pictures of medieval bell players, b) the counter-tenor is a voice associated with early music and c) a solo tenor would have to be superhuman to manage the breathing so there must have been at least two voices and possibly an organ on the bottom line. Subsequent research revealed only one of these to be true, and that only partially – there are indeed pictures of bells, though there is nothing to connect them with organum, but there is no evidence for a voice like a modern countertenor in the medieval period, there is no evidence that the cathedral organ could have been used to accompany voices, and the account books for Notre Dame revealed that often only two singers were paid to sing two-voice organa. It’s possible, of course, that two were paid and that several more sung without payment, but this is surely unlikely. When organum triplum and quadruplum were performed (with three and four voices respectively), then the number of paid singers increased accordingly.
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