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Musical notation was without doubt one of the features that made these changes possible. Throughout the whole of the thirteenth century feverish activity focused around musical notation, producing significant changes and advances. This activity was the result of contact between practising musicians and the theoreticians of the day, as well as those rare people who exemplified both disciplines. The increasingly university-based theoreticians favoured the independence of the note with respect to its grouping, such as happened in the first-documented sources from the Notre Dame period. The tyranny of the rhythmic modes would last for a very long time, albeit varied by, and included within, ever greater values. Johannes de Garlandia drew attention to the independence of the note in his De musica mensurabili positio (ca. 1240), in which he displayed his knowledge of earlier systems and also that of advances allowing for note value determination when isolated from a ligature grouping. In his footsteps followed Franco of Cologne, the most important theoretician of that time and one of the greatest in the history of Western music. As is the case with Johannes de Garlandia, little is known of Franco of Cologne’s career. His key work, Ars cantus mensurabilis, dating from the fourteenth century, indicates that he was “papal chaplain and the preceptor of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John at Cologne”, but at no time is any connection to the University of Paris mentioned.
Nevertheless, when one reads the treatise it appears to have been written at the request of its students. And its teaching purpose is beyond doubt when one observes its clear and structured explanation of note values and the ensuing progressive notational complication, for which Franco seeks and finds satisfactory solutions. Also, his ideas on notation and the new possibilities opened up by them, together with the advances and consensus on the motet and the gradual suppression of such forms as the organum and the conductus, laid the groundwork for changes by the end of the thirteenth century that were to be transformed in the theoretical and practical sources of the next century.
It is not just the theoretical works that talk about the many and radical changes taking place at this time, practical works on music tell us much the same story. The late codification of the inspired manuscripts in the Magnus Liber Organi, and the supposed disappearance of this great book of the organa, which the English theoretician Anonymous IV places in the choir of Notre Dame in Paris as late as 1270, tells us much about the lag between the practice of music and the copying of sources. Some details regarding the new notational trends appear in the later sources for Parisian Polyphony, W2 (Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, helm. 1099) and are corroborated by manuscripts copied in the last quarter of the thirteenth century and the first years of the fourteenth century. The Bamberg (Staatbibliothek Lit. 115), Turín (Biblioteca Reale Vari 42), Montpellier (Faculté de Médecine H196) and Las Huelgas (Burgos, Monasterio de Las Huelgas, ms. IX) manuscripts reflect the alluded to changes in notation. Though not all the sources are strictly comparable (Bamberg and Turin being the most conservative), the final Montpellier notebooks which include the “Petronian” motets of Petrus de Cruce (Pierre de la Croix) show more than any other manuscript the strength and variety of the motet.
The Las Huelgas manuscript should be considered separately. Part of its interest lies in it being a compilation of music spanning more than two centuries: from pieces belonging to the repertoire of Saint Martial of Limoges to some in the Ars Nova style, with personal retouching, modernizing and attributions that bring to mind a constant “updating” of both music and contents. Neither should one forget the English repertoire with its own formal, notational and sound characteristics, resulting in significant and interesting details that were added to the innovations of the continental Ars Nova.
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