Well, I would love to imagine that it was on everyone’s lips, but I don’t think that’s true [laughter]. In reality, the ars subtilior is nothing but a modern invention to distinguish a certain group of works from their historical context. The comparative is especially superfluous since it refers to a more subtle art than the previous one, which is the ars nova, a term used by composers such as de Vitry, Muris, etc. at the beginning of the fourteenth century to define and separate themselves from the previous period, the ars antiqua. It is a kind of self-awareness of the end of an era. All periods were referred to as subtilior, I would even say that all periods were referred to as more subtle than the period immediately predating it. And not only in music, but in fields such as philosophy, etc. The term ars subtilior is valid for any style of Medieval music or any style in Latin. All music is more subtle than its predecessors. Subtle means intelligent. It defines intelligence. In a figurative sense, subtlety is the lead tip of a mental pencil. And, let’s say, between 1375 or 1380 and the end of the fourteenth century, composers often used mental subtlety to compare themselves with composers from the previous period. It is very convenient to call this generation of composers who considered themselves more subtle and more intelligent than those of the ars nova, ars subtilior. It is music of a French-Italian origin, although it is unclear as to whether it came from France itself or was composed by North-Italian francophiles, which is more likely. It is the contact between two opposing musical doctrines, the Italian and the French, at the end of the Middle Ages, creating a theoretical

friction. Is this friction related to the schism in the West?

Yes, it is undoubtedly associated with different views of the world as we know it, as well as that of the world of the great beyond, and with how it is organized and explained. Consider just one example which has so much to do with the ars subtilior, the notion of time: French music of the fourteenth century is proposed as a science capable of representing time as the addition of atoms, the addition of indivisible units. Italian music, however, proposes to explain and represent time as the subdivision of cycles. Exactly the opposite. Constant, infinitely sub-divisible and repeatable cycles, in contrast to the addition of atoms which are all the same. This has led to huge algebraic and mathematical crises and a different representation of musical rhythm, which has also resulted in different forms of musical composition, movement, dance, exclamations and song… In music, if the basic notion of time is altered, everything changes. The ars subtilior is the temptation of combining these two doctrines. It is an impossible temptation. And attempts to demonstrate this have been made precisely because of this impossibility. It is a polemic, a form of composition in which each composer contributes something to the wider discussion. Each composer is completely original and if not, what he is composing doesn’t deserve to be written down, because music’s only use is discussion. It is of no use for dancing, eating, for a wedding or a battle, it is music which speaks about music and thus has something extremely contemporary about it which is similar to the music of this century: it is polemical. Perhaps for someone who has never heard nor seen it written down, its interest lies in that it is a type of music which attempts to fix the moment of the performance. The freedom with which a singer can express the text is imponderable, it is irrational from a mathematical standpoint because it is unbalanced and contains indescribable differences. The ars subtilior is the polyphony of imbalance, everything is always out of sinc, like a underwater mosaic which is twisted by the emotion of a performer. Crystallizing that moment leads one back to the problem of the ars subtilior.

We could come to the conclusion that the works which have been conserved were not written down prior to being performed, but retrospectively.