Music in History and Society

This page will feature information and lesson plans that relate to Music in History and Society.

A Brief History of the Development of Organum and Medieval Polyphony

Gregorian Chant

Much of Western music has its roots in the music that developed out of medieval chant. Chant in turn has its roots in the monastic lifestyle, especially the monks of the Benedictine order. Monks lived a rigorous life of religious devotion, attending eight services per day known as the Daily Office. The singing of psalms was an important part of the daily worship in monasteries across Europe, and chant became a way to remember parts of the liturgy as well. As chant developed, different regions had different ways of chanting different parts of the liturgy. These methods are referred to as dialects of chant.

Pope Gregory I ( r. 590-604 CE) Bishop of Rome began efforts to catalogue and simplify the music used in the Church, favoring the dialect of chant now named for him, Gregorian chant. This not only simplified the use of music in the church, but it served as somewhat of a unifying element in religious practice throughout Europe. Charlemagne (742-814 CE) even used it as a means to politically unify the loosely organized provinces that became the Holy Roman Empire.

Aesthetically, Gregorian chant is monophonic in texture, and features voices singing with straight tone. It is unacompanied and functioned as part of religious services, so it was performed in chapels, cathedrals, and basilicas. It is now generally expected that performances of this type of music, and the styles that followed it be done in some sort of chapel or hall that has the potential for a great deal of reverberation.

Viderunt Omnes

The chant that I will be using throughout this post as an example of various styles is Viderunt Omnes. Viderunt Omnes is a latin text taken from verses of Psalm 98, and was generally used as a gradual for Christmas masses. The text in Latin is as follows:

Viderunt omnes fines terrae salutare Dei nostri: jubilate Deo omnis terra.
Notum fecit Dominus salutare suum: ante conspectum gentium revelavit justitiam suam, alleluia.

The English translation of this text:

All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.
Sing joyfully to God, all the earth.
The Lord hath made known his salvation: he hath revealed his justice in the sight of the Gentiles. Alleluia.

An example of Gregorian Chant Viderunt Omnes

 

Parallel Organum

As is often the case in music, eventually the “next big thing” becomes old news. Choir masters began to look for ways to make their music more interesting, in part to attract more people to services, as well as to make it more interesting to perform. The first major step toward harmony as we consider it today occurred as choir masters began to allow some improvisation over the original voice, usually in parallel harmonies at a fourth or fifth. Some intervals were never used, for example a second, third, tritone, sixth, or seventh, as the Church considered these too dissonant and not “perfect” enough to be used in music evoking messages of God. These often began on the same tone, then added the solo voice. There are not really notated scores of these early parallel organum, as it was improvised, but later composers began write out added parts, which created actual polyphony rather than the heterophony created through improvised parallel organum.

Viderunt Omnes performed with improvised organum
 

Ars antiqua and the Notre Dame school

Léonin (c. 1150-c.1201)is considered to be one of the earliest known composers in the ars antiqua style. His work featured organum duplum, in which one voice, the tenor, would sing the chant in extended not values, giving a drone-like effect while two voices would sing faster elaborations over the top of this cantus firmus. Léonin was credited by Anonymous IV (a treatise by an unknown English author) with the creation of the Magnus Liber Organi and was considered by Anonymous IV to be the greatest composer of organum of his time. He is largely responsible for Notre Dame polyphony's rise.

Léonin's Viderunt Omnes
 

Pérotin rose to prominence in the Notre Dame school at nearly the same time as his predecessor's death, c. 1200, and improved upon many of Léonin's techniques. He added voices in his works, creating organum triplum, and organum quadruplum. One of the best examples of his improvements in the ars antiqua style is the comparison between his Viderunt Omnes and that of Léonin. An even more striking comparison can be made between these two examples of organum and the original plainchant.

 Pérotin's Viderunt Omnes
 

Terms:

Liturgy: the customary public worship done by a specific religious group, according to its

particular traditions. In this context it refers to the text used in the religious rituals that developed in the early Christian church and carried on in the Catholic church/

Monophony: the simplest of musical textures, consisting of melody without accompanying

harmony.

Heterophony: a type of musical texture that features to variations of a musical line that are

performed simultaneously.

Polyphony: a type of musical texture featuring two or more independent melodic lines as

opposed to one melodic line (monophony) or a melodic line accompanied by chords (homophony)

Organum duplum, triplum, and quadruplum: A style of medieval music that features a

commonly known chant sung in one voice using very long note values while two, three, or four (duplum, triplum, or quadruplum) sing over top using faster note values. It began as improvisation, but was later written out.

Cantus firmus: a preexisting melody over which a polyphonic composition is set. In the case
            of Notre Dame organum it was generally a preexisting chant that had polyphonic parts
            written over it, however in some other traditions such as cyclic masses it could even
            include secular songs that had liturgical text set along with them.

Notre Dame school: Not a literal school, this term refers to composers such as Léonin and

Pérotin, as well as others who learned from them or composed in the same style.