Taruskin, OHWM - Ch. 4, Notre Dame.pdf - 2. Middle Ages - Trigon

CHAPTER 6

NotreDamedeParis

Parisian Cathedral Music in the Twelfth

and Thirteenth Centuries

and Its Makers

of Europe by the end of the twelfth century. The process of urbanization,

traced to some degree in chapter 4, brought about a decline in the importance

of monasteries as centers of learning and a swift rise in the prestige of cathedral schools.

These schools were learning centers attached to cathedral churches, the large urban

churches that were the seats ( cathedrae ) of bishops and that served as administrative

centers for a surrounding ecclesiastical territory called a diocese.

The enhanced importance of the cathedral beginning in the twelfth century, espe-

cially in northern Europe, was underscored by the gigantism of cathedral architecture.

The Gothic style (so called since the nineteenth century to emphasize its northern

European provenance), with its soaring lines and huge interior spaces, had its start

precisely at this time. Paris and the surrounding area (including the northern suburb

of Saint-Denis, site of the royal crypt) was one of its earliest sites. The abbey and

basilica of Saint-Denis were constructed between 1140 and 1144. The cornerstone of the

present-day cathedral of Paris, dedicated to the Virgin Mary and affectionately known

therefore as Notre-Dame de Paris (‘‘Our Lady of Paris’’), or simply as Notre Dame, was

laid in 1163 by Pope Alexander III himself. The altar was consecrated twenty years later,

and the building began to function, although the whole enormous structure was not

ﬁnished until the beginning of the fourteenth century.

Within and around the great Gothic cathedrals, the clergy was organized into a

community modeled in many of its aspects on the feudal ideal. The resident staff or

faculty was sworn to a quasi-monastic regime deﬁned by a canon or consensual law.

From this word they derived their title: a full member of the community was a ‘‘canon

regular,’’ or simply canon. The canons elected the bishop who ruled them, and who

parceled out the church lands and their incomes to the canons in the form of prebends

(from praebenda , that which is to be granted), much as a lord would deed land to his

vassals. The community of canons, known as the college or chapter, was organized into

a hierarchy of ranks and ofﬁces overseen by the chancellor or dean, the bishop’s chief of

staff. They included the scolasticus (school director) and the precentor (musical director).

Much of this vocabulary, as the reader has surely noticed, is now used to designate

the ranks and ofﬁces in a university, and that is no coincidence. The university as we

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THE CATHEDRAL-UNIVERSITY COMPLEX

M any circumstances conspired to make Paris the undisputed intellectual capital

chapter 6

know it — or as it was origi-

nally called, the universitas soci-

etas magistrorum discipulorumque

(universal association of mas-

ters and disciples, i.e., teachers

and pupils) — was a twelfth-

century innovation, formed

initially by consolidating and

augmenting the faculties of

cathedral schools. The Univer-

sity of Paris, the ﬁrst great

northern European university,

was by far the largest. It was

preceded only by the University

of Bologna, originally endowed

in the eleventh century as the

pope’s own vocational school of

‘‘canon law’’ for training church

administrators.

Its instructional and ad-

ministrative staff was formed

out of the faculties of three

large existing schools: that of

Notre Dame, that of the canons regular at the abbey of St. Victor (known to us

already as a center of sequence composition), and that of the collegiate church of

St. Genevieve. (A collegiate church was the next lower rank after cathedral: it had

a dean and chapter but no resident bishop.) As a physical plant the University

of Paris grew up alongside the new cathedral. It was fully functioning by around

1170 with the cathedral’s chancellor as its ecclesiastical superintendent’’ charged with

granting its faculty the licentia docendi (license to teach), known to us as the doc-

tor’s degree. It was formally chartered by a papal bull — a letter carrying the pope’s

bulla or seal — in

Interior of the cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris.

1215. Since the sixteenth century it has been known as the Sorbo-

nne, after its largest

constituent college,

an elite doctoral

school of theology

founded — that is,

funded — by Ro-

bert de Sorbon, the

royal chaplain, in

1253.

This unprece-

dented royal/papal

fig.6-2 Philip II of France (Philip Augustus, r. 1180–1223), handing the

royal privilege to the masters and students of the University of Paris in 1200.

Illumination from a mid-fourteenth-century Latin chronicle known as the

Book of Procurors, now kept at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

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fig.6-1

notredamedeparis

ecclesiastical/educational establishment was the environment in which an equally

unprecedented musical establishment thrived. Our knowledge of it, while extensive,

is curiously indirect, pieced together by collating evidence from two or three skimpy

descriptive accounts, four immense musical manuscripts, and half a dozen more or

less detailed theoretical treatises. What we now call the ‘‘Notre Dame School’’ of

polyphonic composition, and are accustomed to regarding as the ﬁrst great ‘‘classical’’

ﬂowering of Western art music, is actually a sort of grand historiographical ﬁction.

Constructing it was one of the earliest triumphs of modern musicology — and still one

of the most impressive.

The musical documents, three service books compiled in Paris in the mid-to-

late thirteenth century and one compiled in Britain somewhat later (but seemingly

containing a somewhat earlier version of the repertory), house an imposing body of

polyphonic chant settings that stands in relation to the modest repertories of the

‘‘St. Martial’’ and Compostela manuscripts in more or less the same way that the great

central cathedral-university complex itself stood in relation to the outlying monasteries

and shrines of an earlier age.

The earlier repertories had been local ones in the main, emphasizing patron saints

and intramural observances, and concentrating on recent chants like sequences and

versus . The new one emphasized the general (‘‘catholic’’) liturgy, the great yearly feasts,

and the largest, musically most elaborate liturgical items. The Parisian or Parisian-style

music books consisted mainly of settings of the Great Responsories for matins and

the highly melismatic ‘‘lesson chants’’ (Gradual and Alleluia) of the Mass, arranged

in the order of the church calendar, with particular concentrations around Christmas,

Easter, and Pentecost (along with the Feast of the Assumption, in recognition of

the Virgin Mary’s status as patron at Notre Dame; but even so, she was hardly a

local ﬁgure).

Where the earlier repertories had consisted, with only the rarest (and oft-times

dubious) exceptions, of two-part settings that paired the original chant tenor with one

added voice, there is a whole cycle of Notre Dame settings with two added parts for a

total texture of three voices, and even a few especially grandiose items with three added

parts for an unheard-of complement of four. The earlier repertories had favored two

styles: a note-against-note style called discant, and a somewhat more ﬂorid style called

organum, with the tenor sustained against short melismatic ﬂights in the added voice.

A typical Notre Dame composition alternated the two styles and took them both to

extremes. In ‘‘organal’’ sections, each tenor note could literally last minutes, furnishing a

series of protracted drones supporting tremendous melismatic outpourings; the discant

sections, by contrast, were driven by besetting rhythms that (for the ﬁrst time anywhere)

were precisely ﬁxed in the notation.

The chant settings associated with Notre Dame, in short, were as ambitious

as the cathedral for which they were composed. They took their stylistic bearings

from existing polyphonic repertories but vastly outstripped their predecessors in every

dimension — length, range, number of voices. They set the world (well, the Western-

world) record for ‘‘intrasyllabic melodic expansion,’’ 1 to use a wonderfully precise term

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a Russian folklorist once coined to describe melismatic proliferation and the way it eats

up a text. (That record still stands, by the way, after eight hundred years.)

To ﬁnd the motivation for this astonishing copiousness, one might look no further

than St. Augustine’s metaphor of ‘‘a mind poured forth in joy.’’ But there may be more

to it. The overwhelming dimensions these composers achieved may not only have

accorded with the size of the reverberant spaces their works had to ﬁll, but may also

have carried a message of institutional triumph at a time notable for its triumphant

institutionalism.

In any case, the Notre Dame composers aspired to an unprecedented universality.

Their works, unlike those created at previous polyphonic centers, could be used

anywhere the Latin liturgy of the western Christian church was used. And they

aspired to encyclopedic completeness: it is evident that the surviving codices reﬂect

an attempt — indeed, multiple attempts — to outﬁt the entire calendar of feasts with

polyphony. (A codex, plural codices , is a large manuscript consisting of several smaller

component ‘‘fascicles’’ collected and bound together.) Thus, with their works, the

musicians of Notre Dame symbolized the strong, united church they served, and

promoted catholicism in the literal and original sense of the word. As we know from

the dispersion of their works in the extant sources, their program was successful. The

central Parisian repertory was copied far and wide and sung well beyond its home

territory. Either as such or as the basis for further elaboration, moreover, the repertory

lasted for generations after its creators’ lives had ended.

PIECING THE EVIDENCE TOGETHER

Those who copied and sang these works for generations did not, however, know their

authors’ names. Like most manuscripts containing music for ecclesiastical use, the

Notre Dame sources carried no attributions. (Only ‘‘secular’’ works like courtly songs

could carry an author’s name without taint of pride, a deadly sin.) We do think we

know the identities of some of the authors, though, and we think we know something

about the history of the repertory and its development. And we know what we know

(or what we think we know) precisely thanks to the alliance of the cathedral church of

Notre Dame with the University of Paris.

From the very beginning, the student body at the university had comprised a strong

English contingent. Even earlier, it had been the rule for English theologians to go to

Paris for their doctoral training. An example was John of Salisbury (ca. 1115–80), the

great neo-Platonic (or ‘‘realist’’) philosopher and biographer of Thomas a Becket, who

traveled to Paris in his youth to study with Pierre Abelard. His ﬁrst important work, a

treatise on good government called Policraticus , was written around 1147,whenhehad

just returned from Paris, and contains a notorious complaint about the gaudy music he

heard in churches there. We don’t know what music he heard; maybe it was something

like Congaudeant catholici (Ex. 5-9), whose composer, Albertus, was the cantor at Notre

Dame around the time of John’s visit. More likely it was never written down at all.

But the fact that the dour English clergyman found so much to condemn is already an

indication that Paris was a special place for music.

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Something over a hundred years later, around 1270 or 1280,wegetanother

Englishman’s testimony — in this case entirely approving, even reverent — about music

in Paris. This second Englishman was the author of a treatise called De mensuris et

discantu (‘‘On Rhythmic Notation and Discant’’) that was published as the fourth item

in a batch of anonymous medieval writings on music brought out by the great music

bibliographer Charles-Edmond-Henri de Coussemaker in 1864, when musicology was

in its infancy. The treatise was headed Anonymus IV in this celebrated publication, and

the name, anglicized by the insertion of an ‘‘o,’’ has unfortunately come since to be

associated, thanks to popular writers and textbook authors, with the writer instead of

the text. The poor fellow, whatever his name may have been, is irrevocably known to

music history students as ‘‘Anonymous Four. ’WecansurmisethathewasEnglish

since the treatise survives in English manuscript copies and makes reference to local

English saints (and even to the ‘‘Westcuntrie,’’ the author’s immediate neighborhood).

We assume that he learned the contents of his treatise as a student in Paris, since he

based most of his discussion slavishly (at times verbatim) on the known writings of Paris

University magistri (lecturers), which he may have ﬁrst encountered in the lecture hall.

If, as seems evident, the treatise is something like a set of university lecture notes,

we may imagine the lecturer pausing amid the technical complexities he was laboriously

imparting to reminisce brieﬂy about the traditions of Parisian polyphony and the men

who made it. This brief memoir — it is without doubt the most famous passage in any

medieval treatise on music — begins with an obeisance to ‘‘Leoninus magister’’ (Master

Leonin, short for Leo), who, ‘‘it is said,’’ was the best organista (composer of organum).

He made a magnus liber , a ‘‘great book’’ of organa de gradali et de antiphonario , ‘‘from the

Gradual and the Antiphoner’’; that is, he made organa on chants from the Mass and

the Ofﬁce books. That is all we are told about Master Leonin.

Next, Anonymus IV reports what the lecturer said about Perotinus magnus (the

great Perotin or Pierrot, short for Pierre), who was the best discantor (composer of

discant) and ‘‘better than Leoninus.’’ Perotin is identiﬁed ﬁrst as the reviser of Leonin’s

work. He abbreviavit the great book (let the translation of that word wait for now)

andinsertedmany clausulae (‘‘little discant sections’’) of his own devising into Leonin’s

compositions.

Then comes a list of Perotin’s original works, beginning with the real newsmakers,

the quadrupla , organa in four parts (that is, three parts added to the Gregorian tenor).

Two titles are given: Viderunt and Sederunt .Both,itturnsout,aregraduals: Viderunt

omnes fines terrae (‘‘All the ends of the earth have seen’’), for Christmas, was reserved

at Notre Dame for the newly instituted Feast of the Lord’s Circumcision (January 1);

Sederunt principes et adversum me loquebantur (‘‘Princes sat and plotted against me’’) was

the gradual for the Feast of St. Stephen the Martyr (December 26).

Next some famous organa tripla by Perotin are listed, including an Alleluia for

the Mass commemorating the birth of the Virgin Mary. Finally, Perotin is credited

with continuing the already venerable tradition of composing music to new Latin

religious lyrics in the form of conductus, both polyphonic and monophonic. Three

titles are mentioned, of which one — Beata viscera (‘‘O blessed womb’’) in honor of the

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