Sacred Music - From The Middle Ages To The 20th Century [CD 3]

12TH-CENTURY POLYPHONY IN AQUITAINE
01 Polyphonie Aquitaine-Domine labia mea aperies Deus in adjutorium meum [01:19]
02 O primus homo coruit [05:36]
Ensemble Organum, dir. Marcel Pérès
03 Resonemus hoc natali [03:23]
Theatre of Voices, dir. Paul Hillier
Mass for Christmas Day
04 Puer natus est [06:01]
05 Kyrie [02:13]
06 Propter veritatem [07:00]
07 Viderunt omnes/ Notum fecit Dominus [11:03]
08 In seculum Longum [00:59]
09 In seculum Viellatoris [01:05]
10 In seculum Breve [01:05]
11 In seculum D' Amiens longum [01:04]
Theatre of Voices, dir. Paul Hillier
13th-century Marian Songs
12 Chansons Mariales-Ave Maria gracia plena [02:40]
13 Pia mater gratie [02:46]
14 Ave nobilis venerabilis [03:48]
Anonymous 4
The Gradual of Eleanor of Brittany (13th & 14th centuries)
15 Graduel d' Alienor de Bretagne-Kyrie Orbis factor [05:41]
Ensemble Organum, dir. Marcel Pérès
An English Ladymass (13th & 14th centuries)
16 Messe Mariale a la cathedrale de Salisbury-Kyrie-Kyria christifera [03:58]
17 Gloria [02:59]
18 Sanctus-Benedictus [01:44]
19 Agnus Dei:Virtute numinis [02:43]
Anonymous 4

CD 3


is the treatises explaining how to realise it. The first method they present, the doubling of the plainchant a fourth below, is
more like an effect of timbre. But from the polyphony of St Martial of Limoges onwards, the voices become individualised.
The process was taken further by the Notre Dame School in the twelfth century. The exploration of polyphony in three, then
four voices made it necessary to abandon the subjective pulse of plainchant and measure note values with precision, so
as to control part-crossing. It became indispensable to know when dissonances would occur in order to resolve them on
consonances. This in turn led composers to classify intervals into families. However, all such classifications show considerable
differences between the European mainland and the English, who were the only ones to use unprepared thirds and sixths.
In fact it is thanks to the notes of an English student, in a document which Coussemaker catalogued as ‘Anonymous IV’, that
we know of the first two great identified composers in musical history, Leonin and Perotin (‘little Leo’ and ‘little Peter’), and
can attribute numerous works to them.

POLYPHONY IN AQUITAINE (ST MARTIAL OF LIMOGES)

The birth of polyphonic chanting is generally attributed to the reference made to it by ‘Hucbald of St Amand’ (in fact, a certain
Otger of Laon) in a ninth-century treatise entitled Musica Enchiriadis, in which the writer describes what is known as parallel
organum. This consisted of a Gregorian melody (vox principalis) in regular notes doubled by a consonant ‘organal’ voice,
which meant, at the time, in almost strictly parallel fourth or fifths. Only the tritone F-B (the modern augmented fourth)
was proscribed on account of its highly dissonant sound. But this diabolus in musica would, in fact, timidly pave the way to
genuine musical creativity: the ‘composer’ had to find another consonance, like octave or unison doubling. These intervals
often became the point of departure or conclusion.

It is needless to say that a system like this could only develop and become more varied, if only by the slow and progressive
emergence of the notion of contrary motion, one melodic line ascending while the other descends (in spite of frequent
crossings, the vox principalis remained the lower). It is in this rule that the essentials of Western counterpoint lie.

With those of Chartres and Winchester, the manuscripts of Saint Martial in Limoges – a vital artistic centre in the twelfth
century and an important meeting place due to its position on the road to Compostela – constitute the most important
evidence of this practice. Marcel Peres has pointed out the difficulties in reading and performing this repertory today: ‘It is not
easy to read (diastematic point notation, but with an imaginary stave), the rhythm cannot be found in the graphic signs alone,
and what is more, this music demands an extremely virtuosic vocal technique. . . . Wherever the ornamentation becomes
complex and expands into flourishes the movement is created by the dynamic power of the consonances and dissonances.
. . . The third and the sixth are out of tune, that is to say, they generate beats and instability. . . . The music of Romanesque
Aquitaine is an incredible art of synthesis in which the connoisseur can discern elements of the art of polyphony described
by philosophers and theorists since the ninth century, as well as visionary intuitions of genius. In a similar way to the music
of J. S. Bach in a later era, this music carries within it all the experience of a tradition that informs and gives life to a creative
projection into the future.’

The immediate future of Western polyphony was to be played out in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Paris.

THE NOTRE DAME SCHOOL

Just as the vitality of secular lyrical creativity moved from southern Europe (troubadours) to the north (trouveres,
Minnesanger), numerous artistic impulses were to be found north of the Loire: Romanesque art made way for the immense


the laying of the foundations of the cathedral in 1163, the expansion of Paris in the reign of Philip Augustus (1180-1223), and
the founding of the University in 1227 by Robert de Sorbon, who gave it his name.

At the beginning of the twelfth century Paris was already a shining light throughout Christianity ‘thanks to the quality of its singers
and above all to the skill with which they improvised their organa’ (Marcel Peres). Three of the names of the great musicians who
succeeded each other in the extremely close circle of the episcopal school have come down to us: Magister Albert, by whom only
a three-part conductus has survived; Leonin, thought to have been active in the mid-twelfth century; and Perotin who was writing
at the turn of the thirteenth century. The two-part compositions are generally attributed to Leonin: collected in the Magnus Liber
Organi (cf. CD 2), some of them are supposed to have been altered by Perotin, the composer of highly impressive three- and four-
part organa. The Magnus Liber Organi having disappeared, these pieces come from thirteenth-century compilations in which the
rhythmic notation is always subordinate to the play between consonances and dissonances.

The Mass for Christmas Day presented here dates from the mid-twelfth century. The Introit is richly troped, a practice that was
constantly expanding in the Middle Ages, with their insatiable appetite for ornamentation and illumination. Here each gloss is
sung by a soloist. Each imploration of the Kyrie is first stated by the soloist, sustained, then repeated by the choir in unison,
and then in parallel organum. The Gradual Viderunt omnes is one of the most celebrated ‘florid’ organa of the Notre Dame
School: each note of the Gregorian melody (tenor) is endlessly prolonged, while increasingly beautiful and longer chains of
melismas are superimposed on the vox organalis.

After the Gospel, the liturgy enters into a state of symbolic contemplation of the mystery of the Eucharist. The chants now
assume a totally different character: the tropes of the Sanctus are sung in organum and the notes of the tenor of the Ite missa
est are drawn out to the extreme, practically to the point of immobility, ‘while the illumination in the discantus develops in
a continuous ornamentation of the intervals of the fifth and the octave. Could one find a more explicit symbol of eternity
impregnating time?’ (Marcel Peres).

HOQUETUS
Medieval European Vocal Music

Hoquetus: hocket/hoqueter (French); ‘to hiccup’; also known as truncatio.

Hocketing dates back to at least the twelfth century (most memorably in the music of Perotin) and seems to have arisen from
the practice of improvising variations on an existing melody. It probably existed long before the invention of musical notation
and can be found in African music as well as European. More recently the technique has been reactivated by composers such
as Gyorgy Ligeti, Conlon Nancarrow, Steve Reich, Kevin Volans, and Louis Andriessen (who used the word hoketus both for a
composition and a performing group).

A hocket is the placing of two parts on top of one another, so that where one part has rests the other has notes, and vice versa;
the resulting combination creates a continuity out of two parts which in themselves are discontinuous. Such music is built on
the close exchange of notes or short groups of notes, and prepares the way for other medieval polyphonic techniques such as
voice exchange (where the groups of notes become short phrases) and canonic imitation. It also leads quite naturally towards
isorhythmic patterns, and the layered voices we find in many medieval motets.

Three different types of hocket may be identified: the variation hocket (based on pre-existent polyphony), of which no complete
examples survive, since it was indeed an improvisational technique; the independent hocket where hocketing is the main


OTHER ASPECTS OF POLYPHONY

From the Renaissance until today, the Catholic Church has periodically found it necessary to suppress the influence of
the Virgin Mary in its liturgy and traditions. Her cult, at certain times and places, became so zealous that Mary-worship
overshadowed even the adoration of the Deity. Western Europe during the Gothic era – the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries
– was without any doubt one of these times and places. Cathedrals soared to the heavens, many, if not most of them, dedicated
to Mary, like the cathedrals of Notre Dame at Paris and Chartres. Rhetoric honouring Mary in prose, poetry and song was as
ardent as any ever put on paper, surpassing even the florid love lyrics of the troubadours and trouveres, and borrowing many
of their romantic turns of phrase.

We begin with pieces from thirteenth-century France. These pieces in Latin are all conductus, a generic term derived from
the practice of using paraliturgical vocal music to accompany, or ‘conduct’ processions during solemn services. Certain
characteristics separate conductus from other Latin compositions of their time: they are settings of poetry – usually, but
not always, religious; they are not based on any pre-existing plainchant melodies, as are the motet and organum; and, in
polyphonic conductus (i.e., for more than one voice part), the singers all declaim the same text together. Some conductus are
all about declamation and others are about virtuosic display, with a minimum of text (Ave Maria gratia plena). There is an
old, hard-dying belief that in medieval vocal compositions text and music bear little relation to each other. It is impossible to
hear sweet and touching songs like Ave nobilis venerabilis without realising that their composers were as capable of sensitive
text-setting as they were of vocal fireworks.

With far greater fervour than was the case on the continent, a wave of passionate adoration of the Virgin Mary swept through
medieval England. Two-thirds of the English polyphony that has survived from this period is associated with her cult. Marian
Masses and votive Offices were said and sung daily in the churches and cathedrals, such as Salisbury (where the cathedral
is, incidentally, consecrated to St Mary). Unfortunately, unlike the French motet, the fragmentation and dispersal of the
English sources oblige performers to resort to various different manuscripts and to match them in order to obtain a coherent
programme. In the excerpts from the Marian Mass presented here the Kyrie and the Gloria come from the same manuscript
and manifest the same virtuosic whirlwinds of ornamental pitches. The Kyrie is also endowed with a trope in honour of the
‘Christifera’ (what was borne by Christ). The Sanctus is composed in the style of a conductus, while the Agnus Dei is in the
‘alternatim’ style, in which the ‘official’ plainsong alternates with its polyphonic Marian trope.