Plainchant and Development

• Plainchants developed separately everywhere in Christian Europe depending on the local tastes and traditions but it was at first all orally transmitted and memorized.

  • For centuries, plainchant or plainsong was monophonic (one voice, no accompaniment) and transmitted orally from monk to monk or nun to nun.

  • Eventually, monks added groups of children (boys) to sing the hymns with them, which transformed the songs in two voices at unison but, an octave apart. The boys where singing the exact same melodic line but an octave above because of their higher register. It created two parallel lines of music one octave apart.

  • Organum: centuries later, they added a second line to the main melody with different notes but always going in parallel. They called this technic organum. Usually, it was a fifth apart because like the octave, the fifth interval has a natural resonance in all sounds. It is generally considered as the most primitive stage of polyphony in Western music.

  • Finally, the drone was added as an accompaniment. Instead of having the second note following in parallel the main melodic line, the second voice would just sustain on the same note. They started to use instruments to play that drone because it could be exhausting on the voice. Instruments such as the organ was used, or now almost forgotten instruments such as the crwth, the psaltery, hurry grurdy or the symphony.

Musical Notation

To memorize all the hymns, monks created a type of notation to remember the main shape of the melody. The symbols used for this first system are called the neumes but it would not give you the exact relative position of every pitch. It worked more as a memory guide to remember works that people had already learned.

• Guide of Arrezo

  • Guido of Arrezo (~AD 1000) created a system of notating pitches.

  • Arrezo’s work at his cathedral was to train young singers to sing plainchant. He calculated that it would take him 10 years to teach them the whole plainchant repertoire. So he created a technique for sight singing by adding to the neumes 4 straight lines so that you could read the relative position of each note.

  • Today we call this collection of lines a stave of staff (even though today we use 5 lines). It went to be more developed later notably for the rhythm notation but at least with Guido’s system, people could read a new chart and not have to know it by heart.

• Authorship

  • This new system of notation also brought the idea of authorship. People could now claim their name as composers on a piece.

  • One of the earliest composer’s name we have is the German female composer, scientist, poet and diplomat Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179.)

    • While plainchant was usually kept anonymous, Hildegard’s music has her stylistic signature. She added ornamentation and melodic detail that stood outside the strict confines of the standard method.

    • She was one of the most productive writer of the Middle Ages. Her work encompasses theological, hagiographical, and medicinal writings, a collection of eighty chants and a dramatic play, the Ordo Virtutum.

Perotin

• Perotin, a young composer working at Notre Dame of Paris in France, became known for his radical approach to harmony and also for his development of rhythm notation.

  • He added 2, 3, 4 voices playing simultaneously to create clusters of notes that we call chords.

  • Inspired by the troubadours (traveling poets, songwriters, musicians), Perotin brought a big new ingredient to western music: rhythm notation.

    • The troubadours were themselves inspired by the professional singers of the courts of Al-Andalous in Muslim Spain.

      • Their songs were formed by the poetic meter of their lyrics and consequently all of these songs have a gentle foot tapping pulse which is deeply influenced by Muslim Spain’s music.

        • Perotin brought that pulse and rhythm to Notre Dame’s sacred music and developed a system to notate it. What he did was just to add one horizontal bar to connect the notes that were shorter. This system is still use today, even though more sophisticated. These bars are called the ligatures.

Guillame de Machaut

• After Perotin’s development of a system to notate rhythm, composers worked on more and more complex pieces.

• Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) started to compose “musical labyrinth” or what we call “isorhythm".

  • The 14th century term used for that technique is talea.

• Machaut would give each melodic lines their specific rhythmical code/sequence to then be combined, creating these never ending and never the same cycles.

• He was also interested in mathematical formulas used at the time in architecture and painting such as the Golden Section.

• Some of these polyphonic pieces written in the 14th century are still considered the most complex and in 1325, Pope John XXII issued a decree to make church music less complicated.

• Machaut was also composing what we call Motet and was inspired by the art of the troubadours. He is considered himself as one of the last trouveres (poet of the langue d’oil, old French).