Conference Agenda

It is no wonder that Taruskin (2005) begins his story of Western music with the advent of Western music notation. The received historical narratives of music in medieval Europe tend to shadow the Bildungsroman of music writing, beginning with the advent of Carolingian neumes and tracing the emergence of novel means of recording rhythm and composing polyphony through a series of stages keyed to particular notational advances and genres. The story of the 13th century typically opens with the age of the ars antiqua, inherited from Leonin and Perotin, with organum purum and the advent of modal rhythm giving way to mensural motets in Franconian and Petronian notation, and finally culminating in the ars nova. Any historical enterprise is inevitably filtered through surviving written records, but the consequence for music history is that our periodisation schemes are often aligned with music-theoretical treatises and changes in notation that are thereby imbued with the importance of defining, watershed moments. While this approach acknowledges the co-constitutive relationship between music theory and practice, it risks eliding not only those aspects of both theory and practice that do not fit a coherent notational narrative but also some powerful continuities across time, place, and institutions.

This panel re-assesses sources of 13th-century song and polyphony, demonstrating how established historiographical categories have obfuscated fundamental connections between genres, repertoires, and notational techniques. The panel re-examines three diverse but representative traditions spanning the entire century: the early treatment of the Benedicamus versicle in Latin conducti and motets (Bradley), trouvère song notations and their chansonniers (Palmer), and late 13th-century Petronian semibreves and their status vis-à-vis the ars nova (Zayaruznaya). It challenges perceived historiographical watersheds at both 1200 and 1300, re-positioning the relationship of 13th-century music to that of its preceding and following centuries. Individually and collectively, these revisionist contributions underscore the flexibility and adaptability of music writing and collecting in the 13th century and the historiographical forces—medieval as well as modern—that have shaped and indeed restricted understandings of a period that still occupies a key position in received narratives of Western music history.

This paper re-examines a perceived disjuncture between the musical repertoires of 12th-century Aquitaine and 13th-century Paris through the lens of the versicle Benedicamus Domino (“Let us bless the Lord”). A substantial number of (polyphonic) Latin songs in Aquitanian sources from the 1100s make direct reference to this versicle, but Sarah Fuller (1969) proposed that “the Benedicamus verse-trope was not greatly favored in Parisian circles” in the 13th century and that “the flourishing conductus had some quite different function.” Janet Knapp’s (2001) statement that “the Parisian school of song composition shows few if any signs of direct contact with that of Aquitaine” reflects the existence of just a single musical concordance with earlier Aquitanian versaria among the many hundreds of compositions in the so-called “great books” of 13th-century polyphony, the Magnus liber organi.

I seek to emphasize and uncover continuities in the treatment of the Benedicamus versicle in the period c. 1100–1350. First, I demonstrate that books from 13th-century Paris preserve traces of a “simple” tradition of voice-exchange polyphony for the Benedicamus. Second, I draw attention to manuscript witnesses often dismissed as chronologically late or geographically peripheral­: the overlooked early 12th-century musical additions in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 560, probably from southern Germany, and the well-known 14th-century music book, Burgos, Monasterio de Las Huelgas, 11, from northern Spain. These sources confirm the prominence and longevity of polyphonic Benedicamus settings, notably absent from intervening French sources. Undermining the impression of independence conveyed by monumental 13th-century collections of Parisian polyphony, I argue that such collections have artificially obscured fundamental continuities in musical practice—across time and place—more readily perceptible in historiographically marginalized sources.

It was in a 1910 article that Pierre Aubry first made the suggestion that trouvère song must have been composed using the medieval rhythmic modes described by 13th century theorists. In doing so he set the wheels in motion for the heated intellectual debate that would ruin his reputation, and ultimately cause him to end his own life. Aubry drew his evidence primarily from one manuscript in particular, the Chansonnier Cangé (BNF fr. 846, or, Trouv O), paying close attention to the lyric “Devers Chastelvilain.” Noting the song’s clear mensural patterning, Aubry metonymically applied it to the entire trouvère corpus. Yet his analysis glided over several key details that complicate this proposed narrative, including the song’s status as an unicum, and its relationship to “De la Procession,” a contrafact found on the same folio.

Trouvère songs’s rhythmically indeterminate notation haunted the field for much of the twentieth century. Cangé, with its clearly differentiated breves and longs and use of mensural ligatures, is an outlier amongst chansonniers and accordingly stood at the center of these debates. Some saw in it a key to unlock the corpus; others, a nonsensical application of mensural notation. Yet close examination of these contrafacts not only brings an internal notational logic into relief, but also points to the unique aspects of this manuscript. While Cangé might not “solve” the problem of trouvère song’s rhythms, it can grant us insight into shifting notational practices and new strategies of compilation at the end of the 13th century.

Building on new work on 13th-century monophonic notation (Everist 2018; Lug 2019), my paper situates Cangé at a moment of notational change. In line with recent manuscript studies (Bell 2003; Curran 2014; Bleisch 2022), I argue that the Cangé scribe used an internally coherent system in which mensural graphemes are adapted to indicate more than rhythm alone. In doing so, I reposition trouvère song in larger historiographical narratives of music notation and medieval song. Despite the traditionally retrospective gaze of the chansonniers, this manuscript can be seen as a site of scribal experimentation and innovation.

The theorist and composer Petrus de Cruce is usually described as having flourished c. 1290. The compactness of this imagined florescence conflicts both with the chronological spread of sources that transmit his motets—some of which may be dated to the 1320s—and with archival records that show Petrus residing in the palace of the bishop of Amiens in 1301–2. Indeed the archival terminus ante quem for Petrus’s death is a 1347 inventory recording a bequest of his. What, then, keeps us from imagining Petrus as a composer who was active in the 1290s, 1300s, 1310s, even the 1320s? I suggest a historiographical force—the perceived transitional nature of Petrus’s notational usage—even more so than scant documentation has compressed Petrus’s lifetime, activity, and sphere of influence.

Whereas Franco of Cologne’s Ars cantus describes divisions of the breve into up to three semibreves, Petrus famously used as many as seven semibreves per breve in his motets. The Ars vetus et nova treatises associated with Philippe de Vitry describe a system—here called ars vetus—that uses up to nine semibreves per breve. Because this system is on display in the Roman de Fauvel, a source known for its innovative notations and one associated with Vitry, scholars have been hesitant to give it the title of an “ars vetus”, preferring to see everything emanating from Vitry as an ars nova, albeit an early one (Bent 2022). This leaves little space for the Petronian ars, which must post-date Franco but quickly become theoretically obsolete to make way for an early ars nova in which it does not participate. Building on Karen Desmond’s recent work, I draw attention to the parallels between Petronian practice and the older system codified by Vitry. Rather than looking like a transitional outlier or a notational “dead end”, Petrus’s system is revealed to be largely continuous with the ars vetus described in the treatises of the 1320s and 1330s. Ars vetus et nova treatises, then, may hold important clues about the ever-elusive rhythmic rendering of Petronian semibreves.