Showing posts with label Franco of Cologne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Franco of Cologne. Show all posts

Friday, December 28, 2012

Anonymous IV

[DailyMedieval is on semi-hiatus for the holidays, and I am re-cycling some older posts. Today's is new, however, inspired by a music CD I received: Secret Voices by the female a capella group Anonymous 4.]

In the post on the Las Huelgas Codex I mentioned that many of the pieces in the codex were new to scholars, but some were familiar. Where else had they been seen?

Notre Dame Cathedral
The collection of recorded polyphonic music produced by composers working at Notre Dame Cathedral from c.1160-c.1250 is referred to as the Notre Dame School of Polyphony. A majority of medieval polyphonic music up to this time was committed to parchment by the Notre Dame School.

This does not man, sadly, that we can set a manuscript in front of a modern musician and have the notes played as they were intended to be heard. Differences in musical notation and rhythm make it close to impossible to know precisely how these pieces were performed centuries ago. For us to make an attempt is only feasible because of analyses of music written by a handful of people. Franco of Cologne was one, John of Garland another (best estimates are that he was keeper of a bookshop in Paris who edited two treatises on music), and the later writing of the industrious student known only as Anonymous IV.*

The "Alleluia nativitatis" by Pérotin
Thanks to Anonymous IV, we have contemporary definitions of what is meant by organum (a plainchant melody with one voice added to enhance harmony), discantus ("singing apart"; a liturgical style of organum with a tenor plainchant and a second voice that moves in "contrary motion"), the rules for consonance and dissonance, and other terms and rules of polyphony.

One "ironic" result of the writing of Anonymous IV is that. through him, we know the names of two composers who would otherwise have been lost to obscurity. He writes about Léonin and Pérotin with such detail and feeling that, although Anonymous would have lived several decades after they lived and composed, they were presumably so famous that their reputations lived on in the school. Léonin and Pérotin are some of the earliest names of artists that we can actually link to their works.

As much as we have been given by the treatise of Anonymous IV, his own identity and details of his life are unknown. Two partial copies of his work survive at Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, England; one is from the 13th century, and one from the 14th. Clearly, his work was considered important enough to copy and preserve—but not his name. He was likely an English student who was at Notre Dame for a time in the late 13th century. Thanks to his interests, we understand more about the development of medieval polyphonic music than we otherwise would have.

*His name is the inspiration for a modern female a capella group.

Saturday, August 4, 2012

More than a Musician

We so often study famous people in isolation, forgetting that their lives and successes probably overlapped other well-known people. Imagine the possibilities when people of vision and ingenuity met with and influence each other?

Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361) is not a well-known name today, but in his lifetime he was acknowledged as the greatest musician of the age, and his own works and his connections with others are worth knowing. In his lifetime, he was a diplomat, a soldier, a poet, a composer and music theorist. Like most university-educated men of the Middle Ages, de Vitry was in Holy Orders and held several clerical positions, finally being appointed Bishop of Meaux by Pope Clement VI.

Some of the motets he composed have survived. His chief contribution to music, however, was in the evolving system of notation. In Ars nova notandi (Art of the new notation), de Vitry improved on Franconian musical notation that had been set out in Franco of Cologne's Ars Cantus Mensurabilis (The Art of Measurement of Songs); de Vitry recognized the existence and importance of duple and triple meter. For connoisseurs of music:
In the treatise Vitry recognizes the existence of five note values (duplex longa, longa, brevis, semibrevis, and minima), codifies a system of binary as well as ternary mensuration at four levels (maximodus, modus, tempus, prolatio), and introduces four time signatures. He also discusses the use of red notes to signal both changes of mensural meaning and deviations from an original cantus firmus. (source)
And of course he knew other accomplished figures of his age, such as Petrarch, Nicholas Oresme, and Gersonides. In fact, de Vitry's musical approach to mathematics (the two subjects were closely linked in medieval education) prompted him to request of Gersonides a work to prove a theory. This 1342 work, De harmonicis numeris (On the harmony of numbers), maintained that, "except for the pairs 1-2, 2-3, 3-4, and 8-9, it is impossible for two numbers that follow each other to be composed of the factors 2 and 3." (source) The result is known today as the Theorem of Gersonides.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

What is Time?

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not: yet I say boldly that I know, that if nothing passed away, time past were not; and if nothing were coming, a time to come were not; and if nothing were, time present were not. Those two times then, past and to come, how are they, seeing the past now is not, and that to come is not yet? But the present, should it always be present, and never pass into time past, verily it should not be time, but eternity.
With this passage, found halfway through Book XI of his Confessions, St. Augustine of Hippo (13 November 354-28 August 430) discussed the difference between Time and Eternity. He knows that he is not aware of time that is yet to come, or time that is past; only time that is present; but he still doesn't know how to define what time is.

A medieval 24-hour clock.
Measurement of time was imprecise. There were "hours" of the day: the Vigil took place between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m., Matins came at Dawn, et cetera. These hours designated times of worship and work for monks and were extended to general use, but they were not exactly a way to quantify time. The hour of Sext was at noon, for instance, which was recognized when the sun was highest, but Matins/Dawn came more or fewer hours before Sext, depending on the time of year. They were segments of the day that altered with the seasons; they did not measure a span of time.

St. Benedict of Nursia (c.480-543), in his Rule for monks, intends them to worship at specific times, and finds a way to measure a span of time. Monks were not to slack at getting up for Matins, and so:
If anyone shall come to matins after the Gloria of the 94th Psalm, which on this account we wish to be said slowly and leisurely, he shall not take his place in the choir, but go last of all, or to some place apart which the abbot may appoint for those who so fail in his sight.
Time could be measured, therefore, by comparison to a known duration.* But even durations could be tricky. Augustine had pondered thinking of a long syllable as equivalent to two short ones, "But when two syllables sound one after the other—the first short, the second long—how shall I keep hold of the short one?" Augustine seemed to be caught up in the idea that time was a continuum, and that he was living in a constant present and could not treat the past and future in the same conceptual way, since he could not live in them. The Middle Ages couldn't grab time and measure it, like water or distance or even acceleration. It was insubstantial, and belonged to God.

The concept of time had to change ... and eventually it did. There was no clear turning point; there had to be some conceptual change, planned or otherwise, to see time not as a line but as a series of points, as separate moments that could be thought of without being linked to a past or future moment.

Sometime in the mid-13th century, we find Franco of Cologne. He was a music theorist who gave us the idea that a mark on a page should distinguish how long a note should be. This was the logical extension of Franco's definition of time: "Time is the measure of actual sound as well as of the opposite, its omission."

Was this the moment? Was it music, with its attention to and reverence for mathematics that accidentally inspired the thinking of time as separate units that could be measured and counted? We might be able to believe that, if there were some evidence that the world began to measure and quantify time; for instance, if the development of mechanical clocks were to start around this time.

Well, guess what happened next?

*This method of measuring spans of time without a clock is used even today.