Medieval Music — From Gregorian Chant to the Notre-Dame School

Medieval Music — Recording an “Audible Civilization”

Medieval music (9th–14th centuries) is the starting point of the 1500-year Western musical history sketched in the overview. Most of what survives from this period is Christian liturgical music, and its records cluster around churches and monasteries.

• 9th century — the appearance of neumatic notation
• 10th century — the birth of organum (primitive polyphony)
• 11th century — Guido of Arezzo’s staff notation and solfège
• 12th–13th centuries — the development of the Notre-Dame school
• 14th century — the Ars Nova, Machaut

The great transitions of these 500 years are “from monody to polyphony” and “from oral transmission to notation.”

Gregorian Chant — The Substratum of Medieval Music

Gregorian chant is the monophonic, unaccompanied plainsong of the Catholic Church. It is traditionally ascribed to Pope Gregory I (r. 590–604), but in fact it was codified in the Frankish kingdom in the 8th–9th centuries.

Characteristics

• Monophonic — everyone sings the same melody
• Unaccompanied — no instruments
• Latin texts (Bible, prayers)
• Free rhythm — no fixed meter; the text leads
• Built on the eight church modes

The Eight Church Modes

Not the modern major/minor system but eight modes:

• Dorian / Hypodorian
• Phrygian / Hypophrygian
• Lydian / Hypolydian
• Mixolydian / Hypomixolydian

A mystical system linked to “sun and moon” and “the seven planets.” Still in use through the Baroque, revived in modern jazz and contemporary music.

Surviving Repertory

Thousands of chants survive, and they are still sung at the Vatican, Solesmes Abbey (France), and Montserrat Abbey (Spain). The Solesmes series on CD is the modern standard.

Neumatic Notation — The Birth of Writing (9th c.)

Early Gregorian chant was transmitted orally. From around the 9th century, at monasteries like St. Gallen (Switzerland) and in the diocese of Metz, neumes developed.

• Small signs written above the text to indicate rise, fall, and ornament
• Pitch is ambiguous (relative only)
• Rhythm and ornament can be recorded in detail

This is the birth of the idea of “writing sound down.” Before, music was momentary; from neumatic notation on, music could travel through time.

Guido of Arezzo — The Staff and Do-Re-Mi (11th c.)

Guido of Arezzo (c. 991 – c. 1050) was an Italian Benedictine monk and music theorist — the leader of the greatest notational revolution of the Middle Ages.

The Invention of the Staff

Neumatic notation had left pitch imprecise. Guido arranged neumes on four parallel lines (a tetragram) and assigned a definite pitch to each line. This is the direct ancestor of the modern staff.

The Solfège — the Origin of Do-Re-Mi

Guido used the opening syllables of the Ut queant laxis hymn as teaching material:

• Ut queant laxis
• Resonare fibris
• Mira gestorum
• Famuli tuorum
• Solve polluti
• Labii reatum

This is the origin of Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La. Later Ut was replaced by Do (“Do for Dominus, Lord”), and Si (later Ti) was added in the 17th century, giving the modern Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si (Ti).

The Guidonian Hand

As a teaching device, Guido used a diagram assigning notes to joints of the left hand. The teacher pointed at a joint and the pupils sang the corresponding pitch — a medieval method of “memorizing the notes with the hand.”

The origins of modern music education lie in an 11th-century monastery.

Organum — The Birth of Polyphony (9th–12th centuries)

Organum is the earliest polyphony — a second melody added to Gregorian chant.

Parallel Organum (9th–10th c.)

• A second voice moves in parallel fifths or fourths with the chant
• The resulting sound is rich in a church space

Free and Melismatic Organum (11th–12th c.)

• Motion becomes contrary and oblique as well as parallel
• The upper voice sings elaborate melismata
• The chant (tenor, lower voice) is stretched out while the upper voice ornaments

“From one melody to two to three or four voices” — Western music sets out on the distinctive road of polyphony.

Music in India, the Arab world, and China developed monophonic and soloistic traditions — the peculiarity of the West is polyphony.

The Notre-Dame School — 12th- and 13th-Century Paris

Anchored at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris (begun 1163), a highly sophisticated polyphony developed in the 12th and 13th centuries. This is the École de Notre-Dame.

Léonin (c. 1150 – c. 1201)

• Compiled the Magnus Liber Organi
• Systematized two-voice organum
• Elaborate melismatic upper voice, sustained lower voice

Pérotin (c. 1160 – c. 1230)

• Léonin’s successor
• Viderunt omnes, Sederunt principes — four-voice organa
• Systematization of rhythmic modes (six basic rhythmic patterns)

Four-voice organum is one of the peaks of medieval music. Modern early-music ensembles (Hilliard Ensemble, Tallis Scholars) have recorded it in CD form.

The Motet — A New Medieval Form

The motet originated from Notre-Dame polyphony in the 13th century as a polyphonic vocal genre.

• Tenor (lower voice) — a fragment of Gregorian chant in Latin
• Upper voices (two or three) — independent texts (Latin and French mixed)
• Each voice could sing a different text (the “polytextual motet”)

“Three voices simultaneously singing different texts” — strange to modern ears — became widely popular in the Middle Ages. The distant origin of the long motet tradition that runs through Bach.

Rhythmic Modes and Mensural Notation

In the 13th century, Pérotin and others codified rhythmic modes. Six patterns could describe most music:

1. Long–short
2. Short–long
3. Long–short–short
4. Short–short–long
5. Long–long
6. Short–short–short

Later, mensural notation (late 13th century) made meter explicit — the ancestor of the modern 4/4, 3/4 system.

The Ars Nova — “The New Technique” of the 14th Century

Ars Nova (“new technique”) was a musical innovation movement of early-14th-century France, taking its name from a treatise by Vitry (c. 1322).

• More complex rhythms (5-tuplets against 3-tuplets)
• Finer subdivisions of note values (bar divided into 3 vs. 4)
• Secularization of art music (the chanson)

Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377)

The representative Ars Nova composer. Canon of Notre-Dame de Paris and himself a poet (a laureate of the Puy de la Fontaine).

• Messe de Nostre Dame — the earliest complete polyphonic setting of the mass by a single composer
• Many chansons, ballades, rondeaux, virelais
• The technique of hoquetus (alternating notes among voices)

Machaut bridged the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He was one of the first musicians with a clear sense of himself as a “composer.”

Secular Music — Troubadours, Minnesänger

Ninety percent of medieval music is sacred, but secular music runs alongside:

Troubadours (Southern France, 11th–13th c.)

• Court poets in Occitan (Provençal)
• Songs of courtly love (fin’ amor)
• Over 200 named troubadours survive

Trouvères (Northern France, 12th–13th c.)

• Court poets in Old French
• The northern counterpart of the troubadours
• Thibaut de Champagne and other noble poets

Minnesänger (German-speaking, 12th–14th c.)

• Court poets in German
• Walther von der Vogelweide foremost
• The subject of Wagner’s Tannhäuser

These secular lineages flowed into later forms — lied, madrigal, opera.

Instruments — Medieval Practice

Records of medieval instruments are scarce, but the main types:

• Lute, vielle (bowed strings), psaltery (plucked)
• Recorder, shawm (woodwinds)
• Organ (the church instrument par excellence from the Middle Ages)
• Bells, drums, tambourine

However, records of medieval instrumental music are overwhelmingly sparse, and modern performances rely on reconstruction research.

The Character of Medieval Music — “The Theology of Time”

Medieval music rests on Christian theology:

• Music reflects the divine order
• Numerical ratios (2:1, 3:2, 4:3) are the beauty of music (Boethius, De institutione musica, 6th c.)
• The threefold division: musica mundana (of the cosmos), musica humana (of humanity), musica instrumentalis (of instruments)

“Music is one with mathematics” — the medieval musical worldview continues from Pythagoras (harmony as numerical ratio) in the earlier [Lineage of Mathematics] series.

Modern Legacy

• Gregorian chant — still used in Catholic liturgy, massively recorded on CD
• The staff — the direct ancestor of modern notation
• Do-re-mi — the basis of modern music education
• Polyphony — the peculiarity of Western music (against most Asian traditions)
• The motet — a form continuing through Bach

“A system of notation and pedagogy invented in a monastery a thousand years ago” is the basis of music education worldwide today.

From This Article to the Next

We have traced 500 years of medieval music, from Gregorian chant to Machaut. The next article enters Renaissance music (15th–16th centuries) — the peak of the polyphony of the Franco-Flemish school (Dufay, Josquin, Palestrina), and Monteverdi’s invention of opera around 1600. Two centuries of the “modernization” of music, opening the door to the Baroque.