Leonin / Perotin: Sacred Music From Notre-Dame Cathedral
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LEONIN PEROTIN: Sacred Music from Notre-Dame Viderunt omnes... "All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God" - this great Old Testament...
LEONIN PEROTIN: Sacred Music from Notre-Dame
Viderunt omnes... "All the ends of the earth have seen
the salvation of our God" - this great Old Testament
vision aptly sums up the inspiration for both the
architecture of Notre-Dame in Paris and the liquid
equivalent to be found in the Cathedral's magnus liber
organi - "the great book of organum".
A picture postcard of Notre-Dame Cathedral tells
you something of its form and appearance but little of its
detail and none of its power: even the best efforts of
imagination are not enough to appreciate fully its
immensity until you are right there, standing next to
what John Julius Norwich neatly summarised as the
"first cathedral built on a truly monumental scale".
Likewise the music written for the cathedral needs to be
heard as near to lifesize volume as feasible to
understand its intensity and force.
Visitors to the Cathedral of Notre-Dame are first of
all struck by the imposing Western façade, but on
entering the building the experience is transformed by
what Abbot Suger of St Denis, one of the forefathers of
the Gothic style of architecture, had conceived as "the
wonderful and uninterrupted light of most sacred
windows pervading the interior beauty"; then there is
the awareness of a vast mass of people contained within
the towering walls and arches; and above all, the
unmistakable sound of distant voices and movement
reflected from innumerable ancient corners. For the
Parisian musicians and worshippers living in the late
twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, however, this was
a dynamic experience as the new structure slowly took
shape above the city skyline: a building project that
would span several generations from the laying of the
cornerstone in 1163.
Leonin, who was considered the master of
polyphonic composition in his time and who appears to
have been responsible for the magnus liber in its
original form, must have spent much of his career in the
unfinished 'choir' or Eastern end of the Cathedral,
separated from the regular sounds of construction by
some kind of temporary screen which perhaps was
moved column by column westwards over the years. By
the time Perotin made a new edition of Leonin's magnus
liber and added his own massive polyphonic versions of
two Gradual chants, most likely for feast-days in 1198
and 1199, practically the entire space of the Cathedral
was ready to resonate in sympathy. Over the next halfcentury
and beyond work continued on the building
until it was as complete as it ever would be.
Certainly that is the story that seems to be
corroborated by the enormous body of music in the
magnus liber itself. The foundation of this repertoire is
plainchant, unmeasured melodies associated with every
liturgical moment in the Church's calendar. Viderunt
omnes 2 is a chant for Christmas Day and its octave,
the Feast of Circumcision.
There are two very simple ways of constructing
polyphony out of plainchant: either by adding a drone,
one note held on as a pedal under the plainchant, or by
simultaneously singing the same plainchant at a fixed
interval above or below (the most obvious example is of
men and women, or men and boys singing the same tune
an octave apart). The ninth-century treatise Scolica [or
Scholia] enchiriadis demonstrates this spontaneous and
unwritten practice of parallel organum with a number of
examples which we have recorded here as individual
verses of a psalm 30.
On top of these early edifices in Western polyphony
we can imagine ad hoc experiments in the performance
of plainchant in a measured style (with each note either
the same length or twice as long as the next), and in the
improvisation of a free part over the existing plainchant.
Today it is easy to forget how well these tunes,
especially those for feast-days such as Christmas or
Easter, would have been known by both the
professionals in the choir and the congregation in the
nave.
The two-part music or organum duplum from
Notre-Dame most commonly associated with Leonin
3-16 is built upon all these earlier developments, with
the familiar tune of the plainchant either slowed down
while a second part elaborates a clearly soloistic line
(organum purum), or rhythmicised into the same
'modal' system as the new solo line (discantus). The
rules for unravelling thirteenth-century notation are
relatively unambiguous for discantus or discant style,
but they leave us with plenty of rhythmic options for the
longer, more virtuosic sections of organum purum - on
this recording we have explored a number of the many
solutions (compare tracks 3 and 9).
It was the more regular discantus sections which
proved most memorable and consequently attracted the
attention of up-and-coming composers, including
Perotin. One section from the Viderunt omnes in
particular, with the single, crucial word "Dominus" (6
and 12) became favourite fabric for rhythmic and
harmonic experimentation, and many new two-part
versions of this section were composed (including
tracks 17-21), either to be inserted as substitute
clausulae or possibly as free-standing pieces. In the
furnishing of new words to the upper part in Factum est
salutare / Dominus 22 there is the audible framework of
the motet, which was to become a separate musical
structure with a future far outside its original liturgical
setting.
With the addition of a third, and then a fourth voice,
the rhythmic organization of the discant style of
organum was fully extended to the upper parts
throughout, just as the Cathedral's original arcade,
gallery, triforium, and clerestory had to be carefully coordinated.
And just as the exceptional height of the
Gothic style of architecture required new solutions to
the problems of this scale of weight-bearing, there were
also further harmonic implications of combining so
many voices - composers had to discover how to
balance intricate mixtures of consonance and dissonance
(harmonic intervals which sound relatively more or less
pleasing to the ear) over a long span of time. According
to an Englishman visiting Paris in the later thirteenth
century (the posthumously-labelled 'Anonymous 4') it
was "Master Perotin who made the best quadrupla", and
it is these earliest surviving examples of four-part
harmony which open the manuscript Florence,
Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, plut. 29.1 ('F') from
which the editions for this recording were largely made.
Our approach on this recording has been to combine
what we know of twelfth- and thirteenth-century
notational theory with the practical results of our own
encounter with this celebrated style; above all, we have
aimed to adopt a pace and an intensity to match the scale
of the building for which this music was written. If, as
for today's visitors to Notre-Dame or for the scribe of
the manuscript known as 'F', it is size that creates the
best initial impression, then go straight to Perotin's
Viderunt omnes 23-28 or Sederunt principes 31, written
for the day after Christmas when St Stephen the first
Christian martyr (and co-patron of the Cathedral) was
remembered. If, however, time allows listening all the
way through from Perotin's freely-composed melody
Beata viscera 1 to a four-part conductus Vetus abit
littera 32, then it may be hoped that we shall have
conveyed something of the staggering cumulative effect
of a Gothic cathedral-in-progress.
Antony Pitts
Beata viscera (more info)
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Beata viscera (monophonic conductus) - 6:09
Viderunt omnes (plainchant) (more info)
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Viderunt omnes (plainchant) - 2:22
Viderunt omnes No. 1 (more info)
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Viderunt omnes... (2-part organum) - 2:09
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...fines terre salutare dei nostri jubilate deo omnis terra (plainchant) - 0:54
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Notum fecit... (2-part organum) - 0:45
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...Dominus... - 1:35
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...salutare suum ante conspectum gentium revelavit... - 3:44
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...justitiam suam (plainchant) - 0:24
Viderunt omnes No. 2 (more info)
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Viderunt omnes... (2-part organum) - 1:20
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...fines terre salutare dei nostri jubilate deo omnis terra (plainchant) - 0:53
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Notum fecit... (2-part organum) - 0:49
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...Dominus... - 0:56
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...salutare suum ante conspectum gentium revelavit... - 2:08
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...justitiam suam (plainchant) - 0:23
Viderunt omnes No. 3 (more info)
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Viderunt omnes... (2-part organum) - 0:38
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...fines terre salutare dei nostri jubilate deo omnis terra (plainchant) - 0:58
2-part clausula (I): … Dominus … (more info)
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2-part clausula (I): ...Dominus... - 0:56
2-part clausula (II): … Dominus … (more info)
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2-part clausula (II): ...Dominus... - 0:54
2-part clausula (III): … Dominus … (more info)
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2-part clausula (III): ...Dominus... - 0:59
2-part clausula (IV): … Dominus … (more info)
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2-part clausula (IV): ...Dominus... - 0:38
2-part clausula (V): … Dominus … (more info)
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2-part clausula (V): ...Dominus... - 0:39
Factum est salutare - … Dominus … (2-part motet) (more info)
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Factum est salutare / ...Dominus... (2-part motet) - 0:40
Viderunt omnes (more info)
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Viderunt omnes... (4-part organum) - 5:15
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...fines terre salutare dei nostri jubilate deo omnis terra (plainchant) - 0:56
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Notum fecit... (4-part organum) - 3:55
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...Dominus... - 0:47
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...salutare suum ante conspectum gentium revelavit... - 3:38
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...justitiam suam (plainchant) - 0:24
Viderunt omnes fines terre salutare dei nostri jubilate deo omnis terra (plainchant) (more info)
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Viderunt omnes fines terre salutare dei nostri jubilate deo omnis terra (plainchant) - 1:07
Psalm 115/113b - Non nobis Domine (organum examples after 9th-century Scolica enchiriadis) (more info)
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Psalm 115/113b - Non nobis Domine (organum examples after 9th-century Scolica enchiriadis) - 7:10
Sederunt principes (more info)
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Sederunt principes (4-part organum / plainchant) - 13:31
Vetus abit littera (4-part conductus) (more info)
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Vetus abit littera (4-part conductus) - 2:29