Pérotin
PÉROTIN
The most gifted composer of the Notre Dame school, places and dates of birth and death unknown. Little is known of Pérotin's life; the assertion that he was court composer to the French kings has been challenged, and scholars set his death year as early as 1200 and as late as 1230: Called optimus discantor (most excellent composer of discant), he was probably the first composer to write in as many as four parts, and he developed the use of unifying devices such as imitation, exchanged voices (Stimmtausch ), and melodic variation, which he inherited from earlier generations and which have been standard contrapuntal practice ever since. Like J. S. bach and mozart after him, he blended diverse national influences into well-organized, large-scale masterpieces that were the high points of his period.
A Pérotin organum consisted of a liturgical chant melody and text that formed the tenor of the polyphonic section but with its rhythm altered. In approximately the same vocal range he added one, two, or three voices, in one of six rhythmic patterns known as modi. Although these patterns were varied at irregular intervals by different devices, the variations never obscured the patterns. The added voices crossed and recrossed one another in clear-cut phrases that usually began and ended on perfect consonances, touching on unisons midway. But the particular color of 12th-century polyphony was conveyed by occasional sharp dissonances on the weak beats, and sometimes even on the strong beats. The syllabic parts of the tenor were extended beneath the added voices into very long notes, sometimes lasting 40 measures and sounding more like a series of drones at different levels than like a melody. This liturgical melody, however, was known to the hearers; an impression of two mental worlds could be conveyed. The melismatic sections of the chant tenor were also reshaped rhythmically into one of the modi, often a slower modus than that of the added voices; these sections were called clausulae. Typical unifying devices are the fragments of imitation in measures three and four and the varied repetition of whole phrases as in measures one and two, seven and eight. There is also a typical Pérotin coda on a prolonged tenor note, with the change to iambic rhythm and descending scale in the added parts.
Pérotin set also sacred and perhaps secular Latin verse in the conductus style. This had no liturgical tenor, and the voices, all in the same modus, were sometimes set syllabically throughout and sometimes with melismatic sections on a single syllable, called caudae. Pérotin's works have survived, along with others of his school, in four "Notre Dame Manuscripts." The pitches in these MSS have been deciphered, but the rhythm problems have not been fully solved. lÉonin's Magnus liber organi, which was partially rewritten by Pérotin, has not yet been found.
Bibliography: h. husmann, Die Dreiund vierstimmigen Notre-Dame-Organa (Leipzig 1940) contains Pérotin music in modern notation; "The Origin and Destination of the Magnus liber organi, " tr. g. reaney, Musical Quarterly 49 (1963) 311–330; "The Enlargement of the Magnus liber organi and the Paris Churches, St. Germaine l'Auxerrois and Ste. Geneviève-du-Mont," tr. a. p. briner, Journal of the American Musicological Society 16 (1963) 176–203. h. tischler, The Motet in Thirteenth-Century France (Doctoral diss. unpub. Yale U. 1942) 1:42–54, lists attributions in Middle Ages and in modern research; The Earliest Motels, Corpus mensurabilis musicae, ed. American Institute of Musicology, v.1– (Rome 1947– ), v.30 (in press). New Oxford History of Music, ed. j. a. westrup, 11 v. (New York 1957– ). v.2. g. reese, Music in the Middle Ages (New York 1940). a. wulf, "Denken in Tönen und Strukturen: Komponieren im Kontext Pérotins," Musik-Konzepte 107 (2000), 53–100. i. d. bent, "Pérotin" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 14, ed. s. sadie (New York 1980) 540–543. d. m. randel, ed., The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music (Cambridge 1996) 683–684. n. slonimsky, ed. Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Eighth Edition (New York 1992) 1391. j. stenzl, "Perotinus und das Ereignis Notre Dame: Auswahlbibliographie," Musik-Konzepte 107 (2000), 101–105. h. tischler, "Pérotin and the Creation of the Motet," Music Review 44 (1983), 1–7.
[e. thurston]
Pérotin
Pérotin
Pérotin (active ca. 1185-1205), of the Notre Dame school in Paris, was the central figure in polyphonic art music during his time and the century thereafter. He was the first to write three-and four-part compositions and invented numerous musical techniques.
Of the life of Pérotin or Perotinus, absolutely nothing is known. For some time it was believed that a number of documents, dating from 1208 to 1238, referred to the composer, but this has recently been shown not to be the case. All we know is his name, the titles of some of his works, and his achievements, which are mentioned in two treatises: one by an eminent philosopher and music theorist, John of Garland, an Englishman who taught at the University of Paris during the second quarter of the 13th century; and the other by an anonymous English student, actually his voluminous class notes taken during the 1270s in Paris. The student informs us that Pérotin "edited" the Magnus liber organi (Great Book of Organa) of his predecessor at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, Léonin, by shortening the long sections of these compositions in which a free-flowing melody was laid over a slow-moving cantus firmus, that is, a series of notes taken from preexisting music—here from Gregorian chants of the Mass or the daily prayer hours. On the other hand, Pérotin added many sections, or clausulae, in discant style, where both voices were regulated by rhythmic patterns in strict meter. Of this style, the anonymous writer tells us, Pérotin was the greatest master (optimus discantor). Over 500 such discant clausulae are extant, some short ones undoubtedly the work of Léonin and of Pérotin's disciples, but the bulk probably Pérotin's own works.
These clausulae were not only sung at services, within the organa, but apparently also enjoyed as instrumental and vocal chamber music. Poets soon discovered that this metric music could well serve poetic texts, and they invented poems to go with the upper part, while leaving the cantus firmus, to be played by an instrument. The text (mot in French) gave the name motet to the new songlike species, which was at first based on Pérotinian discant clausulae but soon became independent of them. The motet was the central type of 13th-century art music. It first carried Latin texts connected with the feasts to which the clausulae belonged, presumably in the last decade of the 12th-century, but soon after the turn of the century it began also to employ French secular texts, many of them including quotations from contemporary trouvère poems and romances.
Pérotin's name is not directly connected with the motet, but the anonymous English student lists several of his works in other categories. Pérotin, he informs us, was the first to compose organa in three voice parts, some 30 of which are preserved. He also wrote two long four-part organa (ca. 1198-1200) whose fame spread throughout the Continent: Viderunt omnes for Christmas and Sederunt for the Mass of St. Stephen's Day, the day after Christmas. These works show great ingeniousness and many technical innovations, such as imitation, use of melodic and rhythmic motives and their variation for unifying a larger work, phrase repetition for the creation of structure, and rhythmic patterning of a Gregorian chant to serve as the basis of his clausulae. As in the organum, Pérotin also advanced to three-and four-part writing in his conductus, strophic Latin songs whose texts were sung simultaneously in all voices but could also be sung by a single person with instruments playing the other parts.
During Pérotin's time Paris became the center of Western culture. The Cathedral of Notre Dame neared completion and with it the Gothic style of architecture its zenith. The various philosophical schools that had grown up around it during the 12th century gave birth to the first general university outside Moorish Spain, where Aristotelian science stimulated a great intellectual debate. Pérotin's music was carried from this center to all the Western countries, where it was sung and imitated well into the 14th century.
Further Reading
Some of the music of Pérotin is available in modern transcription in various publications and also on records. The best account of his achievements is in Donald Jay Grout, A History of Western Music (1960). □