Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

symphonia) and on fashioning a good occursus (a term Guido was in fact the first to use in connection
with musical cadences).

The main innovation in Guido’s discussion—and it was crucial—was attitudinal rather than
substantive, something that seeped from between the lines. Like the author of the Enchiriadis treatises,
Guido illustrated his points with examples; but unlike the earlier writer he gave more than one solution to
contrapuntal problems, between which the student was invited to choose ad libitum, “at pleasure.” Here,
for example (Ex. 5-3), are two counterpoints to a psalm that produce the same occursus: in one case by
direct leap to the final (occursus simplex), in the other by the use of a passing tone to smooth the way
(occursus per intermissas).

EX. 5-3 Guido   d’Arezzo,   Micrologus; Two counter points  to  Jherusalem

Note that for Guido the major second can be used as a secondary consonance (it was, after all, a
“Pythagorean” interval), whereas, as he tells us, the perfect fifth was to be avoided as “hard-sounding.”
So much for the “natural” basis of counterpoint! And Guido makes the rejection of the “natural” explicit.
He does not claim that his methods follow “a certain natural law,” only that they are pleasing. And by
allowing the reader to choose between his two cadences on the basis of personal preference (“taste”),
and implicitly allowing that there may be other solutions for the student to discover (or invent), Guido is
in fact taking an important step in the direction of what we would call an “art,” rather than a mere
mechanical or technical procedure.

Another point Guido did not make explicit, but which was extremely influential nevertheless, was the
fact that the pursuit of maximum variety of interval content implied a “parsimony principle,” a minimum
of motion in the vox organalis. (Today’s counterpoint teachers still grade on the basis of “smoothness” of
voice-leading, in fact.) Some of Guido’s examples resemble drones, though he never says as much. One
example (Ex. 5-4), ostensibly intended as an illustration of the desirability of occasional voice-crossing,
yields an actual drone that is maintained throughout the chant.

EX. 5-4 Guido   d’Arezzo,   Micrologus; Counterpoint    to  Sexta   hora

Guido’s Micrologus was the most frequently copied-out and widely disseminated book on music
theory before the age of printing. Every monastery or cathedral library had a copy, and it was used in
primary music instruction as late as the fifteenth century. We should not be surprised to discover its
influence in the early centers of polyphonic composition that begin to leave documentary traces at about
the same time, but which really flowered about a century later.

The earliest such trace is actually pre-Guidonian: a huge collection of polyphonic tropes from
Winchester in a manuscript (the later of the so-called Winchester Tropers) copied over a ten-year period
ending in 1006. As mentioned in chapter 3, the Winchester Tropers are notated in staffless neumes,
showing that the Winchester cantors (or the monks of the nearby Abbey of St. Swithin, including the
celebrated Wulfstan to whom the whole corpus has been attributed) sang their counterpoints by heart. We
cannot decipher them with much precision, but their contours definitely accord with Guidonian
preferences regarding voice-crossing and occursus. In fact, the implicit Guidonian predilection for