Even though it uses a texture that was described by earlier writers such as Guido and John, while the
cantus-firmus settings seem to be unprecedented, this composition is in fact a much more “modern” piece
—and a much more “artistically” shaped product, as we understand the word—than the one in Fig. 5-2.
Where a cantus firmus may happen to show up in the texture is less of a defining trait than its sheer
presence or absence, and here we have a composition that seems to have been elaborated musically from
scratch, out of sheer joy in pattern-making. “The spirit” of such music, Prof. Treitler has written, “is that
of the magic square and the palindrome.”^7 Such a spirit of playful creativity is more in keeping with
modern understanding of the word “art” than are the functional amplifications of plainchant that we have
been encountering up to now. All at once we seem to behold a planned and finished “artwork”—a fully
shaped res facta, a “made thing,” as musicians would later call such works to distinguish them from
ephemeral improvisations.
Yet we should resist the temptation to imagine that such works, because they are so meticulously
worked out, had to be literally worked out on paper in advance. We are still dealing with the products of
a predominantly oral culture, of which only a few specimens—the cream, presumably—ever found their
way into writing. A piece like the one in Ex. 5-7 was in all likelihood composed by a singer—or more
likely, by two singers—in the act of singing.
The regularities and symmetries—the voice exchanges, the complementation of contour, the melodic
repetitions and sequences—may appear to us to suggest the shaping hand of an “author,” as “classical”
musicians have come to understand the term. (That is to say, a creator who works apart from performers,
out of “real time.”) But they are more likely just the opposite. Patterns like these are not abstract ideas but