Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

memory aids—which is why we use the word “catchy” to describe them. They bear witness to the
process (and the fun) of creativity within an oral culture. Homo ludens and homo faber—“humanity at
play” and “creative humanity”—were close allies in such a culture.


THE CODEX CALIXTINUS


What the rare written-down specimens could do was travel. The versus in Ex. 5-7 was a great favorite. It
is found in three of the four “St. Martial” manuscripts containing polyphony, and it is found as a conductus
in the other main source of early-to-midtwelfth-century polyphonic composition. This other source is a
magnificent copy of the Codex Calixtinus, more accurately known as the “Book of St. James” (Liber
sancti Jacobi), a huge memorial potpourri dedicated to the apostle James the Greater, commissioned by
Pope Callistus (Calixtus) II, who reigned from 1119 to 1124.


According to tradition, the body of St. James was miraculously translated, after his martyrdom in
Judea, to Spain, where he had preached and where he is now venerated (under the name Sant’ Iago or
Santiago) as patron saint. His relics are said to be housed in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, an
Atlantic coastal town in the extreme northwest corner of Spain (above Portugal), built over his reputed
gravesite in 1078. The copy of the Codex Calixtinus at Saint James’s own shrine, one of the great
pilgrimage spots in late-medieval Europe, is of course an especially lavish one, and it is fitted out with
many special features. One of these is an appendix of a dozen parchment leaves containing some two
dozen polyphonic compositions, some specially written for the Office of St. James, others (like the one
given in Ex. 5-7) borrowed from the common monastic repertory of southern and central France.


The appendix is now thought to have been compiled in the cathedral town of Vézelay by around 1170
and shipped or carried down as a gift to the shrine at Compostela. One of the reasons for associating the
manuscript with a fairly northern point of origin is its use of the word conductus in place of versus for
pieces like the one in Ex. 5-7. Another is the inclusion of standard Mass and Office items in polyphonic
elaborations along with the more usual tropes and versus. These settings consist of six responsorial
chants—four matins Responsories, a Gradual, and an Alleluia—from the special local liturgy of St.
James, as given in chant form in an earlier part of the Codex. The polyphonic versions are in the
sustained-tone organum style, with the original chant as the tenor and an especially florid counterpoint
above it. As we shall see, this is cathedral, not monastic, polyphony.


The most florid of all the settings in the Codex Calixtinus is the Kyrie Cunctipotens genitor, familiar
to us already as a chant. It was something of a favorite for polyphonic treatment in the twelfth century. An
anonymous treatise of ca. 1100 called Ad organum faciendum (“How to do organum”) had already used it
to demonstrate note-against-note discant in a rather dogged contrary motion (Ex. 5-8a). The example has
its own historical significance because it is one of the earliest settings to give the vox organalis a higher
tessitura than the original melody.


The placement of the counterpoint above the chant makes comparison with the melismatic setting of
the same item in the Codex Calixtinus (Ex. 5-8b) particularly apt. Putting them side by side, one can
easily imagine the one, or something like it, turning into the other over time (especially if one recalls the
observations in chapter 1 about the gradual elaboration of “the old way of singing”), and finally getting
written down as a “keeper.” Proceeding on the assumption that we are dealing with an embellished
discant, the transcription in Ex. 5-8b has been spatially laid out so that the notes in the tenor come beneath
notes in the vox organalis that form perfect consonances with it. This arrangement corresponds only
loosely with the way in which the parts line up in the manuscript, it is true (see Fig. 5-3). But since the
notation still conveys no specific information about duration, the manuscript alignment may not seem as

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