FIG. 5-3 Cunctipotens genitor, as set melismatically in the Codex Calixtinus, a late twelfth-century French manuscript now kept
at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. The setting begins halfway through the first system and ends at the
beginning of the fifth system.
The most famous piece in the Codex Calixtinus appendix is famous for the wrong reason. It is a
conductus, Congaudeant catholici (“Let all Catholics rejoice together”), that is furnished with two
counterpoints, one in a fairly florid “organal” style, the other a simple discant. Although it is quite
obvious that the two counterpoints were entered separately (the moderately fancy organal voice occupies
a staff of its own, above the tenor; the note-against-note discant is entered, in red ink for contrast, directly
on the staff containing the tenor), the piece was long taken to be a unique three-part polyphonic setting,
supposedly the first of its kind (Fig. 5-4; Ex. 5-9). (Congaudeant catholici’s “rightful” claim to fame is
the fact that it may be the earliest polyphonic piece to carry an attribution in its source; the Codex names
“Magister Albertus Parisiensis” as composer, identifiable by his title as the Albertus who served as
cantor at the cathedral of Notre Dame from around 1140 to 1177.)
The extremely high level of dissonance that resulted from performing the two settings simultaneously
was not at first considered a deterrent. Careless reading of the medieval music theorists, together with
equally incautious assumptions about the relationship of writing to composition, encouraged the belief that
the harmonic style of early polyphony was entirely rationalistic, based on speculative numerology, and,
from a practical—that is, aural—point of view, virtually haphazard. (It was thought, to be specific, that
voices written in succession against a cantus firmus had to accord harmonically only with it, not with each
other; both “written” and “in succession” are now acknowledged to be anachronistically limiting terms.)