efforts have been made to identify him with Anonymus IV’s Perotin, but the facts and the chronology do
not add up.) The situation is more promising in the case of Leonin. Two candidates have been more or
less plausibly identified. One is a certain Henricus Leonellus, who owned a house near Notre Dame and
was a lay member of the abbey of St. Victor. According to the available documents, he died some time
between 1187 and 1192, which would place him in the generation of Anonymus IV’s “Leoninus.” There is
nothing in the documents to connect him with music, though.
The other candidate, recently put forward by the music historian Craig Wright, is especially
appealing: a canon and priest at Notre Dame and St. Victor whose name was Leonius but who was
sometimes referred to in official documents by the same affectionate diminutive—Leoninus, “old man
Leo”—used in Anonymus IV.^3 The peak of his documented activity was reached in the 1180s and 1190s,
and he died in 1201 or 1202. This Leonius is not identified as a musician, but he was a poet of
considerable renown, best known for his Hystorie sacre gestas ab origine mundi (“Acts of sacred
history since the beginning of the world”), a paraphrase of the first eight books of the Old Testament in
verse—some 14,000 lines of it! Anyone who could write that, it seems, could also write “a great book of
organa from the Gradual and the Antiphoner to adorn the Divine Service.” But this still does not constitute
factual corroboration of Anonymus IV’s terse report, and we ought to proceed with utmost caution when it
comes to identifying the composers of the “Notre Dame school” with actual persons. For the unconfirmed
account in Anonymus IV, written long after the fact, has all the earmarks of a “creation myth”—that is, a
story that seeks to account for the existence of something wonderful (here, the matchless repertory of
polyphonic music at Notre Dame) by supplying it with an origin and an originator. (Compare the way the
Bible accounts for the existence of music by naming its inventor—Jubal, son of Lamech, “the forerunner
of all who play the harp and flute”—in Genesis 4:21. Or the way Haydn has been named the “father of the
symphony” or the string quartet, to say nothing of Saint Gregory and his dove.)
MEASURED MUSIC
Even if the poet Leonius was Anonymus IV’s (or rather, the Paris university lecturer’s) Leoninus, that still
would not guarantee the story’s status as fact. A famous church poet would in fact be the ideal
mythological creator of Notre Dame polyphony, for the great glory of that repertory in the eyes of its
latter-day practitioners was the fact that it was metrical. That is to say, it managed to incorporate precise
time-measurement into musical composition and notation, and it did so by adapting to musical purposes
the principles of “quantitative” poetic meter.
This, too, shows the connection between musical practice at Notre Dame and the University of Paris
curriculum. By the twelfth century, quantitative meter—defined by syllable-length rather than by “accent”
or stress—was no longer used by contemporary poets, even when writing in Latin. But it was studied
academically as part of the quadrivium, often from the famous textbook by St. Augustine suggestively
titled De musica (“About music”—that is, the “music” or sonic organization of verse). The rhythmic
practice at Notre Dame was based on similar principles of versification.
In a quantitative meter, one assumes at least two abstract durations—one “long,” the other “short”—
that are related to each other by some simple arithmetic proportion. The simplest proportion is a factor of
two: a long equals two shorts. That already gives the gist of the earliest abstractly conceived musical
meter, as practiced at Notre Dame. Two note-lengths were assumed: a nota longa (shortened in normal
parlance to longa, or in English, a “long”) and a nota brevis (shortened to brevis, or in English, a
“breve”). A long was assumed to equal two breves, and the simplest way of turning their relationship into
a metrical pattern (called an ordo, plural ordines) was simply to alternate them: LBLBLBLBLBL...; in