discant section is clearly being “modeled” on that of the chant melody. And yet the most conspicuous
component of the clausula, the duplum melody, does not participate in the repetition. The cantor, in other
words, sings a continuously evolving, quasi-improvisatory string of ordines over the highly organized
tenor.
Ex. 6-3b shows the same “Do-” clausula as it is found in a different manuscript, also copied in Paris
but about two or three decades later than Flo. (This is the later of the two now kept in Wolfenbüttel,
known as W 2 .) Although the Viderunt organum as a whole is more or less the same in the two sources,
this particular clausula is altogether different. It is a later insert, much more tightly organized into short
ordines than its predecessor, and the tenor participates fully in the modal rhythm with a mode of its own
that is based on groups of perfect and “duplex” or double-measure longs (the latter designated D).
These tenor notes are organized according to a pattern reminiscent of the classical “spondee.” The
spondaic foot consists of two long syllables, and the tenor’s rhythmic mode organizes the spondaic foot
into two alternating perfect ordines: the first consists of a single spondaic foot with a cadential long
(LLL+rest); the other ties the initial foot into a duplex (DL+rest). This modal pattern is now allowed to
override the melodic repetition in the original chant. The repeated phrase is still discernible, but its notes
now have different metrical placements: as the rhythm becomes more abstract and independent as an
organizing factor, pitch and rhythmic organization are somewhat dichotomized. The more abstract the
organization, one might say, the more “artificial” (in the sense of “artful”) the resulting musical shape.
This clausula, with its regular tenor patterns of four “perfections” each, can be conveniently transcribed
into our modern compound-duple meter.
The same clausula is found in Flo as well, but in a special section that contains no fewer than ten
clausulae on the “Do-” melisma: a set of spare parts, so to speak, for insertion into the organum at
pleasure. Just about anything can happen in these playfully (“artfully”) imaginative discants. One of them
(Ex. 6-3c) puts the tenor through a double cursus in strict LLL ordines while the duplum carols away ever
more decoratively, its notes “broken up” into extra breves by a process called fractio modi, literally
“breaking the rhythmic pattern.” (One of the easiest ways of doing this was to add a little stroke called a
plica or “fold” to a neume. The stroke usually stood for a breve on the next higher or lower note in the
scale, its duration “folded” into that of the long to which it is attached. In the transcription, plicae are
indicated by little strokes through the note stems.) There is even an especially souped-up clausula (Ex. 6-
3d) in which both duplum and tenor contain longs and breves in ordines similar to the “iambs” shown in
Ex. 6-1b.
EX. 6-3A “Do-” clausulae transcribed from Flo, f. 99’, with barring following the tractus in the tenor