Dame composers, whoever they were, finally managed to “solve” a longstanding “problem,” namely that
of notating rhythm precisely, thereby making it possible for precisely measured music to be composed.
But that puts the cart before the horse, in fact several carts before several horses.
If we know one thing for certain from the history of medieval music to the point where we have traced
it, it is that notation follows rather than precedes practice. In the case of Gregorian chant, it followed by a
matter of centuries, not to say millennia. In the case of chant-based polyphony it also followed, perhaps
by centuries, as we know from the implicit testimony of the Scolica enchiriadis. So if the theorists of the
thirteenth century finally took up and “solved” the problem of notating a metrically organized melismatic
polyphony, our assumption should be that they were finding a notation for something that was already well
established in oral practice.
Furthermore, to say that rhythmic notation was a “problem” to be solved before there could be
rhythmic composition is to assume that without such notation music was perceived as lacking something.
We easily imagine such an absence as a lack, because the absence of a method for notating precise
rhythms would be a crippling lack for making our music. To assume that the composers of twelfth-century
Paris felt such a lack is to assume that they wanted to make our music, too. Only the assumption that it is
up to “them” to become “us”—in other words, the ethnocentric assumption—can sanction the notion that
discovering modal rhythm was a progressive evolutionary step (from “themness” to “usness”).
So, if it was not the solution to an obvious notational problem, what was the motivation for
developing the patterning techniques collectively known as modal rhythm? The best theory so far, recently
advanced by the medievalist Anna Maria Busse Berger, is that modeling musical rhythm on classical
versification served the same purpose that versification itself originally served—namely, a mnemonic (or
more precisely, a “mnemotechnic”) purpose.^4 It enhanced memory skills, an essential function in an oral
culture.
Rhythm has always been an imprinting device, and remains one to this day. That is why so many rules
and aphorisms are cast as jingles. (Cross at the green,/Not in between; or Red sky at morning:/Sailor,
take warning!; or Early to bed and early to rise/Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.) It is why no
medieval treatise on anything from shipbuilding to organum-singing was without rhyming rules. It is why
the poet Leonius, who may or may not have been Leonin, gave as his reason for writing his 14,000 lines
of biblical verse that it helped “the mind, which, delighted by the brevity of the poetry and by the song,
may hold it more firmly.”^5
Here is a catchy Latin rhyme, attributed to Guido of Arezzo, that every literate or academic musician
from the eleventh to the fifteenth century learned at the beginning of his training since is a popularization
of one of Boethius’s main ideas:
Musicorum et cantorum magna est distancia.
Isti dicunt, illi sciunt, quae componit Musica.
Nam qui facit, quod non sapit, diffinitur bestia. It’s a long way from a musician to a singer. The one knows what
music is made of, the other just talks about it. And he who performs what he knows nothing about is considered an animal.So “Guido well puts it in his Micrologus,” wrote John of Afflighem.^6 But the rhyme is not found in the
Micrologus at all; and John surely heard it, and memorized it, years before he ever read it, which is why
he forgot where he actually came across it. It is found in Guido’s Regulae rhythmicae, a brief digest of
Guido’s teachings on the gamut, intervals, staff notation, modes, and finals, all cast for easy retention (as
the title, “Rhyming Rules,” already indicates) in verse.
And that is why the composers of Notre Dame, who were creating a music of unheard-of melismatic
profusion, found it advantageous to cast their enormously long melodies in an untexted musical