Like the melismatic notation that was developed to specify the rhythms of Notre Dame organum, the
syllabic notation that was developed later in the thirteenth century to specify the rhythms of the motet was
very efficiently fashioned out of the existing fund of “quadratic” plainchant neumes. The first prerequisite
was to come up with single note-shapes to represent the longa and the brevis. The solution will seem
obvious to us, who have lived with its consequences since birth, but at the time it was a considerable feat
of imagination.
As we have known since chapter 1, chant notation already possessed two different notae simplices or
single-note shapes: the point or punctum (simple square) and the rod or virga (square with tail at right).
The distinction between them had to do with pitch: the virga represented a melodic peak. What some
audacious soul had to do was re-imagine the distinction in rhythmic terms: the virga would henceforth
represent the long and the punctum the breve. So it is in Fig. 7-3, which comes from the so-called
“Bamberg codex” (known familiarly as Ba), a collection of exactly one hundred double motets that was
put together at some point between about 1260 and 1290, to judge by its notational style.
Thanks to the explicit differentiation of longs and breves, it is now possible to indicate the trochaic
rhythm of the familiar clausula without the use of ligatures. Because the individual notes now had intrinsic
rhythmic values, and because there were no longer any indefinitely held-out notes like those in organum
tenors, it was no longer necessary to align the parts in score. The layout first used in the motet
manuscripts of the late thirteenth century, in which all the parts are entered on the same page but in their
own separate locations, was a great space-saver and remained standard until the end of the sixteenth
century. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries most of the music that was notated in this way was choral