FIG. 7-9 On a parole/A Paris/Frese nouvele (Montpellier, Bibliothèque Inter-Universaire, Section Médecine, H 196, fols. 368 v–
369). The beginning is again indicated by decorative capitals, halfway down the left-hand page.
Petrus marks off the triplum’s breve units or tempora with little dots called puncta divisionis
(division points) that function like modern bar lines, turning the tempora into measures. Between puncta
there can be anywhere from two to seven semibreves (and according to several theorists, some
composers around this time went as far as a ninefold subdivision of the tempus). In the setting of line 7, in
which one measure is singled out to receive seven separate syllables, there is more than twice the usual
number of semibreves in a tempus. Either they have to go by at more than twice the usual speed, turning a
noble love song into a tongue twister, or the tempo of the whole has to be slowed down sufficiently to
accommodate a “natural” delivery of the shortest note values.
The latter, it seems pretty clear, must have been the intention and the practice. The result is that the
normal semibreve now becomes comparable in actual duration to the normal breve in earlier motets,
giving rise to a tempo at which the “perfect” division of the breve into three semibreves (or into an
“altered” pair) is truly meaningful in transcription, like the one in Ex. 7-10. The spread between the
longest and the shortest note values has reached a factor of 18 (3 × 3 × 2). As a result, the normal
“modal” rhythms underlying the supple declamation of the triplum have now become so slow as virtually
to fade from the surface of the music.
EX. 7-9 Transcription of Fig. 7-9