Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

FIG.    11-2    “Hymn   to  St. Magnus” (Nobilis,   humilis)    as  it  appears in  its source, Uppsala (Sweden),   Universitetsbiblioteket,    MS  C

233,    fols.   19–20.

EX. 11-3 Nobilis,   humilis in  transcription

The critical point is that the treatment of the third as primary normative consonance in Nobilis,
humilis jibes with many early English musical remains. Besides the Sumer canon, with its normative
triads, there is the roughly contemporaneous testimony of “Anonymus IV”—the Paris lecture notes, as we
recall, of an English disciple of Garlandia—that English singers, especially those from “the area known
as Westcuntre” (the West-country, bordering on Wales) called thirds, rather than octaves or fifths, “the
best consonances.”

And there is the tiny repertory of surviving English twinsongs, which maintains the emphasis on
thirds, and also shares with the Sumer canon (and with Giraldus’s account) the use of the F mode with B-
flat, known to us as the major scale. These songs, among the earliest polyphonic vernacular settings to
survive in any language, employ a more sophisticated sort of voice-leading, through contrary motion and
voice-crossings, in addition to strictly parallel thirds; but they still seem, like the other pieces sampled in
this chapter so far, to be the sort of “harmonizations” more often extemporized by ear than written down
(Ex. 11-4).