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singers in order that this kind of
minstrelish and wanton music may
be heard in his church, I believe
that he becomes contaminated
with the disease of simony.”
Attitudes such as Courçon’s, which
associated the intertwined male
voices of polyphony with sodomy,
sought to discredit the new musical
style by associating it with sin.Two handbooks
The first works that attempted
to explain vocal harmony were
Musica enchiriadis (“The Music
Handbook”), c.900, and its
companion text Scholia enchiriadis.
The simplest harmonizing method
illustrated by the writer of the
handbooks was singing in octaves.
This technique was known as
“magadizing” in ancient Greece
and occurs naturally when men and
boys sing in unison. The method of
utilizing a basic harmony, parallel
to the original chant, was called
“simple organum” by the writer of
the enchiriadis. Scholia enchiriadisalso suggests a hybrid method,
whereby the vox organalis
(“accompanying voice”) either
holds a pitch or moves in parallel
harmony with the vox principalis
(“main voice”) before returning
to a unison with the chant at the
ends of phrases.
Although simple organum
involves more than one voice, this
singing in octaves is not normally
described by modern writers as
“polyphony,” because the two parts
are not independent. Creating
harmony by simply following the
melody at a different octave (or
other harmonic interval) makes the
harmonizing part a slave to the
chant’s shape and movement. The
effect is to enrich the sound of the
chant, but the technique of finding
this added harmony has little
finesse. Musicologists prefer toTHE RISE OF VOCAL HARMONY
Pérotin’s Alleluia nativitas was
written for three voices. As seen here,
the number of lines in a staff was not
fixed at this time; they merely gave a
rough idea of the “height” of the notes.describe this technique as
a version of “heterophony”
(embellishing a single line).Scattered examples
A short piece of organum for two
voices moving independently came
to light in 2014 on the back leaf of a
manuscript in the British Library
that can be dated to c. 900. It
appears to demonstrate that some
singers in northwest Germany were
quite adept at this hybrid style of
organum by the end of the 9th
century. Although it is a single
isolated example, the piece (Sancte
Bonifati martyr, “St. Boniface the
Martyr”) is agreed to be the
oldest existing notated piece of
polyphonic music for performance.
The Winchester Troper (c.1000),
a manuscript copied into two books
at Winchester Cathedral fromMasters of organum ... set
minstrelish and effeminate
things before young and
ignorant persons.
Robert of Courçon
English cardinal
(c.1160–1219)US_028-031_Leonin.indd 30 26/03/18 1:00 PM