Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

did many other troubadours.

EX. 3-13    Raimon  de  Miraval,    Aissi   cum es  genser  pascors

Raimon’s canso begins, like the Salve Regina, with a repeated melodic phrase. Like the Salve
Regina, it is a song of devotional praise to a remote, idealized lady. Like the Salve Regina, it is a Dorian
tune in a lightly neumatic style. The Salve Regina, in effect, may thus be looked upon as a canso to the
Blessed Virgin. There is no inherent or intrinsic difference between the idioms of sacred and of “secular”
devotion, and no stylistic difference between the sacred verse-music of the eleventh and twelfth centuries
and such “secular” verse-music as was deemed worthy, beginning in the twelfth century, of preservation
in writing.

THEORY AND THE ART OF TEACHING

Before exploring the implications of these statements, though, or taking a closer look at music set to
vernacular poetry, or discussing the reasons why the word “secular” is being set off in this context by
quotation marks, let us return briefly to the original subject of this chapter, the formulation of new
theoretical concepts and their influence on musical practice. There is one more tale to tell.

For a long time, two of the Marian antiphons, Alma Redemptoris mater and Salve Regina, were
attributed to Hermannus Contractus (Hermann the Lame, 1013–1054), a monk at the Swiss abbey of
Reichenau. That attribution is no longer credited, but Hermann was a notable poet-composer (of
sequences and Offices for local saints) and a major theorist. In his treatise, Musica, Hermann proposed
surrounding the tetrachord of four finals (D, E, F, G) with a tone on either end, thus producing a six-note
diatonic segment or hexachord from C to A, and with symmetrical intervallic content TTSTT.^3 This
module, Hermann implied, sums up with the greatest possible economy the tonal range of Gregorian chant.