CHAPTER 5

Polyphony in Practice and Theory

EARLY POLYPHONIC PERFORMANCE PRACTICES AND THE

TWELFTH-CENTURY BLOSSOMING OF POLYPHONIC

COMPOSITION

ANOTHER RENAISSANCE

As we have seen, and as it is important to remember, there has never been a time in the recorded history

of European music—or of any music, it seems—when polyphony was unknown. Descriptions of music-
making in classical Greece and Rome are full of tantalizing suggestions about harmonic and contrapuntal
practices, and music theory, all the way back to “Pythagoras,” is full of elaborate accounts of harmonic
consonances. As soon as they were in possession of the means for writing their liturgical music down,
moreover, the Franks illustrated sundry methods of harmonically amplifying that music. We have evidence
of polyphonic performance practice for medieval chant as early as we have written evidence of the chant
itself.

Polyphonic performance practices, even if we have only a sketchy idea of them, were surely applied
(or at least available for application) to all the early genres of courtly and urban music encountered in the
previous chapter as well. Reports of rustic part-singing are likewise tantalizing. Gerald de Barri, a Welsh
churchman and historian who wrote under the name Giraldus Cambrensis, made a famous description of
his countrymen’s singing in a volume completed in 1194:

They    sing    their   tunes   not in  unison, but in  parts   with    many    simultaneous    modes   and phrases.    Therefore,  in  a   group   of

singers you will    hear    as  many    melodies    as  there   you will    see heads,  yet they    all accord  in  one consonant   and properly

constituted composition.^1

Giraldus also commented with enthusiasm on the virtuosity of unlettered instrumentalists, harpers who
played “with such smooth rapidity, such unequaled evenness, such mellifluous harmony throughout the
varied tunes and the many intricacies of the part music”—harmony and polyphonic intricacies of which
actual musical documents disclose nothing.

Since there is no period in which the known practices of European music did not include polyphony,
polyphony cannot be said to have an origin in the European tradition. Written or not, it was always there.
As with any other kind of music, its entry into written sources was not any sort of “event” in its history.
(The event, as such, was in our history, the history of what we are able to know.) And by the same token,
there is no point at which polyphony completely supplanted “monophony” in the history of Western music,
especially if we recognize that monophony is only a style of notation, not necessarily a style of music.

Even if we take the strictest view of monophony, the view that equates it with liturgical chant that is
unharmonized in accord with the preference of the Roman Catholic church, the history of its composition
continues for centuries beyond the point at which we can afford the time in a book like this to go on
tracking it. (Still, when a young researcher named Barbara Haggh discovered in the early 1980s that
Guillaume Dufay, a major “Renaissance” composer, had composed elaborate chant offices in the middle
of the fifteenth century, her findings made scholarly headlines—and rightly so, for it served as a forcible
reminder that the march of musical genres and styles down through the ages in single file is something