historians, not composers, have created.)^2
Yet even granting all of this, we can still identify the extraordinary twelfth century as the one in which
European musical practice took a decisive turn toward polyphonic composition. And if we are interested
in isolating the fundamental distinguishing feature of what may be called “Western” music, this might as
well be it. After this turning point, polyphonic composition in the West (not just polyphonic performance
practice) would be indisputably, increasingly, and uniquely the norm. From now on, stylistic development
and change would essentially mean the development and refinement of techniques for polyphonic
composition.
Training in composition would henceforth be basically training in polyphony—in “harmony and
counterpoint,” the controlled combination of different pitches in time—and such training would become
increasingly “learned” or sophisticated. Combination, the creation of order and expressivity out of
diversity or even clash, became the very definition of music (or, to be more precise, the primary musical
metaphor). During the later Middle Ages, the early polyphonic age, music was often called the ars
combinatoria or the discordia concors: the “art of combining things” or the “concord of discord.” The
terms go back to the Musica enchiriadis. They not only underscore the new preoccupation with
polyphony but also reconcile it with older notions of Musica as an all-embracing cosmic harmony. The
word “harmony” was given a new context and a new meaning—the one that is still primary for us.
So the “polyphonic revolution,” while real, should not be mistaken for the beginning, or the invention,
or the “discovery” of polyphony. It was, rather, the coalescing into compositional procedure of what had
always been a performance option and its intensive cultivation. The great spur to this vastly accelerated
development of compositional technique was not so much a change in taste or “aesthetics” as it was a
change in educational philosophy. The twelfth century was the century in which the primary locus of
education shifted first from monasteries to urban cathedral schools and thence to something new: secular
universities. In the course of this shift, Paris emerged as the undisputed intellectual center of Europe.
The burgeoning of polyphonic composition followed exactly the same trajectory. Beginning in
monasteries, it reached its first great, transfiguring culmination in the cathedral schools of Paris, and in a
new form it radiated from that cosmopolitan center throughout Western Christendom, receiving a special
ancillary cultivation in the universities. It was all a part of what cultural historians call the “renaissance
of the twelfth century.”
“SYMPHONIA” AND ITS MODIFICATIONS
To trace this trajectory we need to begin by reviewing some earlier, more or less scattered manifestations
of written polyphony. As a performance practice associated with plainchant, polyphony makes its
documentary debut (as noted briefly, with an example, in chapter 2) in the ninth-century treatise Musica
enchiriadis. A contemporary commentary to it, called the Scolica (or Scholia) enchiriadis, describes two
basic techniques of embellishing a melody harmonically. One consists of simply accompanying a melody
in bagpipe fashion, with a drone on the final of the mode. That method—under the name of “ison
chanting” after the Greek word for “the same note”—still survives as a traditional way of performing the
so-called Byzantine chant of the Greek Orthodox church. The other technique consisted of “parallel
doubling”—that is, accompanying melody with a transposition of itself at a constant consonant interval
(for which the Greek term, used in the treatise, was symphonia). Three intervals were considered eligible
as symphoniae for this purpose; they are the ones we still call “perfect” (fourth, fifth, and octave).
These methods are easy to describe and to illustrate (Ex. 5-1), and they seem eminently practical. In
actual fact they were entirely “theoretical” and, in the case of the second, impracticable. As the examples