CHAPTER 7

Music for an Intellectual

and Political Elite

THE THIRTEENTH-CENTURY MOTET

A NEW CLASS

The rise of the university produced a new class, emanating from Paris, of literati: urban clerics with

secular educations who were put to work as administrators on behalf of the universities themselves, on
behalf of the increasingly feudalized church hierarchy (sometimes called the “cathedral nobility”), and
above all on behalf of the burgeoning civitas, the secular state. The University of Paris, as one historian
has put it, became “the training-ground for Europe’s bureaucrats.” This class found a musical spokesman
in a university magister named Johannes de Grocheio (sometimes gallicized informally as “Jean de
Grouchy”), the author, around 1300, of a remarkable treatise variously called Ars musicae (“The art of
music”) or De musica (“About music”).^1

What makes this treatise remarkable is its worldly bent. It contains neither cosmic speculation nor
nuts-and-bolts theory nor guide to notation. Instead, it offers a survey of “the music which men in Paris
use,” classified according to “how men in Paris use it.” It is, in effect, the first sociological treatise on
music, in which musical genres are defined primarily in terms of their “class” affiliations. It is a potential
goldmine of information for students of music history.

But it can only serve us in that way if its ore is properly refined. Like any theoretical treatise, it
should be handled with care and with a certain skepticism. Its ostensibly descriptive content should be
scrutinized with an eye out for covert prescription, and its explicit social content should be considered in
relation to its implicit social content—namely, its author’s own tacit but all-important social perspective.

FIG. 7-1 Professor lecturing at the University of Paris (from “Les Grandes Chroniques,” an early fifteenth-century historical
manuscript now at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris).
The first of these interpretive tasks is not all that difficult in the case of Grocheio’s survey, because
many of his social classifications are quite plainly prescriptive, and his prescriptions all serve a purpose
he specifies without any undue reticence. That purpose is “leading all things to a good order” in the
interests of social stability. His description of how various types of music are used, then, is really a