By the late thirteenth century, English and French culture were so thoroughly intermixed that their
disentangling is no longer feasible. Nor was their intercourse a oneway street. England was politically
subject to France, but culturally the shoe was often on the other foot. The English college at the University
of Paris was a strong contingent, particularly around the turn of the thirteenth century—precisely, that is,
when the “Notre Dame school” was consolidating. (Remembering that puts an interesting, possibly
significant spin on all the voice-exchanging we observed in chapter 6 in the organa quadrupla attributed
to Perotin.) And so it is not surprising to find occasional French pieces from the period exhibiting traits
reminiscent of the Sumer canon.
Consider the conductus Veris ad imperia (Ex. 11-6), from the Florence manuscript. Though famous, it
is an odd conductus. Yet no one would claim (or at least no one has claimed) that its peculiarities mark it
as an actual English piece. And that is because its chief peculiarity is that its lowest voice (as written) is,
most unusually for a conductus, a cantus firmus. More unusually yet, that lowest written voice is actually
the highest sounding one, so that for the first fourteen measures this ostensible conductus is actually a sort
of harmonized tune or cantilena—a tune that the reader may remember, because it has already appeared in
this account as Ex. 4-2: the troubadour dance-song or balada entitled A l’entrada del tens clar, defined
on its earlier appearance as “a sophisticated imitation folk song.” the “tenor” of Ex. 11-6 shows that one
of the closed endings has been replaced by an open one, so that the scheme is now the stuttering aaaa’B.
Another way of accounting for the “stutter,” of course, is to say that the “a” phrase has been turned into a
pes. And now look what happens in the “upper” parts “over” that pes: what the triplum has the first time,
the duplum has the second, and vice versa. Another way of putting this is to say that the two parts have
made a voice-exchange. And they immediately repeat the exchange over the third and fourth repetitions of
the pes, allowing for a different (closed) cadence the last time.
FIG. 11-3 William the Conqueror setting sail for England, from the Bayeux tapestry (eleventh century).
What marked A l’entrada as folklike was its repetition/refrain scheme: aa’aa’B, where the “prime”
signs stand for “closed” endings, on the final. A peek at
EX. 11-6 Veris ad imperia (conductus)