Between 1050 and 1300, a new style of architecture, later called Gothic, emerged in the construction of churches and cathedrals. The style featured ornate facades, towers, spires, large stained-glass windows, spacious vaults, and pointed arches. These same fanciful developments were also seen in art (in the form of paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts) and in music in the form of polyphony. In contrast to the single-voice melodies (monody) that had been the norm, polyphonic pieces of music were created for voices singing together in independent parts.
Polyphony began as a way of decorating existing chant by simply adding more voices, but it soon became valued as ornament or decoration by those who heard or sang it, making it a central piece of art music in the thirteenth century. Like the spacious vaults and stained-glass windows of church architecture, polyphony added to the grandeur and opulence of the liturgy itself. The development of polyphony was further enabled by simultaneous developments in musical notation (they found a few ways to notate rhythmic durations!).
At its inception and most basic form, it was likely common that voices or instruments performed in multiple parts before the advances in notation in polyphony. The simplest type of such polyphony occurred with the singing or playing of a melody against a drone, a sustained pitch (think bagpipes). One of the earliest forms of polyphony in church music was the organum, where one voice would sing the chant melody (the principal voice) and one or more voices would sing another melody in tandem (the organal voice or voices). In this genre, the voices weren't truly independent of one another: most frequently they moved in a note-for-note fashion (parallel organum). But in the case of florid organum, the organal voice would sing many notes in a melismatic fashion against a single note in the principle voice.
Ornate styles of polyphony flourished in Paris in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, particularly in the new Cathedral of Paris known as Notre Dame (and yes, it too was constructed in the Gothic style). The complexity and magnificence of the music composed here was unrivaled anywhere else in the world, due largely in part that the majority of the music was notated rather than improvised.
One of the most important developments in music notation since Ancient Greece was the new-found ability to notate duration of pitches, an incredibly important advancement in notation for later music. Combinations of note groups called ligatures were used to indicate different patterns of short notes (called breves) and long notes (called longs). Altogether, there were six basic patterns of note groups that have become known as rhythmic modes. You might recall that there were already established church modes to define particular collections of pitches in chant. Now we have modes to distinguish particular groupings of rhythm!
The two principle composers at Notre Dame that left an indelible mark on Notre Dame polyphony and notation were Léonin and Pérotin. Léonin is credited with compiling the Magnus liber organi (“great book of polyphony”), in which is contained two-voice settings of portions of chants for the most important feast days of the church year. Although the great book no longer exists in its original form, the majority of its content exists in the form of extant manuscripts in Germany and Italy. Pérotin built on Léonin's work by editing the Magnus liber and supplementing the organa with additional voices, often adding a third or even fourth voice. Through these additions, Perotin managed to create some of the most sophisticated music to date, music even more magnificent than that of Léonin.
With the introduction of polyphony to liturgical music in the thirteenth century, new forms and genres of vocal music arose, the most important being the motet. The Latin term motetus, from the French mot meaning “word,” came to encompass vocal works that featured newly written Latin texts added to existing music. The motet saw rapid changes and developments, from the inclusion of French language (instead of Latin) to the use of secular topics to the eventual freedom from the established rhythmic modes. The motet is a genre and form of music that will continue to flourish well into the twentieth century, albeit with drastic and radical developments along the way. Not only did motets of this time feature multiple independent voices, but these voices often had completely different texts being sung simultaneously! For example, a triple motet featured three independent voices singing independent notes and text over a fourth voice (called the tenor) that sang a fixed line of music (called the cantus firmus) in long rhythmic durations.
For the first time in music history, note durations were finally being indicated by the shapes of the notes, which is a characteristic Western music has held onto ever since. Around 1280, Franco of Cologne created this new system of notation that had four principle rhythmic values for notes: the double long, the long, the breve, and the semibreve, each half the length of the preceding one. Today, we still use a notation system of whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, and eighth notes (again, each note value half the length of the preceding one.) This new notational system, called Franconian notation, allowed for composers to liberate themselves from the rhythmic modes, leading to both innovation and variety in the composition of motets.
In just a few hundred years, classical music saw huge strides in terms of musical composition. In the year 1000, music consisted essentially of a single melody line; by 1300, polyphonic compositions consisting of multiple independent voices became the norm, although new monophonic music did not fade away entirely. And two major innovations in music notation (rhythmic modes and Franconian notation) allowed more information about the duration of pitches to be written down. As you will read in the next chapter, many more innovations in musical notation and form are yet to come in the fourteenth century.