Organum

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This article is about a style of music. For the musical instrument, see organum (musical instrument). For the experimental music group, see David Jackman

Organum (pronounced /ˈɔɹgənəm/, though the stress is now sometimes incorrectly put on the second syllable) is a technique of singing developed in the Middle Ages, and is an early form of polyphonic music. In its earliest stages, organum involved two musical voices: a Gregorian chant melody, and the same melody transposed by a consonant interval, usually a perfect fifth or fourth. In these cases often the composition began and ended on a unison, maintaining the transposition only between the start and finish (although see below). Organum was originally improvised; while one singer performed a notated melody (the vox principalis), another singer—singing "by ear"—provided the unnotated second melody (the vox organalis). Over time, composers began to write added parts that were not just simple transpositions, and thus true polyphony was born.

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[edit] History

[edit] Early organum

The first document to describe organum specifically, and give rules for its performance, was the Musica enchiriadis (c. 895), a treatise traditionally (and probably incorrectly) attributed to Hucbald of St. Amand. In its original conception, organum was never intended as polyphony in the modern sense; the added voice was intended as a reinforcement of the singers, who were normally in unison. It is also made clear in the Musica enchiriadis that octave doubling was acceptable, since such doubling was inevitable when men and boys sang together; and it was also acceptable to double parts with instruments. The 10th-century treatise Scholia enchiriadis treats the subject in greater detail.

For parallel singing, the original chant would be the upper voice, vox principalis; the vox organalis was at a parallel perfect interval below, usually a fourth. Thus the melody would be heard as the principal voice, the vox organalis as an accompaniment or reinforcement.

This kind of organum is now usually called parallel organum, although terms such as sinfonia were used in early treatises.

[edit] Debate about origins

The Musica enchiriadis documented a practice which was already going on, although it has not been possible to establish a beginning date for the practice, which may go back hundreds of years. Since the treatise was written slightly before the reinvention of standardised musical notation around 900, its descriptions of organum are verbal only, and it is not known how closely they were followed. In addition, both of the Enchiraidis treatises are primarily works on the concept of a pseudo-scientific derivation of the gamut and the modes from theories of conjunct and disjunct tetrachords (series of four pitches involving fixed tone and semitone relationships within them). To some extent it is probable that the treatment given to organum was a treatment designed to explain it in the terms of the evolving theory of the gamut (not least by the observation that parallel fourths outline tetrachords), and was not a descriptive or prescriptive manual of practical organum (rather like the concept of "sonata form" was derived at a much later date in the 19th century in order to describe much Classical period music, irrespective of the fact that most "sonata form" works of that period are not in a invariantly strict sonata form at all, and that the composers and performers of that period certainly would not have recognised the concept in its restrictive sense once it was propounded).

It is also worth noting that strict parallel organum does not generally occur in either of these early treatises as an end in itself. The treatises begin from a premise of parallelism and then move on to suggest better ways of making the organum, involving boundary tones, and the vast majority of musical examples in the treatises in fact use intervals of 2nds, 3rds, 4ths, 5ths and 6ths (by inversion/octave doubling), to create a more artistic result. The aesthetic underpinning the use of these other intervals (usually to do with the concept of a "boundary tone" to preserve the modal integrity, or in order to avoid harmonic tritones or accidentals foreign to the mode) was explored in more detail by Guido d'Arezzo in his Micrologus of around 1020 AD. Scholars have tended to describe this more varied organum as "free organum" (see below).

Scolarship has not yet established whether this early organum was chronologically derived from a more primitive strict parallelism, or from a kind of modally-constrained heterophony. The most pervasive examples of strict "parallel organum" in fact occur only in insular Germanic repertories of the 13th century onwards, and not in the very much earlier Enchiriadis treatises, the works of Guido, or in the various interpretations of the Winchester Troper (in which can be found passages which appear to be notated heterophony at the unison, although transcription problems confound absolute certainty in this).

[edit] Free organum

After parallel organum the next development to arise in the practice of organum is postulated to be that of free organum. The earliest examples of this style dating from around 1020-1050 (the Micrologus of Guido d'Arezzo and the Winchester Troper) utilise parallel motion and oblique motion (one voice moving while the other stays still), but the introduction of contrary motion (voices moving in opposite directions) as well as similar motion (voices moving in the same direction, but to different intervals) led to progressively freer musical lines — a prerequisite element of counterpoint. There are a number of manuscript fragments of the later 11th century and into the 12th century which document the changing styles, from the works of Johannes Cotto to the so-called Chartres fragments. Although free organum is mostly still in note-against-note style, towards the end of its lifetime (some time in the 11th century) there are examples of more than one note of the organal voice against one note in the cantus firmus — another precursor of contrapuntal techniques.

[edit] Florid organum

Organum as a musical genre reached its peak in the twelfth century with the development of two very different schools of organum composition: the St. Martial School of florid organum, which may have been centered around the monastery of St. Martial in Limoges, and the Notre Dame school of organum of Paris (see: rhythmic mode), which included composers such as Léonin and Pérotin, and out of which grew most of the later forms such as the motet.

[edit] Melismatic Organum

[edit] Notre Dame school

[edit] See also

[edit] References and further reading

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