The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music (Cambridge Companions to Music) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

The final relevant ninth-century treatises are known as Musica enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis (reaching their standard form by the end of the century). 10 Both treatises serve as handbooks for training singers (hence enchiriadis ), while the Scolica additionally presents the quadrivial rudiments. The Scolica was written as a dialogue between master and pupil, modelled after Augustine's De musica . The Enchiriadis treatises provided the earliest instruction in improvising organum or polyphony: organum consisted of a vox organalis moving in parallel movement with the chant or vox principalis , at the perfect intervals of an octave, fifth or fourth. A second type of organum grew from the practice of sounding a drone under the chant: the vox organalis , at first stationary (that is, in oblique motion), moves into parallel motion with the chant, then reaches a unison with the chant at the end. The Enchiriadis treatises presented their exposés using a variation of the notation Hucbald had proposed, namely, text syllables are placed in between lines. But in this case, the lines are prefaced by a system of clefs derived from manipulations of the daseia of ancient Greek prosody, hence the term Daseian notation. While the concept of a staff, albeit with notes on the lines and spaces, was to become standard, the Daseian symbols presented orthographic difficulties that prevented their widespread adoption.

Medieval music theory experienced a breakthrough in the late tenth century with the treatise known as Dialogus de musica , most likely written in the province of Milan by an anonymous monk. 11 Presented as a dialogue between master and pupil, the Dialogus codified the letters A B C D E F G with octave duplication as the standard nomenclature for the medieval gamut; the next octave was designated by lower-case a–g, culminating in aa to complete the two-octave span (below A lay Γ, hence the word ‘gamut’). The tone b was inflected: it could appear as ‘square’ or ‘hard’ b ( ) and ‘round’ or ‘soft’ b (♭ ). One of the writer's pedagogical innovations was to promote the use of the monochord, whereby a singer could learn a chant quickly by imitating its intervals sounded on the monochord. Significantly, he contributed to the classification of chants according to mode, which also helped singers master the vast repertory. Following on Hucbald's ideas about the importance of the finals D E F G within the gamut, the Dialogus author identified their importance for modal recognition in the first clear definition of mode: ‘A tone, or mode, is a rule which classes every melody according to its final.’ That is, the final of a chant identifies its mode. Each of the finals is designated by a Greek number, as shown in column 2 of Table 16.1,and each numerical modal category in turn can be subdivided into authentic and plagal, depending on the range of the melody: specifically, an authentic melody usually does not ascend more than an octave above and one tone below the final, while a plagal

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