Pérotin

French composer

• Born: 1155-1160
• Birthplace: Possibly Paris, France
• Died: 1200-1205
• Place of death: Probably Paris, France

Pérotin was a pioneer in the evolution of harmony as a principle of Western music. He transformed the nature of early music by first introducing three- and four-voice textures into church music, by developing polyphonic forms with semichordal sequences, and by adapting liturgical forms to secular purposes.

The named compositions are convincingly dated 1198-1200; the others seem to have been written a bit earlier. His association in the text with the earlier composer Léonin suggests that Pérotin may have begun working under his tutelage, suggesting a possible birth date. Because nothing in his music reflects the changes that took place in music and society after 1203, it is convenient to assume that his death occurred around that time. This date seems more likely because his music was not only admired but also widely copied and distributed, surviving in several different widely separated manuscripts. Had he written after 1203, his work would have been preserved. All attempts to determine more information about the man and his life have failed. Pérotin lives on in his music and in the general information known about life in twelfth century Paris.

Life’s Work

Because Pérotin’s music is in some ways almost as obscure as his life, it is easy to discount his significance. His music is really accessible only to specialists, and specialists often are so mired in minutiae that they lose sight of the larger implications of their enthusiasms. Thus few scholars will say that Pérotin was one of the most important composers in Western music, although in many ways he can be considered the father of harmony; since harmonic texture and sequence is the major distinguishing quality of Western music, Pérotin was indeed of consequence.

Early Life

Almost nothing is known about the life of Pérotin (pay-roh-tan), which in itself reveals the lack of personal esteem accorded artists during the Middle Ages. There is one existing contemporary reference to him, significantly in a treatise on twelfth century composers attributed to a writer designated Anonymous IV. That text associates Pérotin with the then recently built Cathedral of Notre Dame, first begun in 1163; since he cannot be identified as any of the registered principal musicians of the cathedral, the cantors and succentors, he is assumed to have been a choirmaster, though he could have been an organist. The treatise does attribute to him, however, specific compositions by title and others by type.

Along with his predecessor Léonin, Pérotin was connected with innovations in music associated with the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Earlier in the twelfth century, composers centered at the Abbey of St. Martial at Limoges in south-central France had developed a new kind of two-part music called florid, melismatic, or Saint Martial organum. Although not the first type of multipart, multivoice music, it was distinct in having the upper voice improvise a free plainchant melody over drawn-out single notes in the lower, like drones. This lower line had originally been a melody itself; now that became unrecognizable. Thus, a new, nonmelodic aspect became added to the texture of music.

Léonin made the first significant changes to this style, developing a form known as Notre Dame organum, though he also worked in the equally important, related form of descant. Much of his work is preserved in the Magnus liber organi (c. 1170; great book of organum), a liturgical cycle of two-part settings for vespers and matins, as well as alleluias and graduals for the Mass. Magnus liber organi is the first identified volume of compositions by one master; its importance is attested by its preservation in several manuscripts in Italy, Germany, and Spain, as well as in France. Léonin introduced two new features in his work. One involved composing alternating sections of two-part polyphony and choral unison chant; this alternation becomes the principal formal structure. The second novelty is within the polyphony itself: The upper, “melody” part becomes flexible and semi-improvisatory, seeming to reach climaxes almost accidentally.

Léonin’s organum looks and sounds much like chant superimposed on drone, something like unornamented bagpipe music. His descant is much different. Here the lower part moves more quickly, though in equally measured tones; the upper voice moves even faster now in a distinctly rhythmic pattern, almost as if dancing after swaying in the chant of the organum. When combined with organum in this way, the descant sections were called clausulae; they contrasted with the organum sections also in reaching distinct and definite final cadences.

Pérotin continued, expanded, and also transcended these practices. He adopted the basic formal style invented by Léonin but regularized it by establishing more precise rhythms and using clausulae more frequently. The lower part of the organum becomes less dronelike, more rhythmically regular and more melodic. In this respect Pérotin laid the foundation for the later thirteenth century motet, which became the major musical form of the succeeding three centuries. More important, he developed organum in a completely different way by adding first a third and then a fourth voice, creating an entirely new texture in music.

In terms of linear structure, Pérotin’s triple and quadruple organum resemble Léonin’ both have alternating sections of slower, more sustained and faster, more rhythmic material, though Pérotin is always more rhythmic and melodic. Yet the difference in horizontal structure, or overlayering, is almost breathtaking. The upper voices dance, intertwine, cross, and resolve over the moving bottom line. Each line is distinct, moving on its own, but all play against the others. Something completely new happens in the process. The accepted intervals for voice doubling in organum were octaves, fifths, and (rarely) fourths. One of the perhaps unexpected results of multiplying upper voices is the regular emergence of thirds; the combination produces for the first time in Western music what sounds like a sequence of chords. These do not yet work together to form a chordal progression to resolution, but they establish the basis for this later formulation. Pérotin himself is still working with the tonal modes of medieval plainsong, so this kind of progression is unthinkable in his work, but the germ of the idea is there.

This foreshadowing is only part of his glory. Another part resides in the new sounds he creates. His music creates shifting webs of sonority and dissonance, in which the voices weave around one another in an unfolding maze centered on the stable lower part, much like mists floating above a mountain valley. A completely different source of beauty arises from Pérotin’s practice of reflecting the vowel patterns of the text in the melodies and rhythms to which he sets them. In this he anticipates the text imaging of later composers, though few of them match him in subtlety and delicacy.

Pérotin also invented and popularized another, simpler polyphonic form known as conductus. Conductus seems to have originated in separating clausulae from organum and substituting secular (though still sacred) verses for the original hymn and sequence texts. These new verses were then reset so that all voices moved in nearly equal rhythms. This music, written for two, three, or four voices within a fairly restricted range, rested on cadences of fifths and unisons; since thirds occurred frequently and instrumental doublings were common, the effect was quasichordal, prefiguring later harmonic hymn settings. This type, known as conductus style, was extended to other forms, including completely secular ones.

Compared to Léonin’s clausulae, conductus became a considerably expanded form; unlike it, the texts for conductus were commonly set syllabically. Eventually conductus even absorbed certain clausulae which proved easily detachable from organum and used them as contrasting melismas, textless and rhythmically varied, within its own structure. These contrasting passages called caudae gave conductus a structure parallel to that of organum, though the texts were treated quite distinctly.

One further difference had a major effect on the future of music: Pérotin began composing a new melody for the lower part rather than adopting an ecclesiastical chant. Thus he became the first composer to devise both the melodic and the harmonic aspects of polyphonic compositions.

Significance

Pérotin’s final achievement was in laying the foundations of the motet, linked earlier to his practice in organum. In fact, his work in both organum and conductus foreshadowed and tended toward the motet; it is not at all surprising that the motet should supersede both in the history of music. No existing motets have been ascribed to Pérotin, but this lack should not be allowed to obscure his significance in this regard. In that preprint age, the identification of composers in manuscripts was haphazard and casual; it is not incidental that the best-known composer until the sixteenth century is Anonymous. Further, secular music was then far from the serious business it later became. For centuries to come a composer would be identified primarily by his religious and liturgical work. Pérotin can be singled out as the most prolific composer of descant clausulae of the early thirteenth century, and these clausulae are barely distinguishable from motets. Thus he is the true father of motets, and hence of formal Western music.

He is equally important for ecclesiastical music. His organum, for example, established the prevailing manner of presenting the Mass for the following 150 years in itself a remarkable achievement. Even more remarkable is the recognition that when Guillaume de Machaut introduced innovations in Mass settings, the musical form he used was still the organum of Pérotin. Yet beyond that fact lies Pérotin’s almost miraculous anticipation of chordal harmony, since Western music eventually chose to focus almost exclusively on that as a medium of musical expressiveness. In fact, since he worked long before Western composers decided to concentrate on the major-minor axis of tonality, his modal quasichords explore harmonic areas left inaccessible to composers before the twentieth century. Listening to him opens the ear to untrodden regions of sound.

Bibliography

Caldwell, John. Medieval Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. This study attempts to synthesize reconstructions of Pérotin’s music. Includes an extensive bibliography.

Grout, Donald Jay, and Claude V. Palisca. A History of Western Music. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2001. An excellent attempt to place Pérotin in the evolution of Western music. Includes extensive examples and bibliography.

LaRue, Jan, ed. Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966. Contains much information about the nature and forms of medieval music and its background and includes an excellent biographical sketch.

Sanders, Ernest H. French and English Polyphony of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: Style and Notation. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1998. A study that focuses on musical polyphony and the motet in Pérotin’s time and considers the dating of Pérotin’s works.

Treitler, Leo. With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How It Was Made. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. A collection surveying the history of vocal music and its literary aspects in the Middle Ages. Discusses the organum of Notre Dame, the structure of the alleluia, the chant, the history of music writing, music and poetry, and more. Includes a bibliography and index.

Waite, William G. The Rhythm of Twelfth-Century Polyphony: Its Theory and Practice. 1954. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973. Much more than the title suggests, this work is primarily an attempt to decipher medieval manuscript musical notation in order to reconstruct actual musical practice. Contains detailed analyses of the various forms practiced by Pérotin.