The Necessity and Controversy of Early Organum
The Necessity and Controversy of Early Organum
A transition from plainchant to polyphony
Dear readers,
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In Christ,
The Heavenly Chant editors
Organum was a transitionary musical style between plainchant and polyphony in which composers experimented with the addition of melodic lines to plainchant melodies. While in plainchant there may be more than one vocalist singing the melody, they sang with one ‘voice.’ This addition of melodic lines to plainchant is called organum. And it was this addition of more than one ‘voice,’ or melodic line which marked the early steps of plainchant’s “progression” toward polyphony.
The simplest example of the use of two voices or melodic lines is the drone. A style with which many who listen to chant are familiar. In this style of organum, one of the melodic lines is sustained at a single pitch while the second melodic line fluctuates. This creates an interaction between the two voices which gives organum a more complex texture than we find in plainchant. Early organum has various other styles such as the parallel and oblique styles. But for our purposes, it is enough to note that organum is marked by the use of multiple melodic lines.
The two most famous composers of early organum come from the school of Notre Dame: Léonin and Pérotin. Their musical innovations moved composition closer to the polyphonic compositions we come to see later on in composers like Palestrina.
Léonin
Pérotin
Early organum lacks the smoothness and orderliness we find later with a more structured polyphony. During any transitionary period, where new elements are incorporated into old, there is a bit of imbalance before a kind of equilibrium is reached.
As with any period of innovation, composers became a bit overzealous in their attempts to write this style of music. Some criticisms were brought against its later composers, especially those of the Ars Nova school by Pope John XXII. He critiques them in the following way in his decree Docta Sanctorum:
“…some disciples of a new school, while they apply themselves to measuring time, they attempt to invent their own melodies with new notes instead of choosing to sing the ancient ones, ecclesiastical canticles are sung in semi-breves and minims, are riddled with grace notes. For they sunder the melodies with hockets, loosen them with descants, trample them sometimes with three-part polyphonies and motets in the vernacular to such a degree that, now and then, they despise the fundamentals of the Antiphonary and the Gradual, ignore the foundation upon which they are building, disregard the modes, which they do not reckon, but which rather they confuse, when, owing to the multitude of these very notes, the modest ascents and the moderate descents of plainchant, by which the modes themselves are distinguished from one another, are obfuscated. For they run, and they rest not; they fill their ears with impertinence, and they relieve them not; they imitate with gestures that which they have mustered, by which gestures devotion that is to be desired is contemned, and lasciviousness that is to be shunned is made manifest. Boethius himself certainly has not spoken in vain: A lascivious mind takes pleasure in the more lascivious modes or is often softened and moved upon hearing them.”1
One of the issues with such extravagent compositions is that they obscure the text, which, as Pope Saint Pius X stated in Tra Le Sollecitudini, should be preeminent. Sacred music’s “principal office,” he says, “is to clothe with suitable melody the liturgical text proposed for the understanding of the faithful, its proper aim is to add greater efficacy to the text.”
While some organum pieces fit the criticisms of Pope John XXII, there are many others which maintain the “modest gravity” and “mild modulation” he stated should accompany reverent liturgical music. The following seems to me to be one such piece:
Translation taken from Cappella Gregoriana Sanctæ Cæciliæ olim Xicatunensis