Datable “Notre Dame” Conductus: New Historical Observations on Style and Technique

Abstract

One of the greatest obstacles to histories of earlier medieval music lies in the relative absence of concrete historical testimony for extant compositions. Information pertaining to the names, life spans, and working records of composers is rare, dates for the creation or performance of pieces are exceptional, and critical judgments of specific works from contemporaries almost nonexistent. As a result, detailed explanations of how a medieval musical genre may have originated or developed during an era of cultivation can pose special challenges to historians of the period. Scholars may be forced to paint impressionistic or monolithic landscapes that may obscure decades or even centuries of intense artistic transformation. Typically they have to reason from manuscript sources or theoretical testimony produced much later than the compositions they seek to understand, or they may be compelled to draw conclusions from teleological assumptions of how a particular genre unfolded over time. Faced with such impediments, it would seem that investigators would wish to seize upon and exhaust any measure of data able to illuminate the history of medieval music, if only fractionally. Such resources, though, have not always been exploited as fully as they deserve. An example of such an oversight applies to at least thirty-one conductus preserved among the four main manuscript sources now associated with the music ofthe Notre Dame school: F, WI, W2, and Ma.l Thanks to references in their lyrics to contemporaneous historical events, the texts of these pieces can be dated with relative security either to a specific year or within a brief time span. Their subjects are manifold: they mourn the deaths of kings or celebrate their coronations; they chastise popes for corruption and emperors for cowardice; they urge the faithful to take up a crusade, and then just as easily berate them for the loss of holy relics.2 But whatever their intent, this repertory of datable conductus represents a potentially precious sample of changing musical tastes within the total corpus of 275 such works preserved among the four sources. Since other types of hard data concerning the historical development and aesthetic preferences of Notre Dame music are difficult to come by, a comparison of the texts and music of these datable pieces presents an opportunity to evaluate the stylistic development of the conductus from approximately