Polyphony in Medieval Paris: The Art of Composing with Plainchant, by Catherine A. Bradley

Abstract

The most effective and memorable academic books raise tantalizing questions, unsettle previous assumptions, spark discussion, and serve as a launchpad for further scholarly endeavors. Such is the case with Catherine A. Bradley’s first monograph, Polyphony in Medieval Paris: The Art of Composing with Plainchant. I intentionally call attention to the fact that this is Bradley’s first monograph, as there will undoubtedly be others; her extensive knowledge of an intimidatingly vast amount of complex material spanning an entire century becomes immediately apparent when reading any one of the book’s chapters. The monograph firmly establishes Bradley as an authoritative figure in the study of thirteenth-century continental polyphony.Polyphony in Medieval Paris presents a series of seven case studies. One of the book’s many virtues is that any one of these case studies, each featuring meticulously annotated musical examples and richly informative tables, can be read independently without having to rely on material presented elsewhere in the monograph, making the volume particularly suitable for assigned readings in upper-level undergraduate or graduate seminars. At the same time, the chapters taken together form a cohesive unit: cross-references abound, and the case studies are all unified in several ways, most obviously—and prominently—in their focus on the borrowing, reuse, and adaptation of preexistent melodic material in thirteenth-century polyphony. And it is primarily through this examination of composers’ use of preexistent material that Bradley provides a variety of analytical approaches useful for examining organa, clausulae, and thirteenth-century motets, while at the same time expertly unsettling many previously established historiographical narratives.Bradley lays out her approach to analysis in the volume’s introduction: “This book gives serious consideration to the primarily musical and compositional concerns that have previously been overshadowed by interests in the philological, poetic, and polytextual characteristics of thirteenth-century polyphony” (p. 2, my emphasis). In responding to the tremendous variety of questions and issues raised by the music itself, she does not advocate for just one analytical approach, but instead explains how her analyses “are tailored to the nature of the material at hand, responding to features of a particular work or group of works” (p. 8). Through this variety of approaches, she achieves one of the monograph’s primary goals—an advancement of a less “totalising conceptualisation of this repertoire” (p. 9)—and at the same time provides the reader with an arsenal of analytical tools useful for the analysis of thirteenth-century polyphony. This music-analytic mindset, itself distinctive for a book-length study on thirteenth-century polyphony, is doubly valuable, in that its emphasis on compositional process can lead to both aesthetic and historical understanding for the reader.In chapter 1, Bradley focuses on a large group of related motets, organa, and a mini clausula, which all employ various portions of the gradual “Propter veritatem.” Countering the notion that preexistent plainchant was adopted as a fixed object for use in polyphony, she demonstrates several instances in which tenors were altered at their point of polyphonization. Significantly, it is sometimes the altered tenor instead of the original plainchant that is used as the basis of other polyphony. Bradley turns in chapter 2 to an examination of the unusual corpus of so-called “mini” clausulae, a collection of 154 short polyphonic excerpts that occupy fewer than seven folios of F (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 29.1). She argues that these brief snippets likely come from a tradition of organum duplum that is not preserved as part of the Magnus liber organi, but that instead represents the type of polyphony that may have been primarily orally transmitted and more widely performed than the “almost ideal and monumental musical repertoire” preserved in the Magnus liber (p. 80). This enticing proposition, combined with her description of the sudden appearance of the mini clausulae in F as “visually disorientating” (p. 49), piques the reader’s interest, and indeed serves as a catalyst for further scholarly inquiry: one wants not to simply imagine how 154 tiny pieces might fit on fewer than seven folios but to see them, and further, to know even more about how these little gems “work.” Thankfully, the images for F are now online.1 A perusal of these seven folios while reading the chapter augments Bradley’s argument, and inspires the reader (at least this one) to further investigate the other mini clausulae beyond the several that she discusses in the chapter.A core theme of the monograph is the unsettling of commonly held scholarly narratives. For the reader already familiar with Bradley’s impressive output of previously published articles and book chapters, her upsetting of the traditional clausula-to-motet trajectory will not come as a surprise. Naturally, she does not argue exclusively for a motet-to-clausula pathway, advocating instead for an “openness to local reversals of the conventional clausula-before-motet chronology” (p. 83). Accordingly, and to set the stage in this regard, in chapter 3 she discusses two examples of the more usual clausula-to-motet trajectory. Through an examination of the clausulae Reg[nat] 6 and Reg[nat] 8 and their corresponding motets, Deus omnium / REG[NAT] and Infidelem populum / REG[NAT], Bradley presents two (exceptional) cases in which the motets possess regular poetic structures, countering the claim that such regularity was impossible to achieve in motets derived from clausulae. But even for motets with irregular text structures—which indeed constitute a large proportion of the clausula-to-motet repertoire—she argues that irregularity was a deliberate aesthetic choice by motet creators, not a “practical necessity” (p. 107). Bradley also shows that seemingly insignificant variants between clausula and motet are in fact important, and that these variants can not only shed light on chronological questions but also point to deliberate compositional choices. Particularly illuminating in this chapter is her discussion of color, a concept invoked by both John of Garland in De mensurabili musica and Walter of Odington in De speculatione musicae. Noting the theorists’ connection of color with dissonance in her discussion of the relationship between melodic repetition and harmonic consonance/dissonance, she illustrates specific cases in which a dissonance is not a scribal error but rather a deliberate aesthetic choice on the part of the composer.In chapter 4, Bradley addresses the question of how refrains come to be present in clausulae. By integrating Jennifer Saltzstein’s useful categorization of refrain types,2 she argues that the eleven clausulae with intertextual refrains are in fact transcriptions of vernacular motets, and thus the clausulae themselves are not the sources of the refrains. Of course, in so doing, she provides concrete examples that counter the usual clausula-to-motet narrative. She also provides a table that lists every Magnus liber clausula that contains a refrain; the table also lists each related motet, the type of refrain, the vdB refrain number when present, and whether there are notational irregularities—a rich resource indeed. Refrains likewise feature prominently in chapter 5, where Bradley turns to two motets that both begin and end with a refrain, Ne m’oubliez mie / DOMINO and Nus ne se doit / AUDI FILIA; interestingly, however, instead of the arrangement whereby a single refrain is split between the beginning and ending of a motet, in these two motets different refrains are used as bookends. She deftly shows how the refrains are instrumental in the crafting of each motet’s music and text, and argues convincingly that even though those of Nus ne se doit are unique (that is, they are not quoted elsewhere), they still behave as refrains, and thus ought to be considered as such.In chapter 6, Bradley focuses on Un chant renvoisie / DECANTATUR, a hagiographical motet relating to St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and one of the rare cases in which the circumstances surrounding a motet’s network of quoted musical and textual materials are firmly known. The only other motet with the same tenor melody, Amis, vostre demoree, has not been previously associated with St. Elizabeth, partly on account of the mislabeling of the tenor in its source manuscript. In arguing that the DECANTATUR tenor (“decantare” = to sing) can be interpreted as a cue of sorts that evokes the act of singing as well as St. Elizabeth’s life, Bradley provides a splendid reading of Amis, vostre demoree in the liturgical context of its plainchant quotation. Finally, chapter 7 considers a family of works that was frequently recopied throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, several related motets and a clausula that use the IOHANNE tenor. Not only does she demonstrate a “fundamental fluidity” in this network of pieces (p. 244)—that is, the motets do not necessarily derive from the clausula, and the motet with the Latin upper voice does not represent the earliest motet of the group (thus undermining the notion that Latin motets must predate their French counterparts)—but she also shows how specific melodic, formal, and textual features can help to explain why the musical fabric of these IOHANNE motets is so “memorable” and “aurally unforgettable” (p. 212).Although at first glance the book may seem to be directed exclusively to the specialist of thirteenth-century polyphony, Bradley takes great care to systematically walk the reader through a vast array of musical and textual relationships. The sometimes dense analytical discussion should not deter a nonspecialist interested in early polyphony. Each chapter is set up beautifully, its arguments clearly outlined in advance, and following Bradley’s skillfully articulated analyses, each is provided with an extensive, helpful “Conclusions” section.Polyphony in Medieval Paris represents the first book-length study to analyze and scrutinize the musical fabric of thirteenth-century polyphony in such depth and detail, and in so doing it complicates, upsets, and in some instances unquestionably overturns numerous scholarly preconceptions. To be sure, other crucial aspects of thirteenth-century polyphony have been the focus of previous monographs, such as Mark Everist’s influential French Motets in the Thirteenth Century and Sylvia Huot’s groundbreaking Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet.3 Yet as I was reading Bradley’s monograph, a different book often came to mind, one from the same Music in Context series: Anna Zayaruznaya’s The Monstrous New Art, published in 2015.4 Although it focuses on the later, often decidedly different fourteenth-century motet, there are indeed similarities between the two books. Not only do both offer fresh approaches to the music at hand, but both employ similar logic in the selection of the musical material to be examined. In the opening pages of Polyphony in Medieval Paris, Bradley explicitly states that “the book’s musical objects of study have been selected for their potential to unsettle scholarly preconceptions about the repertoire at large” (p. 2). And in her own review of Zayaruznaya’s book for this Journal, Bradley explained how The Monstrous New Art “focuses on motets selected for their strangeness, using these ‘peaks and outliers’ to reflect on generic norms,” calling Zayaruznaya’s approach “profoundly refreshing.”5 In keeping with the themes of borrowing, reusing, and adapting, so frequently enacted in medieval polyphony—and indeed these themes permeate Bradley’s book—I conclude by borrowing Bradley’s own words, words she used to describe someone else’s monograph and that will now be reused here, in a later issue of the same journal, though adapted to reflect not just Bradley’s approach but her entire monograph: Polyphony in Medieval Paris, with its scrupulous attention to musical details of thirteenth-century polyphony, is, indeed, profoundly refreshing.