¿Qué pasa cuando dejamos de cantar todos lo mismo?

We ask ourselves

• If a thousand people sing the same tune, how many things are you hearing?
• Why does this music sound old before anyone gives you a date?
• Who paid somebody to sing, eight hundred years ago?
• How did a musician live if the church was not the employer?
• If almost nobody could read, what is the point of writing music down?
• How many voices can you follow at once before you lose them?

Don't answer yet. We come back to these at the end.

The fragment

Before any recording, you make the polyphony yourselves. Three steps, and the order matters.

One: everyone the same. The whole class sings the first phrase of Frère Jacques in unison, slowly. There may be thirty of you, but only one thing is happening.

Two: out of step. Half the class starts again from the top exactly when the other half finishes the first phrase. Nobody changed the tune, yet clashes and meeting points appear that nobody sang. They come from the delay alone.

Three: a fifth apart. Now with no delay. The high group sings do – re – mi – re – do. At the same time the low group sings fa – sol – la – sol – fa, starting underneath. Both lines rise and fall identically, always five steps apart. It sounds hollow, wide and slightly metallic. That is the ninth-century recipe, exactly.

Now listen to Rex caeli, Domine maris, all of it, with nobody talking over it. Then Viderunt omnes, also complete. Save your faces for the end.

What changed

Before naming anything: describe in your own words what happened in step one and what happened in step three. Odd answers are fine. The names come out of them.

When you all sing the same thing, however many of you there are, there is one single line. When the low group sings different notes but in the same rhythm, there are several notes and one block moving as a whole. And when you enter out of step, each group goes its own way and still fits: there are several independent lines. Those three ways of filling the sound are called texture, and they have names: monody, homophony and polyphony.

Texture is not decoration. It decides how much you can follow. One melody can be sung by anyone on first hearing; four independent lines need somebody to have written them down and people trained to read them. So a change of texture drags behind it a change in who gets to make music, and in what it costs.

The first place this trick appears in writing is a ninth-century treatise called Musica enchiriadis. The oldest surviving copy is from the tenth century. The recipe you just performed is in it: the same melody doubled a fourth, a fifth or an octave away. It was called organum, and for two hundred years it was that and little else.

Musica enchiriadis, copia del siglo X. Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Msc.Var.1, fol. 57r. Autor desconocido, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

The big jump happens in Paris, at Notre-Dame cathedral, roughly between 1160 and 1250. Two names survive, Léonin and Pérotin, and we know them because an anonymous English student wrote them down a century later. What they did was stretch: the old melody stays underneath holding each syllable for a very long time, and two or three new voices run on top.

Here is the fact that explains what it was for. In 1198 and 1199 the bishop of Paris, Odo de Sully, banned the Feast of Fools — a costumed romp inside the cathedral — and ordered music in three and four voices in its place. Polyphony was not born of an artistic itch: it was commissioned to replace a party somebody wanted stopped. Viderunt omnes belongs to Christmas 1198 and Sederunt principes to St Stephen's Day 1199.

The next change is not about voices, it is about the clock. Around 1320 new treatises appear, and one of them, attributed to Philippe de Vitry (1291–1361), gives the period its name: Ars nova. What they bring is notation able to write ever shorter values, and with it rhythms that could not be fixed on paper before. Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377) used that tool to write the Messe de Nostre Dame, in four voices, before 1365: the earliest complete Mass Ordinary attributable to one identified composer.

Hard facts: Musica enchiriadis, ninth century. Notre-Dame, c. 1160–1250, up to four voices. Ars nova, treatises around 1320. Machaut, four-voice Mass before 1365.

The same device elsewhere

Several independent lines at once is neither a medieval nor a European invention. Hear these three back to back and don't rank them.

• La Gozadera, Gente de Zona (2015) — the harmony never moves. What moves is that bass, percussion and keyboards each go their own way and still lock together. The bass dodges the strong beat on purpose.
• Bach's Fugue in G minor (BWV 578) — one theme enters alone. When the second voice starts it, the first carries on with something else. That is step two of the fragment, built by a professional.
• Aka polyphony, in Central Africa — several people sing different crossing lines, with no score and no conductor. It has worked that way far longer than any cathedral has stood.

None depends on the others. All three solve the same problem: making more than one thing sound at once without it turning into noise.

And here at home?

In the Iberian peninsula polyphony arrives early and is well documented. The Codex Calixtinus of Santiago cathedral, copied around 1140–1181, carries an appendix of 22 polyphonic pieces. One of them, Congaudeant catholici, is cited as the only known three-voice work of the entire twelfth century — although the third voice is in red ink and was probably added later. The codex was stolen on 5 July 2011 and recovered on 4 July 2012.

Outside the church other people gave the orders. The troubadour composed; the juglar performed and was paid by the job, in coin, clothing or food. And in Aragón the troubadour could be the king himself: Alfonso II, born in Huesca in 1157 and dead in Perpignan in 1196, wrote poetry in Occitan and kept Giraut de Bornelh, Peire Vidal and Arnaut Daniel at his court. His reign, and his son Pedro's, coincide with the high point of troubadour poetry.

Cantigas de Santa María, Códice de los músicos (El Escorial, b.I.2), fol. 162r, siglo XIII. Autor desconocido, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

The visual evidence is the Cantigas de Santa María, 417 pieces gathered between 1270 and 1282 at the court of Alfonso X, written in Galician-Portuguese. The Códice Rico carries 1,255 miniatures and the Codex of the musicians 40. The instruments are drawn there: bowed vielles, citoles, lutes. This is not a modern reconstruction: it is thirteenth-century people drawing the musicians in front of them.

Before all that, in Zaragoza. Avempace, born there around 1095 and dead in Fez in 1139, served as vizier around 1115–1117 and wrote a treatise on melodies that has not survived. A composition is attributed to him, but the attribution is disputed and that is worth saying. From those same centuries come the jarchas, Romance verses closing poems written in Arabic or Hebrew: the oldest surviving lyric in a Romance language of Europe starts in the mid-eleventh century, and it is from here.

And something is still alive. In the Aragonese Pyrenees — Yebra de Basa, Jaca, Aragüés del Puerto, Jasa — people play the chiflo and chicotén: the right hand plays the melody on a three-holed pipe while the left strikes a string psaltery. One person, two lines at once. Psalteries of that kind are drawn in the Cantigas, and here they were never abandoned.

Classroom activities

• While the Musica enchiriadis organum plays: raise a hand the moment you hear two rather than one. Afterwards count how many of you raised it in the same place.

• While Viderunt omnes plays: half the class follows only the lowest voice with a finger on the desk, marking each time it changes note. It will hardly change at all. The other half counts how many separate voices they can follow before losing them.

• Sing: go back to step two of the fragment and add a third group. With three staggered entries you can no longer wing it: somebody has to say when each one comes in. That somebody is the problem Notre-Dame solved.

• While the cantiga plays: write down every instrument you think you recognise. Then open the image from the Codex of the musicians and find it drawn.

• Analyse: play We Will Rock You and La Gozadera back to back and classify each one. One is pure monody — everyone singing the same thing — and the other is textbook polyphony. The argument is about what sits in between.

Key vocabulary

• Texture — textura: cuántas líneas suenan a la vez y cómo se relacionan
• Monody — monodia: una sola línea melódica
• Homophony — homofonía: varias voces moviéndose con el mismo ritmo, como un bloque
• Polyphony — polifonía: varias líneas independientes a la vez
• Organum — organum: la primera polifonía escrita de Europa, por duplicación a la cuarta, quinta u octava

Resources

The songs in this unit are in the library, each with its own article, full-band chart and tab: We Will Rock You, La Gozadera, Saturn.

Songs from the library to classify by texture, each with its own article and tab: We Will Rock You (monody: everyone singing the same thing in unison), Saturn (one voice in front, an arpeggio holding it up underneath), La Gozadera (bass, percussion and keyboards, each going its own way).

The oldest written organum — Rex caeli, Domine maris, from the Musica enchiriadis.

Four voices at Notre-Dame — Viderunt omnes, attributed to Pérotin, by The Hilliard Ensemble.

Polyphony in Spain — Congaudeant catholici, from the Codex Calixtinus, by the monks of the Monastery of Silos.

Ars nova, with the original notation on screen — Kyrie from Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame, by Cappella Romana.

Outside the church — Santa María, strela do día, cantiga 100 of Alfonso X, by Eduardo Paniagua.

A troubadour song — Kalenda maya, by Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, performed by the Martin Best Mediaeval Ensemble.

The same device, three centuries later — Bach's Fugue in G minor BWV 578, by the Netherlands Bach Society.

The same device, with no score — Aka polyphony, in Central Africa.

Two lines and one musician, in Aragón — a gathering of chiflo and salterio players in Lasaosa, Huesca, June 2015.