The Beginnings of Western Music: Léonin and Notre Dame

Western music began with medieval chants. Antiphonary with Gregorian chants. Georges Jansoone/CC BY 2.5

Today, most people are familiar with Latin chant because of the way it is inserted into film scores, especially in moments of fear. In the “Lord of the Rings” films, the chanting signals the arrival of the Nazgul, and the viewer can expect to see riders in black chasing Frodo through the woods.

But Gregorian chant used to be associated with praise and joy rather than horror. It was also much more complex than its modern adaptations which, by repeating one or two phrases over and over, are designed to elicit a simple emotional response from an audience. Given that plainchant has no instrumental accompaniment and is monophonic—that is, all the voices sing only one line of melody—this may seem surprising.

When you think about it, though, there are a lot of different ways to sing one melody. In the past, sometimes the choir sang together, sometimes in alternating halves. At other times, singing was “responsive,” involving a soloist alternating with a choir. A sung syllable might correspond with one note or be drawn out over many notes. This latter style is known as “melisma”; think of monks performing a religious rite somewhat in the manner of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.”

A brief excerpt from Handel's "For Unto Us a Child is Born" which uses melisma. Public Domain

Throughout the early Middle Ages, anonymity in composition remained the general rule. Only a few names have come down to us. One of these was Nokter Balbulus (the “Babbler” or “Stammerer”). This Benedictine monk came up with a written method to help singers memorize long melismas that make Whitney Houston’s vocal runs seem rather primitive by comparison.

Even given plainchant’s surprising complexity, Christian music remained melodically simple for the first thousand years of its existence. But this started to change in the second millennium.

An Unknown Genius

Burkholder and Palisca describe the development of polyphony as “one of the most glorious accomplishments of the Middle Ages” in their book, the “Norton Anthology of Western Music.” As it happens, there are two names associated with polyphony. The first is “Magister Leoninus,” or Master Léonin. He is known only from one 13th-century document, “Anonymous IV”—so named because it was the fourth anonymous treatise in an antiquarian’s collection. The name refers to both the treatise and its indistinguishable author, an Englishman who studied at the University of Paris.

Notker the Stammler, 10th century, from a medieval manuscript. Public Domain

Anonymous IV tells us that Léonin compiled a “Magnus liber organi,” or Great Book of Polyphony. While this book itself has not survived, the compositions that Anonymous IV says it contained were recorded in several later manuscripts. But why should anyone care about the otherwise unknown author of a lost book, referenced only in a single manuscript written by an anonymous music theorist?

We should care because he was a very big deal. This “Great Book” and its composer represent the beginnings of Western music as it is familiar to us today.

Who Was Léonin?

This French composer flourished from around 1150 to 1200. Anonymous IV’s reference to him as “master” suggests that he was one of the first graduates of the University of Paris. He then served in the cathedral of Saint Etienne that was demolished to make way for the construction of Notre Dame.

Léonin’s innovations were simple yet profound. He developed what is known as the style of “organum”: basic polyphony that added another independent voice to the solo section of a responsive hymn. His Great Book supposedly recorded an early form of notation for coordinating parts. These “rhythmic modes” involved combining two basic note types, the “breve” and the “longa,” (corresponding to our double and quadruple whole notes). The two notes were combined in six ways, corresponding to the basic poetic feet used in traditional verse: the iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapest, spondee, and pyrrhic.

A bar from J.S. Bach's "Fugue No.17 in A flat", BWV 862, from Das Wohltemperierte Clavier (Part I), a famous example of contrapuntal polyphony. Public Domain

We don’t know how many of Léonin’s innovations were his own, or how much he owed to his nameless predecessors. It’s probably a mix: He sat at a nexus point where oral tradition was shifting to writing. Composers committed to paper practices that were already being passed down through memorized habits. In her book “Music Through Sources and Documents,” author Ruth Halle Rowen emphasizes Anonymous IV’s awareness of the changing trends. The nameless author even hints at this when he writes: “For a long time people learned by word of mouth,” and “they taught others saying, ‘Listen and remember this as you sing.'”

Though the terms and notations of this period are mostly no longer in general use, they are the direct ancestors of today’s musical techniques. Léonin’s successor, whom Anonymous IV calls “Perotinus le Grand,” or “Pérotin the Great,” took his master’s developments further, adding parts for three and four voices.

Music and Architecture

Both Léonin and Pérotin are closely associated with Notre Dame de Paris, where they worked for decades. About their day-to-day lives, we can only speculate. Anonymous IV says even less about Pérotin than Léonin, but their functions seem to have been both priestly and musical in nature. Anonymous IV tells us that Léonin was an excellent “organista,” a word which could mean either a singer or composer of organum. Was he a choir member? A music director? A teacher? He may have been all of these things.

In an age when skyscrapers can be built in a matter of months, it staggers the mind to conceive of a building project that spans centuries. Léonin would have witnessed Notre Dame’s foundations being set in 1163, the flying buttresses erected in 1180, and the high altar consecrated in 1182. It seems impossible that he would not have been inspired by what would become the tallest inhabitable building at the time. Did he marvel at how it reached into the sky and long to do the same for the world of melody?

Pérotin, one of the few composers of Ars antiqua who is known by name, composed this Alleluia nativitas in the third rhythmic mode. Public Domain

Whatever their specific thoughts, Léonin and Pérotin’s creativity mirrored the elaborate architectural construction going on around them. In many respects, they are to Western music what Homer is to Western literature. Like Notre Dame’s cornerstone, their names became the foundation for all who built upon them.

Léonin, no doubt, would have been dazzled by the complex forms of polyphony that exploded in the following centuries, much as he would have been struck with wonder at the rose windows that he never lived to see installed. The more distant development of the symphony, like the spire that eventually capped his beloved cathedral, was scarcely to be imagined.

‘Modern’ Medieval Chant?

Few boom boxes today are thumping to the rhythmic modes of Léonin and Pérotin. Attempts have been made, however, to revive medieval chant in modern times. Since the structure of modern vernacular languages makes it awkward to apply the same rules of verbalization, successful efforts are a living throwback to a dead language.

Anonymous 4. roanokecollege/CC BY 2.0

One of the most notable examples of these contemporary compositions is Richard Einhorn’s “Voices of Light,” an opera written in Latin and Medieval French that was inspired by Carl Theodor Dryer’s 1928 silent film, “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” A 1995 album of the opera, which became an international bestseller, was recorded by an all-female a cappella quartet called, appropriately, Anonymous 4. Though this celebrated ensemble updated the roman numeral, the reference is explicit. The echoes of past centuries are everywhere.

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