Musical Syntax in the Middle Ages: Background to an Aesthetic Problem

Author(s): Leo Treitler

Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Autumn - Winter, 1965), pp. 75-85
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
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 MUSICAL SYNTAX IN THE MIDDLE AGES:
BACKGROUND TO AN AESTHETIC PROBLEM

LEO TREITLER

In 1910 Heinrich Schenker sang this elegy: "We

nessing a Herculanum and Pompeii for music. R
musical culture, destroyed is the very tone mate
foundation of music which the artists themselves hav
ioned, unfettered by the limitations of the overto
The most dream-like and artful of the arts, that w
fered the greatest birth pains and which was gran
of all, the youngest of all the arts, Music, is no m

S H E N K E R M O UR N E D HERE the passing of the

music of Wagner and his followers. It was not the f
which a challenge to musical tradition was accomp
proclamations of a "new art" or "music of the future"
death knells, on the other. Nor was it the last. Twice
half-century since 1910, composers have announced a
ics have spoken of the most fundamental upheaval in
music. It appears to be a quality shared by these mom
that each time it is the very essence of our musical tra
to be changed, or challenged. But the accumulated
each time something has remained for the next attack
impression that we are indeed approaching more a
most fundamental.
The latest assault upon musical tradition is said to come from two di-
rections at once: from composers of "totally organized" music, and from
composers whose aim it is to check the listener's efforts to hear organ-
ized structures-either by deriving the order of musical events from
extra-musical, "random" sources, or by leaving the order for the per-
former to determine, usually in spur-of-the-moment decisions during
performance. While these practices seem to lie at opposite poles, they
are thought, in the end, to raise the same questions. The composer of

1 Heinrich Schenker, Neue Musikalische Theorien und Phantasien, Bd. 2: Kontrapunkt (Stuttgart
and Berlin, 1910), p. viii.

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 PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC

random music abandons control of musical relati

of totally organized music is said to work to the sam
listener is concerned, for the relationships in his m
to elude the senses. Both seem to deny necessiti
taken to be essentials of the nature of music.2
Explicitly or otherwise, we have assumed that we perceive music as
moments through time, and we have required of each work of music
that those moments be made, in some sense, to belong together. We
have required, further, that the moments of a work of music be made to
follow and, hence, that their order be fixed, one from the other, and that
they have direction. At various times in the past composers have con-
sidered it a great technical achievement to manage an order that is
reversible in time, but it is an achievement only if we believe in music's
natural irreversibility.
When music has met these demands, we have been able to interpret
one moment as motivation for another, or to put it the other way about,
the second as consequence of the first. We have been able to isolate in
the grammar of melodic, harmonic, temporal, textural, and timbral
organization processes that lead the music from possibilities through
probabilities to necessities. In short, we have been able to speak of a
musical syntax. It is only against the background of a musical syntax

2 Leonard Meyer has examined the philosophical position of the avant-garde in "The End
of the Renaissance?," Hudson Review, xvI (1963), 169-86. The present study owes much to
that exposition.
I cannot entirely agree with the oft-repeated view that total serialism, random compo-
sitional procedures, and the performance of what we may call "variable music" should all be
thought to play into a single undifferentiated aesthetic because the naive listener-naive,
that is, only in the sense that he has not studied the score-is unable to tell one from the
other. Do we consider it wasteful pedantry when a scholar discovers the model for a parody
mass that the naive listener would not have distinguished from a work that has no models?
or when another observes that this motet of Guillaume de Machaut is isorhythmic but that
one is not, though, again, the naive listener cannot tell the difference? No more than we
would argue that comments about the serial aspects of one work of a contemporary com-
poser have no relevance because the naive listener is unable to distinguish that work from
another by the same composer which is not based on a tone row. What is involved here is a
traditional failure to observe the difference between compositional techniques and musical
style. Statements about parody technique, isorhythm, and row manipulations are not state-
ments about musical style-though they are regularly passed off as such-but it is the busi-
ness of the scholar to deal in such statements. It is no more than honest to admit that music
has always been, in some measure, a mode of discourse among specialists. It has rarely been
the case that all the composer's secrets have been directly whispered into the naive listener's
ear. Loss of innocence has come for the latter through the use of his eyes as well. If this seems to
be more the case today, when composers discuss one another's music without having heard
it, the change is only one of degree. What interests them is compositional technique, and the
naive listener be hanged. It is one thing to deplore this attitude, but quite another to over-
look it. As for improvised music, if it seems to the naive listener no different from written-out
and even totally organized music, then he has failed to observe the reason for the spreading
interest of both composers and performers in improvisation: an appeal to the performer's
Spielfreude, something which has become submerged of late. Again, it is one thing to feel that
this very appeal will lower compositional standards [and] quite another to overlook it.
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 MUSICAL SYNTAX IN THE MIDDLE AGES

that we can speak of unity and variety, of climax

we can criticize pieces because they stop but do n
can be puzzled by the introduction to Mozart's Di
that teachers of composition can urge their student
the piece first.
Schenker's rejection of Wagner's music was found
Wagner had rejected the syntactical basis of Germ
Bach to Johannes Brahms. Today's "crisis" poses t
necessity for any syntax at all. It is a question ab
that has survived through many styles and that do
fundamental than the principles that govern any o
vide background for the problem, and as one app
ation of its meaning, I should like to pursue our no
into its early history.

Among the preserved collections of music from

the West, the prolix repertories of chants for the Ma
Roman church predominate. Here is an art in whic
ear motion, contour, and interval is refined beyo
that values the free and graceful soaring of melod
undulations through the most sweeping arches. Y
would take its measure none the less, this very fre
While it is certain enough that plainchant is constr
proceed from points of departure to mode-related
it moves within range limits that are also mode-r
character derives in large measure from embellis
structure. In consequence, articulations are often
more important, the melodies fail substantially t
which phrases impose necessities upon one anothe
merely translates what has already been observed
points of view by Peter Wagner and Willi Apel
Gregorian chant.4 The former spoke of "organic fo
characterized the chant, rather more negatively, a

3 One important category of exceptions to this characterizat

noted. The melismas of certain chants-the Alleluias among the
little internal forms that are effected through the literal and seq
motifs, antecedent-consequent arrangements, and the repetition of a
sentation of contrasting material (A B A, etc.). Peter Wagner has
of this type belong to a chronologically younger group, and that
Alleluias proceed in an apparently "unplanned and unregul
reasonable to suggest in a tentative way that these procedures
language of the chant, but rather that they entered that language
developments of which I propose to speak here. The pertinent re
found in his Gregorianische Formenlehre, Volume 3 of Einfjhrung in
(Leipzig, 1921), p. 398.
4 Wagner, op. cit.; Willi Apel, Gregorian Chant (Bloomington, 195
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 PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC

able and unpredictable." Wagner associated his notio

with the Orient, and indeed, of all the characteristics
took on from the East, one of the most fundamen
have been its attitude toward the disposition of mu
The music of the Church was conservative. From the earliest docu-
ments that allow us to estimate the size of its repertory-I refer to cat
logues of chants arranged according to liturgical category and mode
we can deduce that its major portion must have been well establishe
by the time of the coronation of Charlemagne. From that time, and
until the twelfth century, music for the liturgy underwent no majo
changes of style.
But musical manuscripts that have survived from those same centu
ries preserve, in addition to plainchant, ever more prominent collec
tions of poetry that were sung in connection with the activities of th
monastery and chapter house but that did not serve the liturgy directly.
I refer not so much to the tropes and prosas as to the songs, even mo
independent of the liturgy, that were sung by the monks or the clerg
upon waking in the morning, in entering and leaving the chapel, in
procession to the altar, in procession to the dining hall, in honoring d
tinguished guests, in commemoration of biblical and secular-historica
events, in mourning for some religious or secular leader, and, for a very
large number of pieces, in praise of the Virgin. That poetry, and fro
the very first its music, began to develop means of formal articulatio
and organization to which both liturgical and mundane music a
poetry were eventually persuaded, and that have come down to us a
fundamentals of musical order until the most recent times.
In its fully developed state-and I shall speak of that first-the po-
etry represented the falling into place of a number of principles of
prosody none of which was entirely novel taken by itself. First, its lines
were isosyllabic-any given verse form involved a certain fixed number
of syllables for each line. Any variability in the lengths of lines tended
to be strictly regulated to produce a higher level of rhythmic order.
Thus, with a trochaic meter the final unaccented syllable might be
omitted, but such catalectic lines, as they are called, tended to alternate
in some regular fashion with full lines, so that a rhythm of feminine and
masculine endings was set in motion:

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 MUSICAL SYNTAX IN THE MIDDLE AGES

This principle was a departure from the quantitative ve

etry, in which the meters were created by the reg
long and short syllables. Narrowly interpreted, this
isosyllabism too. But a long syllable could be rep
ones, an entire iambic foot could be replaced by an
could bind in a single syllable the final vowel of on
tial vowel of the next, all without altering the met
variable number of syllables for any verse form. Wh
the line of quantitative verse was the number of t
which the syllables were distributed in their normat
and short. This produced a more fluid rhythm than
down pulse of accentual verse. On the second princ
the line were executed by dynamic stress rather th
and lowering of pitch, as had been the case in classi
third principle was the elevation of rhyme from a c
ornament to an instrument of stanzaic structure.
Here, from a twelfth-century manuscript of Limoges, is a stanza that
will illustrate all three principles.

Sion plaude duc coreas

Precine sodalibus,
Trepant pedes eant manus
Nec sit modus gestibus,
Tuus Davit timpanizat
Et se portat manibus,
Sic rex achis incantatur
Novis captus fraudibus.5

The lines are alternately eight and seven syllables, and they scan as
trochaic tetrameter (the accentual imitation of the trochaic septenarius)
with every second line losing the final unaccented syllable-that is, the
lines alternate feminine and masculine endings. The consequent articu-
lation of the stanza into four groups of two lines each is reinforced by
the two-syllable rhyme in the masculine lines. I shall want to return to
this poem and the reflection of its structure in the melody.
Another poem from a related manuscript shows a somewhat different
structure, but it is made, in any case, on the same principles.

5 The poetic texts and musical examples 1 through 9 are drawn from the repertories of
four related manuscripts written in Limoges and Catalonia between ca. 1100 and ca. 1200
AD. They are Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, fonds latin 1139, 3719, and 3549, and London,
British Museum Additional 36881. For a summary orientation to these manuscripts and
their music, the reader may consult the author's study "The Polyphony of St. Martial," in
the Journal of the American Musicological Society, xvii (1964), 29-42. The manuscripts show noth-
ing whatever about duration, and the transcriptions offered here represent my own inter-
pretations in that regard. The guiding principle has been the assigning of equal durations to
the syllables, in order to bring out the meters of the poetry.

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 PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC

Ave mater salvatoris

Nostri terminus doloris
Virga iesse cuius floris
Mater es et filia;
Nostri terminus doloris
Mater es et filia.

This time three lines of trochaic tetrameter with feminine ending are
followed by a single masculine line, then the second and fourth lines are
repeated. Once again, the structure given by the meter is reinforced by
the rhyme scheme, A A A B A B.
The musical setting follows several equally fundamental principles
(see Exx. 1 and 2). First, the setting of one note-occasionally two notes,
at most three-to each syllable of text. Long melismas obscure the

m m I I m 1 I*1 rn

SJ. I I. I - J IN1 I J
Si - on plau - de duc_ co - re - as Pre - ci - ne so - da - li - bus,

J' j' _ ' T. I -. - 4 _4 1

Tre-pant pe - des e - ant ma-nus Nec - sit mo-dus_ ges - ti - bus,-

-fr r -r+F rI rr - r- -r7r r r F_

Tu - us Da - vit. tim- pa - ni - zat Et_ se por -tat ma - ni - bus,

Sic rex a - chis in -can - ta - tur No -vis cap - tus frau - di - bus.

Ex. 1

m m

- ma - ter sal va - to - ris Nos tri ter mi nus do - - ris

Vir - ga ies - se cu - ius flo - ris Ma - ter es et fi - li- a;

Ns - tri ter - mi - nus do - lo - ris Ma - ter es et fi - li - a.

Ex. 2

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 MUSICAL SYNTAX IN THE MIDDLE AGES

meter and tend to be reserved for the ends of stanzas. Under this condi-
tion, the musical counterpart of isosyllabism is a structure of balanced
phrase lengths. And the alternation of feminine and masculine lines is
matched Ly an alternation of melodic phrases with feminine and mascu-
line endings, respectively. The counterpart in melody of the structuring
role taken by the rhyme depends upon the sense of finality that the
arrival at the tonic imparts to the phrase. With but one exception in
the first example, the phrases that set the masculine, "B" lines-the
even lines in the first, lines 4 and 6 in the second example-end on the
tonic; the other lines end on some other pitch.
The result in each instance is a balanced, closed configuration. It de-
pends in both on the manipulation of phrases that relate to one another
as question and answer, open and closed-in general, antecedent and
consequent. The melody of the first example creates structure on a
higher architectonic level than is reached by the versification of the text.
The text creates four groups of two lines each, but as text these remain
formally undifferentiated. The settings of the first two of those groups
are identical, save that the first goes to the tonic, the second to the fifth
degree-our "dominant." The setting of the third group begins with the
dominant and ends on the tonic, and the setting of the fourth acts
as a sort of coda, reaffirming the cadence on the tonic. All in all,
the music creates a single coherent structure with parts that we
hear, one in terms of the other. It is rather like a Bar form with coda,
300 years before Hans Sachs.
In these first examples, musical form is a matter, first of balanced
phrases, then of a relation between phrases that allows us to hear one as
consequent to, or closure for, the other. The chief instrument of that re-
lation is the differentiation of cadences, with the consequent phrase end-
ing on the tonic. Here are two rather simple instances of the same prin-
ciple, in each of which, but for the cadential differentiation, the second
phrase is a repetition of the first (see Exx. 3 and 4). While this is cer-
tainly the single most important resource devised by the composers of this
time to effect what appears to have been so important to them-a
unified and directed musical entity-there are others on which I should
like to report as well.

Ma - ri - am vox Ma - ri - am cor

i I

Ma - ri - am sen - sus, mens, vi - gor.

Ex. 3

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 PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC

Cas - ti - ta - tis lil - li - um ef - flo - ru - it

Qui - - - pa - ru - it.
Qui - a De - i fi - li - us ap - pa - ru - it.

Ex. 4

-- J- p D J- 4 - - ~ . 'I
Fit sa - cer - dos os - ti - a Ba - bi - lo - nis fi - li - a.

Ex. 5

Cru- cis sup - pli - ci - o Re - pe - ran - do vi - am

o0 ?0 I 0 I
Ex. 6

Di - cens o Do- mi - na A - ve - to Ma - ri - a.

o o ? ? I ? 0 o I
Ex. 7

?-1 - _1 1 -1- I I

-s an n us_ Astn le ti - i j
No - vus an - nus_ di -es_ mag - nus_ As - sit_ in le - ti - ti - a.

I" I

Ex. 8

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 MUSICAL SYNTAX IN THE MIDDLE AGES

In the absence of a literal repetition in the c

phrases are often related through sequential repet
no repetition at all, phrases may be related throu
other sort. In Ex. 6 the first phrase moves up thr
on F, while the second returns G-E-C and ends on the
tially-though not literally-a case of retrogression
ship obtains in Ex. 7, where the first phrase mov
and the second returns, with ornament, through
Similarly, an opening ascent D-A in the firs
is filled in in the descending stepwise motion of the se
more instance of this sort of symmetry: here the pr
range inversion. The first phrase moves from ton
and back down to C. The second phrase moves fr
to G and up again to the tonic (see Ex. 9).

I I I 1 ,C , ,I ) I I I F ,

Re- so - ne-mus- hoc na -ta -li Can - tu quo-dam_ spe-ci - a - li.

~=!
I o I
, I o .
o oI
Ex. 9

What is perhaps the most fascinating and ultimately influential re-

source of all had its basis in the medieval doctrine of the modes. The
components of the modal octave scale were conceived as a pentachord
-the five tones from the tonic up to the fifth degree-and a tetrachord
the four tones from the fifth degree up to the tonic. When the tetra
chord lay above the pentachord, as in example lOa, the mode was called
authentic. When the tetrachord was below the pentachord, as in exam
ple lOb, it was called plagal. I should like to show just two examples
that will demonstrate how this division of the model octave was turned
to structural purpose. The examples are taken from prosas composed by
Adam of St. Victor near Paris, in the twelfth century.6 In the first of
these, the half-stanza consists of two lines of trochaic tetrameter with
the second line omitting the final unaccented syllable-that is, alter-

a. b.

X ,. o O ? ?

Ex. 10

6 The examples are copied from E. Misset and P. Aubry, Les Proses d'Adam de St. Victor
(Paris, 1900), p. 236.

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 PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC

nately feminine and masculine lines (see Ex. 11). In

caesura in the middle of the first line is reinforced by
the second and fourth trochaic feet. That situation is reflected in the mel-
ody by a setting in three distinct phrases, for the two halves of the first
line, and for the whole of the second line. In this case the important
differentiation between the first and second lines does not depend on
the cadences or the position of the tonic, for both phrases 2 and 3 end on
that tone. Rather, the differentiation is effected by the fact that phrases
1 and 2-the settings of the first line of text-lie in the pentachord of
the plagal G mode and the setting of the third line lies in its tetrachord.
The versification in Ex. 12 is identical with that in the preceding exam-
ple: feminine, then masculine trochaic tetrameter, with a rhyme be-
tween the second and fourth feet of the first line. Of course, in both this
and the last example, the final foot of the second line will be made to
rhyme with its counterpart in the second half-stanza. The setting this
time consists in a single phrase for the whole of the first line, lying in
the tetrachord of the authentic G mode, and a single phrase for the
second line, in its pentachord.

A am1 rye --- tr n ri - c -

A- dam- ve - tus, tan - dem le - tus, no -vum pro - me_ can - ti - cum;

X o I_ o I
Ex. 11

XS r r r , r = :4
E - va luc- tum, vi - te fruc-tum,_ Vir - go gau-dens_ e - di -dit;

I o Ex. 12
? I
I have gathered these few examples together as witnesses to the emer-
gence during the Middle Ages of a music that is new in two impor-
tant respects: it builds in a progression of discrete units toward clearly
signaled goals, and its units combine into a higher order of composite
units. The rest is a matter of record. Once established, these structural
techniques, and, more important, their artistic purpose, maintained
their potency. The differentiation of antecedent and consequent phrases
assumed an important role in the fixed forms of the Trouvere songs and
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 MUSICAL SYNTAX IN THE MIDDLE AGES

in secular polyphonic songs of the late Middle Age

sance. The arrangement of two antecedents follow
phrase was the basis of the Meistersinger's Bar form
In principle the same logic is operative in the musi
and nineteenth centuries. Balanced phrase structure
consequent relationships and symmetrical harmon
the creation of transparent structures on successive
combined in a norm for expository musical statem
had in the Middle Ages.

The sense of order and symmetry which emerged

music of the Middle Ages has occupied a central po
ideals of Western music during much of its history
remains the sole criterion for what is and is not "musi
point that the terms of the discussion remain far t
the debate about the music of today revolves on th
and "hierarchy." Composers who have openly reject
those concepts represent have declared themselves
tradition, and there is nothing further to be said save,
an old tradition, but one not yet as old as music. Bu
speak of musical context and syntax and of the percept
If it will not do to restrict those terms to their refere
lenium-essentially a matter of the creation of struc
blocks that are measured from cadence to cadence-then it would be a
major task of contemporary music theory to provide them with refere
that would at once apply to the perception of new musical structu
and offer a more comprehensive view of the music of the past. Only t
will we be in a position to measure the sharpness of the turn wh
music has taken in this mid-century.

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