monoPolyphon
Ways to polyphony
Around the year 1000, manuscripts from France and England bear witness to a revolutionary step that was to uniquely steer European musical culture: The polyphonic version of monophonic chant. Initially, this was not polyphony in the sense of independent voices, but rather the discovery of a new perspective in music.
The art of the so-called organum is already described in music-theoretical writings of the 9th century such as the famous treatise Musica enchiriadis.
Already around the turn of the millennium, the rather schematic specifications of the theorists were adapted compositionally and creatively expanded, as in the organa of various manuscripts from Chartres written around 1000.
A center of these activities is the northern French area, from whose tradition also originate the organa of the so-called Codex Calixtinus.
The art of the organum reaches its climax and endpoint around 1200 in the sonorous, four-part organa of Perotin for the Christmas festival circle at Notre Dame in Paris.
Three sequences associated with the island monastery of Reichenau in Lake Constance serve as examples of the early forms of the organum in our program.
From this art, a variety of polyphonic procedures and styles unfolded in the 12th and 13th centuries, reaching as far as Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame.
Program:
Various forms of organa: Codex Calixtinus, Notre Dame
Guillaume de Machaut: Messe de Nostre Dame
6 singers
Larger church rooms
Performances
- Musica Sacra Maastricht (2015)
- Via Mediaeval, Hornbach (2007)
- Bebenhausen Monastery Concerts (2007)