Ars Antiqua

Ars antiqua is the late-twelfth- and thirteenth-century French polyphonic style centered on the school of Notre Dame in Paris. The signature form is the motet, in which a slow-moving tenor line, drawn note-for-note from Gregorian chant, supports two or three faster upper voices in Latin or vernacular French. Rhythm follows the so-called rhythmic modes — six fixed patterns of long and short notes — which give the music its squarely measured, almost mechanical feel. There are no fixed pitch standards or chord progressions in the modern sense; voices intersect at perfect intervals (octaves, fifths, fourths) and the experience is one of independent simultaneous time-streams rather than block harmony.

Léonin (Magister Leoninus, active c. 1150-1201) and Pérotin (Magister Perotinus, active c. 1200) systematized the polyphonic settings of plainchant at Notre Dame in Paris, producing the Magnus Liber Organi, a foundational repertoire of two-, three- and four-voice settings. By the mid-thirteenth century the motet had spun off as an independent genre with its own theorists — Franco of Cologne and Johannes de Garlandia codified rhythmic notation. The label 'ars antiqua' was applied retroactively in the early fourteenth century, when Philippe de Vitry's treatise Ars nova (c. 1322) introduced new rhythmic techniques and made the older style the 'old art' by contrast.

Find the tenor first — the slowest-moving voice, often holding single chant notes for measures at a time. Then notice how the upper voices, often singing different texts entirely, move at independent speeds above it. The polytextual motets of the late thirteenth century routinely combine a Latin sacred text, a French love poem and a chant tag, all running simultaneously — a deliberate intellectual layering.

Recordings by The Hilliard Ensemble or Ensemble Organum of Pérotin's four-voice organum 'Viderunt omnes' (c. 1198) show the high Notre Dame style at its most cathedral-resonant. For the polytextual motet, try a thirteenth-century Montpellier Codex anthology by a group like Anonymous 4.

Most ars antiqua composers are anonymous — even the names 'Léonin' and 'Pérotin' come only from a single thirteenth-century English theorist known as Anonymous IV, with no surviving biographical detail. Adam de la Halle (c. 1240-1288) is one of the few named composers and wrote both motets and the secular play-with-music 'Jeu de Robin et Marion,' an ancestor of French stage musical theatre.