Leoninus, Poet and Musician

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. HE COMPOSER LEONINUS is a pivotal figure in the history of Western art music, yet to the moment almost nothing is known of his life. Leoninus claims a special place in musical historiography on several counts. First, prior to his arrival on the intellectual scene of twelfth-century Paris, liturgical polyphony was characterized by an almost wholesale anonymity. Aside from a handful of compositions in the Codex Calixtinus,' few previous polyphonic works can be attributed to specific individuals. Undoubtedly there are many reasons for the namelessness of earlier music, not least among them the fact that polyphony in this era most often came into being during the celebration of the liturgy, as a spontaneous creation fashioned by clerics singing within the parameters of the accepted rules of music theory, and not as a fully prescriptive artifact conceived outside of and, indeed, well before the moment of execution. That contemporary observers, henceforth, often felt compelled to associate a person with a particular polyphonic work may imply a new, more modern notion of what a composer and a composition was. Secondly, the amount of music Leoninus has left us is impressive by the standards of any age. His "Great Book of Organum," as Anonymous IV calls it, contains forty-two compositions in its smallest extant form and no * Portions of this article were read at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Philadelphia, 1984, and at the symposium Das Ereignis "Notre-Dame," Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbiittel, April 1985. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Barbara Shailor of Bucknell University, Ralph Hexter of Yale University, and John W. Baldwin of The Johns Hopkins University. I Compostela, Biblioteca de la Catedral, without shelf mark. A description of this manuscript along with a list of relevant bibliographical studies is given in Ripertoire international des sources musicales, BIV', Manuscripts of Polyphonic Music, i ith-Early i4th Century, ed. Gilbert Reaney (Munich-Duisburg, 1966), 238-41. Color facsimiles of the polyphonic compositions are given in Jose L6pez Calo, La musica medieval en Galicia (La Corufia, 1982), pp. 46-51. 2 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETYfewer than ninety-three in its largest.2 And finally, and perhaps most important, all of these works were conceived and notated, in varying degrees, according to a rudimentary system of musical meter and rhythm, the rhythmic modes. Exactly how much Leoninus contributed to the development of modal rhythm and how extensively he applied the modes to his own compositions is difficult to assess, owing, in part, to the many revisions to which his works were subject.3 Nevertheless, it i...

The role of style in the Notre‐Dame period: A preliminary study1

“…Craig Wright has noted that Leonin wrote poetry in quantitative meters, but doubts whether this affected the development of his notational style. 4 A definitive answer to this question may not be obtainable, especially as Richard Crocker has also called attention to the importance of tonic, or pitch, accent in the music of this time. 5 Leo Treitler has suggested that pitch accents originally served to underscore the phrase structure of the text.…”