CHAPTER 10 MUSIC THEORY OF THE ARS ANTIQUA AND ARS NOVA

Franco of Cologne A German intellectual who had come to Paris to teach around He wrote of treatise entitled Ars cantus mensurabilis (Art of Measured Song), which first sets forth a system to classify consonant and dissonant intervals.

CONSONANT AND DISSONANT INTERVALS CONSONANCES –Perfect consonances unison and octave –Intermediate consonances fifth and fourth –Imperfect consonances major and minor thirds DISSONANCES –Imperfect dissonances minor seventh, major sixth, whole tone –Perfect dissonances: minor sixth, semitone, tritone, major seventh

Scholasticism Such a rigid system of classification was typical of an intellectual movement in thirteenth-century Paris called scholasticism. Scholastics organized their various materials in hierarchies of descending importance—chains of categories and relationships. Today, when we prepare an outline with many topics and subtopics, we engage in a scholastic exercise.

Franco posited four basic musical durations: duplex long, long, breve and semibreve, and each of these had a corresponding rest. Except for the duple relationship between double long and long, all relationships were triple. This is the basis of the music of what we call the Ars antiqua (Old Art)—the music of the thirteenth century organized into relatively simple, triple meter units. It is also the basis mensural notation (symbol- specific notation), in which each symbol, be it long, breve, or semibreve, has its own specific value.

Early notational symbols and their corresponding rests

Ars nova About 1320 two music theorists, Jean des Murs (c1290-c1351) and Philippe de Vitry ( ), described a type of music called the Ars nova (New Art). The music of the Ars nova involved four innovations: 1) the introduction of a new short value called the minim as a subdivision of the semibreve 2) the recognition that music might just as well be written in duple meter as triple a. the relationships, semibreve to breve, minim to semibreve, for example, could be duple as well as triple b. a dot was introduced to show triple duration 3) the introduction of triplets into otherwise duple relationships, and conversely two notes into the time normally occupied by three 4) meter signatures (time signatures) were introduced to indicate to performers how the various note values were to be divided into units of twos or threes.

The four basic symbols indicate the four basic medieval meter signatures

The very different values, both cultural and temporal, espoused by partisans of the Ars antiqua, on one side, and the Ars nova, on the other, led to passionate discourse. Jacques de Liège (c1260-c1330), a theorist who coined the term “Ars nova” and Pope John XXII were among the strongest proponents of the conservative style, while Philippe de Vitry and later Guillaume de Machaut advocated newer, more progressive music.