Melanie Spiller and Coloratura Consulting
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Composer Biography: Leonin (fl.c1150-c1201)
Melanie Spiller and Coloratura Consulting
The Englishman known as Anonymous IV published an eponymous treatise in 1285 that told of two
musicians creating polyphony for the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris: Leoninus and Perotinus. Latinized
to sound more Catholic and snooty, their names were actually Leo and Pierre, but they were commonly
known by their diminutive names, Leonin and Perotin (1160-1225, biography to come). If you’ve heard
much Medieval polyphony, you’ve either heard their work or you’ve heard music that evolved from their
work. It’s hard to talk about them separately, but I’m going to give it a try.
Leonin may have been the first composer to use the rhythmic modes, and he also possibly invented a
notation system for them. You can learn more about rhythmic modes here: Musical Modes, Part 2:
Rhythmic Modes.
Leonin served at the Cathedral of Paris in many capacities, beginning in the 1150s, before the building that
stands there now was even begun (construction of Notre Dame started in 1163). Anonymous IV refers to
Leonin as a “master,” which means that he held a Masters of Arts degree from the school that would
become the University of Paris (in 1200).
Nothing at all is known about his childhood or family. He turns up at Notre Dame in the 1150s, and we can
guess that, because he was a canon and a priest, he was around 30 at the time. He was also affiliated with
the monastery of St. Victor, which was also in Paris. This is the same abbey where Peter Abelard (1079-
1142) lectured before his unfortunate love affair with Heloise and ensuing castration in 1116 or 1117.
At any rate, Leonin was a poet who paraphrased the first eight books of the Bible in verse, and he did the
same for several shorter works as well.
Anonymous IV called Leonin an excellent organist (meaning a singer or composer of organum rather than a
keyboard player) and credits him with compiling a Magnus liber organi (“Great Book of Polyphony”). The
collection contained two-voice settings of the solo portions of the responsorial chants (Graduals, Alleluias,
and Office responsories) for the major feasts of the year. Elaborating the chants like this, showing the
whole year’s music, was a vision as grand as that of those who would build Notre Dame Cathedral.
Leonin didn’t collect all that music alone, despite the suggestion by Anonymous IV that he did. At the very
least, Leonin was a leading driver of the project, but it’s doubtful that any one person could have
accomplished the deed. The original book, sadly, didn’t survive, and it isn’t certain whether there was
music notation (as we know it) available for use at the time, so it may have been a collection of poems with
some sort of code or annotation for how the music sounded. The repertory survives in later manuscripts,
primarily one now in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, and one in Florence Italy. There’s no way to know how much
of the music or poetry was actually written by Leonin, though.
Although the documentation is missing, Leonin was probably the composer who developed the contrast
between melismatic plainchant writing (without rhythm or measurement) and discant (somewhat
rhythmic) in two-part organa for Graduals and Alleluias, and in processional Office responsories, often
proceeding from one style to the other. It was Leonin who developed the pattern of a slow plainchant-like
melody in the tenor line (now called cantus firmus) that provides a foundation for an upper voice to affect
runs and melodic sequences. This dancing upper voice, called the duplum, demanded a new kind of
documentation for the aforementioned rhythmic modes.
Leonin’s settings are impressive in their length, but they’re still shorter than those set by Perotin, who may
have been his student. Many were recycled tunes, and because there are many variations on a theme that
survive into today’s chant, it seems likely that a lot of music was transmitted orally and that musicians felt
free to interpret, add, or change as they felt inclined. Building from a familiar foundation is a good way to
go when you’ve got lots of people trying to memorize something.
Most music of the time was unison—monophony. Two discrete voices were a novelty in the 12
th
century. It
was Leonin who first documented the rules for this new form of music, now called polyphony, that would
ultimately evolve into the chords and complex rhythms that we know today.
One of Leonin’s pieces, Viderunt omnes, was documented by Anonymous IV. It’s in both the Wolfenbüttel
manuscript and the Florence manuscript. It has two voices and features two different styles of polyphony:
organum and discant. The organum set a slow lower voice with one or two notes in the upper voice for
every single note in the lower voice. The discant style is note for note in both parts, parallel melodies in
synchronized rhythm. The intonation of the respond and most of the verse were sung polyphonically,
probably by solo voices; the rest was sung in unison by the choir. In Viderunt omnes, all three styles
(plainchant, organum, and discant) are on display.
The melismatic portions of Gregorian chant (the parts with multiple notes on a single syllable) seems to
have been essentially extracted to provide separate pieces, with the original note values of the chant
slowed down, and the organum or discant in the upper part moving faster and superimposed against it.
This is called clausulae.
Between 1150 and 1175, Leonin provided two-part organa for all of the Responsorial chants on major
feasts, Responsories and their verses for Vespers and Matins, and the Graduals and Alleluias for Mass. His
plan to write them all was subsequently rivaled only by the somewhat smaller cycle of three-part organa by
Perotin (1160-1225, biography to come), and by the phenomenal publications of Heinrich Isaac (c1450-
1517) in the 16
th
century and William Byrd (1543-1623) in the 17
th
. Leonin’s new style of music was widely
accepted across Europe.
Leonin’s Magnus Liber includes 13 pieces to be used for the Hours (Vespers, Compline, etc.) and 33 works
for the Mass. Both sections begin with works for Christmas and continue into the liturgical year, providing
not only items for the major feast days, but also works for various other occasions. The emphasis on the
material for the Hours is placed on various Processional Responsories, while those from the Mass stress the
Gradual and the Alleluia, the two chants already singled out as especially suitable for polyphonic treatment
due to their soloistic character. All of the works in the Magnus Liber are for two voices and reflect the
division into the two styles of organum and discantus.
These early motets were the first to put text to the melismatic upper voice of a clausulae—previously, the
text was only written below the longer, slower tenor part. This important innovation was accompanied by a
notational change from modal notation to syllabic notation for the upper voice or parts. Syllabic block
notes took four forms: syllabic (simple conductus), duplum (organa dupla of the early Leonin period),
modal (organa and clausulae of the Perotin period), and motet (the earliest motets). For the most part, this
is too heavily technical for this biography, but maybe one day I’ll write a blog post on the subject.
Some theorists think that Leonin derived the six rhythmic modes from his study of St. Augustine’s De
musica, a treatise on metrics. He writes of three “long” notes tied together by a ligature and followed by
three sets of two “short” notes—essentially each of the first three notes divided equally in two. The
pattern evolves into sets of three counts, a long note being roughly equivalent to two short notes, so that
the pattern of long-short-long-short can be counted out as six beats (in the modern sense of 6/8).
Leonin contributed a masterly use of flexible and variable rhythms, nearly always limited to the first
rhythmic mode, which alternates long and short notes, with a lilt much like today’s 6/8 pattern. He breaks
up the long and short notes into lesser values (called copulae, or links, by theorists of the day), which
foreshadows what would come in the Baroque era (1600-1750) but baffled historians because
contemporary theorists described them as being “between discant and organum and having the character
of both.” That’s not very helpful, really. It’s like saying it’s a color that lies between blue and yellow, if you
see what I mean.
Although Leonin played with melismas, they were short, only rarely containing a melodic leap larger than a
third. They often contain glissando-like passages running through a whole octave or even more. Leonin’s
melodic curve is broader than Perotin’s, which tend toward squarer rhythms and short motives. You’ll meet
Perotin in my next post.
Nothing is known about where Leonin is buried or what he died of or when. We can probably assume that
he’s somewhere in Paris, as he spent very little time away from there. At least, he spent little time away
that we know about.
Sources
“A History of Western Music,” by J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca. W.W. Norton
& Co., New York, 2010.
“The Norton/Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music,” edited by Stanley Sadie. W.W. Norton & Co., New York,
1994.
“The Encyclopedia of Music,” by Max Wade-Matthews and Wendy Thompson. Anness Publishing, Ltd.,
Wigston, 2012.
“The Concise Oxford History of Music,” by Gerald Abraham. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979.
“Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music,” by Don Michael Randel. Belknap Press of Harvard University,
Cambridge, 1978.
“A Dictionary of Early Music, from the Troubadours to Monteverdi,” by Jerome and Elizabeth Roche. Oxford
University Press, New York 1981.
“The Pelican History of Music, Volume 1: Ancient Forms to Polyphony,” edited by Denis Stevens and Alec
Robertson. Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1960.
“Music in the Medieval World,” by Albert Seay. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, 1965.
“The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900-1600,” by Willi Apel. The Mediaevel Academy of America,
Cambridge, 1961.
“Medieval Music,” by Richard Hoppin. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1998.
“Music in the Middle Ages,” by Gustave Reese. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1940.
“Companion to Medieval & Renaissance Music,” edited by Tess Knighton and David Fallows. University of
California Press at Berkeley, Berkeley, 1997.