Melanie Spiller and Coloratura Consulting
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Composer Biography: Perotin (c1160-c1220)
Melanie Spiller and Coloratura Consulting
Also Perotinus and Perotin the Great. Perotinus and Perotin are both diminutives of Pierre. There were five
men named Pierre attached to Notre Dame during the same period, and although some can be eliminated
because of their superior rank (you wouldn’t call a priest “Joe” or “Freddie” in public), it’s presumed that the
one who was only a deacon (not a priest), is the one who made a great contribution to the art of music, and
the one whose history is covered here.
Perotin was the most famous member of the Notre Dame School of polyphony, and along with Leonin, he
was one of the last masters of the ars antigua style. Like Leonin, he earned the academic degree of master of
arts at the school that would later become the University of Paris, and he was licensed to teach.
Little is known about the man himself, but his name appears in the treatise of Anonymous IV (whose dates
and actual name aren’t known, only that he was a student visiting Paris from England) in 1285. This
comprehensive treatise refers to Perotin as a “master” and he’s called “optimus discantor” in several
manuscripts, meaning that he was the ultimate discant writer. (There’s more about discants in the piece
Composer Biography: Leonin (fl.c1150-c1201).
Perotin and his contemporaries created organa (plainchant with another voice or two floating above it) for
two or three voices. A two-voice organum was called a duplum, a three-voice a triplum, and a four-
voice—Perotin’s innovation—a quadruplum. The voices above the tenor were named in descending order, so
the highest voice was the quadruplum, and so forth. The upper voices used the rhythmic modes, allowing
exact coordination among them, and they moved in similar vocal ranges, crossing repeatedly (meaning that
one voice starts high and ends low, and another starts low and ends high).
Perotin was probably the most celebrated musician involved in the revision and re-notation of the Magnus
Liber attributed to Leonin.
He was probably born around 1160 and died around 1220. His exact dates aren’t known, but are extrapolated
based on evidence that he flourished in Paris between 1180 and 1205. Some of his dates are approximated
from some late-12
th
century edicts by the Bishop of Paris, Eudes de Sully (d. 1208), that mention organum
triplum and quadruplum regarding a “feast of the fools.” The bishop’s edicts are quite specific and suggest
that Perotin’s organum quadruplum Viderunt omnes was written for Christmas 1198, and that Sederunt
principes, also a quadruplum, was for St. Stephens Day (December 26) in 1199, for the dedication of a new
wing of the Notre Dame Cathedral that was just beginning construction.
Not everyone liked the new music. An Englishman, John of Salisbury (1120-1180), who would become Bishop
of Chartres, taught at the University of Paris during the years that Leonin and Perotin were there, and
attended many services at the Notre Dame School. He compared the duo of voices to the singing of sirens
(mythological creatures who lured sailors to their deaths with music) rather than of men and equated it to
birdsong. But, he warns, the beauty of it might be likely to incite lust rather than devotion. It must be
moderately done, he insists, in order to transport the soul to the society of angels.
Perotin’s major achievements include the revision of Leonin’s collection of organa in the Magnus Liber, as I
mentioned earlier, and the introduction of new elements of style and scoring. He used all the rhythmic
modes, providing rhythmic interest in both voices of two-part writing, and added one or two more voices to
produce music in three or four parts. The celebrated organa on the Christmas and St. Stephen’s Day Graduals
(Viderunt and Sederunt) are four-part settings conceived on a monumental scale apt for the new Cathedral of
Notre Dame and are rich in eloquent, imaginative, and delicate vocal writing. They are justly hailed as
masterpieces of Gothic music.
Perotin was also a composer of clausulae (rhythmic features at the ends of short phrases) that may have
been used to shorten Leonin’s organa (where one voice slowly sings the plainchant and the other parts dance
around it), and conductus (where the various voices sing at the same speed) in up to three parts. Perotin
probably invented conductus based on Leonin’s organum.
Perotin composed organa, the earliest type of polyphonic music (for more about polyphony, see Chords
versus Polyphony), and pioneered the styles of triplum and quadruplum (three- and four-part polyphony
respectively). Two of his pieces (Sederunt principes and Viderunt omnes) are the only known four-voice
organa.
He wrote many pieces with a phrase from one voice repeated in another. Using phrases this way emphasizes
dissonances before resolving to the fifth and octave above the chant melody (called the tenor line), using
harmonic tension to reinforce the consonance while sustaining the listener’s interest.
He also used a form called a rondellus, where three voices sang a sort of round, like this:
Triplum
a b c
Duplum
c a b
Tenor
b c a
Because all three voices in a rondellus are in the same vocal range, the listener hears the polyphony three
times, with voice parts traded so the timbre changes each time. There are also rondellus-motets. Rondellus
sections appear frequently in English versions of conductus from the later 13
th
century; Anonymous IV was
probably English and may have brought this form back with him when he finished his studies in Paris.
Where Leonin wrote primarily in the first rhythmic mode (long-short) for the upper voices and the fifth mode
(long and a half, totaling the same duration as the long-short combination) in the tenor (cantus firmus),
Perotin’s most important development was the use of all six rhythmic modes in the tenor line. This is earth
shattering in that suddenly, all the voices are rhythmically interesting and there’s a rhythmic counterpoint for
the first time. This is the parent of motet writing.
Early motets put text to the melismatic upper voice of conductus for the first time—upper voices had been
either played on an instrument or sung on open vowel sounds. This important innovation led to a notational
change for the upper voices. Previously, syllabic block notes (see The History of Music Notation for more on
this) took only two forms: syllabic (simple conductus) and duplum (the organa dupla of the early Leonin
period). Perotin’s innovations added two more: modal (for organa and clausulae of the Perotin period), and
motet (the earliest motets).
Organum puts the main melody in the tenor (from the Latin tenere); a duplum organum creates a second
voice with either a more melismatic version (with wiggly bits that diverge from the primary melody at a
greater speed) of the tenor or a sort of opposite melody, creating counterpoint. With only two voices, the
upper voice can wiggle around ecstatically while the tenor plods earnestly on, but when you add a third and
fourth voice, rhythm becomes essential, if only to keep things together. That’s how conductus was born.
In Perotin’s time, the liturgical melody serving as the tenor line appears twice, the second time in half (or
double—twice as fast) the values of the first appearance. Franco-Flemish composer Guillaume de Machaut
(c1300-1377) would do the same thing in the 14
th
century.
Conductus uses the same principles as organum, but sets a rhymed Latin poem to a repeated melody, much
like the later hymn form that was particularly expanded upon by William Byrd (1543-1623) in England and
Johann Sebastian Bach (1675-1750) and other Lutheran Germans in the 18
th
century.
Perotin is known to have collaborated with poet Philip the Chancellor (c1160-1236), whose Beata viscera he
could not have set before about 1220; some sources suggest that Perotin died around 1205. It isn’t known
exactly where or when he died nor where he’s buried.
Sources
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“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.
“Early Medieval Music up to 1300,” edited by Dom Anselm Hughes. Oxford University Press, London, 1954.
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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.
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California Press at Berkeley, Berkeley, 1997.