Il finera car touz iourz vivre

Ne pourra pas.

(He will meet his end, for he cannot live for ever)

The ensemble of texts brought together in the celebrated MS 146 of the fonds français in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, makes up a complex and many-sided essay on government and kingship, one directed to the French monarch Philip V (1317–22) at or near the beginning of his reign. Its various elements reflect on the problem-laden final years of the rule of his father, Philip IV ‘le Bel’ (1285-1314), and the troubled succession that followed in 1315 and 1316. Each fascicle of the manuscript, the so-called Roman de Fauvel, the dits of Geffroi de Paris, the collection of songs and dits ascribed to Jehannot de Lescurel, and the anonymous verse chronicle of the years 1300–16, interacts with the others in myriad ways and on many levels to yield a collective commentary on the state of the monarchy and the realm, and an admonitio on wise rule.

Without question, one of the most familiar texts to students of medieval music is the often-cited passage in the treatise of Anonymous IV that offers an account of the historical development of the Notre-Dame tradition. I introduce my own discussion of the ‘making’ of the Parisian liber organi with a brief consideration of this famous text.The Latin is, with minor adjustments, that of F. Reckow, Der Musiktraktat des Anonymus 4, 2 vols. (Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 4-5; Wiesbaden, 1967), i, pp. 45-6. The translation is my own, but it has benefited from suggestions by Leofranc Holford-Strevens (most important among them, the readings of ‘optimus organista’ and ‘optimus discantor’ as ‘an excellent organista’ and ‘an excellent discantor’).

The extraordinary dissemination of the Parisian repertory, resulting in its establishment in the thirteenth century as a kind of ‘Classical’ style (and later as an ars antiqua), was greatly abetted – if not made possible in the fist place – by what may have been an exclusively written mode of transmission. This is apparently the earliest body of polyphony to have been conceived, preserved and circulated entirely in writing. Equally important for the impact of the music of Paris, however, is the fact that it spawned a didactic tradition. It provided the foundation for a group of treatises that were the first to elucidate an already existing polyphonic repertory. Rather than instructing the singer how to generate polyphonic embellishments of plainchant ex tempore, these theoretical texts provided him with the information he needed to transform the written symbols in the manuscript before him into sounding music consistent with the intentions of the composer (or, at least, of the scribe), and they offered guidance to the organista wishing to create other works in a similar idiom. To be sure, these treaties did not transmit the Paris style intact.