In the preceding chapter we have tried to trace the perfecting of a form of melody called plain-song. We have seen how the mass of the Catholic Church was set to solo music. Apart from the highly expressive quality which the music inevitably acquired because of the reality and life of the new emotional religion, the plain-song of the mass did not differ from the artistic music of the Greeks and the Romans, that is to say, it brought forward no new means of effect or of expression. We may say it was the adaptation of old and tried methods to new ends. We can hardly suppose that the technique of composition had been advanced by the early Christian composers beyond the point to which the Greeks had brought it, nor that the art of music had been expanded during the first centuries of the Christian era to greater proportions than the Greeks had developed it. The theorists of the first nine centuries made blunders in trying to systematize Christian song according to the remnants of Greek theory which had been preserved; yet the Greek scales were still in use, though misnamed by the theorists, and composers for the church still conformed to them. But about the beginning of the ninth century a new element appeared in music for the church which the Greeks had left practically untouched and which was probably the contribution of the barbarian peoples of northern and western Europe, either the Germans or the Celts, namely, part-singing. To the single plain-song melodies of the ritual composers added another accompanying melody or part. The resultant progression of concords and discords was incipient harmony, the practice of so weaving two and later three and four melodies together was the beginning of the science or art of polyphony.

I

Polyphony was practically foreign to the music of the Greeks. They had observed, it is true, that a chorus of men and boys produced a different quality of sound from that of a chorus made up of all men or all boys, and they had analyzed the difference and found the cause of it to be that boys’ voices were an octave higher than men’s; and that boys and men singing together did not sing the same notes. This effect, which they also imitated with voices and certain instruments they called Antiphony, and they considered it more pleasing than the effect of voices or instruments in the same pitch which they called Homophony. The practice of making music in octaves was called magadizing, from the name of a large harp-like instrument, the magadis, upon which it was possible. But magadizing cannot be considered the forerunner of polyphony, for, though melodies an octave apart may be considered not strictly the same, still they pursue the same course and are in no way independent of each other; and the effect of a melody sung in octaves differs from the effect of one sung in unison only in quality, not at all in kind.

The allegiance of theorists to Greek culture all through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance has tended to conceal the actual origin of polyphony, but as early as 1767 J. J. Rousseau wrote in his Dictionnaire de musique, ‘It is hard not to suspect that all our harmony is an invention of the Goths or the Barbarians.’ And later: ‘It was reserved to the people of the North to make this great discovery and to bequeath it as the foundation of all the rules of the art of music.’

The kernel from which the complicated science of polyphony sprang is simple to understand. One voice sang a melody, another voice or an instrument, starting with it, wove a counter-melody about it, elaborated by the flourishes and melismas which are still dear to the people of the Orient. Some such sort of primitive improvisation seems to have been practised by the people of northern Europe, and to have been taken over by the church singers. The later art of déchant sur le livre or improvised descant was essentially no different and seems to have been of very ancient origin. The early theorists naturally took it upon themselves to regulate and systematize the popular practice, and thereupon polyphony first comes to our notice through their works in a very stiff and ugly form of music called organum, which in its strictest form is hardly more to be considered polyphony than the magadizing of the Greeks.

The works of many of the ninth century theorists such as Aurelian of Réomé, and Remy of Auxerre, suggest that some form of part-singing was practised in their day, though they leave us in confusion owing to the ambiguity of their language. The famous scholar Scotus Erigena (880) mentions organum, but in a passage that is difficult and obscure. Regino, abbot of Prum in 892, is the first to define consonance and dissonance in such a way as to leave no doubt that he considers them from the point of view of polyphony, that is to say, as sounds that are the result of two different notes sung simultaneously. In the works of Hucbald of St. Amand in Flanders, quite at the end of the century, if not well into the tenth (Hucbald died in 930 or 932, over ninety years of age), there is at last a definite and clear description of organum. The word organum is an adaptation of the name of the instrument on which the art could be imitated, or, perhaps, from which it partly originated, the organ; just as the Greeks coined a word from magadis.

Of Hucbald’s life little is known save that he was born about 840, that he was a monk, a poet, and a musician, a disciple of St. Remy of Auxerre and a friend of St. Odo of Cluny. Up to within recent years several important works on music were attributed to him, of which only one seems now to be actually his—the tract, De Harmonica Institutione, of which several copies are in existence. This and the Musica Enchiriadis of his friend St. Odo are responsible for the widespread belief that polyphony actually sprang from a hideous progression of empty fourths and fifths. Both theorists, in their efforts to confine the current form of extemporized descant in the strict bounds of theory, reduced it thus: to a given melody taken from the plain-song of the church the descanter or organizer added another at the interval of a fifth or fourth below, which followed the first melody or cantus firmus note by note in strictly parallel movement. The fourth seems to have been regarded as the pleasanter of the intervals, though, as we shall see, it led composers into difficulties, to overcome which Hucbald himself proposed a relaxation of the stiff parallel movement between the parts. In the strict organum or diaphony the movement was thus:

Either or both of the parts might be doubled at the octave, in which case the diaphony was called composite.