Ars antiqua

"Ars antiqua", also called ars veterum or ars vetus, refers to the music of Europe of the late Middle Ages between approximately 1170 and 1310, covering the period of the Notre Dame school of polyphony and the subsequent years which saw the early development of the motet. Usually the term is restricted to sacred music, excluding the secular song of the troubadours and trouvères; however sometimes the term is used more loosely to mean all European music of the thirteenth century and slightly before. The term "ars antiqua" is used in opposition to "ars nova", which refers to the period of musical activity between approximately 1310 and 1375.

Almost all composers of the "ars antiqua" are anonymous. Léonin (fl. late 12th century) and Pérotin (fl. c.1180 – c.1220) were the two composers known by name from the Notre Dame school; in the subsequent period, Petrus de Cruce, a composer of motets, is one of the few whose name has been preserved.

In music theory the "ars antiqua" period saw several advances over previous practice, most of them in conception and notation of rhythm. The most famous music theorist of the first half of the 13th century, Johannes de Garlandia, was the author of the "De mensurabili musica" (about 1240), the treatise which defined and most completely elucidated the rhythmic modes. A German theorist of a slightly later period, Franco of Cologne, was the first to describe a system of notation in which differently shaped notes have entirely different rhythmic values (in the "Ars Cantus Mensurabilis" of approximately 1260), an innovation which had a massive impact on the subsequent history of European music. Most of the surviving notated music of the 13th century uses the rhythmic modes as defined by Garlandia.

The "ars antiqua" is sometimes divided into two rough periods, known as the early Gothic and the high Gothic.Fact|date=June 2008 The early Gothic includes the French music composed in the Notre Dame school up until about 1260, and the high Gothic all the music between then and about 1310 or 1320, the conventional beginning of the "ars nova." The forms of organum and conductus reached their peak development in the early Gothic, and began to decline in the high Gothic, being replaced by the motet.

Though the style of the "ars antiqua" went out of fashion rather suddenly in the first two decades of the fourteenth century, it had a late defender in Jacques of Liège (alternatively Jacob of Liège), who wrote a violent attack on the "irreverent and corrupt" "ars nova" in his "Speculum Musicae" (c.1320),Fact|date=June 2008 vigorously defending the old style in a manner suggestive of any number of music critics from the Middle Ages to the present day. To Jacques, the "ars antiqua" was the "musica modesta", and the "ars nova" was a "musica lasciva"—a kind of music which he considered to be indulgent, capricious, immodest, and sensual (Anderson and Roesner, 2001).

ee also

*Renaissance of the 12th century

References and further reading

* . "Ars Antiqua". "The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians", ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vols. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2
* Anderson, Gordon A., and Edward H. Roesner. "Ars Antiqua [Ars Veterum, Ars Vetus] ". "The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians", edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. 29 vols. London: Macmillan, 2001. ISBN 1561592390
* Franco of Cologne. "Ars cantus mensurabilis". English translation by Oliver Strunk in his "Source Readings in Music History",Fact|date=June 2008 . New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1950.
* Gleason, Harold, and Warren Becker. "Music in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance", third edition. Music Literature Outlines, Series 1. Bloomington, Indiana: Frangipani Press, 1981. ISBN 0-89917-034-X
* Hoppin , Richard H. "Medieval Music". New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1978. ISBN 0-393-09090-6