Classical Metrics and Medieval Music

Author(s): Albert Seay

Source: The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Vol. 23, No. 2
(Jun., 1969), pp. 59-67
Published by: Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1346695
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 CLASSICAL METRICS AND MEDIEVAL MUSIC

ALBERT SEAY

Albert Seay (B.A. and B.M., Murray College; M.M., Louisiana State
versity; Ph.D., Yale University) is presently professor of music and
man of the Music Department at Colorado College. His publications
critical editions of composers and Latin treatises for the American Inst
of Musicology. His book, Music in the Medieval World, was publis
1965 by Prentice Hall.

Scholars of literature have long explored the implications of V

Horace, and Ovid, together with many other Latin writers of fol
times, upon Medieval and Renaissance writers, considering the relat
from almost all angles. That our Roman poets were potent sources
spiration goes without saying; questions of metrics, of imagery, of
matter, of language, of structure were long decided upon the basis of r
ence back to Latin origins. As a part of an educated man's inte
baggage, a thorough knowledge of Latin as a language (dead or no
vided a powerful source of inspiration continuously for centuries there
only in the last half-century or so has this influence waned to such an
that we can no longer expect our students to recognize automatical
is one of the great foundations in our literary and artistic history.
However, it is difficult for many historians of literature to rec
that the fertilizing power of classic literary procedures and the te
thereof had an equally strong role in the development of its sister arts
in particular, music. The understanding of the extremely close r
between poetry and music during most of our past cultural history is
completely closed book to many students of literature, but it does
times, to those of us who are students of the history of musical st
development, not sufficiently considered in its implications by those in
other humanistic disciplines.
At any rate, it is my hope to touch upon the impact of the Latin p
and their system of metrics upon certain areas of the history of m
particular the importance of their attitudes and procedures in the d
ment of musical notation and in musical composition. It is this in
connection between language, poetry, and music found in the class
that made it possible for certain crucial advances to be made in mu
its earlier history in Western civilization, advances upon which re
of our musical practices since then.
Let me begin with a few bits of background that hold within t
selves clues to what musicians were to single out as of import. Th
is the emphasis upon oratory that is such a strong characteristic of
education. The road to success in Rome in the years before the full
of the Empire lay in the law and the ability to speak well before the Se

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60 RMMLA BULLETIN JUNE 1969

(One might remark that things have not changed too much at the present
time.) This stress upon speaking well was a strong one and an oratorical
talent was much to be treasured. Some idea of the high esteem of a brilliant
speaker is reflected in the magnificent essay of Cicero, "De Oratore." In
this work Cicero discusses many aspects of the orator's art, the profits to
be gained by doing it well, the type of influences wielded by great speakers
in the past, and the importance of the orator in the life of the state. One of
the most interesting of these points is that found in Book III, Section 60,
where Cicero talks of what the orator needs beyond those words with
which he hopes to sway his audience. There are gestures, to be sure, as well
as clear and meaningful enunciation of the words as standard procedures;
but, which is more important to our subject, there is the use of various tones
of voice and certain kinds of rhythmic phrasings. Evidently, this gives the
orator something of the problems and techniques of the musician, for music
too works with both these items, labelling them, however, melody and
rhythm. That the affinity of the two arts is a close one is further made clear
by Cicero's repetition of the anecdote about one of the Gracchi, who, in
making his speeches to the audience, brought with him a player of the
fistula or reed flute, a musician who performed in the background at the
same time as Gracchus spoke. This music had two functions, the first to
suggest by what was being played the general mood of what was being
said, to underline the words of the orator by means of music (again, paren-
thetically, I might point out that movies and TV have changed nothing of
this attitude); as a second point, the music was to suggest something of
the rhythm of the words and to emphasize certain of them by the length or
shortness of the accompanying notes. Gracchus was thus made a more
effective orator by his use of music as a way of increasing the impact of his
speech.
As is remarked by one of the speakers in Cicero's colloquy, one cannot
go around carrying flute players with him (save in the case of mad sopranos
who always seem to have them in their handbags). But one can teach
aspiring talents how to speak and how to deliver speeches if the reasons in
back of having a flutist around can be retained. So it is with Roman edu-
cation, for, from the evidence of many early manuscript sources, signs were
rather rapidly worked out to show the embryo lawyer or orator just how
certain kinds of lines were to be delivered. The system as devised was one
of writing various types of symbols over the text of the work to be studied,
these symbols giving the student a hint as to the method of delivery, stresses,
length of syllables, etc.
It is this system that became so important in the history of the develop-
ment of musical notation in the Western world. Originally designed to in-
dicate the quantity of syllables alone, they could rather easily also indicate
a raising of the voice or its lowering if they were placed in a relatively
higher or lower position. One may easily see this in many of our earlier

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 CLASSICAL MERICS AND MEDIEVAL MUSIC 61

manuscripts of plainchant, the system of notation usually called campo

aperto, where there are no lines to indicate exact pitch.
These early signs, called neumes, were primarily rhythmic in character,
suggesting a long or a short value by their shape. They are much like the
present-day signs used in poetic analysis, a long line, either horizontal or
oblique, indicating the long value, the point marking the shorter one. Com-
binations of these two basic signs could be and were made to indicate the
various standard poetic rhythms, and certain other special symbols, derived
from these two, were gradually worked out to build up more complicated
combinations.
It is on these facts that we base our assumption today that early per-
formance of Gregorian chant (to use the term most familiar to nonmusicians)
was a rhythmic one. Only as melody began to assume the central position
and the focus did there come the now standard idea that all notes of chant
are of equal value; this assumption seems to have taken place somewhere
around the end of the tenth and beginning of the eleventh centuries.
That rhythm was one of the major elements of earlier chant is proven
by the attention given to metrics by early writers on the subject. St. Augus-
tine, in his six books, De Musica, spends the major part of his work in talk-
ing about poetic rhythms, something that for many years led too many
scholars to dismiss his book as wrongly named and irrelevant to the history
of musical development. Recent research has exploded this viewpoint and,
as a result, we have had to revise much of our thinking about the early
history of plainchant and, in particular, its early performance.
St. Augustine is primarily concerned with the teaching of poetic metrics
as applied to music. As a man thoroughly acquainted with the classic poets,
he felt the harmonies of Vergil and Horace as a modem Frenchman still
feels the harmonies of Racine and Coreille. He noticed something of the
shift from quantitative to qualitative poetry coming about in his own time
and feared that it meant the destruction of what he had long felt to be the
unity of the great tradition of Western literature. One could not read the
great masters of Latin poetry well unless one understood their metrical prin-
ciples and, as this applied to his own situation in the Church, the texts to be
sung within the liturgy could lose their grandeur and meaning if performed
in a meaningless manner, one giving no attention to the metrics of the text
sung. The spontaneous recognition of quantities was disappearing, and
St. Augustine regretted its passing.
Most of the examples in the De Musica are taken from the works of
the various grammarians of his time and slightly earlier, men such as
Terentianus, Victorinus, and others. Still, he spends much space on selected
phrases from Vergil and Horace, showing his pupil, a music student, their
beauty, aptness, and skill in metrical organization. The Augustinian system
as he has outlined it, although primarily oriented to music, is also applicable
to any sort of motion, be it poetic, choreographic, or to the movement of
objects.

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62 RMMLA BULLETIN JUNE 1969

In view of the decay of rhythmic organization within plainchant and

a consequent eventual turn of notation toward a stress on delineation of
pitch, it is to be regretted that St. Augustine's book has an air of nostalgia
about it and that his ideas had no effect on the course of musical history at
his time; it is even more regrettable that his plan to complete his study of
music by an additional series of books on melody was never completed. As
a full study of all aspects of music at his time and through his influential
position as one of the major figures of the early Church, it would have per-
haps stemmed something of the decadence then taking place in the per-
formance of plainchant.
In spite of the fact that music did lose its rhythmic variety and became
a series of notes of equal value, one cannot overlook the fact that its methods
of pitch-level notation were directly derived from methods used originally
in schools to teach poetry and its metrics. Although the rhythmic significance
of the symbols and even the symbols themselves had disappeared or been
altered in their musical uses, they remained within the textbooks of poetry
of the time. The study of poetic metrics did not disappear, or at least insofar
as it pertained to literature, and, as we will see, became again a source
of innovation in music at a later date.
St. Augustine's work did not disappear, even though its remarks on
rhythm did not apply to the performance of plainchant in the churches after
the ninth century. Nevertheless, most musical theorists were well aware
of the book; one of its definitions, that music is the "scientia bene modu-
landi," became a fixture in nearly all later discussions, from Cassiodorus in
the fifth century on to Roger Bacon in the thirteenth and even later. With
the introduction of polyphony and, in particular, its development within the
Notre Dame school of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, St. Augus-
tine's exposition of classical metrics was to begin a whole new series of de-
velopments.
As long as polyphony involved little more than the placing of one note
of a new melody line against one note of the given plainchant, the melody
that was to be ornamented and musically glossed, there were no proble-
matic difficulties of rhythm. The original plainchant, sung in equal values,
was a foundation that made it simple to add something else proceeding at
the same pace. The problem only became difficult when, as in the twelfth-
century school of St. Martial at Limoges, there was the idea of adding many
notes in the newly composed voice or voices to but one note of the given
chant. While the added notes could be sung evenly and possibly were, with
the lower voice holding its note as long as necessary, there seemed to be a
need for some kind of rhythmic organization; certain notational quirks
found in manuscripts coming from St. Martial suggest that the problem
had already been noted. Whatever the reason for the need, and there could
be many, there was a solution, this arrived at by the great choirmaster of
Notre Dame in the late twelfth century, Leonin.

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 CLASSICAL METRICS AND MEDIEVAL MUSIC 63

The foundation of Leonin's innovations lay in his realization that the

system of classical metrics as exposed by St. Augustine was the only real
solution, with the organization of the new melodic line into a rhythmic
shape based upon the standard kinds of metrical feet that had been the
bases of classical poetry. In summary, the results of Leonin's thinking as
he distilled it from St. Augustine were (1) Music will have a constant
rhythm consisting of the repetition of a metrical foot or feet equivalent to
each other in the number of beats (governed by an up-and-down motion
of the hand) and in their overall length (or what we would call today an
equivalence of measures); (2) This rhythm will be measured off into
phrases by the introduction of rests, these marking the ends of phrases; (3)
The end of each phrase will be marked by an incomplete foot, this followed
by a rest that completes the measure; and (4) Arbitrary rests equivalent to
a foot or to half a foot may be inserted within the phrase.
As a result, Leonin devised a system of what are called rhythmic modes,
these are patterns of rhythms made up of various arrangements of longs and
shorts; they are, as one might expect, rhythmic patterns based on those of
poetry-iambic, trochaic, etc., into which the various pitches are organized.
The governing principle is that of the up-and-down motion of a conductor,
with each motion considered as having three parts, normally divided into
a long of two parts and a short of one. This pattern could be reversed into
one of a short of one part followed by a long of two, or extended by having a
long of three followed by a pair of shorts, the first of one unit, the second of
two, or its reverse, with the long coming as the second large unit.
It is this system, first seen in the Notre Dame organa of the late twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, which was to dominate most of the music written
in that period and on into the fourteenth century. The rhythmic modes are
the foundation of musical construction and even the notation of the music
of this period is not one in which the individual note has a specific value.
Instead, the value is indicated by the way in which notes are grouped
together into various kinds of note shapes, figures derived from the early
neumes that had once indicated the poetic shape of a particular text. Only
in the middle of the thirteenth century, with the development of the Notre
Dame motet and its emphasis on the individual syllable, is there a break-
down of the notational system. Nevertheless, even with the development of
specific note shapes designating a specific rhythmic value, an innovation
coming with Franco of Cologne, there is still a reliance upon the rhythmic
modes for the arrangement of note values within a melodic line.
It is evident that the study of metrics as transmitted by the work of
St. Augustine led to a decisive change in the history of Western music, one
that has set the course of music ever since. The introduction of a kind of
musical notation that could, in the course of time, become more and more
exact has brought us today to an era in which it is possible for a composer
to have complete control over his music, control that can be exercised

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64 RMMLA BULLETIN JUNE 1969

through the preciseness of notation of rhythm and of pitch that take their
beginnings in our Latin past. It is this achievement that makes us believe
that those who have spoken of a renaissance in the twelfth century have
spoken with accuracy and truth, for it is the twelfth century in which all
these developments began.
The influence of poetic procedures taken from the classics is not primary
for the greater part of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for the influence
of the rhythmic modes becomes weaker and weaker during this time. Still,
the great Latin writers continue to be quoted by almost every writer on
music in the period. For example, in his Complex of the Effects of Music,
Johannes Tinctoris, a Belgian theorist writing around 1475 at the court
of Naples, calls on either Vergil, Horace, or Ovid in almost every one of
his twenty chapters. In some cases, the quotation is not always what one
might have expected, were it not for the reverence in which these three
writers were held. I think here of the chapter in which Tinctoris is dusting
off the old question that "Music adorns the praises of God." To substantiate
this point, he introduces the well-known passage of the Aeneid, Book VI,
where Aeneas is speaking with the Sibyl to a choral background. This is
not an isolated example, for one soon learns the tags and looks forward to
seeing them, cheek-by-jowl with something taken from either the Bible or
a Church Father.
The study of the three great Golden Age poets (and others as well) re-
mained as one of the strongest parts of the school curriculum, with every
student eventually taken through the classics. With the renewed interest in
the classics during the fifteenth century and with the beginnings of printing
as a way of diffusion of texts, the audience for the Latin classics (and the
Greek ones as well) became a wide one indeed; one can but remember
the fantastic success of the distinguished printer, Aldus Manutius, and his
long series of what can surely be considered as the ancestors of our present-
day pocketbook, to see something of this spreading of acquaintance with
the classics among a population which, in earlier years, might well not have
made such a contact.
In teaching the classics, music was called into service as a valuable
instructional aid. Instead of merely reciting those sections of the Aeneid
that one had learned by straight memorization, some devised simple ways
of singing them, so that they would be easier to recall. It also helped in
motivating the student who might well have forgotten the prime necessity
of knowing Latin well, not only for the esthetic pleasure of reading its great
works but as a practical tool for those who intended to continue their study
in the universities.
A second way of encouraging Latin students and increasing their fa-
miliarity with the language was by the presentation of school plays, these
incorporating large chunks of the masters. One such play of this kind was
the Ludus Dianae by Conrad Celtes, performed before Maximilian at Linz

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 CLASSICAL METRICS AND MEDIEVAL MUSIC 65

in 1501; in it, there were musical settings of antique meters. In 1507 comes
one of our first collections, this prepared by Celtes' pupil, Tritonius, in
which the settings are of Horatian odes. Other musical settings followed
rather rapidly, the ones in Germany alone surprising by their multitude,
settings made by Michael in 1526, by Senfl (a close friend of Martin Luther)
in 1534, and by Paul Hofheimer in 1539. So important had these settings
become that they were even used to teach melody formation, as in the
Dodekachordon of Glareanus, published in 1547.
What made these settings of interest and of musical importance? Per-
haps the most important elements are those of rhythm and musical style,
for they seem to have introduced a new approach at a time when music had
been leading to a kind of contrapuntal complexity that still remains without
parallel. The development of musical style from the time of Notre Dame to
around 1500, this last that period showing the supremacy of a contrapuntal
school of composition best represented by Josquin des Pres, is one in which
the emphasis turned more and more toward strong individuality of each
voice line, opposition of rhythms between one part and the others, intellec-
tual complication for its own sake and a kind of music that seems at times
to provide words only to give the mouths of the singers something to do
besides sing "ah." Melody lines were conceived as raw material for de-
velopment and little or no attention was paid to the prosody of the text and
its rhythmic characteristics. What text there would be, in all four voices,
was almost unintelligible, for these were few, if any, occasions on which
the text would be pronounced simultaneously by all four voices.
It is the complete variance with these normal methods that sets off
these school Horatian and Vergilian compositions from the usual ones of
the times. First of all, for clarity of pronunciation, all the voices concerned
sang the text homophonically, that is, in vertical harmonic arrangement with
simultaneous presentation of the syllable in all voices. Block chords were
provided and, the basic melody being found in either soprano or tenor
voices, there was simultaneity of movement and pronunciation in all the
others. It was at the opposite pole from the procedures developed in the
previous two centuries or so, those which had led to complex counterpoint
and independent parts.
The second point, of perhaps more importance to our subject, is that
composers of this kind of school song early recognized that they could not
ignore the basic metrical movement found in the text which they were
setting. The principle was rapidly formulated that the antique meter of
the text had to be matched by a corresponding musical rhythm. Dactyls
and iambics, when set to music, required an analogous succession of long
and short notes, one in which the long notes would be taken as exactly twice
as long as the short ones. The length of notes to be used to various words
would be determined by the length of the particular syllable, not by the
will of the composer or by the demands of the musical phrase.

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66 RMMLA BULLETIN JUNE 1969

Interest in this style of musical setting of classic texts is evident in the

first half of the sixteenth century. Not only were they still found in the
schools of the time, and this even into the latter part of the century in
Germany, as can be seen in the performance of the Ajax lorarius, the Scaliger
translation of Sophocles, in 1587, but in the popular music prints of the day,
where Horatian settings and compositions based on Vergil may be found
at the side of the French chanson. To cite but a few examples, the Lament
of Dido, "Dulces exuviae," was a favorite text, the most famous settings
being those of Adrian Willaert, the celebrated choirmaster of Venice in the
early sixteenth century, and that of Jacques Arcadelt, the slightly later
Flemish master, at one time the choirmaster of the Sixtine Chapel at Rome.
The Willaert work appeared in a collection of motets in 1547, the Arcadelt
piece in a collection of chansons from 1556. Arcadelt was also the author
of other classic settings, including the famous "Integer vitae" of Horace,
all of them coming in what were primarily collections of chansons.
Not all of the composers working with classic texts were willing to
write in the simple manner employed by men writing for schools and their
school dramas, perhaps because their musical training was at a higher degree
of complication. Still, one cannot be unaware that, even though there is no
strict adherence to the principle that a long value is always to be twice the
value of a short, there is maintained a rhythmic relation between the value
of the notes and the metric situation. Long values in the poetry are mirrored
by values of two, three, or more beats in the music, short ones of one or
one-half beat. The texture of the music in most of these is homophonic, all
voices presenting the text simultaneously for most of the time; there are a
few exceptions, these mainly at cadences where there is an effort to round
off the line musically as well as poetically by using a special cadence
formula.
The principles of coincidence of poetic and musical metrics thus estab-
lished had many repercussions, particularly in Germany and in France,
where the ways developed for the setting of classic texts were carried over
into the settings of texts in the vernacular, texts into which were incorporated
the same principles or what were thought to be the same principles as those
employed by the classic poets, both Greek and Latin.
In Germany, the influence was primarily upon religious texts in Ger-
man, these to be sung by the congregation in Lutheran churches. The
melodies were conceived of as representing the rhythmic structure of the
German text and were then harmonized by simultaneously sounding accom-
panying parts. It is from this foundation that the chorale, that essence of
Lutheran belief, took its departure; its history is also one of dispersion into
the liturgies of other Protestant sects. It may be hard to realize, but each
time that we sing in our churches a hymn such as "A mighty fortress," we
are indirectly acknowledging the power of Latin metrics.
The situation in France and the interest of certain major poets in the

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 CLASSICAL METCS AND MEDIEVAL MUSIC 67

past led to a much more highly developed artistic result, this worked out
by poets of the Pleiade, particularly by De Ba'f; not only was there the
humanistic desire to imitate the sentiments and language of the ancients,
but there was also the desire to imitate their rhythmic structures as well.
From this came the movement known as "vers mesuree," where French
words were arbitrarily given quantitative values for their syllables, rather
than retaining the qualitative ones. With these quantitative values the poet
could imitate exactly metric structures as found in Greek and Roman
poetry, with all the variety of metric lengths therein available. Settings of
these poems were then made by various court musicians, in particular by
Claude Le Jeune. His published musical collections contain many examples
of this "musique mesuree," both for sacred and secular purposes. Like the
German school songs, there are patterns of longs and shorts in a homophonic
manner, the longs twice as long as the shorts.
I hope I have been able to suggest something of the tremendous impact
upon musical procedures made by metric theories exemplified by the work
of the great classic Latin poets. New methods in the musical handling of
rhythm by Western composers have often owed their inspiration to the sister
art of poetry, although the manner of application often led eventually to
something showing little of its origin. The first great crisis of Western
music, how to handle the rhythms of polyphony, could not have been so
easily solved without the model of the Latin past in poetry as a starting
point. And again, when music had almost reached an impasse in com-
plexity and in disregard of its poetic text, it was again the same wellspring
that provided a new answer, one that has furnished composers from Arcadelt
to Debussy and Stravinsky with satisfying answers.

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