The imposing organa quadrupla and tripla associated with the musical repertory of Notre Dame of Paris have never ceased to inspire admiration and wonder. As the first extant examples of rhythmically precise polyphony for more than two voices, they enjoy pride of place in opening the large codices that transmit their music and were lauded by thirteenth-century music theorists with such superlatives as optima and nobilissima. So unprecedented in conception and impressive in their display of musical coordination and coherence, these grandiose pieces continue to astound and provoke listeners some eight centuries after they were initially conceived.

It is the question of how these musical edifices may have been generated, transmitted and performed in the context of Parisian clerical cathedral culture that occupies Guillaume Gross in Chanter en polyphonie à Notre-Dame de Paris aux 12e et 13e siècles. In this intriguing and provocative study, a revised version of his 2004 thesis from the Université de Tours,Footnote ¹ Gross seeks to uncover what strategies may be at work in the unfolding of the musical material in the upper voices of the tripla and quadrupla. In laying out his argument in the opening two chapters of the book, he is especially struck by the discrepancies of the historical record. The earliest documentation that specifically mentions the singing of three- and four-part organa at Notre Dame comes from the well-known episcopal decrees of Eudes de Sully, Bishop of Paris, promulgated in 1198 and 1199. These directives, which allow the performance of distinct mass and office chants in three and four parts on the feasts of the Circumcision and St Stephen, correlate closely with certain examples of tripla and quadrupla transmitted in the main manuscript sources of this repertory. Surprisingly, though, the written forms of the pieces do not surface until some forty to fifty years after their sanctioning in the liturgy, and their specific acknowledgement in any theoretical treatise takes even longer to arrive. When this particular mass of evidence is placed beside the knowledge that the singers of this music also had to perform it in choir with no recourse to books,Footnote ² the likelihood arises that this type of polyphony was regularly executed – and possibly even initially composed and transmitted – without written aids such as parts or scores. This raises the question as to what types of resources may have enabled composers and performers to craft, execute and assimilate the long, interlacing melismas that make up the musical substance of tripla and quadrupla.

To respond, Gross first takes his cue from a series of short remarks in the treatises of Johannes de Garlandia and Anonymous 4. In the fifteenth chapter of the so-called ‘Paris’ version of Garlandia's De mensurabili musica (BNF lat. 16663, fol. 75v), the theorist speaks directly of certain melodic ornaments (colores) that describe either repetitions of motivic cells in single voices or phrases exchanged among two or more parts in a polyphonic composition. The last of these Garlandia even specifically describes as a procedure common to tripla and quadrupla. Furthermore, as the theorist's discussion of colores continues, we learn from the sixteenth chapter of this source that the sense of recognition such colores bring through repetition excites feelings of pleasure and aesthetic appreciation in the listener. These observations are also echoed by Anonymous 4's famous remarks about Perotin's compositions which were fashioned ‘cum habundantia colorum armonicae artis’, and later on where the same theorist describes the composer's four-voice Viderunt omnes and Sederunt principes as containing colores and pulchritudines. Because the Paris version of Garlandia's treatise also provides us – thankfully – with some written-out examples of basic musical colores, Gross is able to connect these illustrations with strikingly similar melodic gestures that appear throughout a number of multi-voice organa, especially in the two quadrupla of Perotin.

The use of the term color, though, has significance beyond the art of music. As Edward Roesner intimated in the general preface to his 1993 complete edition of the Parisian tripla and quadrupla,Footnote ³ the technical meaning of this word in this type of context is closely associated with the arts of poetry and rhetoric. Since the types of figures mentioned by Garlandia can be construed as musical analogies to rhetorical colores (verbal ornaments associated with repetition that may be used to construct and give aesthetic substance to a speech or poem), Gross is able to connect Garlandia's colores with specific verbal flourishes found in a number of poetic or rhetorical manuals (artes) that would have formed the foundation of a medieval cleric's education in the medieval liberal arts. From this basis he is then able to expand the repertoire of figures beyond the most basic ones given in Garlandia's treatise to accommodate others. As a result, Garlandia's description of repetitio diversae vocis (‘voice exchange’) is assimilated with the rhetorical expression commutatio. This figure is described in the Rhetorica ad Herennium as ‘when two contradictory thoughts are expressed by a permutation of terms whereby the second proceeds from the first in a completely contradictory manner’ (cf. p. 333). Similarly, the oratorical colores known as repetitio and conversio (neither mentioned by Garlandia) may be identified in melodic terms as a practice of relating several successive phrases with a motive that respectively begins or concludes them, while gradatio signifies sequential melodic movement, and anadiplosis showcases the practice of opening a succeeding phrase with the same motive that closed the previous one – a very frequent and striking gesture in some of the quadupla.

Armed with his assemblage of musico-rhetorical tropes, Gross is able to demonstrate how they can saturate the sections of a composition, from the smallest cells in a motive or phrase to much more extensive swathes of a piece. A particularly intriguing segment of the book (pp. 203–13) analyses major sections of Perotin's Viderunt and Sederunt to demonstrate how the singers/composers could construct a composition by building outwards from these musical colores to fashion immense blocks of sound disposed with coherence and logic on a variety of levels. These blocks succeed each other and are marked by differentiation in the specific material they use, but they also cohere through complex strategies of recollection and variation. Not content with melodic analysis alone, Gross goes much further in showing the varieties of correlation and contrast as melodic, rhythmic and harmonic patterns work together to create repetitive frameworks that give further shape to sections of these organa (Ch. 7, pp. 217–36).

The significance of these methods of compilation, ornamentation and elaboration comes to a head in the final, eighth chapter of the book. Here Gross elucidates how the appropriation and disposition of figures shared by rhetoric, poetry and music are ingrained in the mastery of the Latin language that was expected of all members of the clergy. This is music, he avers, fashioned and performed by and for an erudite class of elite clergy who put their exceptional command of language, grammar and oratory in the service of music. These abilities allowed them to create works with intellectual depth that appealed to both the senses and the spirit by relying on the same types of techniques that informed their verbal expressions.

The training and effort attendant in the mastery of the Latin language depended on processes of memorisation, division, compartmentalisation and localisation, allied especially closely with medieval stratagems of memory. The use of colores, versification and other mnemonic devices in the verbal realm of the poetic and rhetorical artes was intended to inhere the practices of eloquence deeply in the mind of the well-educated cleric so that its resources could be called upon at a moment's notice. This mental arsenal was not committed to memory merely for its own sake, but was also intended to serve as the cornerstone for new and ‘original’ composition. It functioned not merely for retention, but as a part of ex tempore invention. This raises an implication that Gross never appears to state outright, but intimates throughout the book: whether the composition of such works as the tripla and quadrupla could have been effected on the spot by virtuoso cleric singers collectively turning their rhetorical tools towards musical ends. Whether this be the case or not, such ‘works’, once achieved and solidified, could be retained in the memories of their practitioners for decades without the use of written aids, as the content of the music was passed down orally from cleric to cleric.

As is readily apparent, studies such as this one correlate closely with scholarly emphasis on memory and orality in medieval arts. In the realm of music this is most apparent in this book's relationships with the recent work of Anna Maria Busse Berger.Footnote ⁴ Gross's and Berger's efforts are eminently complementary and an assiduous reader of one will want to keep the other at hand for consultation. Although Berger's wider ranging book does not treat the tripla and quadrupla per se, it alerts us to a number of mnemonic strategies beyond the specific concentration on the artes poeticae and rhetoricae that Gross implements, and which would be very useful for consideration in tandem with them. On the other hand, Gross, by focusing on a specific segment of the organum repertory also circumscribed by place and time (Paris, c.1200–c.1250), is able to deepen his discussion significantly with cogent analysis of a large number of musical examples to show how precisely the poetic and rhetorical artes can inform these compositions. It is especially his appropriation of rhetorical devices turned towards musical ends that I find the most intriguing and fascinating element of this book. It allows students of this repertory to approach the extraordinary inventiveness in the construction of these pieces with a significantly new analytical resource; one, moreover, derived from the seminal theoretical writings associated with the music of Notre Dame. With this study readers are urged to consider and implement some powerful new evidence on the relationships among the arts of music, rhetoric and memory.

This is, therefore, a work that offers many absorbing insights, and scholars of competing sentiments will doubtless find much in it to contemplate and discuss, whether they are ultimately convinced by Gross's overarching conclusions (and implications) about memory and orality in the composition and transmission of these organa, or not. Those who disagree will likely challenge his assumption that the absence of early manuscript sources for these pieces implies that none existed. Certainly there is validity in claiming that the present state of the written record should account for immeasurable losses, especially if such sources were more utilitarian or functional than the beautifully executed codices and fragments that now transmit the surviving tripla and quadrupla. Closely related to this consideration is the contrast between the written redactions of these three- and four-part pieces and the Parisian organa dupla that accompany them in a number of sources. Unlike the two-voice pieces, whose various redactions offer such variety and fluidity from section to section that virtually no single version can, or should, claim authority, the musical texts of the tripla and quadrupla are striking in their uniformity, a relative fixity that extends not only to the content but to the details of their notation. This, it seems, is a strong argument for the existence of written exemplars at the earliest stages of conception for these pieces, whereas the dupla appear to have encouraged continual recasting of their content by composers, performers and scribes.

Other quibbles with this book surface in certain points of emphasis, such as the fact that the author virtually discounts any treatment of the discant portions of these organa. Except for one small segment from the quadruplum Viderunt omnes (p. 209), the entire discussion within these covers concentrates solely on the sections with sustained tenor tones. Why leave the discant segments out of contention when they are integral to the works under discussion? Similarly, it seems that some of the pieces under consideration are more amenable to the use of colores than others. In terms of their preponderance among the numerous examples that pepper this book, the two quadrupla, Viderunt and Sederunt, appear to be especially rich in the musico-poetic figures Gross enumerates. Curiously, though, out of the approximately three dozen pieces that make up this repertory (listed in an appendix), less than half of these occasion specific discussion or even citation in the examples. And although the consideration of rhythm, as Gross is careful to emphasise, is refreshingly subordinated here to the prevailing discussion of melodic content, it is still unnerving to find the concept of ‘modal rhythm’ characterised as rigid and inflexible (as on p. 242), when the surface details of the pieces demonstrate the contrary. Furthermore, the modes themselves are presented in this book (as in Busse Burger's) as a mnemonic device that appears to be fully conceptualised and operative at the time these pieces were created, rather than an organisational schema prompted by theorists who followed decades later. But despite any reservations one will likely have with this or that segment of the book, the assimilation of melodic gestures and rhetorical tropes, combined with the close analysis of the examples that Gross offers throughout, make this study profitable and rewarding to consult. I dare say that, once finished with it, you will remember it for some time to come.