# Congaudeant Catholici



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

_Congaudeant catholici_ is a vocal piece from the Codex Calixtinus, which dates to the 12th-century. This codex contains some of the oldest examples of written polyphonic music one can find. Most are at two voices. But Congaudeant Catholici seems to be at three voices. If this is true, then it's the oldest written polyphonic piece at three voices one can find. Nevertheless, there are some aspects that make some scholars (like Taruskin) to doubt about this spectacular claim. In particular, the third voice is written using a different color and it seems it was added later by another scribe, maybe even decades later. Furthermore, when the three voices are sung together, one can hear some very wild dissonances (for the standars of that time.) Thus, some claim that the supposed third voice is just an alternative version of the second voice that was added later.

What do you think?

Performance with the three voices:


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

I can't comment on the musical history of the piece - being clueless - but I loved the music and I look forward to reading some other posts by better-informed members.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Ingélou said:


> I can't comment on the musical history of the piece - being clueless - but I loved the music and I look forward to reading some other posts by better-informed members.


It's indeed really amazing how these pieces from the very dawn of western art music still resonate even today with an exceptional beauty and force. Medieval music is one of my favorites. :tiphat:


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

Peter Wagner, the great scholar of Gregorian music, believed the work was a two-part composition with two options. The notation doesn't agree with any three-part notation we know, and the harmonic language is at odds with contemporaneous ideas of consonance and dissonance. The two melodies in black notes constitute a composition in the same style as many other pieces for two voices of the period in question. Similarly, the two melodies on the lower staff, one in black and the other in red notes, form a normal composition for two voices. As already mentioned, if all three voices are combined the composition has dissonances in a frequency and a style that are contrary to all traditions we know for Western polyphony from any period. The same dissonances hold if the melody on the upper staff is combined with the melody in red notes on the lower staff. So, as the venerable Dutch musicologist Hendrik van der Werf has said, we do well to join those scholars who hold that "Congaudeant Catholici" as preserved in the Codex Calixtinus, actually consists of two settings for two voices each notated in a very efficient way.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

aleazk said:


> _Congaudeant catholici_ is a vocal piece from the Codex Calixtinus, which dates to the 12th-century. This codex contains some of the oldest examples of written polyphonic music one can find. Most are at two voices. But Congaudeant Catholici seems to be at three voices. If this is true, then it's the oldest written polyphonic piece at three voices one can find. Nevertheless, there are some aspects that make some scholars (like Taruskin) to doubt about this spectacular claim. In particular, the third voice is written using a different color and it seems it was added later by another scribe, maybe even decades later. Furthermore, when the three voices are sung together, one can hear some very wild dissonances (for the standars of that time.) Thus, some claim that the supposed third voice is just an alternative version of the second voice that was added later.
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> Performance with the three voices:


Three voice organum could well have been common in 12th century Paris. Anonymous IV just says that Perotin was the best composer of descantus, not that he invented it, and anyway he was just a student at the Sorbonne, he may not have been aware of Magister Albertus or others.

The interesting question for me is why Taruskin thinks that the harmonies don't fit 12th century style. Are they really wilder than things we find in Leonin? Anyway harmonising early manuscripts can be quite a skill, often accidentals aren't present in the text and the voices are sometimes not very clearly lined up, even knowing the mode may not be a simple matter, let alone all the enharmonic adjustments that people would have made when the voices collide. It would be nice to see an image of this piece.

You may be interested in some of the three voice polyphony on this CD


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Mandryka said:


> Three voice polyphony could well have been common in 12th century Paris. Anonymous IV just says that Perotin was the best composer of three voice polyphony, not that he invented it, and anyway he was just a student at the Sorbonne, he may not have been aware of Magister Albertus or others.
> 
> The interesting question for me is why Taruskin thinks that the harmonies don't fit 12th century style. Are they really wilder than things we find in Leonin?


The thing is that this codex seems to be older than Leonin and Perotin.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

aleazk said:


> The thing is that this codex seems to be older than Leonin and Perotin.


Certainly much older than Perotin, Leonin was from the generation after its compilation.

There are two points

1, The harmonies of the three voiced version aren't right for C12 france
2, Three voices aren't right for C12 france.

Both don't seem to me to be supported at the moment.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Mandryka said:


> Certainly much older than Perotin, Leonin was from the generation after its compilation.
> 
> There are two points
> 
> ...


Are you sure about the dates? Jeremy Yudkin's _Music in Medieval Europe_ puts the compilation date at ca. 1170, when both Leonin and Perotin would likely have been living. Yudkin suggests that the title of the Codex was given on the mistaken assumption that it was compiled by Calixtinus II, who was pope from 1119-24. If it were compiled around 1170, three voice writing would make sense.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

EdwardBast said:


> Are you sure about the dates? Jeremy Yudkin's _Music in Medieval Europe_ puts the compilation date at 1170, when both Leonin and Perotin would likely have been living.


The compilation, but the compositions themselves may be older than that. Anyway, I would guess scholars have these dates right, otherwise it wouldn't make much sense all the fuss about it being the oldest known three part piece if Perotin or even Leonin did one before it. I mean, the polemics surrounding this piece is well known.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

I have my own pet theory which answers the issues about the dissonance and the different color for the third voice. Suppose the composer indeed wanted to do a three part piece, but that this was very uncommon at the time. Then, by this reason, perhaps the composer didn't have enough practice in order to "refine" the dissonances in such a piece, being such an uncommon task. On the other hand, to make explicit that this piece was outside the norm of just two voices, then that's why the third voice was marked with a different color as an alert to the reader. I admit this theory is a bit improbable.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

aleazk said:


> The compilation, but *the compositions themselves may be older than that*. Anyway, I would guess scholars have these dates right, otherwise it wouldn't make much sense all the fuss about it being the oldest known three part piece if Perotin or even Leonin did one before it. I mean, the polemics surrounding this piece is well known.


I would guess some were and some weren't, otherwise it seems odd the compiling would span half a century. Even something composed a decade before the compilation date would have been in Leonin's working life.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

aleazk said:


> I have my own pet theory which answers the issues about the dissonance and the different color for the third voice. Suppose the composer indeed wanted to do a three part piece, but that this was very uncommon at the time. Then, by this reason, perhaps the composer didn't have enough practice in order to "refine" the dissonances in such a piece, being such an uncommon task. On the other hand, to make explicit that this piece was outside the norm of just two voices, then that's why the third voice was marked with a different color as an alert to the reader. I admit this theory is a bit improbable.


Have you managed to find the manuscript online? It would be good to see what we're talking about.

I repeat, as far as I can see we've not seen one iota of support for the idea that the harmonies are not in an appropriate style. Or have I overlooked it?


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

I've made a hash of the attachments and don't want to bother trying to sort it out. But here is a page from the Codex which contains the setting notated in diastematic neumes of a two part clausula(?) beginning with "Alleluia" in the middle of the first line. The first part is transcribed into modern chant notation below. Both come from Willi Apel's Notation of Polyphonic Music. Apel writes that there is considerable ambiguity about how the notes of the two lines should align.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

EdwardBast said:


> c. Apel writes that there is considerable ambiguity about how the notes of the two lines should align.


Thanks. I might buy Apel's book -- his book on keyboard music before 1700 is full of his strong no nonsense character which I like!

Anyway I'm not surprised to hear that "there is considerable ambiguity about how the notes of the two lines should align." There's always that sort of thing to deal with.

I wonder if there's any other evidence of the existence of three part polyphony in the C12.


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

Here's a copy of the 'Congaudeant Catholici' score and Taruskin's comments on the piece:









"The most famous piece in the Codex Calixtinus appendix is famous for the wrong reason. It is a conductus, Congaudeant catholici ("Let all Catholics rejoice together"), that is furnished with two counterpoints, one in a fairly florid "organal" style, the other a simple discant. Although it is quite obvious that the two counterpoints were entered separately (the moderately fancy organal voice occupies a staff of its own, above the tenor; the note-against-note discant is entered, in red ink for contrast, directly on the staff containing the tenor), the piece was long taken to be a unique three-part polyphonic setting, supposedly the first of its kind. (Congaudeant catholici's "rightful" claim to fame is the fact that it may be the earliest polyphonic piece to carry an attribution in its source; the Codex names "Magister Albertus Parisiensis" as composer, identifiable by his title as the Albertus who served as cantor at the cathedral of Notre Dame from around 1140 to 1177.)

The extremely high level of dissonance that resulted from performing the two settings simultaneously was not at first considered a deterrent. Careless reading of the medieval music theorists, together with equally incautious assumptions about the relationship of writing to composition, encouraged the belief that the harmonic style of early polyphony was entirely rationalistic, based on speculative numerology, and, from a practical-that is, aural-point of view, virtually haphazard. (It was thought, to be specific, that voices written in succession against a cantus firmus had to accord harmonically only with it, not with each other; both "written" and "in succession" are now acknowledged to be anachronistically limiting terms.)

What may in fact be the earliest surviving three-part polyphonic composition is a Christmas conductus, Verbum patris humanatur ("The word of the Father is made man"). It is found as a two-part discant setting in one of the Aquitanian manuscripts, and in three parts (of which one, the tenor of course, is common to both settings) in a small French manuscript of the late twelfth century now kept in the library of Cambridge University."


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Mandryka said:


> I repeat, as far as I can see we've not seen one iota of support for the idea that the harmonies are not in an appropriate style. Or have I overlooked it?


Well, only a scholar very acquainted with the medieval harmonic methods and history of their development can answer that. Since I don't have such expertise, I can only believe in good faith what scholars like Taruskin say (in Rick's posts we can see more clearly his actual rationale.)

Personally, I love how the three voices sound when sung together.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

It sounds like a third part mixed in that doesn’t belong and it creates the unusual dissonances that do not sound natural, imo. Nor does it sound like a celebratory work with those clashing lines. I do not consider it unique three-part polyphony but a likely manuscript error or a misreading of it.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Peres does it rather well. It's on his Compostela CD. Sequentia also very introspective. But my favourite is a rather austere one, Paul Hillier on an interesting CD here


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

aleazk said:


> Well, only a scholar very acquainted with the medieval harmonic methods and history of their development can answer that. Since I don't have such expertise, I can only believe in good faith what scholars like Taruskin say (in Rick's posts we can see more clearly his actual rationale.)
> 
> Personally, I love how the three voices sound when sung together.


I may be misreading, if so, sorry, but surely Taruskin doesn't say that the harmonies of the third voice are not in an appropriate style, he rather says that the questions of alignment are more complicated than had been previously thought.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Mandryka said:


> But my favourite is a rather austere one, Paul Hillier on an interesting CD here
> 
> View attachment 117251


Ah, yes, I love that CD. But, if I remember well, they sing the two-part version.

Btw, Sequentia delivers a very powerful take on the Codex's music. They give to it an incredible forward momentum and drama, kind of crazy that you can achieve that for simple, purely diatonic, two-part pieces (I guess that speaks for the venerable ancient composer that made them):


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