Notre-Dame school

A group of composers active in Paris around 1160–1250 who developed early polyphonic music associated with Notre-Dame Cathedral. Its repertory includes elaborate organum and some of the earliest surviving rhythmic notation.

Organum: Medieval polyphony in which one voice sustains or elaborates a chant while another sings alongside it. The school’s defining repertory expanded organum into long, intricate settings of chant.
Florid organum: A style of organum in which an upper voice sings many notes above slowly sustained chant notes. Its extended melismas are a signature texture in Notre-Dame repertory.
Léonin: A composer associated with Notre-Dame polyphony in the late twelfth century, known through a later account by Anonymous IV. Anonymous IV credits Léonin with compiling a major book of organum.
Viderunt omnes (Pérotin): A four-voice setting of the Christmas gradual Viderunt omnes attributed to Pérotin by Anonymous IV. It is a landmark example of the school’s large-scale organum quadruplum.
Notre-Dame polyphony attribution: The scholarly problem of identifying composers of medieval polyphonic works from incomplete evidence. Most surviving works lack composer names, limiting certainty about who belonged to the school.
Gregorian chant: A body of monophonic liturgical song used in the Roman Catholic Church. Notre-Dame composers used chant melodies as the foundation for many polyphonic works.
Discant: Medieval polyphony in which voices move together in measured rhythm, often note against note. Discant passages contrast with the freer, sustained sections of Notre-Dame organum.
Pérotin: A composer associated with Notre-Dame polyphony around the turn of the thirteenth century, praised by Anonymous IV. Anonymous IV connects Pérotin with elaborate three- and four-voice organum.
Sederunt principes: A four-voice setting of a gradual for the feast of Saint Stephen, attributed to Pérotin by Anonymous IV. Its long spans and layered voices exemplify the school’s most ambitious surviving polyphony.
Anonymous IV (authorship): The unresolved identity and circumstances of the English theorist known as Anonymous IV. His account anchors the school’s composer biographies, but his identity remains unknown.

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