Pérotin

Pérotin was a French composer associated with Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris around 1200. He is known for expanding polyphony through works for three and four voices.

Notre-Dame school: A group of composers and musical practices associated with Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral around the late 12th and early 13th centuries. Pérotin is conventionally placed within this school, whose polyphonic style his works exemplify.
Viderunt omnes: A four-voice organum setting of the Christmas Gradual associated with Pérotin. Its sustained chant foundation and flowing upper voices demonstrate the scale of his organum.
Anonymous IV: An English writer of the late 13th century who described musicians and practices of the Notre-Dame school. This treatise is the chief source for Pérotin’s reputation and place in the school.
Anonymous compositions: Musical works whose composers are unknown or not identified in surviving sources. Most music associated with Pérotin survives without an author’s name in the original manuscripts.
Organum: A medieval form of polyphony in which one or more voices are added to a chant melody. Pérotin’s best-known works develop organum into large-scale, multi-voice compositions.
Sederunt principes: A four-voice organum setting of a gradual for the feast of Saint Stephen, attributed to Pérotin. Its extended sections and four-part writing show how Pérotin organized unusually large musical spans.
Léonin: A composer associated with Notre-Dame polyphony, whom Anonymous IV names as an earlier master of organum. Anonymous IV presents Pérotin as a successor who improved upon Léonin’s work.
Manuscript attribution: The process of assigning a work to a composer using evidence from manuscripts and related sources. Pérotin’s named works depend largely on later testimony, not signed compositions.
Gregorian chant: A body of monophonic liturgical song used in the medieval Western Church. Notre-Dame organum often placed chant melodies beneath newly composed upper voices.
Florid organum: Organum in which the added voice sings many notes above each sustained note of chant. Pérotin’s upper voices use this contrast between moving melodies and prolonged chant tones.

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