‘Nous avons encore d'anciennes Chansons de Thibault, Comte de Champagne, l'homme le plus galant de son siècle, mises en Musique par Guillaume de Machault.’J.-J. Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768), p. 81. Rousseau may have been misled by the registration of the manuscripts C and A in seventeenth-century catalogues of the royal library, respectively as: ‘les chansons de Thibault, comte de Champagne, roy de Navarre, mises en musique. Diverses chansons antiennes’ and ‘Les amours de Guillaume de Machaud, en rimes. Poésies de Thibaud, roy de Navarre. La Prise d'Alexandre et autres romans anciens.’ See for these references L. Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (Garland Composer Resource Manuals, 36; New York and London, 1995), pp. 78 and 89. With this naive confusion in his Dictionnaire de musique Jean-Jacques Rousseau was not as far off the mark as it might seem; although Machaut (c. 1300-77) certainly did not set to music entire chansons of his famous predecessor, he did quote several times from chansons by Thibaut (1201-53) as a springboard for his own poetical and musical thoughts.In motets 3, 4, 5 and 15, as will be seen in the following discussion.

At the conclusion of his introductory book on musicology, Armand Machabey briefly hinted at a related study, that of musicologists themselves. The musicologist, Machabey affirmed, was on the whole a positive being who contributed to the good of society but who also craved isolation for work which often went unrewarded. This scholar's accomplishments, though sometimes tedious, were nonetheless beneficial to society, for, among other things, they increased public enjoyment of classical music. The musicologist had one flaw, however: a tendency to ‘treat his conclusions as personal and untouchable acquisitions’. What is more, an undue ‘attachment to an illusory priority can lead him to the tragic and ridiculous’.A. Machabey, La musicologie, 2nd edn (Que Sais-Je, 978; Paris, 1969), pp. 120-1: ‘Il a une propension à tenir ses conclusions pour des acquisitions personnelles intouchables et son attachement à une illusoire priorité peut le conduire jusqu'au tragique et au ridicule.’

The so-called Vatican Organum Treatise (henceforth VT), or ‘Ars organi’, included in the composite manuscript Ottoboni lat. 3025 in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana is believed to have been copied in northern France (or possibly England) around the middle of the thirteenth century.The most comprehensive work on the treatise is F. Zaminer, Der vatikanische Organum-Traktat (Ottob. lat. 3025): Organum-Praxis der frühen Notre Dame-Schule und ihrer Vorstufen (Münchner Veröffentlichungen der Musikwissenschaft, 2; Tutzing, 1959). Recent con-tributions include I. Godt and B. Rivera, ‘The Vatican Organum Treatise—A Colour Reproduction, Transcription, and Translation’, in In Memoriam Gordon Athol Anderson (Institute of Mediaeval Music, Musicological Studies, 39/2; Binningen, 1984), pp. 264 1 ff., and L. Treitler, ‘Der vatikanische Organumtraktat und das Organum von Notre Dame de Paris: Perspektiven der Entwicklung einer schriftlichen Musikkultur in Europa’, Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis, 7 (1983), 23-31. Bernhard Bischoff, the palaeographer whom Zaminer consulted (p. 24), has dated the treatise c. 1225-50, plus or minus twenty years. The filigree script of VT (about 60% of the size of the scripts of F, W 2 or W 1 ) closely compares with the following dated manuscripts published in C. Samaran and R. Marichal, Catalogue des manuscrits en écriture latine portant des indications de date, de lieu ou de copiste, 6 vols. (Paris, 1959-68): Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France [hereafter BN] lat. 8097 (Tours, 1232), Paris, BN lat. 15652 (Paris, 1240-5), Paris, BN lat. 15143 (1270), Paris, BN lat. 15133 (1270) and Charleville, Bibliothèque municipale 25 (before 1281). The treatise transmits a theoretical tract as well as a large repertory of musical examples, including three organum settings. The tract of VT, along with thirty-one rules regarding simple two-voice progressions, is related to certain discant treatises that stand in the ‘old’ Ad organum faciendum tradition of the early twelfth century, treatises whose dissemination throughout Europe reaches well into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries;See Zaminer, Der vatikanische Organum-Traktat, pp. 42-71; S. Fuller, ‘Theoretical Foundations of Early Organum Theory’, Acta musicologica, 53 (1981), pp. 52 ff.; ead., ‘Early Polyphony’, in The New Oxford History of Music, ii: The Early Middle Ages to 1300, ed. R. Crocker and D. Hiley (Oxford and New York, 1990), pp. 508-28; K.-J. Sachs, ‘Zur Tradition der Klangschritt-Lehre: Die Texte mit der Formel “Si cantus ascendit . . .” und ihre Verwandten’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 28 (1971), pp. 233 ff.; and H. H. Eggebrecht and F. Zaminer, Ad Organum faciendum: Lehrschriften der Mehrstimmigkeit in nachguidonischer Zeit (Mainz, 1970). The closest relatives of VT are the ‘Louvain’ (edition: CS II, pp. 494a-496b), ‘Pseudo Guido’ (CS II, pp. 191b-192b), ‘Si cantus equalis’ (CSM IV, pp. 38-40 and Sachs, ‘Zur Tradition’, pp. 244-5) and ‘Venice’ treatises (Zaminer, p. 134). For the most recent contribution on this subject consult Michael Bernhard's forthcoming article ‘Eine neue Quelle für den Vatikanischen Organum-Traktat’ (Quellen und Studien zur Musiktheorie des Mittelalters, 3; Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Veröffentlichungen der Musikhistorischen Kommission). The relevant text is found in G. P. A. Bolton Library (formerly Cathedral library), Tipperary, Cashel MS 1 – a composite source of medieval treatises – and corresponds to the rule section of VT beginning ‘De regulis organi’. As the Cashel text does not include the first two sections (or 42 lines) of VT – ‘Incipit ars organi’ and ‘Vis in organo’ – and has no musical examples, it stands squarely in the tradition of the simple voice-leading manuals. Most scholars of voice-leading treatises are well aware of the ‘anom-alous’ character of VT (cf. Fuller, ‘Early Polyphony’, p. 527). the numerous musical examples and three organum settings (with a duplum voice in a florid style), however, are related to the ‘new’ organum coming out of Paris.

I. THE MUSIC: GALL-TO-GREG-TO-ROM

For archaeologists of plainchant - those who deal with the music before there are notational records - the focus has been on the repertories ROM-11 and GREG-8/10.Thanks to Susan Rankin and David Ganz for many improvements. Abbreviations for repertories: ROM = Old Roman; GREG = Gregorian; GALL = Gallican; MOZ = Old Hispanic or Mozarabic. Numerals indicate a century or range of centuries: GREG-8/10 = Gregorian recension, text witnesses of the late eighth century, as represented in R.-J. Hesbert, Antiphonale missarum sextuplex [hereafter AMS] (Brussels, 1935), with first musical witnesses of the tenth century, as in Graduale triplex, ed. M.-C. Billecocq and R. Fischer (Solesmes, 1979); ROM-8 = Old Roman states of the eighth century; ROM-9/11 = Old Roman states of the ninth through eleventh centuries, that of the eleventh century in Die Gesänge des altrömischen Graduale Vat. Lat. 5319, ed. B. Stäblein and M. Landwehr-Melnicki (Monumenta monodica medii aevi, 2; Kassel, 1970). Each represents a ‘Roman’ practice. ROM-11 appears in a handful of manuscripts from the region of Rome, dating from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries; the liturgical usage is Urban. GREG-8/10 appears in hundreds of manuscripts from all over Europe, with verbal texts reaching back to the late eighth century, and with neumatic notations to the late ninth. In liturgical and textual respects GREG is a near twin of ROM, yet it has clear marks of formulation in the Frankish north. In musical respects, what is most significant about the repertories is that they share certain amounts of modal-melodic substance, yet they differ markedly as to process, style and detail. It has been a major challenge to define those relationships and determine what they mean about earlier musical developments.D. Hiley, Western Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford, 1993) summarises earlier positions (pp. 561-2); recent book-length contributions include P. Bernard, Du chant romain au chant grégorien (Paris, 1996); M. Haas, Mündliche Überlieferung und altrömische Choral (Bern, 1997); T. Karp, Aspects of Orality and Formularity in Gregorian Chant (Evanston, 1998); J. W. McKinnon, The Advent Project: The Later Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Mass Proper (Berkeley, 2000).

O du armer Judas, was hastu getan?

Das du deinen Herren also verrathen han,

Darumb mustu leiden in der helle pein

Lucifers gesellen mustu ewig sein,

Kyrieleison.ldquo;O wretched Judas, what have you done? / You have betrayed your Lord! / For that you must suffer torment in Hell, / You must be Lucifer's companion eternally. / Kyrie eleison”. Text from P. Wackernagel, Das deutsche Kirchenlied von der ältesten Zeit bis zum Anfang des XVII. Jahrhunderts, 5 vols. (Leipzig, 1864-77; repr. Hildesheim, 1964), ii, pp. 615-18; translation mine.

Rooted in Catholic folk piety, the song ‘O du armer Judas’ became one of the most common expressions of religious and political belief in the popular culture of sixteenth-century Germany. The Judaslied was the ideal vehicle for musical propaganda in the Reformation, and it turned the Catholic notion of the eternally damned betrayer of Christ on its ear. Protestant polemicists rewrote the song to equate Catholic authorities with Judas, and their contrafacta forged unbreakable links between the Judaslied melody and the idea of Catholic corruption. The very strong political associations the song would come to have with the Lutheran movement might well have been reason enough for a composer to avoid setting such a controversial work polyphonically, but at least four chose it as a model.Other than Senfl, Arnold von Bruck, Matthias Eckel and Cosmas Alder also arranged the Judaslied polyphonically, and a number of anonymous settings exist. See Das Tenorlied: Mehrstimmige Lieder in deutschen Quellen, 1450-1580, ed. N. Böker-Heil, H. Heckmann and I. Kindermann, 3 vols. (Catalogus musicus, 9-11; Kassel, 1979-86), iii, p. 105. Among these was Ludwig Senfl, court composer to the Catholic Wittelsbach dukes in Bavaria. Senfl's setting raises interesting questions about his position at the court, his music and religious toleration in the early days of the Reformation.

Without question, one of the most familiar texts to students of medieval music is the often-cited passage in the treatise of Anonymous IV that offers an account of the historical development of the Notre-Dame tradition. I introduce my own discussion of the ‘making’ of the Parisian liber organi with a brief consideration of this famous text.The Latin is, with minor adjustments, that of F. Reckow, Der Musiktraktat des Anonymus 4, 2 vols. (Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 4-5; Wiesbaden, 1967), i, pp. 45-6. The translation is my own, but it has benefited from suggestions by Leofranc Holford-Strevens (most important among them, the readings of ‘optimus organista’ and ‘optimus discantor’ as ‘an excellent organista’ and ‘an excellent discantor’).