David Maw

REDEMPTION AND RETROSPECTION IN JACQUES DE LIÈGE'S CONCEPT OF CADENTIA

Jacques de Liege was the first theorist to use the word cadentia in relation to harmonic theory, preceding later such uses, as far as survivals attest, by a century and a half. The concept he developed under this term (set out in Speculum musicae , IV. l) has been connected in recent times to ideas in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century discant theory now related to the notion of directed progression. While there are linguistic similarities in Jacquess exposition to that of this (mostly later) theory, there are also important discrepancies in the concepts content; and there is an ideological anomaly in viewing Jacques as the exponent of an important idea of Ars nova harmonic theory. This article proposes a different reading of the concept, one congruent with Jacquess conservative intellectual stance. It identifies two contrasting, though complementary, aspects within it, and examines the role of an expression of approximation ( ea, quae prope sunt, sunt quasi idem ) whose ultimate significance remains uncertain. What emerges clearly, however, is that Jacques regarded cadentia as a process whereby imperfect concords were redeemed for perfection, so that their presence in polyphonic music might be tolerable in an aesthetics of retrospection. His account of polyphony draws upon an established idea in mensural theory dating back at least to John of Garland; and it contrasts significantly with the contemporaneous but more modern account of Marchetto of Paduas Lucidarium .

Lost Sounds and Found Experiences in Music 1300–1600

Sound is so much a central part of our daily experience of music that we do not normally give it a second thought. Yet when we attempt to encounter music historically, sound becomes straightaway a problem. Once a performance of music has ended, all that remains of it is memory; and once the music is no longer remembered, the link with its original sound is completely lost. Before notation was invented, music existed only in performance and memory; the chain between sound, memory and recreation was continuous. Memory is a creative faculty, so performances of a ‘piece’ of music (a concept that is difficult to define without a written artifact to which to relate it) might differ from occasion to occasion in their specific content (matters of pitch, rhythm and expressive nuance). A desire to ensure uniformity in the performances of sacred chant led to the invention of notation in the ninth century. Just as the invention of writing gave to words an existence independent of speech, so the development of notation gave music a life independent of its sounds. It is thanks to this that we have any direct knowledge of early music at all. Yet changes in musical fashion during the fifteenth century, exacerbated by the fixity that notation brought, led to the rejection of past music (a practice that continued into the eighteenth century); the manuscripts of old music were relegated to libraries, if they were not destroyed or recycled; the music was no longer performed, and its sound was lost forever. So Daniel Leech-Wilkinson asserts that ‘almost everything we might wish to know about the sound of medieval music is lost to us’, and his book The Modern Invention of Medieval Music is a study of the attempts made by scholars and performers to fill the lacunae in knowledge.1 Focusing on French and Italian polyphonic repertories from the thirteenth, fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the first two chapters show how the sound of medieval music as it has been presented to modern ears has been significantly influenced by scholarly research on the use, or not, of instruments in polyphonic vocal music. This is a central question, as almost all surviving medieval music is vocal. M AW Lo st S ou nd s an d Fo un d Ex pe rie nc es in M us ic 13 00 –1 60 0