Ars antiqua, also called ars veterum or ars vetus, refers to the music of Europe of the late Middle Ages between approximately 1170 and 1310, covering the period of the Notre Dame school of polyphony and the subsequent years which saw the early development of the motet. In Music, polyphony is a texture consisting of two or more independent Melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice ( Monophony In Western music, motet is a word that is applied to a number of highly varied choral musical compositions Usually the term is restricted to sacred music, excluding the secular song of the troubadours and trouvères; however sometimes the term is used more loosely to mean all European music of the thirteenth century and slightly before. A troubadour ( IPA:, originally) was a composer and performer of Occitan Lyric poetry during the High Middle Ages (1100&ndash1350 Trouvère ( MWCD: /trü'ver trü'vər/ sometimes spelled trouveur, is the Northern French ( Langue d'oïl) form of the word Troubadour The term ars antiqua is used in opposition to ars nova, which refers to the period of musical activity between approximately 1310 and 1375. Ars nova was a stylistic period in Music of the Late Middle Ages, centered in France, which encompassed the period roughly from the preparation
Almost all composers of the ars antiqua are anonymous. Léonin (fl. Léonin (also Leoninus, Leonius, Leo) ( fl 1150s — d ? 1201) is the first known significant late 12th century) and Pérotin (fl. Pérotin ( fl c 1200 also called Perotin the Great, was a European Composer, believed to be French, who lived c. 1180 – c. 1220) were the two composers known by name from the Notre Dame school; in the subsequent period, Petrus de Cruce, a composer of motets, is one of the few whose name has been preserved. Petrus de Cruce (Pierre de la Croix was active as a Cleric, Composer and theorist in the late part of the 13th century
In music theory the ars antiqua period saw several advances over previous practice, most of them in conception and notation of rhythm. Music theory is the field of study that deals with the Mechanics of music and how Music works The most famous music theorist of the first half of the 13th century, Johannes de Garlandia, was the author of the De mensurabili musica (about 1240), the treatise which defined and most completely elucidated the rhythmic modes. Johannes de Garlandia ( Johannes Gallicus) (fl c 1270 &ndash 1320 was a French music theorist of the late Ars antiqua period of Medieval In Medieval music, the rhythmic modes were patterns of long and short Durations (or Rhythms imposed on written notes which otherwise appeared A German theorist of a slightly later period, Franco of Cologne, was the first to describe a system of notation in which differently shaped notes have entirely different rhythmic values (in the Ars Cantus Mensurabilis of approximately 1260), an innovation which had a massive impact on the subsequent history of European music. Franco of Cologne (fl mid-13th century was a German music theorist and possibly composer Most of the surviving notated music of the 13th century uses the rhythmic modes as defined by Garlandia.
The ars antiqua is sometimes divided into two rough periods, known as the early Gothic and the high Gothic. This article is about Gothic art See also Gothic architecture Gothic art was a Medieval art movement that lasted about 200 The early Gothic includes the French music composed in the Notre Dame school up until about 1260, and the high Gothic all the music between then and about 1310 or 1320, the conventional beginning of the ars nova. The forms of organum and conductus reached their peak development in the early Gothic, and began to decline in the high Gothic, being replaced by the motet. Organum (ˈɔrgənəm though the stress is now sometimes incorrectly put on the second syllable from Ancient Greek ὄργανον - organon "organ instrument In Medieval music, conductus (plural conductus) is a type of sacred but non-liturgical vocal composition for one or more voices
Though the style of the ars antiqua went out of fashion rather suddenly in the first two decades of the fourteenth century, it had a late defender in Jacques of Liège (alternatively Jacob of Liège), who wrote a violent attack on the "irreverent and corrupt" ars nova in his Speculum Musicae (c. Jacob of Liège, aka Jacobus Leodiensis or Jacques de Liège, is believed to have written the Speculum Musicae, The Mirror of Music during the second 1320), vigorously defending the old style in a manner suggestive of any number of music critics from the Middle Ages to the present day. To Jacques, the ars antiqua was the musica modesta, and the ars nova was a musica lasciva—a kind of music which he considered to be indulgent, capricious, immodest, and sensual (Anderson and Roesner, 2001).