Sacred Polyphony

Before following its history, we must agree on words. Polyphony is not merely "beautiful church music": it is a precise way of making several voices sing together, clearly distinct from other ways.

Several voices, one prayer

The word polyphony means the combination of several melodic lines sung simultaneously, each with its own life within the whole.^[4] The composer's art consists in making these lines, as they overlap, produce a true chord at every moment, without losing their independence: this is called counterpoint (from the Latin punctus contra punctum, "note against note"). A fine polyphonic page can thus be read in two ways: horizontally, following each voice as a complete melody; and vertically, listening to the harmony born of their encounter.

Polyphony, monody, homophony

Three neighbouring terms are often confused. Monody is singing in a single voice, in unison: the whole choir sings the same melody. Gregorian chant is its most perfect form, and it remains the bedrock from which polyphony emerged.^[5] Homophony presents a principal melody sustained by chords moving at the same rhythm — the principle of the hymn or the chorale. Polyphony, lastly, superimposes lines that are rhythmically and melodically autonomous: the voices enter one after another, continue, cross. It is this independence of the voices that makes its richness — and its difficulty.

Why speak of "sacred" polyphony?

Polyphony is not reserved for the church: it also produced the profane chanson and the madrigal. We speak of sacred polyphony when this art places itself at the service of worship: Masses, motets, psalms, hymns, Magnificat, Marian antiphons. The association Una Voce defines it thus: "measured song in several voices which, born of the Gregorian choirs, began to be used in the Latin Church in the Middle Ages".^[6] The text is most often Latin, in the Roman liturgy — although a master like Byrd, presented below, also composed sacred polyphony in English for the Anglican rite — and the music remains subordinate to the prayer it carries. It is this organic bond with worship that distinguishes sacred polyphony from mere choral music.

Western polyphony did not appear all at once. It grew slowly, inside Gregorian chant itself, like a second voice gradually detaching itself from the first.

The first attempts: organum

The oldest written witnesses of singing in several voices go back to the end of the 9th century. The anonymous treatise Musica enchiriadis (c. 850-900) is "the earliest surviving attempt to establish a system of rules for polyphony" in learned Western music.^[7] It describes organum: a second voice doubling the Gregorian melody at a fixed interval (the fourth or the fifth), first in parallel, then with freer movements. Its author is unknown: the old attributions to Hucbald or to Odo of Cluny are now abandoned.^[8] Primitive organum is still only a reinforcement of Gregorian chant — but the decisive principle is laid down: two voices can pray together without singing the same note.

Saint-Martial of Limoges

In the 11th and 12th centuries, the abbey of Saint-Martial of Limoges became one of the great centres of this nascent music. Organum, tropes and sequences were cultivated there; the added voice began to adorn itself, unfolding in vocalises above a sustained note.^[9] This "Aquitanian polyphony" directly prepared the great Parisian flowering: it taught the upper voice to become a melody in its own right.

The school of Notre-Dame of Paris

It was in Paris, around the building site of the new Notre-Dame cathedral, that polyphony crossed a threshold. Between 1160 and 1250 approximately, a generation of musicians built up the first great written polyphonic repertory covering the whole liturgical year: the Magnus liber organi ("the great book of organum").^[10]

Two names dominate this school, known above all through a late witness, the theorist designated as "Anonymous IV"; their identity therefore remains partly conjectural.^[11] The first, Leonin (Leoninus, active c. 1160-1190), is regarded as the author of the Magnus liber: he is said to have fixed two-voice organum, one voice holding the Gregorian note at length while the other unfolds in broad vocalises.^[12] The second, Perotin (Perotinus, active c. 1200), took the art much further: he composed organa in three and four voices (triplum, quadruplum), such as the famous Viderunt omnes and Sederunt principes.^[13] To coordinate so many voices, the Notre-Dame school developed the rhythmic modes, the first regular systems of durations: polyphony became measured.

The birth of the motet

From this Parisian polyphony came a form destined for an immense future: the motet. It was born when a proper text was added to the upper voices of a clausula (a fragment of organum). The medieval motet thus superimposed several texts on several voices above a Gregorian melody serving as foundation. A learned form par excellence, it would become, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the great laboratory of sacred polyphony.

In the 13th and 14th centuries, polyphony ceased to be a gloss on Gregorian chant and became an autonomous art, with its own notation and its own rules. The theorists themselves named this turning point: the 13th-century Ars antiqua was succeeded by the 14th-century Ars nova.

Mensural notation

The decisive progress came from writing. Around 1250, the treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis, attributed to Franco of Cologne, laid down a simple and revolutionary principle: the duration of a note depends on its graphic shape.^[14] From then on, complex rhythms could be noted precisely — an indispensable condition for making independent voices converse. This was the birth certificate of mensural notation, the ancestor of our solfège.

The Ars nova

At the beginning of the 14th century, a treatise traditionally attributed to Philippe de Vitry, the Ars nova (c. 1322), gave its name to a whole movement — although the existence and attribution of this treatise are debated today.^[15] The French Ars nova further refined rhythm (binary subdivisions, syncopation, isorhythm) and made polyphony a learned architecture. Sacred music gained in suppleness what organum had in solemnity.

Guillaume de Machaut and the Messe de Nostre Dame

The summit of the Ars nova is the work of Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-1377), poet and canon of Reims. His Messe de Nostre Dame (composed before 1365) is a decisive landmark: it is the first complete cycle of the Ordinary of the Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, Ite missa est) conceived as a unity by a single identified composer.^[16] Earlier polyphonic Masses, such as the Messe de Tournai, were anonymous compilations assembling movements by different authors. With Machaut, the Mass became a signed and coherent work of art: the way was open for the great cycles of the Renaissance.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, sacred polyphony enjoyed its first golden age thanks to the musicians of the Low Countries (Flanders, Hainaut, Artois): the Franco-Flemish school. Trained in the choir schools of the northern cathedrals, they spread throughout Europe — Rome, Florence, Milan, Naples, Madrid, Vienna — and imposed everywhere their science of counterpoint.

Dufay and the motet of Florence cathedral

Guillaume Du Fay (c. 1397-1474), the dominant figure of the first generation, alone illustrates the union of music and great Christian architecture. On 25 March 1436, for the consecration of Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral, whose dome Brunelleschi had just completed, he composed the motet Nuper rosarum flores.^[17] A summit of the polyphony of its time, the work unfolds a solemnity equal to the event. (For a long time scholars sought in it a musical tracing of the dome's proportions: this attractive thesis is now refuted by musicologists.^[18])

Ockeghem, master of counterpoint

Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1410-1497) embodies the next generation. An undisputed master of counterpoint, he pushed canonic writing to a dizzying refinement: his Missa prolationum sets four voices singing in a mensuration canon, and we owe him the oldest surviving polyphonic requiem.^[19] In his hands, counterpoint is no game: it is a way of letting God's infinity be heard in the interlacing of voices.

Josquin des Prez, the "prince of music"

The name that dominates the whole turn of 1500 is that of Josquin des Prez (c. 1450/55 - 1521), regarded as "the most famous European composer between Du Fay and Palestrina" and the central figure of the Franco-Flemish school.^[20] He died at Condé-sur-l'Escaut on 27 August 1521, bringing polyphony to a new balance between learning and expressiveness: each voice serves the meaning of the text, each entry underlines a word. His contemporaries venerated him as a summit — Luther himself admired his music. With Josquin, sacred polyphony reached a moved clarity that already heralded the ideal of the following century.

Writing techniques

The Franco-Flemish golden age can be recognised by a few characteristic procedures, which one must know to listen to this music. The following table summarises them.

These techniques explain the density of Renaissance polyphony: it is never an "accompanied" melody, but an edifice in which each voice is necessary to the whole.

In the 16th century, the centre of gravity of sacred polyphony shifted to Rome. In the climate of the Counter-Reformation, as the Catholic Church answered the Protestant challenge with a great effort of liturgical purification and beauty, one man became the very symbol of church music: Palestrina.

Palestrina and the "stile antico"

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525 - 2 February 1594), for many years choirmaster in the great Roman basilicas, left an immense output: more than a hundred Masses and hundreds of motets.^[22] His name ended up designating a whole style — the stile antico, the "ancient style": a modal counterpoint of supple and balanced lines, in which dissonances are carefully prepared and resolved, and in which passages where all the voices move together let the words be clearly heard.^[23] This ideal of intelligibility of the sacred text made Palestrina's music the model the Church would hold up, for centuries, to all church composers. His own part in the reform of sacred music is the subject of a separate dossier.^[24]

"Classic polyphony comes very close to Gregorian chant, the perfect model of all sacred music, especially that of the Roman school, which, in the 16th century, reached the peak of its perfection through the work of Pierluigi da Palestrina." — Saint Pius X, motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini, 1903^[25]

The Missa Papae Marcelli

Palestrina's most famous work is the Missa Papae Marcelli ("Mass of Pope Marcellus"), probably composed in 1562 and published in 1567.^[26] Dedicated to the memory of the brief pontificate of Pope Marcellus II, it became the sounding symbol of the Tridentine reform: a six-voice Mass of luminous clarity, in which the text remains perfectly audible. A tenacious legend holds that this Mass alone convinced the fathers of the Council of Trent not to banish polyphony from the liturgy. This story, popularised by the biographer Giuseppe Baini in 1828, is historically fragile: nothing proves either that the Council ever meant to proscribe polyphony, or that Palestrina's Mass was the decisive factor in such a decision.^[27] The full story of this legend is told elsewhere.^[28]

Victoria, Lassus, Byrd: a polyphonic Europe

Palestrina was not alone. At the same period, three other masters brought sacred polyphony to its summit, each in his own country.

Tomás Luis de Victoria (Ávila, 1548 - Madrid, 1611), a priest trained in Rome at the German College, is the greatest composer of the Spanish golden age. His polyphony, more austere and more mystical than Palestrina's, culminates in his Officium defunctorum (requiem) of 1605, written for an empress's funeral.^[29]

Roland de Lassus (Orlando di Lasso, Mons c. 1532 - Munich, 14 June 1594), the last great Franco-Flemish master, pursued a European career before settling at the Bavarian court. A composer of prodigious fertility — more than two thousand works — he excelled in every genre, from the penitential motet to the madrigal.^[30] (A striking coincidence: Palestrina and Lassus, the two greatest masters of their generation, died in the same year, 1594.)

William Byrd (c. 1540 - 4 July 1623), lastly, is the great English master. A recusant Catholic in a now-Protestant England, he composed three Latin Masses (for three, four and five voices) and his Gradualia for the clandestine Masses celebrated in persecuted Catholic homes.^[31] His polyphony, written in danger, is one of the most moving testimonies of fidelity in the history of music.

The Venetian school: separated choirs

In Venice, polyphony took another, spectacular direction. In Saint Mark's basilica, whose architecture offers several galleries, the choirmasters set two separated choirs (cori spezzati) answering each other in echo from one end of the building to the other. Adrian Willaert, choirmaster of Saint Mark's from 1527 to 1562, was probably its initiator.^[32] His distant successor Giovanni Gabrieli (c. 1554/57 - 1612) brought this polychoral art to its peak: his Sacrae Symphoniae (1597) set several choirs of voices and instruments conversing, creating an unheard-of sonic spatialisation.^[33] Venetian polyphony, sumptuous and architectural, already heralded the Baroque.

The Council of Trent (1545-1563), the great council of Catholic reform, also addressed church music. But what it really said is often distorted by legend.

What did the Council really say?

The text is found in a decree of the twenty-second session (17 September 1562), the Decree concerning the things to be observed and avoided in the celebration of the Mass. It is brief and general. The fathers simply ask that everything profane be kept out of churches:

"Let them banish from churches all that music, whether by organ or singing, in which anything lascivious or impure is mixed, as well as all secular actions, so that the house of God may appear and be called truly a house of prayer." — Council of Trent, session XXII, decree on the celebration of Mass (1562)^[34]

It must be noted plainly: this decree explicitly mentions neither "polyphony" nor "intelligibility of the text", and it in no way threatens to banish singing in several voices.^[35] The requirement that the words remain comprehensible belongs to the spirit of the reform and to the debates of a post-conciliar commission of cardinals, not to a literal prescription of the decree.

The legend of the "saving of polyphony"

On this slender foundation was built one of the most enduring myths in the history of music: Palestrina is said to have saved polyphony, threatened by the fathers of Trent, thanks to the Missa Papae Marcelli. The tale, widely spread by Baini's biography (1828), was immortalised by Hans Pfitzner's opera Palestrina (1917). But no contemporary source confirms it: neither the Council's intention to proscribe polyphony, nor the decisive part played by the Mass, is attested.^[36] The beauty of the legend detracts nothing from a solid fact: the Counter-Reformation truly wanted a sacred music that was clear, dignified and at the service of the text — and Palestrina remained its model.

Why did the Church want, for her worship, not only singing, but singing in several voices? Behind the beauty of sound lies a precise theological intuition.

Beauty at the service of the liturgy

The first foundation is the same as that of all sacred art: if the Word became flesh, then matter — stone, colour, but also sound — can serve the mystery and make it present to the senses. Polyphony is to music what stained glass is to light: a worked matter that lifts the soul towards God. This logic of the Incarnation, which justifies the sacred image, also justifies crafted singing: beauty is no worldly luxury, but a way of honouring the holiness of the liturgy. This is the common foundation of all Christian art.

The unity of voices, image of the Church

The second foundation belongs more properly to polyphony. To make distinct voices sing together, without reducing them to unison or letting them contradict one another, is to depict what the Church herself is: a communion in diversity, one body made of different members. From the earliest centuries, the Fathers saw in singing together an image of this unity. Saint Ignatius of Antioch wrote to the Christians of Ephesus, around 107:

"Let each of you become a choir, so that, in the harmony of your accord, taking the tone of God in unity, you may sing with one voice to the Father through Jesus Christ." — Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Ephesians, 4^[37]

Saint Basil the Great likewise saw in psalmody sung in common that which binds the people together in the unity of a single chant.^[38] Sacred polyphony is therefore not only beautiful: it says something of the Church, in which many voices make but one prayer.

"He who sings prays twice"?

An adage attributed to Saint Augustine is often quoted: "He who sings prays twice" (qui cantat bis orat). In reality, this formula is found in none of Augustine's works: it appears, in its brief form, only from the 16th century onwards.^[39] What Augustine really wrote, in his commentaries on the psalms, is deeper:

"He who sings praise does not merely praise: he praises joyfully. He who sings praise does not merely sing: he also loves Him whom he sings." — Saint Augustine, Commentary on Psalm 72, 1^[40]

The same Augustine, in his Confessions, tells how he was moved to tears by the singing of the Church of Milan, while confessing his fear that the pleasure of the ear might prevail over the meaning of the words.^[41] This tension — beauty that uplifts, yet can also distract — runs through the whole history of sacred music, and explains the Church's constant vigilance towards it.

The triumph of the Baroque style, in the 17th century, first seemed to relegate Renaissance polyphony to the past. But it never really died: it survived, resurfaced, and in the end was fully reborn.

The Baroque turning point

Around 1600, a new way of composing prevailed: the seconda pratica ("second practice"), theorised around Claudio Monteverdi. The principle was reversed: whereas the stile antico let music be governed by its own laws, the new school wanted the text to govern the music, even at the cost of breaking the rules of counterpoint to express the passions.^[42] The quarrel, opened by the theorist Artusi's attack (1600) against Monteverdi, thus set the old against the modern. Accompanied monody and the vocal concerto took over.

The survival of the stile antico

Yet Palestrina's style did not disappear: it endured in the most solemn church music and became the reference exercise of every composer. In 1725, Johann Joseph Fux codified strict counterpoint in his Gradus ad Parnassum, a manual that took Palestrina precisely as its model and trained generations of musicians — down to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.^[43] The stile antico thus became the eternal grammar of sacred music.

The Cecilian movement

In the 19th century, faced with the "theatrical" drift of church music (where Mass was sometimes sung to opera tunes), a vast reform movement rose in Germany: the Cecilian movement (Cäcilianismus), placed under the patronage of Saint Cecilia. Franz Xaver Witt founded in 1868 the Allgemeiner Cäcilienverein, approved by Pius IX, which sought to restore Gregorian chant and Palestrina's polyphony as the models of true church music.^[44] The movement, despite its excesses, directly prepared the reform of Saint Pius X.

Solesmes and the recording renaissance

At the same time, the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes undertook the scholarly restoration of Gregorian chant: Dom Pothier published the Liber Gradualis (1883), Dom Mocquereau launched the Paléographie musicale (1889), works that would lead to the Vatican Edition under Pius X.^[45] Finally, in the 20th century, specialised ensembles brought Renaissance polyphony back to life: the Tallis Scholars, founded in 1973 by Peter Phillips, established it as a great concert and recording repertory, rediscovered by a wide public.^[46] Sacred polyphony, five centuries after its golden age, has never been so much listened to.

For a century, the Church has clarified, through several major documents, the exact place of polyphony in worship. The line is constant: Gregorian chant first, classical polyphony immediately after.

Saint Pius X and Tra le sollecitudini (1903)

The great reference text is the motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini of Saint Pius X (22 November 1903), a true charter of sacred music. In it Pius X sets Gregorian chant as "the supreme model of sacred music":

"The more closely a composition for church approaches in its movement, inspiration and savour the Gregorian form, the more sacred and liturgical it becomes." — Saint Pius X, Tra le sollecitudini, 1903^[47]

And he immediately sets classical Roman polyphony — Palestrina's — as what comes closest to it, and therefore as the second form par excellence of church music.^[48]

Pius XII and Musicae sacrae disciplina (1955)

Half a century later, Pius XII devoted a whole encyclical to sacred music, Musicae sacrae disciplina (25 December 1955).^[49] In it he confirmed the doctrine of Pius X, encouraged the singing of the faithful and musical training, and reaffirmed the proper dignity of classical polyphony, while cautiously opening the door to new forms faithful to the liturgical spirit.

Vatican II: Gregorian chant first, polyphony "by no means excluded"

The Second Vatican Council, in the constitution on the liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium (4 December 1963), took up and fixed this hierarchy. It first called the treasury of sacred music "a treasure of inestimable value, greater even than that of any other art",^[50] recognised Gregorian chant's first place, then expressly named polyphony:

"The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services. But other kinds of sacred music, especially polyphony, are by no means excluded from liturgical celebrations, so long as they accord with the spirit of the liturgical action." — Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium, no. 116^[51]

Such is, still today, the position of the Church: sacred polyphony is neither a relic nor a mere ornament, but a living part of the liturgical treasury, heir to a thousand years of Christian genius, and ever offered to the prayer of the Church.

Sacred polyphony belongs to the vast whole of the Church's art and music. For the bedrock from which it emerged, see Gregorian chant; for the master who fixed its classical ideal, Palestrina and the musical reform; for the great liturgical works born of this tradition, the Stabat Mater, the Dies irae, the Requiem Mass in history, Mozart and the Catholic Mass and Bach and the Christian tradition. For the theological foundation of all sacred art, see the theology of the icon and, for the Counter-Reformation context, the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the Liturgical Movement.