What was the sound-world of Notre Dame polyphony? While we have manuscripts that provide us with ideas about rhythm and how the parts line up with each other, even with this information, many mysteries and puzzles remain and make it a challenge to understand the sonic reality of this music. How much of this music and tradition was improvised, how much was composed? What about rhythm? And tempo? The separation between composer and performer, improvisation practice and composition are not so clear as in our modern sensibilities, so how the manuscripts represent the actual sounds of that time is also ambiguous. Solving this requires time and investigation, though of course any solution is only one possible solution amongst many, and must involve the creative engagement of the performer. In approaching this repertoire, we experimented with tempo, timbre, expressivity of line, ornamentation and improvisation, finally arriving at our own versions of how to sing this music, which are themselves too always in process. We further seek to more fully embody the spirit of this music through our own compositions and improvisations. While trying to produce an “authentic” result is certainly a fool’s errand, we instead attempt an authentic approach, ultimately arriving at the only thing that can be authentic - our own unique interpretations and creations.

In this program we will mix very different types of composition which are nonetheless tightly linked to one another. The conducti of Notre Dame are very specific pieces from that time, with up to four voices pronouncing the text together at the same speed, homorhythmically. The harmonic colors of those pieces are very unique and beautiful, alternating between deep sweetness and harsh dissonances. We surround these compositions with two Gregorian chant offertories, a genre of chant which are the main soloistic pieces of the liturgy. They are long, intensely demanding vocally and highly melismatic. Upon those chants we will explore one improvisatory technique used at that time: a soloist will improvise a flourished organum upon the melody of the plain chant, a practice used to make the chant even more solemn and heavenly.

Another way for medieval musicians to update a piece was to embellish it with what they called tropes. They are new texts or new melodies added to already existing music. We find this phenomenon throughout the Middle Ages, making pieces real puzzles by transforming melismas into texted passages, and sometimes even converting a sacred piece into a secular one. Through this process, a melody would travel and develop its own life. The composition we insert in the program is influenced by this technique: the trouvère poem « contre le temps » is inserted into a monodic conductus melody, to which voices are then added. This composition will always remain open to improvisation during the performance, as it probably was in medieval times, endowing each version with an immediacy and vitality that comes from knowing that each performance is unique.