"CHOIR SINGS" "When I was eight years old, I came here to join the choir of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London." "Over the next ten years or so I learnt, rehearsed and performed some of the most beautiful and profound music ever written for the human voice." "I must confess that over that period I paid little attention to the stories behind this wonderful music." "But now I've been given a chance to make a journey to find out about the lives, and the beliefs of those that sang it and those who composed it." "SINGING" "In this series I'm going on a pilgrimage to investigate four landmarks in the history of Western sacred music." "This is a story of a thousand years of praise through song." "My journey will take me across Europe to the Eternal City of Rome to discover how the music of the Vatican powered the Renaissance." "To Tudor Britain and a country in turmoil as Catholic worship is driven underground." "And to Germany where Protestant music reached its zenith with the genius of Bach." "But first I'm leaving London for medieval Paris to follow the story of the early development of Christian church music." "From the haunting simplicity of plainchant to the full glory of Gothic polyphony." "THEY SING" "Our starting point is the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris - the building at the heart of the Gothic revolution that took place in northern France at the end of the 12th Century." "An explosion of creativity that brought the cutting edge of medieval technology, together with the outer limits of musical experimentation." "The result was a sound, the like of which, had never been heard before - harmony." "This is music which can illuminate not only the world of the Church but also the lives of the people who composed, performed and heard it." "To help me explore this medieval "Big Bang", Harry Christophers, the musical director of The Sixteen has chosen four of his specialist singers - tenors Mark Dobell and Simon Berridge baritone Eamon Dougan and bass Jonathan Arnold" "have brought their early music expertise to the Gothic basilica Of Saint-Denis in the north of Paris." "When these cathedrals were being built the musicians were creating this sound to match the building and the two worked hand-in-hand." "It's quite clear that music was there for the glory of God, the buildings were there for the glory of God." "CHOIR SINGS" "When it was first heard it must have been just..." "I mean, the most modern thing anybody had ever heard." "This is Saint-Julien-Le-Pauvre on the Left Bank of the Seine." "From here I can see Notre Dame on the other side of the river." "Both churches were being built at around the same time - the 1160s and 1170s." "The construction of Saint Julien grew from generations of traditional builders' knowledge and expertise." "# Salve, Regina" "# Mater misericordiae... #" "For a thousand years this was the standard church architecture, thick walls enclosing an interior like a sort of chambered cave divided by these massive pillars supporting the ceiling." "And punctuated by small, round arched windows." "# Ad te clamamus" "# Exsules... #" "And the music that filled this space was plainsong or single lines of chant - simple, effective and beautiful." "One pure line of melody without any accompaniment or harmony and in free-time, the only sense of tempo or rhythm being determined by the length of the phrase being sung and the capacity of the singer's lungs." "# .." "Lacrimarum valleo. #" "Well, plainsong started way back in the 6th Century really and it became the focal point of the singing in the services, beautiful, simple lines that could within that get quite elaborate." "HE SINGS PLAINSONG" "The principle thing is a vocal line that's easily memorable and the congregations would have know these lines and sung along with them." "Even though it's a single line it's incredibly expressive." "# Salutare Dei nostri... #" "For hundreds of years there was no musical notation." "The manuscripts used by the choir contained nothing but the text." "The melodies had to be learned by heart and performed from memory." "It took ten years for a singer to learn the full repertoire of his own church community." "THEY SING" "But Saint Julien and plainsong represent the past." "Notre Dame and its music is the future." "I'm standing in the Place Du Parvis Notre Dame and there she is" " Notre Dame herself." "In the late 12th Century, this area was a maze of overcrowded streets, crammed with students, ecclesiasticals, artisans and merchants." "It must have been an extraordinary experience to see this huge, elaborate building overshadowing the medieval city." "But this wasn't just a big new cathedral, it was a Gothic statement in stone and glass, a revolutionary building." "What was new about it?" "What's new is the Gothic style is really revolutionary in certain techniques of construction and these techniques allowed for thinner, more slender, much more elegant buildings." "Gothic architecture exists because of the invention of the rib vault." "And a rib vault is what I'd see if I looked up at the ceiling...?" "Yes, a rib vault is like the bones of the body which were then fleshed out with tissues and skin." "So there's an entire new approach to the skeleton and then about 30 years into the history of Gothic architecture, some magnificent builder invents, applies, the flying buttress and this is the first important church where the flying buttress is employed." "And the flying buttress allowed what?" "The flying buttress allows what I'd call precise, tactical support at the very point on the upper part of the wall where you need it and it bears what we call the compression load." "If you could strip away the skin of the building, you would find the flying buttress touching on the outside of the wall and that corresponds precisely to the point where the rib vault comes down..." "The highest point of pressure." "Yes." "Gothic cathedrals can be much thinner in the walls because of the support system of the rib vaults up on the top coupled with the flying buttresses on the outside." "Flying buttresses - even the term is faintly glamorous - that provided the technology new medieval space effort, transferring the thrust downwards, or essentially propping up the walls." "Goethe called architecture "frozen music"" "and linked directly to the building of this monumental structure is a second crucially important musical triumph." "A new architecture in sound." "You can find it in the Magnus Liber - the Great Book - the single greatest achievement in medieval music." "At the time when virtually no music was written down this is a unique and permanent record of the early development of Western music." "In its original form it contains a cycle of music for the entire Church year and crucially it shows the evolution from single lines of chant to polyphonic or many voiced music." "It's one of the ironies of history that while the master builders of this magnificent cathedral remain unknown we do know the names of two French composers of this period " "Leonin and his successor, Perotin who both made major contributions to the music of Notre Dame and in particular, the Magnus Liber." "Their compositions together with those of their anonymous French contemporaries are known collectively as the music of the Notre Dame school." "The key work of the Notre Dame school" " Viderunt Omnes a standard Biblical text it had been chanted as plainsong for centuries." "But in the hands of Leonin it was transformed into something radically new and different." "# Salutare... #" "Leonin did something really special because he took the plainsong, put it into long notes, very long notes, so the first note really does sustain for a very long time." "# Vi-vi-vi-vi-vi-vi... #" "Stretching out the plainsong, Leonin produced sequences of long, low drone notes over the top of which a second voice could elaborate - the birth of harmony" "# Vi-vi-vi-vi der... #" "The part that I sing is really a baritone bass part." "You were sustaining very, very long notes for very long periods of time under the more florid texture of the upper voice." "HE SINGS" ""Viderunt omnes fines terra," all the ends of the Earth have seen." ""Salutare Dei nostri," the salvation of our God." ""Jubilate deo," make a joyful noise to God" ""Omnis terra," all the Earth." "It is, of course, partly about the process of singing and of making music but now those two Latin words, "Viderunt omnes" take minutes to sing." "What you're losing is any sense of the Viderunt text making sense but what you do gain by Leonin's new setting of these texts is a dance-like, spiritual, joyous music." "# O-o-omnes... #" "This is very different from the modern harmonic landscape with its very low bass and high treble." "Here is an exquisite smoothness of interlocking voices and a sense of infinity which for many musicians reflects a state of perfection." "# Dei nostri... #" "Virtually all we know about the music of the Notre Dame school comes from an important but anonymous treatise written in the 13th Century." "So long after the composers of the music were dead." "We don't know the author's name and so he's referred to imaginatively as Anonymous IV." "But we do know he was an English student from the University of Paris, and possibly from Bury St Edmunds and that thankfully, his bluffers guide to singing has survived." "Anonymous IV wrote in this crucial document that a composer called Leonin compiled a collection of musical scores for the singers of Notre Dame - the Magnus Liber." "Professor Mark Everist has made a special study of the handful of surviving medieval manuscripts and transcribed some of the music used in our singers' performance scores." "Mark, the Magnus Liber, the Great Book." "Can I try and define what precisely it is?" "Because it isn't a book." "You're right." "It's not really a book at all." "There's a kind of weird description of the Magnus Liber as a collection of music, polyphonic music, two parts for the elaboration of Mass and Divine Office." "Where's this come from?" "This comes from Anonymous IV." "Anonymous IV?" "Yes." "Tell me about HIM...presumably." "I'm guessing "him" but who knows." "Anonymous IV is really interesting." "He's the first writer about music to actually talk about music and its past." "So he's writing in the last quarter of the 13th Century, 100 years after Leonin..." "Our first musicologist?" "You could very well say that and he gives you a story about Leonin, the types of ecclesiastical positions he had." "CHOIR SINGS" "The people who are actually performing and composing this music are a particular group of the ecclesiastical team at Notre Dame and they're called the Clerks of Matins." "They were responsible for solo parts of plainsong which also turn into the elaborate sections of polyphonic music." "Are they in holy orders?" "Barely." "These guys were hired by the year and summarily fired every year." "Anonymous IV talks about them as "notaters of music,"" "in other words - people who write music down." "For these pioneers of polyphony, the frankly awe-inspiring vastness of the interior of the Gothic cathedral of Notre Dame must have been an exciting and challenging new acoustic space." "For the first time I began to get a real sense of what inspired the Notre Dame composers to push their singers into new choral territory, discovering new musical sounds even as the building took shape around them." "HARMONIC SINGING" "Leonin must have spent much of his career here in the unfinished choir at the eastend of the cathedral, separated from the incessant noise of building by a temporary screen that moved Westward column by column as the years passed." "It's very interesting - you come into a building like Notre Dame and if you sang plainsong, just that single line, you'd find in this sort of acoustic the notes blending into another note." "So you've got the basic form of harmony..." "With the echo..." "With the echo building, which is fabulous." "We're in a revolutionary place in its architecture and these composers followed suit..." "And is this a good singing architecture?" "Absolutely amazing." "And it must've made people tingle with excitement." "And it's a meditative aid, isn't it, on a par with light they were discovering in these buildings?" "They were using this wonderful new building to shape the sound they were creating." "And there are very clear thoughts about the whole architecture having to resemble the music - the two being in partnership." "I find this amazing in this particular building at this particular time that these men had this revolutionary idea." "THEY SING IN LATIN" "Paris has changed out of all recognition, of course, since medieval times, but standing on one of the towers of the cathedral, you get some sense of the medieval city still." "I wonder what it was like for a medieval man or woman to be standing here looking down on their fellow human beings down below." "They must have felt like God or an angel." "The cathedral dominates the city." "God looking over the sprawl of human life." "UNACCOMPANIED SINGING" "Andrew, the first thing that struck me when I saw this as a child, and it still strikes me now, is its size." "It's absolutely enormous - even in 21st-century Paris." "Why is it so big?" "It still dominates Paris now but you've got to remember in the 12th century, when it was built, it was all about political control as well as religious." "So the political leaders of that time..." "The cathedral was founded by Philippe Auguste and his big idea was that Paris would replace Rome as the political and religious centre of Europe." "It had been the ambition of Maurice de Sully, who commissioned the first architects, that this would overwhelm..." "He was the first minister of Philippe Auguste." "This would overwhelm any Roman ambitions to control Europe." "This isn't just about a parish but about unifying France as a country and spreading political control beyond the borders of Paris." "Did it work?" "Were people amazed by its grandeur?" "Did it turn Paris into a rival to Rome?" "Paris was already a rival intellectually." "It drew people to come and look in awe at this thing but it put the stamp on what Paris was already doing." "This is the centre of all intellectual, theological authority in Europe." "What I find interesting, if you look at the height of Notre Dame right now and it literally overshadows all the little transepts and little cells where the monks and priests would be delivering the word of God..." "Was that a deliberate statement?" "Absolutely." "The area around it, tell me a little about the area around it." "All of this is pretty sanitised and pretty clean." "All of this would have been little alleyways, streets..." "This piazza wouldn't have been here?" "All of this would have looked something like Calcutta or contemporary Bombay." "It was also a very fervid kind of place." "The borders of Paris were just the bridge there and the bridge there." "It was lined with hustlers, thieves, tarts..." "Paris was tight." "It was packed into that space." "Provincials feared it as a dangerous place cos they could hear the noise of Paris, several leagues away, as they would put it, and that was what was characteristic." "The noise, the shouts, the touts and hawkers and all this stuff." "24 hours a day?" "24 hour." "It was a dangerous but absolutely fascinating place." "The idea was that the word of God dominated everything that went on." "We can capture a sense of what life was like from the works of philosopher and musician Peter Abelard who'd arrived in Paris from the provinces to study theology." "MUSIC PLAYS" "He was, in his own estimation, a handsome man, a brilliant speaker, a poet, a composer and very, very charismatic." "He took rooms here in the house of the Canon of Notre Dame" " Fulbert." "In exchange, he agreed to tutor Fulbert's beloved niece Heloise." "She was clever, she was beautiful and inevitably Abelard found her irresistible." "Before long, in Heloise's room, the couple discovered an intoxicating combination of study and sex." ""Obeying your command from the start" ""I changed both my heart and my habit" ""Proving you to be the only possessor both of my body and of my mind." ""I never looked to my own passion," ""but only to yours, which I was always zealous to gratify."" "The couple married in secret, fled to Brittany and had a son." "But Abelard couldn't resist coming back to the centre of intellectual life" " Paris." "Their secret marriage was the talk of the city, but when Fulbert found out he planned a grizzly revenge." "THREATENING MUSIC PLAYS" "One night, a group of men broke into Abelard's room and in his own words, "Cut off that with which he had committed the sin."" "Abelard and Heloise's love survived even his castration." "She became a nun, he continued to teach and to study in Paris." "What remains today of their relationship is a series of letters they exchanged." "They display a heady and perhaps peculiarly French combination of love of philosophy and of each other." "FROM HELOISE'S LETTERS: "There were two things in you I must confess" ""with which you could captivate the heart of any woman." ""Your skill in making songs and your joy in singing them." ""This was why all the girls burned and sighed with love for you" ""and, well, jealous of my pleasures...and my bed."" "Abelard composed a hymn book for use by the community of nuns that Heloise joined." "Only one poem with its setting has survived from that work." "It's a meditation on the disappointments of human life." ""In heaven, in the presence of God" ""when every day is a Sunday and there is rest for the weary" ""there will be no separation between a wish and its fulfilment." ""All prayers will be answered." ""But in the meantime, we just have to soldier on."" "# O quanta qualia" "# Sunt illa sabbata" "# Quae semper celebrat" "# Superna curia" "# Quae fessis requies" "# Quae merces fortibus" "# Cum erit omnia" "# Deus in omnibus. #" "This is the 12th century built in stone and the direct inspiration for Notre Dame." "Here Harry Christopher and his singers are experimenting with the Gothic acoustics to try and recreate the authentic sound of Leonin's Organum Duplum - two-part polyphony." "Organum is this idea of the long notes and above it this very improvised line - duplum." "When we sang in Saint Denis, it was staggering because the sound went just all the way back." "Lovely acoustic, an even sound all the way through." "What I call a beautiful tail to the end of the sound." "THEY HARMONISE" "The first thing that struck me was the very powerful acoustic." "It was very clean and yet a nice reverberation." "You really felt, as a singer, that it was a beautiful building to receive that sort of music." "When we finished a long-held chord, it came back absolutely in tune which is very gratifying indeed and not always the case, I'd say." "# Omnes. #" "These early two-part compositions are milestones in the history of Western music." "Some of the first known pieces for two independent parts." "And crucially, they were written down." "Helen Deeming is an expert in mediaeval polyphony with a special interest in the graphic representation of musical sounds." "People had experimented with the idea you could draw horizontal lines to connect notes of the same pitch." "The very first musical notation was little marks above a text." "The idea of it was to remind you of a tune that you already knew." "Gradually, people realised that you could place the marks higher up or lower down the page." "The real innovation was the idea of having horizontal lines that would connect all of the notes of the same pitch." "It enables music to move around much more quickly and freely than it had been able to before." "Now it was possible to sight read." "To read it form the page and make the musical sounds." "It must have had a massive effect on the practitioners." "Very much so." "I think it's a revolution in music writing - the development of the stave." "Marks that symbolise notes fixed on a set of lines placed one above the other - learn to write with the system and you can copy or compose a complex new music." "Learn to read with this system and you can speedily learn a new repertoire." "Rules were a mediaeval obsession." "Endless academic energy was spent seeking to perfect an explanation of how the universe works." "Fusing the Old and the New Testaments with Greek philosophy, science and mathematics, scholars formulated universal laws." "And music was a key player." "Nearly 2,000 years earlier, the philosopher Pythagoras had discovered correspondences between the musical notes that he heard as harmonious and the mathematical intervals he could measure between them." ""The scientific laws behind this," he declared," ""must be the same as those that govern the motions of the stars and planets."" "Mediaeval scholars seized on this idea of harmonic purity and tried to produce a set of rules that would work for music and that fitted into the greater philosophical scheme of things." "Every theorist talks technically." "They talk endlessly about details of notation, which is codified in this fantastic scholastic way so everything has a structure, everything has got a place in which it fits." "We actually have curricula for music from the 1260s." "It's exactly what you'd expect." "It's more akin to physics than what we might understand as music." "But it's not just theory." "One of the beauties of music is that you can easily put theory into practice." "This is a workshop in Essex that belongs to Nick." "He's a guitar maker." "He's going to show me how to make a very simple instrument - the monochord." "I'm completely incompetent." "He's going to lead me through." "Nick, let's start." "This is a very simple instrument compared to guitar making." "We start off with four identical-sized pieces of wood." "We have four corner pieces, which I'm going to get you to glue on." "There's your block of wood." "You just need a very thin bead of glue." "Just a squiddle, we call it in the trade." "Then, this is the mucky bit." "That's fine." "The monochord is really simple to build." "What it does, is quite clever." "A determination to demonstrate that Pythagoras' rules can be applied to Western church music inspired the theorists to try to measure precisely the fractions of notes within an octave." "OK, so that's stuck." "We leave that to dry." "I think, if we're very careful, we can probably put the base on." "They discovered that two intervals - the fourth and the fifth produced a satisfactory resonance, a harmony." "Just as Pythagoras' pure maths had predicted." "With this instrument, the monochord, these mathematical relationships could be both measured and demonstrated." "There we go." "Now, we're gonna have one end a tailpiece and at the other end we're gonna have a guitar machine head." "You're in." "The monochord is simply a box with a single string." "When you pluck this string, it will vibrate at a specific frequency and that produces a note." "If you halve its length, the plucked string will vibrate at twice the frequency of the original and the note will be an octave higher." "Can I do it?" "It's going to be a disaster..." "Please do." "One that side." "NICK HUMS" "There's the octave." "Using this little sliding bridge, you can subdivide it endlessly." "Like magic, you can calculate and both see and hear the different harmonic intervals and their relationships." "You get the sense this is Pythagoras, the perfect intervals, Greek philosophy, but this is actually a completely practical instrument." "Yeah." "There's nothing quite like hearing it in the flesh, so to speak." "You can hear a theory being put into practice." "Here I am proudly going off with my own monochord." "I've learnt a lot about it as well." "I think you need a gin." "Thank you very much." "Right, this is where maths meets music." "Mark, this is the string divided 2 to 1." "So it should be an octave." "Should be." "We hope." "Would you sing that, please, Mark?" "# Ah-h-h. #" "HIGHER NOTE # Ah-h-h. #" "It's a perfect octave." "We think that's about a C." "Round about a C." "The second interval is a fifth." "So we have this, the lower note..." "# Ah-h-h. #" "# About a D. # And then this should be..." "Actually, you sing it first." "HIGHER NOTE # Ah-h-h. #" "SAME NOTE Magic!" "That's a fifth." "So that's an A. And this should be a fourth." "So..." "# Ah-h-h. #" "HIGHER NOTE # Ah-h-h. #" "SAME NOTE" "That's the principles." "Pythagorean principles." "'This is science and music working together at the birth of harmony.'" "Leonin and the Notre Dame singers discovered that the notes which sounded right when sung together corresponded to the ideas about harmonic purity developed by the theoriticians and demonstrated by the monocord." "Harry, I spent a long and entertaining morning building this, which is my monochord." "I'm very proud of it." "What precisely was it used for?" "It's very impressive." "Thank you!" "Very impressive indeed." "It was used quite simply to give the note..." "Uh-huh." "..but more importantly to teach young musicians what intervals were, and particularly the fourth and the fifth." "We're going to try and reconstruct the very early stages of organum, is that right?" "Yes, I mean, organum is based on the chant..." "Yeah. ..so we've got that wonderful chant, Hec Dies, for Easter Day." "Right." "And they'll sing the chant first of all very simply." "# Hec" "# Dies. #" "Now, on very high feast days, special occasions, this could well have been sung at the octave, like this." "SOME SING AN OCTAVE LOWER # Hec" "# Dies. #" "So that's the other line singing an octave below and it gives it a bit more weight and..." "Yeah, and you get a feeling of a real festive occasion." "So that's the first thing we think they ever did, was to add an octave to give it a bit of ballast." "Absolutely" "And then what was the next stage?" "Well, this is interesting because this is the interval of the fifth." "This should be a fifth." "A bit Chinese." "HIGHER NOTE So we sing the chant like this." "WITH FIFTH INTERVAL ADDED # Hec" "# Dies. #" "That to me sounds like a rather hollow... sinister sound." "It's a very hollow sound." "It is, absolutely hollow." "And sort of suits the arches of this church." "But then we have something slightly different and we hear the interval of a fourth, a little lower." "WITH FOURTH INTERVAL ADDED # Hec. #" "Hear that chant now." "# Hec... #" "'So here's the range of notes that will harmonise 'when Leonin remodels the plainsong as polyphony with the long drone notes 'and elaborate second voice.'" "Those three intervals are the three basic intervals that we get from Pythagorean theory, and theorists at this time were writing about those intervals and saying these are the..." "The pure, the perfect intervals." "If you can imagine that Hec Dies heard on Easter Day for the first time, it must have been the same effect as Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring for its audience." "Some people must have hated it, others thought, "Wow!" "What is this fantastic music?"" "SINGING IN HARMONY" "These tunes, especially those for the great feast days, would have been known to everyone in a church, the congregation in the nave just as much as the choir in the stalls." "But who was this music being sung for?" "It was, of course, being directed up to heaven." "The ultimate, the final audience for this music was God." "SINGING IN HARMONY" "The music soars up to God and his saints and his angels." "It also self-consciously aspires to perfection, the perfection of heaven." "SINGING CONTINUES" "Pure but complex, the voices independent but accurately positioned against one another." "An intellectual exercise governed by mathematical patterns but with a mystical, spiritual intention." "The design and complexity of the music reflecting the increasingly flamboyant style of the architecture." "The flying buttresses, the pointed windows, the tracery, the statuary, the vastly ambitious stained glass..." "this is the real Gothic." "So this is the Sainte Chapelle." "And it's absolutely extraordinary." "Who built it and why?" "It was built by Louis IX." "This was going to house the relics of the Passion and especially the crown of thorns." "And that was going to make it the centrepiece of Western Christianity." "So again it was a big religious statement and it was a big political statement." "Like Notre Dame." "Like Notre Dame." "But what was most incredible about this chapel is really the architecture." "You've got this new technology and some people describe it as the triumph of the intangible." "If you look around you, this is like a window on heaven." "It's psychedelic in the sense that it's trippy, it's visionary, and this incredible transcendental beauty as well, in some ways, the apogee of Western Christian art." "There's something beautiful about this as well, which is to do with the 13th century and the material melted into the intangible, into the impossible." "What happens here is impossible." "And remember, to the medieval mind, this is a mind-blowing experience." "Everything here is a movement towards the space of the beyond and the divine." "For them, it would have been a picture of heaven." "It looks like heaven, like the very heavens themselves, and I find it mind-blowing looking at it now, so you can imagine what it would have meant to the medieval imagination." "Every single feature of these extraordinary buildings was designed to convey this dizzying theological message, their elegant geometry reflecting the concept of God's ordered and harmonious universe." "The new polyphony was an integral part of this, as vibrant and richly textured as the stained glass and stonework." "So, along with Gothic architecture, this music spread throughout northern France and then very quickly throughout medieval Christendom." "SINGING IN HARMONY" "Paris had become the pre-eminent city in Western Europe in the 12th century." "The city itself was expanding as a centre for learning in terms of the schools which would become the University of Paris." "It was also a great centre for trade because of the River Seine." "SINGING CONTINUES" "There are people coming into Paris from all across Europe, so they're going to Notre Dame and hearing this music and seeing this fabulous new building." "So anybody with an interest in music recognises this as something quite mind-blowing and is rapidly picking up manuscripts of it and taking what they find there back to their home countries." "So presumably some people said, "Oh, you must hear the new Leonin, it's fantastic"?" "Absolutely." "It was possible to send the book to another place and for some other singer to read it from the page and make the musical sounds without having to have another singer come with him to teach him the tune." "'This is the flowering of the Middle Ages, 'from the end of the 12th century when Leonin flourished, until the Renaissance two centuries later." "'The startling new harmonies of the Notre Dame School would now be heard everywhere." "'Not just in the new Gothic cathedrals but in monasteries, 'aristocratic chapels and every church that could obtain a set of music manuscripts 'and some singers who could read them." "'Although there is no one document we could call the Magnus Liber, 'there are about half a dozen surviving Notre Dame manuscripts 'scattered across Europe, evidence of how efficiently polyphony was now being exported." "'In the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbuttel, northern Germany," "'I discovered two of the best-preserved examples.'" "These are our Notre Dame manuscripts, the binding is modern but the content is the original parchment and script, probably of the middle of the 13th century." "In this time parchment was the only material to write books." "Paper was not yet known in Western Europe." "And so parchment made from sheep, geese or mainly calves..." "It's very simple, isn't it?" "It's a working handbook." "Yes." "Nothing ornamental about it." "And presumably it was much used..." "'It must have been handled by generations of singers." "'It arrived in Germany after centuries of use in Scotland." "'It's slightly grubby, stained 'and peppered with splashes of ancient wax.' Extraordinary!" "An enormous amount of music." "'It's not difficult to imagine a medieval singer in a darkened Gothic church 'trying to follow the notes by the light of a flickering candle.'" "BOTH READ: "Viderunt omnes."" "Yes, that's it. (Wow.)" "It's fantastic." "'The second of the two collections looked and felt rather different.'" "This is a different writer, isn't it?" "Yes, it's a different writer." "This is surely written in France." "We don't know who ordered this manuscript." "Probably it was written for someone who was interested in a little bit more beauty and luxury and therefore these initials were painted with colours and even with gold, which was a quite expensive..." "thing in the Middle Ages." "The copyist's work is so delicate and so intricate and you can see the music echoing the architecture for which it was composed." "SINGING DROWNS SIMON RUSSELL BEALE'S WORDS" "With scores like these being copied and circulated," "French Polyphony began its inevitable takeover of Europe, changing fundamentally the way choirmasters, singers and congregations thought about the relationship between music and Divine worship." "All the key factors that powered the Gothic revolution were now in place." "THEY SING" "A new method of writing down notes, the monochord, new acoustic spaces created by the Gothic style of architecture - everything comes together to provide the circumstances in which polyphonic music can flourish." "Leonin's is not the only name that has survived from the Notre Dame school of composers." "We also know that his successor was called Perotin." "Within a generation Perotin had compiled a new edition of Leonin's work." "Anonymous IV describes Perotin as a master who wrote the best four-part polyphony." "Sederunt Principes was written for the feast of St Stephen, the first Christian martyr and co-patron of Notre Dame." "THEY SING SEDERUNT PRINCIPES" "Just as the Gothic builders used flying buttresses and rib vaults to support all this tracery and stained glass," "Perotin used Leonin's development of duplum organum, the extended tenor drone and the Pythagoras-approved note intervals to support more and more elaborate, interwoven vocal parts." "SINGING CONTINUES" "SINGING ENDS" "So we've arrived now at one of the big-bang moments of Western music." "How long before this happened had the Church been singing what we were singing?" "Only a matter of about 50 years." "We're really talking about the turn of the 12th century." "We have Leonin writing those duplum organum and then Perotin coming along and revising it and actually turning it into four part." "Now that obviously by necessity..." "..has to change, needs discipline... ..needs much more organisation." "So this is Viderunt Omnes - Perotin." "It's again based on a plainsong chant." "Let's sing it." "Let's sing the opening phrase." "You're going to ask me to sing it as well, aren't you?" "I certainly am." "On your head be it." "I've got my modern version of a monochord." "HE PLAYS A NOTE" "# Viderunt omnes. #" "Great." "So that's the basic tune." "Now what does he do?" "Now, the same as Leonin, in that we have the long note values so the plainsong is elongated..." "Poor old Jonathan has to do it by himself." "You can join me on this." "I thought you might say that." "OK." "And then over the top of it we have these added parts." "Duplum - second part, triplum - third part, quadruplum - fourth part." "If I were to sing it with you and destroy the beauty of the whole thing, do we do what I was taught at school - staggered breathing..." "Yes." "I breathe and you don't, then you breathe and I don't." "Yes." "Through osmosis, we know when the other person is going to..." "Or you can indicate through the subtle use of your little finger..." "Oh, really?" "..on the page." "If I know that you're going to breathe, I won't." "Shall we have a go?" "HE PLAYS THE NOTE ON THE MOUTH ORGAN" "ALL SING TOGETHER # Vi... #" "THEY CONTINUE TO SING IN PARTS" "So we had various different interpretations." "Our fingers worked." "That was the most exciting thing for me!" "I think the thing is, that chord at the beginning, the impact that would have had, in 1198, when it was first ever performed " "Christmas Day - it was an amazing moment." "It still sounds very rich, even to modern ears." "It does, yes." "It's an athletic sing, that's the other thing." "When you hear the whole thing, it's a big sing." "It's amazing, as we go through the piece, we've got great moments of real discord." "If we just sing a little passage..." "THEY SING "OMNES" IN PARTS" "It's the most fantastic cadence, isn't it?" "Absolutely brilliant." "It gives is a very earthy feel as well." "Despite the fact that it's spiritual music and sacred music, it gives it a real earthy quality that would really ring true." "Many a modern composer would be proud of that moment." "Absolutely." "# Vi... #" "It's not hard to imagine how they might have felt when they first sang this four-part music which had never been done before really." "It's got an amazing rawness, an amazing power." "You can just imagine that they would have felt overwhelmed by that." "This was really a new departure." "It was a real moment in history." "THEY CONTINUE TO SING "Viderunt Omnes"" "What four-part Perotin must have sounded like to a congregation turning up in the 12th century and hearing that amazing texture, that chordal, four-part ringing down the nave and then coming back, absolutely amazing." "They are now experiencing something completely new." "SINGING CONTINUES" "Contemporary listeners reacted with the medieval equivalent of shock and awe." "The Bishop of Chartres who attended services in Notre Dame at this time gave this first-hand description." ""That which is most tuneful among the birds cannot equal them." ""Hearing the soft harmonies of the various singers," ""some taking the high parts, others the low," ""some singing in advance, others following in the rear," ""you would think yourself listening to a concert of sirens," ""rather than men," ""and wonder at the power of voices." ""Such is their skill in running up and down the scales" ""so wonderful the shortening or multiplying of notes," ""the repetition or emphatic utterance of the phrases."" ""VIDERUNT OMNES" CONTINUES" ""The treble and trill notes are so mingled with the tenor and the bass" ""that the ears lose all power of judgement." ""When this is taken to excess it is more fitting to excite lust than devotion." ""But if it is kept within the bounds of moderation," ""it drives care away from the soul, confers joy, peace and exultation in God" ""and transports the soul to the society of angels."" "SINGING CONTINUES" "# ..o-omnes. #" "The Notre Dame School gave the Western world its first taste of developed harmony and that taste would lead on to Bach, as we shall hear later in this series, and also to the harmonic riches of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner" "and the whole range of popular music." "Vitus Abit Littera is a celebration." ""This is the day of joy, let us rejoice," says the text," ""Our guilt is forgiven."" ""VITUS ABIT LITTERA" IS SUNG" "And surely you can hear that joy in the complex hypnotic play of the four voices." "In the next episode of Sacred Music, my journey will take me to Rome to discover the unaccompanied choral music of the Italian Renaissance and its greatest master, Palestrina." "His story will take us into the heart of the labyrinth of 16th-century Vatican politics where popes wield power and authority and singers take the praise of God to dizzy new heights." "THEY CONTINUE TO SING "Vitus Abit Littera"" "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk" "Repair and Synchronization by Easy Subtitles Synchronizer 1.0.0.0"