This week’s theme is…“New” Music! Today I often find that the label “New” is applied to music that is self-consciously experimental, unconventional, or cutting edge in some way, although technically any music that has been recently created is new. But then I suppose you have to answer the question “how recently created does something have to be to be called new?”, and that can end up in some seriously shameless naval-gazing! The truth is that every piece of music was new at some point. Beyond that, some music is based on the theme of newness. This week we explore some such examples.
“New” Music, Day 2 – Garrit Gallus by Philippe de Vitry
What is your favorite book by Doctor Seuss? Is it The Cat In The Hat? I’m not sure it’s my favorite, but it’s a good one, and I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s among his most famous stories. If you need a refresher, you can listen to Justin Bieber read it here:
If you’d rather hear another narrator, there are many others on YouTube, so just search and take your pick. Have you ever noticed the rhythmic nature of Dr. Seuss’ typical style of writing? While it is often obscured by the expressive pacing and inflection of readers as they instinctively guide the dramatic curve of the text, Dr. Seuss is always highly rhythmic. As a trained musician it is often most difficult for me to ignore, and when I read Dr. Seuss I tend to exaggerate the pronounced, lilty rhythms of poetry like that found in The Cat In The Hat. It’s just hard for me not to and I derive a sort of satisfaction from imagining the rhythmic transcription as I do so.
You can quite easily transcribe the rhythm of The Cat In The Hat or any poetry that feels like it. That lilty, rollicking feeling indicates that it is in what musicians call compound time, which means that the beat is divided into three equal parts. Compound time signatures usually have a 6, a 9, or a 12 on the top. I’m not going to go into all the theory of how time signatures are constructed, but if you’re interested there are plenty of resources available online. Just search for “compound vs. simple time” and you should get on the right track. One recent popular song written in a compound meter is A Thousand Years by Christina Perri. It has two beats per measure, and so the top of the time signature would be 6, because 2 beats times 3 divisions equals 6:
Whenever I teach music theory to freshmen at universities I always find understanding compound time signatures to be the first major mental feat, and I sometimes use texts like the Dr. Seuss books to help them understand how it feels. They are often amazed to see the rhythms we have been practicing pop up in those familiar children’s books.
I couldn’t find any formal musical training in Dr. Seuss’ biography. He probably learned a bit about music at some point in his life, but however much that was, I very much doubt he would have been aware of embedding these compound rhythms into his poetry, at least not in those terms.
I’m going to digress slightly at this point, but you’ll see how it fits in with Dr. Seuss pretty soon. Young children have a way of asking questions that are far deeper than adults are equipped to handle, don’t they? A little kid will, almost flippantly, ask for a simple answer in response to an enormously complex, and ultimately unanswerable, philosophical, moral, or cosmological question that the adult may have pondered for years without arriving at a pat conclusion. As an example of this, I’ve had children of all ages ask me where music comes from. And I really don’t know. The history of humankind is far too extensive and obscured in its earliest times to really know. But what I do tell them is that we can see commonalities between music and other things people do, like, for example, language. Listen to this. It is not even 4 minutes long, but will completely change the way you view music and language:
Nifty, right? Maybe even mind-blowing? Depends on whom you ask I suppose. I never get tired of playing that for people and I wish I could have seen your reaction if you just experienced it for the first time. Here’s a fun video of a fifth grade class having their first experience of this phenomenon, and they’re pretty cute:
So, what does this teach us? Obviously music and and language spring from a similar source and are not always, and maybe never, separate entities in human experience. Diana Deutsch’s demonstrations show us that we are constantly singing, and singing can be notated, and notation always has a meter. But what we call meter in music goes by another name in poetry, prosody. If you’ve studied prosody, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Dr. Seuss had done that, you are probably familiar with the different metric feet, which are basically rhythms, and scansion, which is basically the practice of notating those rhythms. You can see musical meter as a formalized organization of poetic metric feet, which is, I imagine, related to how rhythmic notation began to evolve, way back in twelfth century Europe. Listen to this:
This is one of the few sprawling 4-voice polyphonic masterworks to survive from the pen of a musician named Perotin, who lived and worked at Paris’ Cathedral of Notre Dame in the 1200s. At this time composers like him were taking Gregorian Chants, slowing them waaaaaaaay down (the long notes on the bottom staff are the original notes of a teeny fragment of chant) and improvising or composing fantastic musical lines above them. It wasn’t notated the way you see in the video – that is a modern transcription. They thought about it poetically, in what were called “rhythmic modes”, which are very much like poetic feet. The rhythmic modes of Notre Dame end up working pretty well in our contemporary compound meter, and a few of the modes were:
| Medieval Mode Number | Modern Notation | Rhythmic Sound | Prosodic Sound | |
| First Mode |  |
Long – Short | Stressed – Unstressed | Trochee |
| Second Mode | |
Short – Long | Unstressed – Stressed | Iamb |
| Sixth Mode |  |
Short – Short – Short | Unstressed – Unstressed – Unstressed | Tribarch |
There are also other rhythmic modes which combined some of the shorter structures. But can you hear them in Perotin’s music now? A constant interplay of poetic metric feet that plays out over ten minutes. I think it’s notable that you can basically notate The Cat In The Hat and poems like it in the milennium-old Notre Dame rhythmic modes.
In the late 1200s and early 1300s this way of thinking about rhythm was codified by music theorists like Franco of Cologne, who worked to clarify the notation and seemed to instinctively realize that greater flexibility in notation of rhythm was possible, but didn’t quite break out of the box the rhythmic modes had drawn.
But, around the same time, other musicians were trying to push it a little further. Musicians like Philippe de Vitry. With a life and career spanning the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, Philippe de Vitry was a brilliant poet, composer, and cleric, was widely admired for his contributions to music and poetry, as well as his general intelligence and grasp of his contemporary sciences. He also became the bishop of Meaux, France, from 1351 until his death a decade later, and occupied the chair of St. Etienne Cathedral:
That would probably inspire me too. He is credited with writing a treatise on composition and notation called Ars Nova, which means “New Art”, although it is perhaps better translated as “New Technique”. The “Old Technique” (Ars Antiqua) was anything that used the rhythmic modes like music of Perotin and Franco, and there was heated debate and pamphlet wars-a-plenty between devotees of the respective techniques as the Ars Nova began to flourish. Maybe Franco was a bitter old fuddy-duddy, and it seems ridiculous to us now, but the work of de Vitry and his fellow “New Artists” took major leaps to break out of the rhythmic modes and explore new territories of freedom, flexibility, and expression. Listen to this zesty piece by Philippe de Vitry in which you can hear remnants of the old rhythmic modes, but with a greater freedom and intricacy:
Does that music feel a bit cheeky to you? If it does, you’re not mistaken, and this is for a couple reasons. One is the very engaging performance; this kind of music and its history often occupies a central place in very sterile music history lectures, supplemented with even more sterile recordings. Those are the kind of recordings I remember from my days covering this subject matter in music history classes and the recordings we listened to were not all that engaging. But that is changing as committed performers seek to bring music like this beyond the dissection table and bring out the very human interest behind the structure. What are they singing about? It’s a dense allegory about corruption in the Church, not unlike the poetry of the Golliards that features in Carmina Burana (see this post for more about the Golliards and Carmina Burana). These texts were written a little later than Carmina Burana and came to be collected in a volume called the Roman de Fauvel, which, like the earlier Golliardic poetry, was inspired by moral decay in the Church and greater society. It is the source of a number of Philippe de Vitry’s surviving works and may be one of the reasons that Pope John XXII did not like the Ars Nova.
While The Cat In the Hat and the Roman de Fauvel were separated by almost a millennium, and created to accomplish very different artistic goals, the characteristic rhythms that unify them are indicative of music’s deep connection to spoken language, evidence that they are both very much a part of our universal human heritage.
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