Pérotin

Perotin, was a European composer, believed to be French, who lived around the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century.

Perotin's works are preserved in the Magnus Liber, the "Great Book" of early polyphonic church music, which was in the collection of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. The Magnus Liber also contains the works of his slightly earlier contemporary Léonin. However, attempts by scholars to place Perotin at Notre Dame have been inconclusive, and very little is known of his life. His dates of activity can be approximately established from some late 12th century edicts of Bishop of Paris, Odo of Sully, which mention organum triplum and quadruplum, and his known collaboration with poet Philip the Chancellor, whose Beata viscera he could not have set before about 1220. One source suggests that his Viderunt Omnes was composed for St. Stephen's Day (December 26), 1199. His music, as well as that of Léonin and their anonymous contemporaries, have been grouped together as the School of Notre Dame.

Perotin composed organum, the earliest type of polyphonic music that went beyond the monody of Gregorian and other types of chant. He pioneered the styles of organum triplum and organum quadruplum (three- and four-part polyphony); in fact his Sederunt principes and Viderunt omnes are among only a few organa quadrupla known. He was one of very few composers of his day whose name has been preserved, and can be reliably attached to individual compositions; this is due to the testimony of an anonymous English student at Notre Dame known as Anonymous IV, who wrote about him.

A prominent feature of his compositional style was to take a simple, well-known melody and stretch it out in time, so each syllable was hundreds of seconds long, and then use each of those held notes (the tenor, Latin for "holder", or cantus firmus) as the basis for rhythmically complex, interweaving lines above it. The result was that one or more vocal parts sang free, quickly moving lines ("discants") over the chant below, which was extended to become a slowly shifting drone.

His music influenced modern "minimalist" composers such as Steve Reich, indeed, it can be argued that Perotin himself was a proto-minimalist. His works include Viderunt omnes, Sederunt principes, Alleluia posui adiutorum, and Alleluia natiuitas in the organum style as well as Dum sigillum and Beata uiscera in the single-melody conductus style. (The conductus sets a rhymed Latin poem called a sequence to a repeated melody, much like a contemporary hymn.) Later in life he earned the title "Perotin Magister" which means Perotin the master or expert.