In the Shadow of Notre Dame

Chloë Allison answers questions on her doctoral research into medieval polyphony, which forms the basis of our latest performance project. Marginalia’s In the Shadow of Notre Dame breathes life into the forgotten sound world of twelfth-century Paris and explores its vibrant and ambitious musical community in story and song.

What is your research about?

At the end of the twelfth century, Paris was an exciting place to live. The French kings had recently moved their court to Paris permanently, a huge new cathedral was being built, and lots of the most talented and ambitious thinkers travelled from all over Europe to teach and study at the constantly-expanding university. In that economically and intellectually rich environment, singers created music in ways and on scales that were completely new – yet they did so almost entirely without the help of notated music. My research looks at how communities of Parisian singers worked together orally to craft some of the most intricate vocal music ever created and asks who these unnamed virtuosi were and how they thought.

How did you first become interested in this music?

I took a course on it as an undergraduate at Cambridge. I have always been interested in the historical, cultural, and sociological aspects of music but it was the particular challenges posed by medieval history that really got me hooked. The main hurdle is that very little information survives about how Parisian singers worked. There are some edicts made by a grumpy Bishop telling singers to stop messing around on particular feast days, and some aspects of this music are written about in a dry treatise associated with the University. (Yes, everyone at the Medieval University of Paris had to learn music theory!) This means I have to be a detective historian and tease out meaning and inference from a small amount of evidence. This involves analysing notated records of the music that singers created and circulated mostly orally. There’s a bit of a conflict there: how can you learn about a fluid oral practice from fixed, notated pieces? It definitely involves a lot of imagination. It feels like shining lights from lots of different directions on a nine-hundred-year-old picture that is very much in the dark, trying to illuminate it as much as possible. I find that really exciting.

What does this music actually sound like? How different is it from things we hear more often?

It sounds *very* different. But it’s at least three hundred years older than anything we hear regularly today, so I suppose that’s to be expected! There are no chords or keys and rhythm works in sets of repeating patterns without time signatures or bars. The music I work on particularly was sung at the points in the church service which were intended to be meditative. Whether you keep that original devotional context or not, allowing the sound to wrap around you, especially in a lovely acoustic, is something really special. I can’t imagine how amazing it must have been in Notre Dame, especially in the candle light and in a building that at the time was surely even more awe inspiring than it is today!

What is your favourite thing about your work?

Definitely the opportunity to put myself in the shoes of singers from centuries ago. This was not two or three grand composers who composed their music and then passed on scores to lowly singers for performance. This was an ambitious group of singers who loved experimenting together, and possibly competing with each other, to make music – border-line outrageous, in some cases! Getting a personal insight into the lives of these individual, unnamed singers, speaking to them across the centuries, is really special – especially when my life as a musician in a thriving university town with a vibrant choral tradition is so similar to theirs in many ways.

Two-voice piece for Christmas illuminated with the Tree of Jesse, Manuscript F (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Pluteus 29.1), fol. 65r

Two-voice piece for Christmas illuminated with Visit of the Magi, Flight to Egypt, and Slaughter of the Innocents, Manuscript F (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Pluteus 29.1), fol. 99r