Polyphony

Summary

Dominique Pagani defines polyphony as the interweaving of several autonomous voices, each beautiful in itself, from which a higher beauty arises. He sees it as the opposite of accompanied melody1. He places it historically as a liberation from monody, a single voice even when many chests sing it. At the Notre-Dame school and at Saint-Denis, the voices begin to diverge like the ogives of Gothic cathedrals, which he calls a novum organum2. He traces monody back to Eastern psalmody, handed down through the Byzantine style, and notes that Corsican polyphonies preserve its most archaic features. In Bach, polyphony compensates for a constant metre and requires following several voices at once3. He does not treat it as a Western privilege: in his view, the polyphonies of the Solomon Islands and of the Pygmies are as complex to analyse as a Bach fugue or The Art of Fugue45.

1. 1From Bach to the Pygmies22 Jun 2022 · 7:30
2. 2From the lost voice to the path of modernity: from modal music to tonal music23 May 2021 · 13:20
3. 3The music of history26 Apr 2015 · 32:38
4. 4The music of history26 Apr 2015 · 1:10:22
5. 5From Bach to the Pygmies22 Jun 2022 · 9:56

Summary produced automatically from 8 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.