Léonin News
French 12th-century composer associated with polyphony in Notre Dame
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2024-03-25
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2022-10-05 06:00:09
Adventures in Fourths: Music of Debussy, Bartók, and Gershwin
The Greek name for the interval of the perfect fourth was diatessaron. Translating as “across four,” it is a word which brings to mind Pythagorean harmonic ratios. Wide open sonorities that suggest neither major nor minor, perfect fourths and fifths became prevalent in the early medieval polyphony of composers such as Léonin and Pérotin. In the piano pieces below, we hear twentieth century composers exploiting the perfect fourth for purely expressive reasons. Here are three ...
2019-04-19 06:00:42
Léonin, Pérotin, and the Birth of Polyphony at Notre Dame
Why did the devastating fire at Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral capture such intense worldwide attention this week? One reason is because of the way Notre Dame connects us to the past by way of nearly a thousand years of history. The stones of this iconic structure, which Victor Hugo described in 1831 as “a vast symphony in stone,” have presided over great plagues, the turmoil of the French Revolution, Napoléon Bonaparte’s self-coronation, and the ...
2019-04-15 23:28:00
Music by early masters of polyphony who worked at Notre Dame de Paris:Léonin:: Pérotin:
2019-04-15 19:07:00
Notre Dame de Paris
Notre Dame de Paris October, 2018 Photo by me Notre Dame de Paris is on fire; the spire has collapsed and it seems that if the roof hasn't collapsed, it will very soon. There were renovations under way and it's possible that something went wrong with an electrical connection or something like that.Two of the earliest composers for whom we have names, and whose compositions can be identified, worked at Notre Dame, Léonin and Pérotin. Their style is known in the US as Notre Dame polyphony.On Flickr, I have a full album of photos I took last October of the great church. This is unimaginably sad, a tremendous loss for the world and for me personally.
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- timeline: Composers (Europe).
- Indexes (by alphabetical order): L...