Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie, 6 | 1993

Recent research on oral literature has allowed to underscore the importance of oral tradition for the formation and transmission of the melodic repertoire of the Christian liturgy in the Early Middle Ages. Also, a number of earlier literary and theoretical sources preceding the development of musical notations bear testimony to vocal polyphony. These texts suggest that such practices – referred to as organum – comprised singing in parallel motion as well as singing on a mobile drone created on the basis of « tetrachordal » perception of the melody « set in organum ». Organum-type forms of polyphony transcribed in the late eleventh and until the sixteenth century demonstrate the vitality of this type of plurivocality. From this angle, musical transcriptions represent a possible application, at a given time, of such polyphony, and a comparison of transcriptions made of the same piece in the same place but over several decades allows to glimpse the evolution of this orally transmitted piece.