Philippe de Vitry

(b Paris, 31 Oct 1291; d there, 9 June 1361). French theorist,poet and composer. He studied at the Sorbonne and held numerous prebends, but his main sphere of activity was the French court, where he was secretary and adviser to Charles IV, Philippe VI and Jean II, and known as a leading intellectual. He undertook many diplomatic missions, some to the papal court in Avignon. In 1351 he became Bishop of Meaux. In his capacity as a musician, for which he received many tributes, he wrote a famous and authoritative treatise, Ars nova (c1322-3), and composed motets and other music. The most original part of Ars nova is the last ten chapters, on mensural rhythm and notation. Vitry presented normative formulations of new concepts of rhythm and notation; the two main features are the minim (half-note, for which he established the notational symbol) and imperfect mensuration (the division of note-values into twos as well as threes at every level). Much of his creative and literary output is lost, but he probably wrote the fine poetic texts of his surviving motets. The earliest of them were inserted into theRoman De Fauvel, where some of the monophonic contributions may also be Vitry s. His original approach established a hierarchic concept of the voices, in which the sustained tenor had a clearly defined structural foundation. He combined a slow-moving, patterned tenor with a superstructure of two faster moving voices, allowing increased melodic and contrapuntal flexibility. Each composition is an entity with a specific structural and poetic indivduality. Of the 12 motets that can be ascribed to Vitry, none has a chanson tenor, and only one has French texts. His structural use of isorhythm clearly influenced Machaut.

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Philippe de Vitry (1291-1360) was a French poet, composer, and churchman-statesman. His treatise Ars nova became the rallying cry for all "modern" composers after about 1320.

Born in Paris, Philippe de Vitry was the son of a royal notary. Philippe served several French kings, carrying out political missions that took him to southern France and a meeting with the Pope at Avignon. As a cleric, he received several money-producing canonates; in 1351 he became bishop of Meaux near Paris. One of his friends, Italy's leading poet, Petrarch, in a letter of 1350, called Vitry the foremost French poet of his time.

Nearly all Vitry's literary works are lost. Especially regrettable is the loss of his French poetry set to music, ballades and rondeaux in which he created a new style in song anticipating Guillaume de Machaut. Surviving are one ballade without music; two longer poems, one written in reference to a crusade planned for 1335 by King Philip VI; and two poems that serve one of his 12 extant motets. Of Vitry's Latin poems only one has reached us outside of those that are incorporated in his motets.

Vitry's earliest musical works, five motets, are preserved in a musical appendix added in 1316 to a moralistic romance, Le roman de Fauvel, written in 1314. Seven motets by Vitry, mostly composed between 1320 and 1335, are included in later collections, and the texts of a thirteenth work survive in one of the many additional manuscripts that include these pieces. In his motets Vitry emerges as the first highly individual composer. Each work is a distinctive work of art, expresses personal ideas, and is characteristically shaped.

The new techniques which Vitry embraced in his music he expounded in his famous treatise Ars nova (ca. 1320). It is mainly through him that these techniques gained widespread acceptance. They include a new system of proportional tempo changes and meters, including the adoption of the formerly neglected duple meter beside the triple meter; the introduction of the intervals of the third and sixth as consonances, considered as dissonant before him, and therewith of the triad and what we now call its first inversion; a freer use of accidentals; and the employment of new, smaller note values.

In addition to the new ballade style, Vitry created a new technique in motet composition, today called isorhythm. This consists in employing a long and complex rhythmic pattern, which governs one or all voice parts of a motet in one of the following ways: both melody and rhythmic pattern may be repeated, sometimes in a new tempo, usually twice as fast; the rhythmic pattern may be repeated but superimposed on new melodic content; or the pattern may be divided into several subpatterns, which, with ever new melodic content, may be repeated in an arbitrary order and any number of times. This highly complex method has been said to foreshadow some 20th-century approaches.

Further Reading

Vitry's music is available in a modern edition by Leo Schrade. Information on him appears in Gustave Reese, Music in the Middle Ages (1940); Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization (1941); and Denis Stevens and Alec Robertson, eds., The Pelican History of Music, vol. 1 (1960).

Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361). A Champenois who was notary to Charles IV, and bishop of Meaux from 1351, renowned in his own day as a philosopher, mathematician, classical scholar, poet (Petrarch called him ‘the only poet in France’), and musician. His few surviving works include motets in French and Latin, a bucolic ballade (Le dit de Franc Gontier, parodied by Villon), and a longer allegorical poem in praise of crusading, Le Chapel des trois fleurs de lis. Today he is known principally as a great musical innovator, and the author of the Ars nova, one of the first textbooks of polyphony.

[Nicholas Mann]

• Period: Medieval (1-1449)
• Country: France
• Born: October 31, 1291 in Vitry, Champagne, France
• Died: June 09, 1361 in Paris, France
• Genres: Vocal Music

Biography

Philippe de Vitry, poet and musician, philosopher and intellectual, councilor to three kings, began his stellar career with a master of arts degree from the Sorbonne. Pope John XXII conferred upon him the first of many ecclesiastical revenues in 1321. By this point, Vitry may have already been serving as a notary to the Royal Court; his documented service to French royalty spanned three reigns, Charles le Bel, Philippe VI, and Jean II. In 1346, Vitry accompanied Jean to war as a "companion in arms," and he served as an ambassador to the Papal court in Avignon starting in 1350. In that year, he was named Bishop of Meaux, a post he retained until his death in 1361. During his life, Vitry was commended by no less a writer than Francesco Petrarch as "the one true poet of France," and by numerous professional musicians as the "flower and jewel of singers"; he was said to have discovered the very means of composing music in his time.

Philippe de Vitry has long been erroneously thought to have codified his new theories of music composition some time around 1320 in a revolutionary treatise called the Ars Nova, or "New Art" (setting its teaching in contrast to the compositional styles in the previous century). Musicologists now doubt that such a single work existed. Nevertheless, vestiges of his teachings on music have survived in a number of smaller treatises and tracts by his pupils. His expansions of musical practice largely deal with rhythmic features: the codification of different mensurations (or musical time signatures), specifically duple time; the use of red notation to indicate new proportional rhythmic values; and the standardization of a new shorter note value, the minim. In each of these cases, it seems he influenced his peers and pupils more in codification than in revolutionary invention.

Though a contemporary musical treatise suggests Vitry "discovered" the means of composition for secular verse forms such as the ballade, the lay, and the rondeau, virtually none of his secular music survives. Almost all his extant music is in the form of the fourteenth century motet, not to be confused with the Renaissance musical form by this name. The motets display a dramatically hierarchical ordering of voices, with a slow-moving tenor voice based upon a plainchant melody (often subject to rhythmic manipulations), complemented by one or more upper voices, moving in shorter note values and set to different texts. The added texts, assumed to be the work of the composer himself, most often add an ironic level of commentary to the chant text, enhancing the rational pungency of the piece's affect. The most famous of the motets attributed to Vitry appear in the provocative and sumptuous illuminated manuscript, dated 1316, of the Roman de Fauvel, in which the corrupt government of France is personified as an ass. ~ Timothy Dickey, All Music Guide

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