Ars antiqua
Polyphonic music of 13th-century France, preceding the Ars nova.
What it means
Ars antiqua, "old art," is the retrospective name for the polyphonic music of 13th-century France, above all that of the Notre-Dame school in Paris and its successors. The term was coined only in the 14th century, once composers wanted to distinguish this earlier era from the new compositional and notational approach of the Ars nova. To its own practitioners, this was simply contemporary music, not "old" at all.
The Ars antiqua encompasses the major polyphonic forms of the 13th century: organum by Notre-Dame masters Léonin and Pérotin, the motet as a secular or sacred form combining several simultaneously sung texts, and the conductus, a syllabically set Latin strophic song.
In the notation
The period is defined by modal notation: rhythm was indicated not through individual note values but through fixed patterns of six rhythmic modes modeled on ancient poetic meters. Only toward the end of the era did Franco of Cologne, in his treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis, develop a notation that assigned fixed, independent time values to individual note shapes — an important step toward the mensural notation of the Ars nova.
Musical use
The Ars antiqua marks the flowering of early Western polyphony. Growing out of organum, in which a liturgical melody is expanded by one or more accompanying voices, the motet became the central genre: over a tenor voice drawn from Gregorian chant, the upper voices carried their own, often secular texts, so that different languages and subjects sounded simultaneously.
The Ars antiqua is distinguished from the Ars nova, which from around 1320, with Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut, introduced a more differentiated rhythmic system that allowed duple as well as triple subdivisions of note values on equal footing and loosened the strict reliance on fixed rhythmic modes. Ideas of consonance and dissonance shifted too: where the Ars antiqua treated pure fifths and octaves as the only perfect consonances, thirds and sixths gained increasing weight in the Ars nova.
Performance practice
When you listen to or perform Ars antiqua music, pay attention to the modal rhythmic patterns underlying each voice; they give the music its dancing, striding character. In motets, it helps to follow each text layer separately so you can trace how the voices are artfully layered.