Untitled

THE CONDUCTUS
used in the liturgy as a transition to a particular function or to pre
cede the end of the service. The word was also employed in secular
music, but it preserved its solemn associations and was never used,
for example, of a love-song. 1 It occurs also in the twelfth-century
Daniel play from Beauvais (see p, 214) for the ceremonial entries
of the characters. 2
The form of the conductus is strophic, i.e. the text consists of verses
which have the same structure. As a rule these strophes also have the
same music; but in some cases there is new music for every strophe,
while in others we find the system of progressive repetition used in
the sequence. The difference between the old 'rhythm' and the con
ductus is not only that the verse forms and the strophes are now more
varied but also that the music is much more elaborate : long melismata
are used which form a splendid contrast to the purely syllabic sections.
Equally important is the fact that the conductus became a polyphonic
form as early as the beginning of the twelfth century, within the socalled
'St. Martial school', and developed still further in the work
of the '
Notre Dame school' about 1200 (see pp. 326-37). In fact
the melismatic element reaches its height in the polyphonic form.
The following example of a monodic conductus occurs in some of
the St. Martial manuscripts and in another from Beauvais; the tran
3
scription follows one of the former:
Ex.54
5
a) Ex A - dae vi - ti -
b)De - i et ho - mi -
- o Nos - tra re -
- nis Per Chris - turn
-demp - do -
ti -
mi
= - o Tra-xit pri-mor-
- - - numFac-ta con-cor -
4
1 For a fuller discussion see J. Handschin, Notizen ttber die NotreDame-Conductus*,
in Bericht iiber den musikmssenschaftlichen Kongress zu Leipzig (1925), pp. 209 ff.;
Ellinwood,loc. cit.,pp. 165 Iff., zadDieMusik inGeschichteundGegenwart9 $.v* Conductus.
3
J. Handschin, op. tit, p. 211. The right explanation of the word *conductus% though
not the explanation of its wider use, was given as early as 1 853 by J. L. d'Ortigue in his
Dictionnaire du plain-chant, but it was not generally accepted and was even forgotten.
The Latin conductus has a forerunner in the Byzantine apelatikos (see J. Handschin,
Das Zeremonienwerk Kaiser Konstantins und die sangbare Dichtung, 1943), but the
analogy extends only to the function, not to the form. The manuscript Schaffhausen 108
contains one of the Latin Ms in the so-called *
Cambridge song-book' (no. 12 in K.
Strecker, Die Cambridger Lieder, 1926), with the title 'Conductus Pythagoricus*. This
is an early example of the wider use of the word 'conductus', since the manuscript
appears to date from c. 1100.
8
Paris, BibL Nat. lat 1139 (c. 1100), fo. 35-35v , where two strophes are written with
neums.
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