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EARLY ENGLISH PART-SONGS
s
Je flod: and I mon wa - xe wod, mulch sorw I
.
i
'
wal - ke with for beste of bon and
(Birds in the wood, and the fishes in the water, and I must grow mad, much
sorrow am I troubled with for the best of bone and blood.)
Similar treatment occurs in *
Jesu Cristes milde moder ' 2
(a translation
'
of the sequence Stabat juxta Christi crucem'), which consists very
largely of parallel thirds. The further influence of this type of writing
is to be observed in the three-part pieces written in the style generally
known as 'English descant' (see p. 350).
ORGANUM
In the earlier part of this chapter (p. 3 1 7) something was said about
organum in the thirteenth century. This form must now be considered
in greater detail, not so much for what it is as for what it produces
later by way of the clausula. The original form of organum is simple
enough. It consists of a tenor singing (or playing) a Gregorian melody
in long notes ofindeterminate duration while a voice above is descant
ing in florid melismatic passages. By conventional signs, to which
allusion is made more than once in the treatises, the two voices
co-ordinate with one another when the slow-moving tenor is about
1 Oxford, Bodleian, Douce 139, fo. 5; facsimiles in Wooldridge, Early English Har
mony, pi. 7, and Stainer, Early Bodleian Music, pi. 6. Recorded in The History ofMusic
in Sound, ii, side 18. For other interpretations of the text see Early Bodleian Music, ii,
p. 10, and Oxford History of Music, 2nd ed., i, p. 307; cf. Wooldridge in Sammelbande
der internationalen Musikgesellschaft, iv (1902-3), p. 571.
a Brit. Mus., Arundel 248, fo. 154 r ; facsimile in Wooldridge, Early English Harmony,
pi. 35.