Petrus de Cruce
Petrus de Cruce (also Pierre de la Croix) was active as a
Life
13th-century composer, theorist, and scholar, Petrus de Cruce was apparently born in or near
Theoretical contributions
Mensural notation had developed by fits and starts during the 13th century as the old ligatures/rhythmic modes became, for various reasons, less suited to the indication of polyphony’s new subtleties, as we shall see below. Not the least problem was that notation in individual part-books was cheaper than notation in score (since each piece took up much less overall space), so a way had to be found of doing it—this would involve the development of a reliable system by which to indicate note-by-note metrical value. The beginning of such a solution was Franconian notation, so called after the theorist Franco of Cologne, who outlined the system in his c. 1260 treatise, Ars cantus mensurabilis (The art of mensurable music). This system recognized the double-long, long, breve, and semi-breve as the units of note value, related to one another by triple grouping; the double was always worth two longs, but a long could be perfect (and therefore worth three breves) or imperfect (and worth only two), depending on the exact sequence of notes. The breve was the "tempus", equivalent to the ‘unit of the beat’ in modern notation (three quarters to a measure in ¾ time, etc.), or a modern measure if we consider all of the music to have been in 3/1, so perfect tempus was triple meter, and imperfect tempus would be duple once introduced. A breve could theoretically be worth either three semi-breves or two in Franconian notation, but if worth two, one or the other would be doubled in length. There was no provision in this notation for equal duple division, which (along with imperfect tempus, therefore) would have to wait until de Vitry codified the concept of prolation in his Ars nova of 1322.
By the 1280s, tripla (the top parts of
Petrus’s free usage of the divided breve had far-reaching implications for musical style. With more notes, the triplum became the most prominent of the three voices in contemporary texture, and the other two were relegated to a supporting role. Also, more notes and more intricate subdivision led to a slowing of general tempo—the semi-breve was performed more slowly than it had been in earlier practice,[citation needed] becoming the true unit of the beat, and the lower voices lost their rhythmic vitality, becoming mere structural successions of breves and longs.
Petronian motet
Composed around 1300, these motets are still considered part of the
See also
Further reading
- Ernest H. Sanders and Peter M. Lefferts, 'Petrus de Cruce,' The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Online, ed. M. Lacy, accessed 4 June 2005. <http://www.grovemusic.com>
- Albert Seay, Music in the Medieval World, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965.