1160-1245 PEROTIN & THE SCHOOL OF NOTRE DAME

 

PEROTIN

Sederunt Principes, Salvatoris Hodie, Beata Viscera

 

LÉONIN-PÉROTIN

Et Valde; O Mater, Mater Pia, Deus Pacis,

Et Valde, Luget Rachel, Benedicamus Domino

Ensemble Gilles Binchois/Dominique Vellard

 

The most highly acclaimed musical figure of the High Gothic period, Pérotin, Magister Perotinus, c1160-1205, worked in Paris and was the

most celebrated exponent of the School of Notre Dame, in which monophonic chant was elaborated into polyphony.  He composed mostly hymns & sequences, as well as some likely partial attributions of mass cycles (along with his older contemporary, Léonin).  It was for his supreme mastery of this style that he was dubbed "The Great."  The Notre Dame School emerges as one of the most fascinating and most successful phenomena in the history of Western music and may be regarded as the greatest French school of composition of all time.  Created in the fertile intellectual milieu that was Paris in the 12th and 13th centuries, the music coming from Notre-Dame created a sensation throughout Europe.  It is this repertoire, the music created to embellish the most important days of the church year at Notre-Dame, sampled on this disc.

 

Ambroise AMB9947