Philippe de Vitry

Philippe de Vitry (October 31, 1291 – June 9, 1361) was a French composer, music theorist and poet. He was an accomplished, innovative, and influential composer, and is credited to have been the author of the Ars Nova treatise.

He was born in Paris; however, biographical details of his life are sketchy. Given that he is often referred to in documents as "Magister," he is thought likely to have studied at the University of Paris. Later he was prominent in the courts of Charles IV of France, Philippe VI of France and Jean II of France, serving as a secretary and advisor. Perhaps aided by these House of Bourbon connections, he also held several canonries, including Clermont, Beauvais, and Paris, and served for a time in the antipapal retinue at Avignon starting with Clement VI. Additionally, he was a diplomat and a soldier, and is known to have served at the siege of Aiguillon in 1346. In 1351, he became Bishop of Meaux, east of Paris. Moving in all the most important political, artistic, and ecclesiastical circles, he was acquainted with many sages of the age, including Petrarch and the famous mathematician, philosopher and music theorist Nicole Oresme. De Vitry died in Paris.

Philippe de Vitry is most famous in music history for writing the Ars Nova (1322), a treatise on music, which gave its name to the music of the entire era. While his authorship and the very existence of this treatise have recently come into question, a handful of his musical works do survive, and show the innovations in notation, particularly mensural notation and rhythm, with which he was credited within a century of their inception. Such innovations as are exemplified in his stylistically-attributed motets for the 'Roman de Fauvel' were particularly important, and made possible the free and quite complex music of the next hundred years, culminating in the 'Ars subtilior'. In some ways the "modern" system of rhythmic notation began with the Ars Nova, during which music might be said to have "broken free" from the older idea of the rhythmic modes, patterns which were repeated without being individually notated. The mensural notation or notational predecessors of modern time meters also originate in the Ars Nova.

De Vitry is reputed to have written chansons and motets, but only some of the motets have survived. Each motet is strikingly individual, exploring a unique structural idea. Vitry is also often credited with developing the concept of isorhythm (an isorhythmic line is one which has repeating patterns of rhythms and pitches, but the patterns overlap rather than correspond. For example, a line of thirty consecutive notes might contain five repetitions of a six-note melody, and six repetitions of a five-note rhythm).

Five of Vitry's three-part motets have survived in the 'Roman de Fauvel'; an additional nine can be found in the 'Ivrea Codex'.

He was widely acknowledged as the greatest musician of his day, and even Petrarch wrote a glowing tribute of him: "...he is the great philosopher and truth-seeker of our age."

References and further reading

• Bent, Margaret; Wathey, Andrew, "Philippe de Vitry," Grove Music Online, Laura Macy, ed., accessed 18 December 2005 <http://www.grovemusic.com>.
• Hoppin, Richard H., Medieval Music, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978. ISBN 0-393-09090-6
• Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel, "The Emergence of Ars Nova," The Journal of Musicology 13 285-317, 1995.
• Sanders, Ernest H., "Philippe de Vitry", in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2
• Wathey, Andrew, "The Motets of Philippe de Vitry and the Fourteenth-Century Renaissance," Early Music History 12 119-150, 1993.

External Links

• Biography at classical.net
• Biography

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