(Lat.: ‘old art’).
A term used by a group of writers, mostly active in Paris in the early 14th century, to distinguish the polyphony and notation of the immediate past from the new practice of their own time, the Ars Nova (Ars Modernorum), especially that associated with Philippe de Vitry, Johannes de Muris and their circle in the 1310s and 20s. (The word ‘ars’, as understood in the Middle Ages, translates the Greek word technē, a ‘technique’ or ‘craft’, and has no aesthetic connotations.)
Among music theorists, the champion of the Ars Antiqua was Jacobus of Liège, who in his encyclopedic Speculum musice (1320s) upheld the authority of Franco of Cologne, Magister Lambertus (whom he called ‘Aristotle’) and Petrus de Cruce, and while criticizing the moderns defined the main virtues of the old practice: (1) modern composers wrote only motets and chansons, neglecting other genres such as organum, conductus and hocket (CSM, iii/7, p.89); (2) modern composers used a multiplicity of imperfect mensurations alongside perfect ones in their work, whereas the old practice, following Franco and Lambertus, adhered exclusively to perfection (CSM, iii/7, pp.86–8); (3) the moderns divided semibreves into smaller values, perfect and imperfect groups of minims and semiminims, whereas the followers of the Ars Antiqua divided breves only into semibreves in perfect mensuration, holding that the semibreve was indivisible (CSM, iii/7, pp.35–6, 51–3); (4) as a consequence, paradoxically, the rhythmic language used by the moderns was much more limited and inflexible than that of the adherents to the old practice (CSM, iii/7, pp.38–9); (5) the moderns engaged in a great deal of experimentation with notation, resulting in an inconsistent practice, whereas the followers of Franco had a clear and established tradition for notating their music (CSM, iii/7, pp.51–3); (6) the moderns indulged too much in quirky and capricious rhythmic movement, musica lasciva, while the followers of the old practice kept within the confines of a more restrained musica modesta (CSM, iii/1, p.60). From this it is evident that the Ars Antiqua is the musical practice of the latter half of the 13th century, preserved most comprehensively in manuscripts such as F-MOf H196, D-BAs Lit.115, and I-Tr Vari 42, and described by the theorists mentioned above, the many commentaries, abbreviationes, and compendia based on Franco's Ars cantus mensurabilis, and the De musica of Johannes de Grocheio. Such manuscripts as B-Br 19606 and F-Pn fr.146 (the Roman de Fauvel), both from the second decade of the 14th century, are transitional in a sense, containing works in both Ars Antiqua and Ars Nova.
The definition of the term ‘Ars Antiqua’ is often extended now to include the music of the Notre Dame period and its main composers, Leoninus and Perotinus. The genres that Jacobus praised and the rhythmic idiom he discussed developed from this earlier tradition; and indeed, the repertories of organum and conductus belong properly to that tradition rather than to the period with which he was concerned. In this more comprehensive definition, then, the Ars Antiqua includes two large historical periods, the Notre Dame school, dating from about 1160 to about 1250 and preserved in manuscripts such as I-Fl Plut.29.1, D-W 628, D-W 1099, and E-Mn 20486, and the period from about 1250 to about 1320, specifically referred to by Jacobus. The former is characterized by liturgical polyphony with Latin texts and by modal rhythm and an emerging mensural notation; the latter is dominated by controlled mensural rhythm and a developed notation, and by the genre of the motet, above all the French motet, but it also saw the beginning of a written tradition of instrumental music and secular polyphonic song. The earlier genres of conductus and organum were extensively reworked in the light of the changed aesthetic that came with mensural rhythm; it is undoubtedly through such modernized versions that Jacobus knew the earlier repertory. Whatever merits the expanded definition of the Ars Antiqua may have, a distinctly new period, an Ars Nova, did emerge in the 1310s and 20s. While many of the innovations of the Ars Nova were indeed radical, many others represent extensions of the earlier practice; thus Philippe de Vitry expressly based his rhythmic system on the Ars Vetus of Franco. Sensitivity to these changes and expansions of Ars Antiqua practices on the part of modern and more conservative musicians alike doubtless moulded the rather polemical distinction Jacobus drew between the two artes.
See also Ars Nova; Sources, ms, §§IV, V, VII; and Theory, theorists, §6–7
MGG1 (H. Besseler)
MGG1 (‘Notre-Dame-Epoche’, H. Husmann)
MGG2 (W. Frobenius)
R. Bragard, ed.: Jacobi leodiensis speculum musicae, CSM, iii (1955–73)
L. Schrade: ‘The Chronology of the Ars nova in France’, L'Ars Nova: Wégimont 1955, 37–62
F.J. Smith: Jacobi leodiensis speculum musicae: a Commentary (Brooklyn, NY, 1966–83)
M. Huglo: ‘De Francon de Cologne à Jacques de Liège’, RBM, xxxiv–xxxv (1980–81), 44–60
M. Haas: ‘Studien zur mittelalterlichen Musiklehre I: eine Übersicht über die Musiklehre im Kontext der Philosophie des 13. und frühen 14. Jahrhunderts’, Forum musicologicum, iii (1982), 323–456
R. Eberlein: ‘Ars antiqua: Harmonik und Datierung’, AMw, xliii (1986), 1–16
S. Pinegar: Textual and Contextual Relationships among Theoretical Writings on Measurable Music of the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (diss., Columbia U., 1991)
GORDON A. ANDERSON/EDWARD H. ROESNER