A name given by modern scholars to the group of musicians active in Paris between about 1150 and about 1250. Most were ecclesiastics, and would have been associated with the Cathedral of Notre Dame or with one of the group of churches that stood on the site before work on the cathedral began in about 1160, but some may have had affiliations with other churches in Paris, such as the abbey of St Victor, or with religious houses elsewhere in Europe. This ‘school’ cultivated, among others, the polyphonic genres of organum, conductus and the liturgical motet, producing large repertories that were collected in the so-called Magnus liber organi associated with the composers Leoninus and Perotinus. Perhaps the most important achievement of these musicians was their transformation of polyphony from a performing practice into ‘composition’ in the modern sense; from an idiom that had for the most part been generated extemporaneously in performance to one in which the music was ‘composed’ before its performance. There appeared in the music of the Notre Dame school an ordered system of consonance and dissonance and a coherent rhythmic language that for the first time in Western music was expressed in its notation. These developments laid the foundations of the contrapuntal and rhythmic practice that would prevail for the next three centuries, and paved the way for the mensural notations in which late medieval and Renaissance music was written and transmitted.
See Discant, §I, 3–4; Leoninus; Magnus liber; Organum, §§8–10; and Perotinus.
EDWARD H. ROESNER