Terms used in Middle English discant treatises (c1390–c1450), and in a few later theoretical works, in specifically musical senses involving the improvisation of a discant above or below a plainchant. The technique of ‘sight’ or ‘sighting’ was also called ‘imagination’ or ‘imagining’ (Lat. ‘fictus visus’, ‘perfectio ocularis’).
(1) A singer was expected to be able to improvise simple discant above or below a plainchant, visualizing the notes he sang as consonances above or below the notes of the chant on the four-line staff. If he was extemporizing his part in essentially the same compass as the plainchant, he could visualize or ‘sight’ the actual notes that he sang ‘in voice’. The mean, for example, might sing a unison with, or a 3rd, 5th, 6th or octave above the plainchant (ex.1): these intervals all fit conveniently on the staff with no need for leger lines or transposition. (It follows that a mean may only sing the wider intervals when the plainchant lies low.) ‘Sight’ here designates simply the imagined notes or series of notes visualized at their true pitch.
(2) The term also came to be used for the series of ‘acordis’, the choice of consonances, specified for each ‘degree’ of discant and for the singer of faburden, and also the rule by which they were derived from the chant. ‘Mean sight’ has five consonances above the plainchant with no transposition; countertenor sight (ex.2) has the same five, but may also use them beneath the chant, making nine consonances in all, still without transposition. The remaining degrees of discant all need to sing intervals wider than the octave, and cannot therefore visualize their notes directly on the plainchant staff at the sung pitch. They have to transpose. The treble (ex.3) has the choice of the 5th, 6th, octave, 10th and 12th above the plainchant, and is instructed to ‘sight’ them on the staff an octave lower: to sing the 5th above the chant ‘in voice’, he must imagine the 4th below it ‘in sight’. A boy quatreble’s consonances are the octave, 10th, 12th, 13th and 15th above the chant (ex.4): he must ‘sight’ them a 12th lower. The singer of counter or countir (ex.5) keeps below the plainchant all the time: he has seven normal consonances (unison, 3rd, 5th, 6th, octave, 10th and 12th below), which he arrives at by visualizing them a 5th higher ‘in sight’. If the counterer has a low voice and the chant lies high, he may also sing the 13th and 15th below it; but in order to ‘sight’ these he must increase the interval of transposition to a 12th. The singer of a faburden, though not strictly a discanter, also uses a transposed sight (ex.6): his two consonances, the 3rd and 5th beneath the plainchant, are to be derived from sighted notes a 5th higher. In all these cases the sight is transposed, so that ‘sight’ comes also to mean the rule of transposition. By a further extension, the term ‘sight’ can mean any of the above voice-parts.
Exx.1–6 show the choice of intervals for each degree of discant and for faburden, as recommended by the anonymous treatises in GB-Lbl Lansdowne 763, the last and fullest exposition of the subject. The bottom staff gives the plainsong note (breve) at its actual pitch on the four-line staff and shows the sighted notes from which the pitches ‘in voice’ are derived (black semibreves); the middle staff, for ease of reference, shows the same notes on the modern bass staff. The top staff shows the notes actually sung ‘in voice’ (semibreves) and, above, the name of the sight in question and its interval of transposition, if any (‘=’ means there is none). The numbers beneath the upper two staves show the intervals that the sighted and voiced notes make with the plainsong note; a minus sign means an interval beneath the plainsong.
The system of sights was first hinted at in the pseudo-Franconian Compendium discantus (CoussemakerS, i, 156b, c1300, English): the term used is ‘ymaginabis’. Treble sight with octave transposition upwards was also known in late 15th-century Italy: it was used by Guillelmus Monachus (c1480) both in his description of fauxbourdon and gymel and also as a notational convenience (‘in order to have a full understanding of sighted consonances, note that the unison is taken [to mean] the octave’, ed. Seay, CSM, xi, 1965, p.35); and the English Carmelite John Hothby, who travelled widely and lived and taught in Italy, has left a brief discussion of ‘sighted discant’, which he described specifically as English, in his Regule … supra contrapunctum (‘this way of singing is called sighted discant: I will explain how to “see” this manner on the four lines [of the plainsong staff]’, CoussemakerS, i, 333). Bukofzer (1936, pp.41, 156ff) also mentioned references to octave sight in Ramis de Pareia and Burzio.
S.B. Meech: ‘Three Musical Treatises in English from a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript’, Speculum, x (1935), 235–69
M.F. Bukofzer: Geschichte des englischen Diskants und des Fauxbourdons nach den theoretischen Quellen (Strasbourg, 1936/R) [texts of some Eng. discant treatises]
T. Georgiades: Englische Diskanttraktate aus der ersten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts (Wurzburg, 1937)
S.W. Kenney: ‘“English Discant” and Discant in England’, MQ, xlv (1959), 26–48
B. Trowell: ‘Faburden and Fauxbourdon’, MD, xiii (1959), 43–78
For further bibliography see Fauxbourdon and Faburden.
BRIAN TROWELL