ABSTRACT
Modern observers of medieval music usually make a sharp distinction between monophony and polyphony, between chant and its accretions, on the one hand, and organum, on the other. Longs and shorts in organum are distinguished as follows: through consonance; through a note symbol; by way of the penultimate. Hence the rule: everything that anywhere comes together by virtue of consonance is said to be long. In 1949 Willi Apel, and three years later William Waite, addressed the problem of rhythm in organal passages in the Magnus liber. Garlandia says, in effect, that any note of an organal passage consonantly coinciding with a note in the tenor is long; in most cases this would be the last note of a phrase, followed by a rest. Insights and conclusions concerning the music of the Magnus liber are inhibited by uncertainty as to the historical stages that our sources represent, not to mention our ignorance of Garlandia's copy or Leoninus's autograph.
