ABSTRACT
Students of medieval music show little disposition today to challenge interpretation of the multi-voice Parisian conductus as a modal genre: the evidence from both theoretical and musical sources weighs too heavily in its favor. This chapter examines the specific application of the modal principle to a small, stylistically coherent, but notationally perplexing group of two- and three-voice compositions of the syllabic or declamatory type, and clarifies the relationship between poetic and musical rhythm in these compositions. The poems in question are all in a regular trochaic rhythm and all are declaimed in the longs and breves of the first mode. The Notre Dame composer acknowledged the analogy between trochaic rhythm and the first mode by setting large numbers of texts in the way shown. When the first mode governs the declamation of a texted composition it is typically linked with lines having odd numbers of syllables—five, seven, or eleven, most characteristically—or with couplets of fifteen.
