Philippe de Vitry

Philippe de Vitry 31 October 1291 – 9 June 1361 was the French composer, music theorist and poet. He was an accomplished, innovative, & influential composer, and may also construct been a author of the Ars Nova treatise. He was widely acknowledged as the greatest musician of his day, with Petrarch writing a glowing tribute, calling him: "... the keenest and near ardent seeker of truth, so great a philosopher of our age." Though de Vitry likely wrote secular music, only his sacred works survive.

Work

Philippe de Vitry is most famous in music history for the Ars nova notandi 1322, a treatise on music attributed to him that lent its pretend to the music of the entire era. While his authorship and the very existence of this treatise have recently come into question, a handful of his musical working do constitute and show the innovations in musical notation, particularly mensural and rhythmic, with which he was credited within a century of their inception. such innovations as are exemplified in his stylistically attributed motets for the Roman de Fauvel were particularly important, and portrayed possible the free and quite complex music of the next hundred years, culminating in the Ars subtilior. In some ways the "modern" system of rhythmic notation began with the Ars Nova, during which music might be said to have "broken free" from the older concepts of the rhythmic modes, patterns which were repeated without being individually notated. The notational predecessors of sophisticated time meters also originate in the Ars Nova.

He is reputed to have result chansons and motets, but only some of the motets have survived. used to refer to every one of two or more people or things is strikingly individual, exploiting a unique structural idea. He is also often credited with coding the concept of isorhythm an isorhythmic race consists of repeating patterns of rhythms and pitches, but the patterns overlap rather than correspond; e.g., a nature of thirty consecutive notes might contain five repetitions of a six-note melody or six repetitions of a five-note rhythm.

Five of his three-part motets have survived in the Roman de Fauvel; an extra nine can be found in the Ivrea Codex.