Explain how the Gothic cathedral influenced musical composition and performance
Please provide the best answer for the statement.
1. With its vast spaces and stone walls, the Gothic cathedral could be as animated by its acoustics as by its light. Ecclesiastical leaders were quick to take advantage of this quality in constructing their liturgy. At the School of Notre-Dame, in Paris, the first collection of music in two parts, the Magnus Liber Organi (The Great Book of Polyphony), was widely distributed in manuscript by about 1160. What makes it so significant is that it represents the beginning of the modern sense of “composition”—that is, works attributable to a single composer (though many of its composers remain anonymous).
2. At the end of the century, Pérotin revised and renotated the Magnus Liber. His “Viderunt Omnes” (“All Have Seen”), a four-part polyphonic composition, builds to a crescendo that seems to soar upward, imitating the architecture of the Notre-Dame cathedral (where it was designed to be sung) and elevating the faithful to new heights of belief. The complexity of its rhythmic invention mirrors the growing textural complexity of the facade of Gothic cathedrals.
3. Developing from this polyphony was an even more complex musical form, the motet, consisting of three (sometimes four) voices, one of which was sometimes played instrumentally, perhaps by the organ, whose rich tones, resonating through the nave of the cathedral, gained increasing favor through the Middle Ages. All these competing lines were held together like the complex elements of the Gothic facade—balanced but competing, harmonious but at odds.
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