Singing in Stimmtausch ca. 1100–1350: Repositioning Polyphony in Medieval France

Abstract This article examines a long-lived medieval musical practice that complicates categories of monophony and polyphony: the technique of strict voice-exchange or Stimmtausch, which involves a melody whose phrases ascend and descend through an octave, and can therefore be combined and swapped between voices, to sound in contrary-motion polyphony. Often labeled “simple” or “primitive,” Stimmtausch is here considered in relation to the category of “non-mensural” polyphony, theorized by Reinhard Strohm. The article explores the early history of the so-called Stimmtausch Hymn, recorded in manuscripts across Europe from the late eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. It reveals a network of concordances for this melody with the text In hoc festo gratissimo: in twelfth-, late thirteenth-, and fourteenth-century witnesses from the German-speaking lands and Bohemia (including the overlooked Mü 560 and the recently discovered Prague G.60) and in the fourteenth-century Spanish Codex Las Huelgas (Hu). Prague G.60 and Hu offer wholly exceptional, and at times contradictory, records of the Stimmtausch Hymn in rhythmically prescriptive Franconian notations, thereby questioning the significance and attendant authority of mensural and non-mensural notations. Presenting new evidence for the presence and variety of two- and three-voice Stimmtausch practices in the period ca. 1100–1350, the article also addresses their apparent absence in books from France. It argues that compilers of collections of songs and polyphony in twelfth-century Aquitaine and thirteenth-century Paris knew but usually chose not to record Stimmtausch compositions. Moreover, it suggests that the Parisian Magnus liber organi deliberately broke with the twelfth-century past to give an artificial impression of novelty and independence, still accepted and perpetuated in music histories.