The Earliest Source of Notre-Dame Polyphony? A New Conductus Fragment from the Early Thirteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While it is known that Parisian organum and related genres were being cultivated in the last quarter of the twelfth century, no manuscript collection dating before the 1230s has yet been discovered. The surviving Notre-Dame sources do not predate the decade 1230–40 at the earliest. The manuscript Troyes, Médiathèque du Grand Troyes 1471 alters this picture. The binding flyleaves of this source transmit the texts of eight conducti and two Benedicamus Domino, which were set to receive two-part music that was never entered. Despite the absence of written notation, these fragments offer the opportunity to address the implications of polyphonic book production in the generation preceding the great Notre-Dame manuscripts. Codicological and historical evidence suggests a Parisian origin and a possible date of 1210–20 for a source probably comparable to such manuscripts as F and W 1 . Such an early date makes these flyleaves the earliest surviving witness to the production of books of Parisian polyphonic music, and challenges the general assumption that no thirteenth-century manuscripts of Notre-Dame polyphony were produced before the second quarter of the thirteenth century. It also raises questions relating to the notation, chronology, and transmission of the repertory in the early thirteenth century.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".