Peter Phillips’ LRB review (Vol. 48 No. 8 · 7 May 2026; archived) of Composers in the Middle Ages, edited by Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne and Gaël Saint-Cricq, is very enlightening to me, since I’d forgotten what little I once knew about medieval music; I’m bringing it here for the etymology of tenor given in this paragraph:
The first experiments with voice part-writing came in the middle of the 12th century. From the start this involved writing a tenor part, based in chant that followed rigid mathematical formulae, with two parts above, often with very lively rhythms. Until the end of the 14th century, the mathematics tended to be applied only to the tenor; by the 15th century, it had spread to include the upper voices as well. But the tenor part remained the generating force for every sacred composition, often providing the theological ideas that the texts in the upper parts would debate. This technique is known today as isorhythm and it is in contemporary descriptions of isorhythm that the word ‘tenor’ is first found (from the Latin tenere, to hold). The tenor voice held the structure together, and was usually the lowest in the ensemble. In time, contrary to modern usage, the countertenor voice came to sing lower as well as higher than the tenor. Proper bass parts, and even the use of the word ‘bass’, are vanishingly rare at this time.
The OED’s 1911 entry has this to say in the etymology: “< Old French tenor, ‑our, 13th cent. (also tenoire, ‑eure, ‑ure, 13–14th centuries), modern French teneur (feminine), substance, import of a document, etc. < Latin tenōr-em course, import (of a law, etc.), < tenēre to hold.” In the main section, under II.4.a. “The adult male voice intermediate between the bass and the counter-tenor or alto, usually ranging from the octave below middle C to the A above it; also, the part sung by such a voice, being the next above the bass in vocal part-music,” they add “So called apparently because the melody or canto fermo was formerly allotted to this part,” which doesn’t really clarify it. Does the “held the structure together” explanation work for people?
Some more good bits from the review:
Legend has it that the founding corpus of liturgical chant was dictated by a dove into the ear of Pope Gregory I (r.590-604), hence the term ‘Gregorian’. It is examined here by Henry Parkes, who argues that the tradition of humble anonymity was derived from a self-deprecating desire not to upstage Gregory. It was only after many centuries that a personality as argumentative as Abelard’s finally made no attempt to conceal his name. Both he and Hildegard were pursued by exceptional fame in their lifetimes, which ensured that much they did was documented. Abelard was the most sought-after theologian and public debater of the 12th century. Hildegard was content to be known as an abbess and a polymath, concerned not only with music but also with medicine, both as a writer and as a practitioner. She was unusual in openly acknowledging the existence of inspiration in her music, so bringing her part way towards the world of the 19th-century composer and qualifying medieval composers for entry into Scholes’s Companion, though with the inconvenient proviso that she thought composition attributable only to God. In the opening of Scivias (1151), she writes: ‘I spoke and wrote these things not by the invention of my heart or that of any other person, but as by the secret mysteries of God I heard and received them in the heavenly places.’ Hildegard died at the age of 81, having written more music than any other identifiable writer of the time. […]
It wasn’t until 1400 that composers were regularly named in the sources. But this doesn’t mean there aren’t clues, not least in the music itself, as the tradition of introducing acrostics into texts to identify people – composers, lovers and wives, sponsoring monarchs and aristocrats – bears witness. A motet from 1373, ‘Ferre solet’, not only gives the name of the composer, encoded in the first letter of various lines in the poetry (‘JOHANNES VAVASSORIS’), but by the same process, elaborately concealed, we find the words ‘ANNO DOMINI MILLESIMO TRECENTESIMO SEPTUAGESIMO TERCIO FECIT ISTUM MOTETUM’ (‘he made this motet in the year of our Lord 1373’). The most elaborate acrostic of all, said to be the longest in Western literature, is contained in Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione (c.1342), which in its completed form consists of fifty canti of poetry in terza rima. The initial letters of each terza rima create three complete sonnets, the first of which ends: ‘GIOVANNI E DI BOCCACCIO da CERTALDO’. It also refers to Boccaccio’s presumed lover, Maria d’Aquino, whose name is ciphered through an additional acrostic (the initial letters of the odd-numbered lines), creating an acrostic within an acrostic. There are plenty of names in this repertoire if you know where to look. […]
A useful example of isorhythmic composition can be found in the Kyrie of the Messe de Nostre Dame by Machaut (c.1360), which belongs to the first polyphonic mass cycle. The tenor part is a pre-existing chant melody organised into seven units, all with the same rhythm and the same number of notes (four), though of different pitches, as the chant dictates. The ‘triplum’ and ‘motetus’ parts then weave their counterpoints above the tenor and around each other. It is a simple example of the type. Within a few decades, however, this way of composing had produced some of the most rhythmically difficult music that has ever been written. The tenor parts could easily employ gradual diminution of the note lengths, making the chant quotations harder and harder to follow, while in the upper parts any of the standard notes could be subdivided according to context and whim: a minim could be divided into any number of crotchets, not simply two or four as we would do today, but sometimes an inconvenient number such as seven or nine. The result was a school of composition known as the ars subtilior, which not only drove these possibilities to extraordinary lengths, but also turned their notation into works of art. Baude Cordier’s heart-shaped chanson about love, ‘Belle, Bonne, Sage’, is a classic example (the red notes imply rhythmic alterations).
The ‘Belle, Bonne, Sage’ image really is gorgeous. And I liked the conclusion:
Yet these off-putting properties in medieval music aren’t so different from those that have been put before the public in recent times, including serialism. If you wouldn’t choose to go out to hear Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie II, you might for the same reasons avoid Machaut’s ‘De souspirant/Tous corps qui de bien amer/Suspiro’. After all, it’s no easier to ‘hear’ what the Fibonacci sequence is doing in Mikrophonie II than it is to hear what the maths mean in Machaut’s motet. You would be missing something, though. Behind every mathematical puzzle in music there is a solution, and one doesn’t need to work it out mentally to hear it, or at any rate enjoy it. The ‘cancrizans’ or crab canons by Josquin or Bach, which may use retrograde inversion with augmentation, can’t be fully understood just in the hearing – you need, at the very least, a score and some time – but they have an appeal that defies analysis.
The older I get, the less I worry about the complex architecture of a piece of art and just let myself enjoy it if I can.
I seem to recall being taught that the tenor voice was so called because it held the basic melody (which was so slow you couldn’t hear it as a melody). Also that at one period it was the lowest voice; a bass voice was only added later. But someone here will know.
*walks away whistling L’homme armé, not that slowly*
Everybody’s favorite medieval hit! Discussion here.
“An Inconvenient Number of Crotchets” sounds like a rejected title for a country-house murder mystery.
Would Baude Cordier be the detective or the victim?
“Baude Cordier” reminds me of the dubious wordplay in the song title “Baud to Tears,” which may seem cleverer if (like the New Zealanders who performed it) you are non-rhotic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=3tuFZJxKV1M
The Economist reports that there seems to be a tenor crisis. Surely the most urgent problem the world suffers from right now.
I don’t know if it is an unbroken tradition or an independent innovation, but shape note singing also (still?) puts the melody in the tenor line. Here is New Britain, the best known shape note song, better known as Amazing Grace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPOo4dOuPbQ
Reopening the Strait of Ormuz pales into insignificance by comparison.
there seems to be a tenor crisis.
True. Those who sing in amateur choirs are aging; their voices are deepening (as I know for myself). You can corral (chorale?) school kids for the trebles and altos — as per the photo in the NS piece — but this leaves a gap in the middle. You need the Tenors loud enough everybody else can pitch against them, and keep to the beat through the fancy descant/bass pedal notes.
Our local amateur annual Messiah has had to put up with a terrible Tenor for many years.
@RH: you beat me to the shapenote mention! and that world in some ways holds onto that older definition, with the tenor part (sometimes also called “lead”) being distinguished by carrying the melody rather than pitch-placement: all parts can be sung in multiple octaves, and in my experience the tenor part usually is.
Here’s a wacky 15th-century thing where the tenor does a simple plainchant-based cantus firmus with a Latin text (and lots of silence) while the other three voices do more complicated polyphony while singing entirely different lyrics in Middle French. I think maybe there’s a theoretical sense in which the cantus firmus is the “melody” but it don’t necessarily come off that way to the untutored ear?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1pVskiw7gg
Wacky to us, but normal back then.
“Composition using a cantus firmus continued to be the norm through the 13th century: almost all of the music of the St. Martial and Notre Dame schools uses a cantus firmus, as well as most 13th century motets. Many of these motets were written in several languages, with the cantus firmus in the lowest voice; the lyrics of love poems might be sung in the vernacular above sacred Latin texts in the form of a trope, or the sacred text might be sung to a familiar secular melody.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantus_firmus
Jerry F.’s link says that assigning the cantus firmus to the tenor part was a later development after things started off with it usually as the highest part and then shifted it to having it be the lowest part. Those wacky medievals and their insatiable quest for novelty.
Cantus Infirmus
I prefer the wacky medievals.
i recently learned “tenor” is also a prosody or rhetorical term – a metaphor has a tenor and a vehicle.
Unfortunately it’s very unclear as to which is which in terms of the metaphor, since the concepts of holding and conveying overlap. So the technical terms to describe a metaphor are themselves very bad metaphors.
https://www.britannica.com/art/tenor-literature
I must say I’m not surprised.
In (English) bellringing, tenor is the lowest bell/highest number ” it is usually the tonic note of the bells’ scale.”
My local church seems to have reinvigorated its change ringing team (after the bells fell silent following the earthquakes): they nowadays have a couple of spells on a Sunday, and practice one or two evenings a week.
We have more tenors than sopranos usually. And I’m not really a baritone. I cannot effectively sing bass regularly.
> Jerry F.’s link says that assigning the cantus firmus to the tenor part was a later development after things started off with it usually as the highest part and then shifted it to having it be the lowest part. Those wacky medievals and their insatiable quest for novelty.
Yes what we call fauxbourdon in the proper sense. It, falsobordone, and fauburden (I think this is the spelling) can all be used somewhat interchangeably.
The cantus (soprano) holds the melody, the tenor is a fourth below, the bass a sixth. Then you go to four, so the altus is above the tenor. The soprano (Cantus or superius) is a sixth above the tenor, and then the alto alternating in thirds and fourths above. The bass starts and ends on the unison (unless you add a suspension or some other variety within the rules of counterpoint) and alternates in thirds and fifths below the tenor: the alto has to do the opposite (so if improvising, like in cantare super librum, the bass has to signal to the alto whether the second improvisation will be a third or a fifth below).
In freer polyphonic compositions you don’t necessarily have a cantus firmus, and it can shift by imitation (in some sort of canon, in reusing elements from the cantus firmus in different voices — Palestrina’s Regina Caeli for four voices comes to mind) but conventionally it’s in the tenor if you have four voices with some parts passing into the cantus. For example you hear the original plainchant a lot in the Heinrich Isaac settings of the Communio for the Mass, Magnificats (we sing a lot of Lassus) have the original psalm tone in his polyphonic falsobordone-adjacent settings of 1567.
Tenor is also interchangeable with dominant when speaking of Gregorian psalmody. It is the note on which the tone (related to but not interchangeable with mode) is sung in Gregorian chant like in the Divine Office or in chants of the Mass with psalm tones, because after the incipit you hold the note on a fixed pitch (any frequency, it’s up to you, but it’s the same note for solmization purposes).
Thanks, I love getting details like that.