Ars antiqua

This covers the period of the Notre-Dame school of polyphony (the use of multiple, simultaneous, independent melodic lines), and the subsequent years which saw the early development of the motet, a highly varied choral musical composition.

Usually the term ars antiqua is restricted to sacred (church) or polyphonic music, excluding the secular (non-religious) monophonic songs of the troubadours, and trouvères.

[1] The original Medieval usage of the expression ars antiqua, found in the Speculum Musice of Jacobus and also by Johannes de Muris (the only one to use the exact term ars antiqua), referred specifically to the period of Franco of Cologne, approximately 1250–1310, but this restricted usage is rarely employed in modern scholarship.

[4] In music theory the ars antiqua period saw several advances over previous practice, most of them in conception, and notation of rhythm.

[6] Though the style of the ars antiqua went out of fashion rather suddenly in the first two decades of the 14th century, it had a late defender in Jacques of Liège (alternatively known as Jacob of Liège), who wrote a violent attack on the "irreverent, and corrupt" ars nova in his Speculum Musicae (c. 1320) vigorously defending the old style in a manner suggestive of any number of music critics from the Middle Ages to the present day.