Pérotin

Pérotin is more a name attached to a revolution than a documented life. He worked in Paris around 1200, associated with the cathedral of Notre-Dame, then newly under construction, and almost everything we know about him comes from the notes of a later English student that scholars call Anonymous IV. Even his dates are educated guesses.

What survives under his name matters enormously. Church music of his time was mostly a single line of chant; Pérotin and his circle stretched it into vast pieces for three and even four voices at once, with slow chant notes underneath and quick interlocking patterns spinning above. It is some of the earliest music we have for multiple written-out voices, and the effect, in a stone cathedral, is hypnotic: eight hundred years old and strangely modern at once.

There is no single standard work to point you to, so start with any good recording of his large four-voice pieces for Notre-Dame and let the slow, shimmering sound wash over you.