These musical innovations appeared in a greater context of societal change. The lyrics of love poems might be sung above sacred texts in the form of a trope, or the sacred text might be placed within a familiar secular melody. In the thirteenth century, the chant-based tenor was becoming altered, fragmented, and hidden beneath secular tunes, obscuring the sacred texts as composers continued to play with this new invention called polyphony. Twelfth-century composers, such as Léonin and Pérotin developed the organum that was introduced centuries earlier, and also added a third and fourth voice to the now homophonic chant. Polyphony rose out of melismatic organum, the earliest harmonization of the chant. 1000, are the oldest surviving example of practical rather than pedagogical polyphony, though intervals, pitch levels, and durations are often not indicated (van der Werf, 1997). 900, are usually considered the oldest surviving part-music though they are note-against-note, voices move mostly in parallel octaves, fifths, and fourths, and they were not intended to be performed. This point-against-point conception is opposed to "successive composition," where voices were written in an order with each new voice fitting into the whole so far constructed, which was previously assumed. In all cases the conception was likely what Margaret Bent (1999) calls "dyadic counterpoint," with each part being written generally against one other part, with all parts modified if needed in the end. Also, as opposed to the species terminology of counterpoint, polyphony was generally either "pitch-against-pitch" / "point-against-point" or "sustained-pitch" in one part with melismas of varying lengths in another (van der Werf, 1997). Baroque forms such as the fugue-which might be called polyphonic-are usually described instead as contrapuntal. The term is usually used in reference to music of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.
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