Headscratcher #3

[Starrmark]

Another piece with the same note repeated from start to finish can be found on IMSLP: Henry Purcell's Fantasy on One Note. I wonder whether Purcell was aware of Josquin's one-note motet and filched the idea. Sure looks that way.

http://imslp.org/wiki/Fantasia_upon_One ... ll,_Henry)

MS

[sbeckmesser]

Gregorian chant was sometime performed in the Middle Ages against a long held drone note. And the "tenor" (from the latin "to hold") notes in organum could last a very long time. But because the original notation does not include "measures," both of these genres are disqualified from this particular query.

--Sixtus

[pml]

Sixtus, that's a technical exception you're raising: true, Gregorian chant and some (not all!) organum isn't measured, but later music of the period that may not have bar lines to delineate "measures" may still be measured without them. The usual terms for the musical notation of the late mediaeval and renaissance periods are black, or white, mensural notation: from Latin mensuralis, from mensura (= "measure"). Instead of measuring by the "bar", in differing mensurations you might measure the length of a piece by the longa, brevis, or semi-brevis.

Regards, PML

[Ender Wiggin]

Chopin Raindrops prelude