History
Voice exchange appeared in the 12th-century repertory of the Saint Martial school as a consequence of imitation. Voice exchange first became common in the Notre Dame school, who used both double and triple exchanges in organa and conductus (in particular the wordless caudae). In fact, Richard Hoppin regarded voice exchange as "the basic device from which the Notre Dame composers evolved ways of organizing and integrating the simultaneous melodies of polyphony," and of considerable importance as a means of symmetry and design in polyphonic music as well as starting point for more complex contrapuntal devices. The importance was not lost on theorists of the time, either, as Johannes de Garlandia gave an example, which he called "repetitio diverse vocis," and noted in "three- and four-part organa, and conductus, and in many other things."
In Pérotin's four-part organum "Sederunt principes", sections that are exchanged vary considerably in length, from two to more than ten measures, and parts that are exchanged are sometimes nested (i.e. there is a brief voice exchange among two parts within a larger section which subsequently is repeated using a voice exchange). The elaborate patterns of voice exchange in pieces like "Sederunt" prove that Perotin composed them as a whole, not by successively adding voices.
In the 13th century, the technique was used by English composers of the Worcester school as a structural device. In the genre rondellus, as described by the theorist Walter Odington (c. 1300), the central part of the piece was based entirely on voice exchange. Ordinarily, but not always, the text is exchanged along with the melody. It also appears in the lower parts (pes) of Sumer Is Icumen In, while the upper parts always include a new melodic phrase instead of a true voice exchange.
Voice exchange gradually died out after 1300, due to the gradual separation of voice ranges and the expansion of the ambitus of a composition. However, it occasionally made limited appearances in simple polyphony of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and was for example common in the upper parts of Baroque trio sonatas.
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