Tenor.

Peter Phillips’ LRB review (Vol. 48 No. 8 · 7 May 2026; archived) of Composers in the Middle Ages, edited by Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne and Gaël Saint-Cricq, is very enlightening to me, since I’d forgotten what little I once knew about medieval music; I’m bringing it here for the etymology of tenor given in this paragraph: The first experiments with voice part-writing came in the middle of the 12th century. From the start this involved writing a tenor part, based in chant that followed rigid mathematical formulae, with two parts above, often with very lively rhythms. Until the end of the 14th century, the mathematics tended to be applied only to the tenor; by the 15th century, it had spread to include the upper voices as well. But the tenor part remained the generating force for every sacred composition, often providing the theological ideas that the texts in the upper parts would debate. This technique is known today as isorhythm and it is in contemporary descriptions of isorhythm that…