Franco of Cologne

FRANCO OF COLOGNE. - Music theorist and composer, active in the 13th century (ca. 1250-80). From manuscripts of his works it is known that he was chaplain to the Pope and praecceptor of the hospital of St. John of Jerusalem in Cologne (C. Coussemaker, L'art harmonique au moyen âge, Paris 1865, p. 22).

Of his activity as a composer there is record in Jacques de Liège, who, in Book VII of the Speculum musicum, says he heard in Paris a triplum (a three-voice composition) attributed to F. of C. (C. Coussemaker, Scriptores, II, p. 402).

As a theorist he gave his name to a new period in the history and notation of music, in that he codified pre-existing rules and added others, on the division of the breve into three semibreves, on ligatures, on consonances and dissonances, etc., in the Compendium discantus magistri Franconis (op. cit., I, pp. 154-36) and above all in the Ars cantus mensurabilis (M. Gerbert, Scriptores, III, pp. 1-16; C. Coussemaker, op. cit., I, pp. 17-18). This latter treatise was in the past attributed to Franco of Paris, a not well-defined personality and perhaps slightly earlier, to whom a passage of Coussemaker's anonymous IV alludes (op. cit., I, p. 342), which speaks of two Francones. To the theoretical work of Franco of Paris there are perhaps connected a commentary and three compendia, all with the same opening, evidently analogous to the original («Goudent broviste moderni») published by the same C. Coussemaker (op. cit., I, pp. 202-96, 303-19, 319-27, 383-403). Modern mensural notation is based on the Franconian system, used in its broad outlines down to the whole of the 16th century.

The principal manuscripts of the Franconian treatises are found in Paris (Bibliothèque Nationale), in Oxford (Bodleian Library), in London (British Museum), in Milan (Biblioteca Ambrosiana), etc.

Luisa Cervelli