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For the Polish village, see Leonin, Lublin Voivodeship.

Léonin (also Leoninus, Leonius, Leo) (fl. 1150s — d. ? 1201) was the first known significant composer of polyphonic organum. He was probably French, probably lived and worked in Paris at the Notre Dame Cathedral and was the earliest member of the Notre Dame school of polyphony and the ars antiqua style who is known by name. The name Léonin is derived from "Leoninus," which is the Latin diminutive of the name Leo; therefore it is likely that Léonin's given French name was Léo.

All that is known about him comes from the writings of a later student at the cathedral known as Anonymous IV, an Englishman who left a treatise on theory and who mentions Léonin as the composer of the Magnus Liber, the "great book" of organum. Much of the Magnus Liber is devoted to clausulaemelismatic portions of Gregorian chant which were extracted into separate pieces where the original note values of the chant were greatly slowed down and a fast-moving upper part is superimposed. Léonin might have been the first composer to use the rhythmic modes, and maybe he invented a notation for them. According to W.G. Waite, writing in 1954: "It was Léonin's incomparable achievement to introduce a rational system of rhythm into polyphonic music for the first time, and, equally important, to create a method of notation expressive of this rhythm."[1]


According to Anonymous IV, Léonin's work was improved and expanded by the later composer Pérotin. See also Medieval music.

The musicologist Craig Wright believes that Léonin may have been the same person as a contemporaneous Parisian poet, Leonius, after whom Leonine verse may have been named. This could make Léonin's use of meter even more significant.[2]


  1. ^ W.G. Waite: The Rhythm of Twelfth-Century Polyphony: its Theory and Practice,[page needed]. Yale Studies in the History of Music, New Haven, 1954.
  2. ^ [1]

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