(Latin; " New Art ")
Musical style of 14th-century Europe, particularly France.
As composers began to use ever shorter notes in their music, the old system of rhythmic mode s (see Ars Antiqua ) ceased to be adequate to describe it. In his treatise Ars nova (1323), Philippe de Vitry (1291–1361) proposed a way of relating longer and shorter notes by a metrical scheme
the ancestor of time signatures
whereby each note value could be subdivided into either two or three of the next-shorter note. Though seemingly abstract, this innovation had a marked effect on the sound of music because composers were better able to control the relative motion of several voices, and 14th-century music consequently sounds much less "medieval" to modern ears. De Vitry and formes fixes .