A descant, discant, or is any of several different things in music, depending on the period in question; etymologically, the word means a voice (cantus) above or removed from others. The Harvard Dictionary of Music states: A descant is a form of medieval music in which one singer sang a fixed melody, and others accompanied with improvisations. The word in this sense comes from the term (descant "above the book"), and is a form of Gregorian chant in which only the melody is notated but an improvised polyphony is understood. The had specific rules governing the improvisation of the additional voices. Later on, the term came to mean the treble or soprano singer in any group of voices, or the higher pitched line in a song. Eventually, by the Renaissance, descant referred generally to counterpoint. Nowadays the counterpoint meaning is the most common. Descant can also refer to the highest pitched of a group of instruments, particularly the descant viol or recorder. Similarly, it can also be applied to the soprano clef. In modern usage, especially in the context of church music, descant can also refer to a high, florid melody sung by a few sopranos as a decoration for a hymn. Origin and development In origin, discant is a style of organum that either includes a plainchant tenor part (usually on a melisma in the chant) or is used without a plainchant basis in conductus, in either case with a "note against note" upper voice, moving in contrary motion. It is not a musical form, but rather a technique. The term continued to be used down to modern times with changing senses, at first for polyphony in general, then to differentiate a subcategory of polyphony (either in contrast to organum, or for improvised as distinct from written polyphony). By extension it became the name of a part that is added above the tenor, and later as the name of the highest part in a polyphonic setting (the equivalent of "cantus", "superius", and "soprano"). Finally, it was adopted as the name of the highest register of instruments such as recorders, cornets, viols, and organ stops. "English discant is three-voice parallelism in first-inversion triads." However, because it allowed only three, four, or at most five such chords in succession, emphasizing contrary motion as the basic condition, it "did not differ from the general European discant tradition of the time". Because English