When discussing varietas Tinctoris cites six works that exemplify the concept, of which four survive. Chapter 6 considers up to what point these pieces, which span the major genres of the day, illustrate Tinctoris’s ideas. The chapter analyzes this music at different levels of zoom, and in light of the relevant compositional parameters.

Chapter 4 argues that varietas in Tinctoris’s usage gestures toward an esthetics of opposition. The chapter situates Tinctoris’s discussion in the context of The Art of Counterpoint as a whole, while showing how the individual components of varietas – melody, rhythm, texture, and so on – give teeth to the concept.

In the second decade of the sixteenth century some musicians began to tire of teleologies. Chapter 15 describes a “new sonorousness” that would soon flourish in music by composers such as Jean Richafort and Adrian Willaert. Whereas their settings of the Pater noster embrace continuous musical flow, Josquin’s reaches new heights in projecting an esthetics of opposition.

Chapter 1 introduces three esthetic paradigms – kaleidoscopic, alternatim, and oppositional – that can help ground discussions of musical flow. Using examples spanning Gregorian chant through mid sixteenth-century polyphony, the chapter makes a case for a shift to and from an esthetics of opposition in the years surrounding the period at the heart of the book.

In a passage in his famous Art of Counterpoint (1477) devoted to the widely diffused concept of varietas, Johannes Tinctoris offers a prototheory of musical pacing and flow. Chapter 3 surveys the terms that for Tinctoris underpin this concept before describing how a modern tendency to make too much of the false friends varietas/variety has impeded our understanding.

Tinctoris was among the first music theorists to back up his points with citations of many polyphonic works. Chapter 5 takes another look at these well-studied examples, not for the sake of the theoretical ideas Tinctoris uses them to support, but to ask how deeply he knew the music in question. The central claim is that Tinctoris, himself an accomplished composer, had intimate knowledge of contemporary repertoire.

Chapter 2 confronts head-on a dearth of documentary evidence about the poetics of compositional practice and practical music-making, mining extant writings for insights into contemporary thinking about music while seeking out analogies with fifteenth-century discourses about other time-bound experiences.

The bulk of Part IV digs into the repertoire to explore the myriad ways composers activated an esthetics of opposition across a nearly 100-year span. Chapter 11 considers how Guillaume Du Fay’s early songs pit introductory melismas against densely texted phrases to create productive oppositions. The chapter also shows how Du Fay’s stunning Malheureulx cueur gives voice to the virelai form.

This section of the book takes a holistic approach by exploring elements of the compositional lingua franca that catalyzed a new musical poetics. Chapter 7 identifies approximately eight parameters (e.g., text-setting, cadences, and harmony) that in tandem can be used to create dramatic arcs.