Until the ninth century, the role of the professional musician in pre-Islamic Arabia and Mesopotamia was primarily fulfilled by women. Men were socially prohibited from working as musicians, though some transgressed gender and social boundaries by adopting feminine dress and playing ‘women's’ instruments. With the advent of Islam, patronage of qiyān (singing girls), mukhannathūn (effeminates) and later, male musicians, did not substantially change. During the early Abbasid era (750–950 ce), however, their collective visibility in court entertainments was among several factors leading to debates regarding the legal position of music in Islam. The arguments for and against took place in the realm of politics and interpretation of religious law yet the influence of traditional expectations for gendered musical performance that had existed on the cultural landscape for millennia also contributed to the formation of a musical semiotics used by both sides.

In this article, I examine the representation of musicians in the early Islamic court in Baghdad from the perspective of select ninth-century Arabic texts. First, I begin with a summary of the gender roles and performance expectations for pre-Islamic court musicians and point to their continuation into the early Islamic courts. Then, I suggest how the figure of the musician became a key referent in the development of a musical semiotics used in medieval Islamic music discourse.

In 1971, at the International Josquin Festival-Conference, I mentioned for the first time a group of newly discovered documents on the early career of Adrian Willaert in Italy, drawn mainly from the account books of his patron, Cardinal Ippolito i d'Este (1479–1520). In several articles since then I have briefly described these findings but until now have not been able to furnish the full particulars on which they depend. This article aims to do just that, and adds enough by way of commentary to provide a new portrait of the young Willaert's connections with Ferrarese patrons in these years. This new portrait not only transforms our view of his early maturity and its context, but extends his first known Italian period back some seven years before 1522, heretofore the first secure date for his presence in Italy altogether.

The medieval chant traditions of the Eastern and Western churches can generally be traced back to about the tenth century, when the earliest surviving notated manuscripts were created. In these earliest sources, the various traditions are already distinct from each other and fully formed, each with thousands of chants that are assigned to at least eight modes and belong to dozens of melody types or families, carefully distributed across the daily, weekly and annual cycles of a complicated liturgical calendar. Yet we have hardly any information at all as to how these traditions evolved into the highly complex state in which we first find them. Where did they come from and when did they originate? How and when did they achieve the relatively fixed form in which we know them? Questions such as these have been important in chant research during the last thirty years, ever since Willi Apel outlined what he called ‘the “central” problem of the chant, that is, the question concerning its origin and development’. But attempts to investigate these questions have often been conceived too narrowly, overlooking as much evidence as they include or more. For instance, many scholars have written about ‘the central problem’ as if it belonged mainly to Gregorian chant and its close relative, the Old Roman or special Urban repertory, when in fact the origins and early history of almost every tradition of Eastern and Western chant are equally obscure.

Niccolò Fausti, master of ceremonies at St Mark's Venice from 1576 to 1598, in one of his several additions at the back of a manuscript ceremoniale of 1564, lists the days on which Vespers in the ducal basilica were performed by two choirs of singers.

This article investigates a corpus of sixteen thirteenth-century motets whose formal structures are rigorously modelled on the AAB formal type of the trouvère chanson. This corpus bears witness that the first specimens of hybridization between polyphony and the high-style lyric chanson arose as early as the 1240s, well before the emergence of fourteenth-century polyphonic song. The analysis of the make-up of the AAB form of the motets first reveals that its elements completely match those of the pedes-cum-cauda formal type of trouvère chansons. The formal impact of song citations within the corpus is then explored, together with the different modalities according to which they are involved in the make-up of the AAB form. Finally, the analysis of the texture of the works brings to light the singularity of their fabric: remodelled by the structures of the trouvère chanson, it breaks with the traditional format of the motet and turns into the texture of a motet-chanson.

Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1444–76), fifth Duke of Milan, set out when he acceded to power in 1466 to style himself as one of the most glorious of rulers and to make his court (in the words of the contemporary chronicler Bernardino Corio) one of ‘the most splendid in the universe’. Galeazzo, a contemporary of King Louis XI of France and Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy, entertained grand designs of turning his ducal coronet into a king's crown and transforming Lombardy into a royal realm, just as Charles the Bold sought to elevate the duchy of Burgundy to a kingdom. The two dukes, as vassals of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, relied on that monarch's power to bestow the kingly crown; both failed tragically in the end. As part of his design to impress his contemporaries with the princely splendour of his court, in 1471 Galeazzo focused his energies particularly on the ambitious project of developing the best musical chapel in Italy. During the course of the next two years he sent emissaries to the rulers of England, Flanders, France, Naples and his neighbour Savoy, seeking to hire (or borrow, in the case of Savoy) the best singers available. His cappella grew to include more than thirty singers, making it larger than any other in Italy, even the papal chapel.

Professional musicians first appeared in medieval Europe during the tenth century. These jongleurs, or minstrels, earned a precarious living by travelling alone or in small groups from village to village and castle to castle, singing, playing, dancing, performing magic tricks and exhibiting trained animals. These itinerant performers were often viewed as social outcasts, and were frequently denied legal protection as well as the sacraments of the church. With the revival of the European economy and the growth of towns during the twelfth century the opportunity for more stable living conditions emerged, and the minstrels began to organise themselves into brotherhoods or confraternities, eventually developing guilds of musicians. By forming corporations and thus voluntarily placing themselves under the power of rulers or civic authorities, the musicians could achieve a modicum of social acceptance and legal protection.

Musical commodities frequently accompanied European explorers, soldiers, merchants and missionaries who travelled to Asia in the early modern period. During this time, numerous theoretical treatises and musical scores – both printed and manuscript – were disseminated throughout Asia. This article examines the dissemination and use of European musical works in early modern China, Japan and the Philippines, before identifying the titles of scores and treatises so far known to have been present in these territories. In order to measure the relative success of European missionaries in transplanting music to early modern Asia, it then takes as case studies the local production of three significant sources of European music during the seventeenth century: (1) the earliest example of printed European music from Asia, produced by the Jesuit press at Nagasaki in 1605; (2) a Chinese treatise on European music that was commissioned by the Kangxi Emperor in 1713 and printed the following decade; and (3) a 116-page manuscript treatise, compiled by an unidentified Jesuit in late seventeenth-century Manila, which synthesises the most current European music theory as well as commenting on local musical practices.

Emanating from a cosmos ordered according to Pythagorean and Neoplatonic principles, the Boethian musica mundana is the type of music that ‘is discernible especially in those things which are observed in heaven itself or in the combination of elements or the diversity of seasons’. At the core of this recurring medieval topos stands ‘a fixed sequence of modulation [that] cannot be separated from this celestial revolution’, one most often rendered in medieval writings as the ‘music of the spheres’ (musica spherarum). In the Pythagorean and Neoplatonic cosmological traditions, long established by the time Boethius wrote his De institutione musica, the music of the spheres is just one possible manifestation of the concept of world harmony. It pertains to a universe in which musical and cosmic structures express the same mathematical ratios, each of the planets produces a distinctive sound in its revolution and the combination of these sounds themselves most often forms a well-defined musical scale. Although the Neoplatonic world harmony continued to function in medieval cosmology as the fundamental conceptual premise, the notion of the music of the spheres, despite its popularity among medieval writers, was generally treated neither at any significant length nor in an innovative fashion. Quite exceptional in this respect is the treatise that forms the subject of the present study, a text beginning Desiderio tuo fili carissime gratuito condescenderem and attributed to an anonymous bishop in the late thirteenth-century manuscript miscellany now in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Barb. lat. 283, fols. 37r-42v) but probably coming from a Franciscan convent in Siena. This seldom considered work affords a remarkable and special insight into the ways in which old and new ideas converged, intermingled and coexisted in the dynamic and sometimes volatile cross-currents of medieval scholarship.

In 1449, the records of the church of Our Lady at Antwerp mention a new singer, Petrus de Domaro (see Figure 1). He does not reappear in the accounts of 1450, and those of the subsequent years are all lost. Musical sources and treatises from the 1460s to 80s call him, with remarkable consistency, P[etrus] de Domarto, and reveal that he was an internationally famous composer in the third quarter of the fifteenth century.

At the conclusion of his introductory book on musicology, Armand Machabey briefly hinted at a related study, that of musicologists themselves. The musicologist, Machabey affirmed, was on the whole a positive being who contributed to the good of society but who also craved isolation for work which often went unrewarded. This scholar's accomplishments, though sometimes tedious, were nonetheless beneficial to society, for, among other things, they increased public enjoyment of classical music. The musicologist had one flaw, however: a tendency to ‘treat his conclusions as personal and untouchable acquisitions’. What is more, an undue ‘attachment to an illusory priority can lead him to the tragic and ridiculous’.A. Machabey, La musicologie, 2nd edn (Que Sais-Je, 978; Paris, 1969), pp. 120-1: ‘Il a une propension à tenir ses conclusions pour des acquisitions personnelles intouchables et son attachement à une illusoire priorité peut le conduire jusqu'au tragique et au ridicule.’

The following observations make no claim to either profundity or finality, but attempt to improve on the texts and translations currently available, to comment on their metres (some rudimentary information being given in Appendix A), and to offer a few conjectures concerning authorship. This last question has interested Du Fay scholars, who generally allow him to be the author at least of Salve flos/Vos nunc: whereas Laurenz Liitteken denies him all else, David Fallows writes that ‘Some at least of his song and motet texts are likely to be by him’, singling out Salve jlos for the first-person reference at the end of the motetus; Alejandro Enrique Planchart, having pointed out that Du Fay's literary talent in Latin was recognised at school with a copy of Alexandre de Villedieu's Doctrinale, would give him some others as well. In principle, a composer may write his own text, like Machaut; or collaborate with a poet, as Du Fay evidently did with Périnet in Ce moys de may, and one Nicholas with one William in Argi vices; or be given a text to set by a patron or employer, as when Du Fay was sent texts from Naples on the fall of Constantinople, presumably including 0 tres piteulx, de tout espoir fontaine (OO vi, no. 10).

Looking back over the past half century of research into the music of early Tudor England, it is clear that interest has been focussed principally upon sites of wealth, privilege and power. Dominating the arena are courts and household chapels, cathedrals and colleges, and the men and women who headed them. Perhaps that focus has been inevitable, since by their very nature wealthy and powerful institutions have the means to leave behind them rich deposits of evidence: not only high-art music, itself often notated in fine books, but also detailed records of expenditure, of the contractual duties carried out by or expected of musicians, and of valuable assets such as books and musical instruments. Moreover, where magnificence is on show there will often be eyewitness accounts to report on what has been seen and heard. All of those forms of evidence survive in quantity from early Tudor England, and it is hard not to be drawn to them.

The so-called Vatican Organum Treatise (henceforth VT), or ‘Ars organi’, included in the composite manuscript Ottoboni lat. 3025 in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana is believed to have been copied in northern France (or possibly England) around the middle of the thirteenth century.The most comprehensive work on the treatise is F. Zaminer, Der vatikanische Organum-Traktat (Ottob. lat. 3025): Organum-Praxis der frühen Notre Dame-Schule und ihrer Vorstufen (Münchner Veröffentlichungen der Musikwissenschaft, 2; Tutzing, 1959). Recent con-tributions include I. Godt and B. Rivera, ‘The Vatican Organum Treatise—A Colour Reproduction, Transcription, and Translation’, in In Memoriam Gordon Athol Anderson (Institute of Mediaeval Music, Musicological Studies, 39/2; Binningen, 1984), pp. 264 1 ff., and L. Treitler, ‘Der vatikanische Organumtraktat und das Organum von Notre Dame de Paris: Perspektiven der Entwicklung einer schriftlichen Musikkultur in Europa’, Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis, 7 (1983), 23-31. Bernhard Bischoff, the palaeographer whom Zaminer consulted (p. 24), has dated the treatise c. 1225-50, plus or minus twenty years. The filigree script of VT (about 60% of the size of the scripts of F, W 2 or W 1 ) closely compares with the following dated manuscripts published in C. Samaran and R. Marichal, Catalogue des manuscrits en écriture latine portant des indications de date, de lieu ou de copiste, 6 vols. (Paris, 1959-68): Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France [hereafter BN] lat. 8097 (Tours, 1232), Paris, BN lat. 15652 (Paris, 1240-5), Paris, BN lat. 15143 (1270), Paris, BN lat. 15133 (1270) and Charleville, Bibliothèque municipale 25 (before 1281). The treatise transmits a theoretical tract as well as a large repertory of musical examples, including three organum settings. The tract of VT, along with thirty-one rules regarding simple two-voice progressions, is related to certain discant treatises that stand in the ‘old’ Ad organum faciendum tradition of the early twelfth century, treatises whose dissemination throughout Europe reaches well into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries;See Zaminer, Der vatikanische Organum-Traktat, pp. 42-71; S. Fuller, ‘Theoretical Foundations of Early Organum Theory’, Acta musicologica, 53 (1981), pp. 52 ff.; ead., ‘Early Polyphony’, in The New Oxford History of Music, ii: The Early Middle Ages to 1300, ed. R. Crocker and D. Hiley (Oxford and New York, 1990), pp. 508-28; K.-J. Sachs, ‘Zur Tradition der Klangschritt-Lehre: Die Texte mit der Formel “Si cantus ascendit . . .” und ihre Verwandten’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 28 (1971), pp. 233 ff.; and H. H. Eggebrecht and F. Zaminer, Ad Organum faciendum: Lehrschriften der Mehrstimmigkeit in nachguidonischer Zeit (Mainz, 1970). The closest relatives of VT are the ‘Louvain’ (edition: CS II, pp. 494a-496b), ‘Pseudo Guido’ (CS II, pp. 191b-192b), ‘Si cantus equalis’ (CSM IV, pp. 38-40 and Sachs, ‘Zur Tradition’, pp. 244-5) and ‘Venice’ treatises (Zaminer, p. 134). For the most recent contribution on this subject consult Michael Bernhard's forthcoming article ‘Eine neue Quelle für den Vatikanischen Organum-Traktat’ (Quellen und Studien zur Musiktheorie des Mittelalters, 3; Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Veröffentlichungen der Musikhistorischen Kommission). The relevant text is found in G. P. A. Bolton Library (formerly Cathedral library), Tipperary, Cashel MS 1 – a composite source of medieval treatises – and corresponds to the rule section of VT beginning ‘De regulis organi’. As the Cashel text does not include the first two sections (or 42 lines) of VT – ‘Incipit ars organi’ and ‘Vis in organo’ – and has no musical examples, it stands squarely in the tradition of the simple voice-leading manuals. Most scholars of voice-leading treatises are well aware of the ‘anom-alous’ character of VT (cf. Fuller, ‘Early Polyphony’, p. 527). the numerous musical examples and three organum settings (with a duplum voice in a florid style), however, are related to the ‘new’ organum coming out of Paris.

The musical activities connected with the teaching of Christian doctrine in the early modern era have failed to attract substantial scholarly attention. In fact, the noteworthy and by no means obvious association between singing and catechism is a longue durée phenomenon, and one of the most ubiquitous and characteristic elements of Catholic sonic cultures in the period 1550–1800. Interconnected as these practices are with many different aspects of early modern culture, their study raises questions and offers insights not only on musical issues, but on problems of interdisciplinary relevance. The present essay discusses their role in the pastoral work of early modern Jesuits and, conversely, the role of the Society of Jesus in the development of this tradition. Three different phases are examined: the export of the method from Spain to Italy in the sixteenth century; its adaptation to the French environment in the early seventeenth century; its further development in the golden age of popular missions.

The conditions of artistic production in late sixteenth-century France required musicians and poets, composers and painters, choreographers and performers to work together. They shared the same objectives and they worked from the same aesthetic principles. Their common experience suggests that, as historians and analysts, we can enlighten the study of one art form – music or the dance, for example – by placing it within the context of others, assessing their interaction and their shared purpose. If this assumption is accepted we must consider issues of production, that is those practical matters concerning technique and the varied conditions of performance; we must examine the audience's expectations of those events which drew together the arts into a single spectacle or in a sequence of festivals and which relied for their inspiration on intellectual currents nourished through renewed acquaintance with ancient sources; and we need to assess the nature of the works themselves, their impact on the status of the artist (broadly defined), and on the social and political benefit for the patrons. There is inevitably much overlap across these three areas of production, expectation and outcomes, yet, in the discussion which follows, attempts will be made to keep them separate.

These lines adorned one of the triumphal arches built in honour of Ferdinand of Aragon's ceremonial entry into Valladolid on 5 January 1513. This event, like so many other such entries throughout Europe during the sixteenth century, was intended to recall the Triumphs of the Roman emperors, though it was also embedded in a long-established entry ritual. The ephemeral buildings all'antica, the apparati, street decorations, pageants with allegorical, mythological and historical figures, as well as music and dancing of various kinds all formed part of a royal spectacle devised according to the political process of image-making.

Scholars have long been aware of the intriguing fact that the late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century French song repertory survives almost exclusively in non-French sources. Most of the principal collections of chansons copied between c.1380 and 1420 – that is, in the period corresponding roughly to the reign of Charles VI, sources like PR, Pit, ModA and FP – derive from Italy; further witness to the circulation of this repertory south of the Alps is found in additional, fragmentary sources, such as Lu, SL and GR. In comparison, the number of French songs preserved in manuscripts of northern provenance is remarkably slight. Moreover, those works that do survive in such sources (and these are mostly Flemish fragments) are generally simple works in classic Ars nova style; hardly any songs from the repertory we associate with Ars subtilior feature in these collections at all.

Marian guilds and confraternities proliferated in fifteenth-century Brabant. They gave expression to the pride, devoutness and community spirit of the urban middle classes. Their chapels were invested with all the riches their members could afford: altarpieces, stained-glass windows, painted statues, silk and velvet cloth, gold and silverware, and other expensive ornaments. But the jewel in the crown for every confraternity was polyphony. Prestigious Marian confraternities such as those at 's-Hertogenbosch, Bergen op Zoom and Antwerp were among the major musical establishments of the Low Countries. They employed some of the best-known composers of their time: Jacob Obrecht, Pierre de la Rue, Johannes Ghiselin, Jacobus Barbireau, Matthaeus Pipelare, Nicasius and Jheronimus de Clibano, Paulus de Roda and Hermannus de Atrio. Other Marian confraternities in Brabant are also known to have cultivated polyphony, though probably on a lesser scale, for instance Brussels and Diest.

Evidence for assumptions about the transmission of written polyphony in the fifteenth century comes primarily from two sources: archival references, both letters and pay records; and music manuscripts, the collections of the polyphony performed at a given centre. Unfortunately it is all too rare that specific archival references can be associated with surviving manuscripts of fifteenth-century polyphony. For some centres manuscripts have survived but not the archives, while for others there are archival references to the copying of music, but the manuscripts have disappeared. Nevertheless, there is ample evidence to indicate that many large manuscripts were compiled from what Charles Hamm termed ‘fascicle-manuscripts’ – small gatherings of bifolios just large enough to contain one long work or several short ones. By means of fascicle-manuscripts music could circulate randomly, travelling with singers from court to court, or it could be transmitted intentionally, as when the choir at one centre commissioned a piece from a composer working elsewhere. According to this argument, the large manuscripts we are familiar with may not even have been the normal repositories for music in this period. They were created only when enough fascicle-manuscripts had accumulated. These would then be recopied into a single manuscript, providing a greater degree of permanence. The manuscript San Pietro b 80, a large choirbook which can now be shown to have been copied for the choir at the basilica of San Pietro in Vaticano, represents one of those rare instances when archival data can be matched to an existing manuscript.