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.

Although the castrato played a central role in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century musical life, he occupied a position at the margins of early modern society. As a consequence of the surgical alteration of his body and the superior musical training that he received as compensation for his ‘acquiescence’ in that act, he found himself navigating a path through a bifurcated world. For him, the surgery had both public and private consequences: while society would publicly celebrate his vocal virtuosity, it would also circumscribe his private activities, and withhold from him the right to marry, or to enjoy an intimate relationship with a woman. As he soon realised, the realities of his special status meant that many of those who would revel in his phenomenal vocal abilities would also ridicule him as effeminate and as a sexual misfit, and would accuse him, ironically, of possessing a voracious sexual appetite that rendered him a threat to women. When he travelled north to work in German-speaking societies, particularly those in which the Lutheran confession held sway, that simple migratory act instantly compounded the number of those qualities that contributed to his ‘Otherness’: while in his homeland his standing as an emasculate and a musician already set him apart from others, in Lutheran regions, his status as a foreigner, an adherent of an outlawed (and highly suspect) confession, and a member of a privileged group that moved in the rarefied atmosphere of the local court all served to intensify his marginality.

At the heart of the biography of Guillaume de Machaut as currently understood there lies an inconsistency so great as almost to present a paradox, for it seems irreconcilable with the evident content of his surviving output of musical works. From 1338 until his death in 1377 Machaut possessed a canonry and prebend of the cathedral and metropolitan church of Our Lady of Reims. Conventionally it has been assumed that soon after his receipt of this benefice, and certainly by 1340, he had taken up residence within one of the prebendal mansions located in or near the precinct of the cathedral, and that he made this his permanent domicile for the remainder of his adult life – a period little short of forty years.

Was music notated at Rome before the St Cecilia gradual, finished in 1071, was begun? If so (as seems likely), does the common wisdom hold true that no examples of such notation have survived? And if a search through sacramentaries, lectionaries, evangeliaries, bibles and homiliaries written in urban and suburban Rome before 1071 should disclose bits of such notation, what would they reveal? An earlier stage of music writing indigenous to Rome, or a borrowed technique recently imported? And if borrowed, borrowed from where?

In a letter written in the year he died, the novelist Italo Calvino spoke of his unease with the writing of the story of his own life: ‘Each time I see my life fixed and objectified I am seized with anxiety, especially when it is notes that I myself have supplied … by repeating the same things [but] using different words I always hope to get round my neurotic relationship with autobiography.’ Such testimony from a still-living creative artist is a valuable reminder of the historiographical conundrums of even the most apparently ‘authentic’ biographical narrative. Those of us who read, research and write the stories of long-dead artists, relying as we must on the contents of documents both written and preserved for all kinds of forgotten and quite likely unfathomable reasons, have learnt to be cautious, if not a little anxious, in our relationships with what they seem to be saying to us. The more consciously autobiographical such writings appear to be, the more circumspectly we tend to tread, trying to temper the seductive pleasure of a time-dissolving intimacy with our subjects which such texts seem to promise with our historians' sense of their Siren dangers. Nevertheless, in the case of the still largely unknown story of Philippe de Monte, whose scarce documentary sources, apart from a rich but small handful of private letters, consist of the often enigmatic prefaces to his published music, the addition of two new, very substantial and intensely autobiographical documents can hardly fail to excite expectations of increased access to ‘the man himself’.

In 1685, the Portuguese Jesuit Thomas Pereira was ordered by the Qing Kangxi emperor to write books on Western music theory in Chinese. Presented in the books were seventeenth-century practical and speculative music theories, including the coincidence theory of consonance. Invoking the concept of ‘boundary object’, this article shows that the cultural exchange, which gave rise to new knowledge by means of selection, synthesis and reinterpretation, was characterised by a lack of consensus between the transmitter and the receivers over the functions of the imported theories. Although the coincidence theory of consonance could potentially effect the transition from a pure numerical to a physical understanding of pitch, as in the European scientific revolution, it failed to flourish in China not only because of different theoretical concerns between European and Chinese musical traditions, but also because of its limited dissemination caused by Chinese print culture.

During the course of his thirty-year career in Italy between the early 1470s and the first years of the sixteenth century, Tinctoris witnessed the printing of only two of his own theoretical works. His glossary of musical terms, the Terminorum musicae diffinitorium, has been convincingly shown to have issued from the Treviso press of the author's compatriot and contemporary Gerardus de Lisa, around 1495, although the work had clearly been compiled in manuscript form some twenty years previously. The Diffinitorium has, indeed, fared relatively well at the hands of modern scholarship, though one suspects that its generic significance as an early musical dictionary has occasionally clouded critical judgement on its actual content, and there still remain unanswered basic questions as to why, and for whom, the book was printed at all. By contrast, the other, fragmentary treatise of Tinctoris to be printed in his lifetime, De inuentione et usu musice – a work frankly more interesting by far than the Diffinitorium – has received surprisingly scant attention, and a reassessment of the place, date and circumstances of its publication is long overdue. In addition, it seems appropriate to take the opportunity of presenting here some new fragments of the treatise which have recently come to light in north-east France.

In the early seventeenth century many Lutheran composers produced music in printed pamphlets for weddings, funerals and other ceremonies. Johann Hermann Schein, Thomas-Kantor in Leipzig, said that he composed and performed pieces for ‘various occasions’, admitting that some had been ‘completed in haste’. At least eighty-eight pieces by Schein survive in pamphlets from his tenure of the Thomas-Kantorate between 1616 and 1630, and more such pieces are known to be lost. Other musicians in Leipzig such as Georg Engelmann and Samuel Michael wrote occasional pieces at a lesser rate, as did students from the university. And this repertory of occasional music was but part of the vast quantity of printed ephemera from the period, including thousands of poems, sermons and orations.

For James Haar on his 70th Birthday

The sixteenth century in Italy was a time when academies of all kinds flourished as venues, and often as arbiters, of literature and high culture. A casual look at the academies might give the impression that they were mostly social in nature, that they functioned as a pastime for bored aristocrats and ambitious letterati. As originally constituted, the Accademia degli Umidi, founded 1 November 1540, indeed fitted this description, but with one difference characteristic of Florentine society - it was organised by twelve men of various social classes with a common interest in poetry and language. The academy expanded considerably under the patronage of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici and on 25 March 1541 was reconstituted as the Accademia Fiorentina. Its avowed purpose was to promote the Tuscan language as an instrument of literature and knowledge, in an age when mastery of Latin was required of any educated man. In advancing the cause of vernacular literature, the Accademia Fiorentina, like other academies of the time, greatly extended the programme of Italian humanism, making available the fruits of humanist thought and enquiry to a larger public.

The twin questions of the origin and purpose of Trent 88–91, the four celebrated codices compiled by Johannes Wiser during the third quarter of the fifteenth century, have continued to puzzle musicologists ever since the manuscripts were rediscovered more than a hundred years ago. Adler and Koller, whose pioneering study of the Trent Codices, published in 1900, still retains so much of its original force, saw Wiser’s collection as having been compiled ‘in and for Trent’ under the humanistic influence of Johannes Hinderbach, provost of the cathedral from 1455 and prince-bishop of the city and region from 1465. At the time of writing, next to nothing was known about the life of the obscure priest who had been responsible for the most important musical collection of the fifteenth century, and it was not until nearly thirty years later that the Trentino scholar Renato Lunelli published his crucial discovery showing that Wiser was employed as schoolmaster at the cathedral school in Trent during the very period when he must have been busy assembling his great collection. The article in question was written partly in response to a highly polemical and largely unsubstantiated piece that had been published by the Austrian historian Rudolf Wolkan a few years earlier. Wolkan had rejected the idea of a Tridentine origin for the codices, arguing that there was literally no evidence of any form of musical activity in Trent prior to Hinderbach’s time, and that the reign of his predecessor, Georg Hack (1444–65), which Adler and Koller had defined as the period during which most of the copying must have taken place, would not have been conducive to so large-scale an artistic enterprise, owing to Hack’s strained relations with the city over which he presided. Instead, Wolkan maintained that the codices had been compiled in Vienna, where they might have formed part of Hinderbach’s library, and suggested that it could have been under his auspices that they eventually reached Trent.

In his Prologue, Guillaume de Machaut lists the ballade entée, or ‘grafted ballade’, as one of the many genres he is inspired to write to praise and honour all ladies. It is unclear from this fleeting reference, however, exactly what type of work Machaut meant by this term and whether he was referring to a purely poetic form or to one that involved music. That the practice of citation in lyric poetry was well established at this time is demonstrated by Machaut's own output, which reveals him to have been a master of this art; this literary tradition was to continue to thrive in the later fourteenth century.

The conventional view on the origin of the gradual was stated succinctly by Peter Wagner: ‘The Responsorial solo in the mass is of apostolic origin…in imitation of the Jewish liturgy a solo from the psalmist was inserted between the readings.’ The precise form this view has taken more recently in the works of both musical and liturgical historians can be summarised as follows. The early Mass or Eucharist consisted of two major parts. The essential part, the Eucharist proper, had its origins in the Last Supper, a Jewish ceremonial meal, possibly the Passover Seder. This was preceded by a ‘service of the Word’, made up of four elements: scripture reading, discourse on the reading, congregational prayer and psalms sung in response to the readings. This pre-eucharistic service was plainly and simply an adoption en bloc of the ancient synagogue service.

Of all the musical traditions in the world among which fruitful comparisons with medieval European chant might be made, the chant tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church promises to be especially informative. In Ethiopia one can actually witness many of the same processes of oral and written transmission as were or may have been active in medieval Europe. Music and literacy are taught in a single curriculum in ecclesiastical schools. Future singers begin to acquire the repertory by memorising chants that serve both as models for whole melodies and as the sources of the melodic phrases linked to individual notational signs. At a later stage of training each one copies out a complete notated manuscript on parchment using medieval scribal techniques. But these manuscripts are used primarily for study purposes; during liturgical celebrations the chants are performed from memory without books, as seems originally to have been the case also with Gregorian and Byzantine chant. Finally, singers learn to improvise sung liturgical poetry according to a structured system of rules. If one desired to imitate the example of Parry and Lord, who investigated the modern South Slavic epic for possible clues to Homeric poetry, it would be difficult to find a modern culture more similar to the one that spawned Gregorian chant.

Late in the year 1028, Adémar de Chabannes embarked on an ambitious and audacious project to create a new liturgy for the Feast of Saint Martial that would venerate its honoree as an apostle. It is difficult to exaggerate the monstrous nature of the venture and the claim it supported. The historical Martial was well known from the works of Gregory of Tours, the sixth-century historian, as a third-century Roman missionary to Aquitaine and first bishop of Limoges. There his burial place became an important pilgrimage destination and the eventual site of a Benedictine monastery founded in Martial's memory. Adémar, with the full support of the abbot, Odolric, and monks of the abbey of Saint-Martial, and Bishop Jordan of Limoges, sought to transform the historical Martial into a first-century Jew, younger cousin of Simon Peter, an intimate of Jesus himself, whom he served at the Last Supper, Saint Peter's personal delegate to Gaul, and a saint of apostolic rank.

On the abdication of his father Charles V from the Spanish throne in 1556, Philip II was to inherit probably the most important and prestigious court chapel in Europe. Its history, structure and musical eminence were well established during the time of the Burgundian dukes in the fifteenth century, under whose patronage some of the most prominent musicians and composers found their livelihood; as an institution, it was also partly indebted to traditions and an infrastructure inherited from the Castilian court of Ferdinand and Isabella which was passed on to Charles V following the death of Ferdinand in 1516. When Philip II came to power, the amalgamation of his own court and chapel with that of the Emperor resulted in an organisation of unheard proportions, even though many officers of the Imperial court were to accompany Charles V on his retirement to the monastery in Yuste, in Spain, and others of Philip's own train were to return independently to their homeland on periods of extended leave. This was evidently a time of considerable upheaval, during which membership fluctuated and the structural organisation necessarily underwent a period of some adjustment.

One of the most challenging problems in the performance of sixteenth-century music is the interpretation of tempo relationships between passages of duple and triple time. After c. 1520 binary signatures became standard for most pieces, and ternary passages within them were notated as sesquialtera or triple proportions. The signs of these proportions ostensibly specify precise tempo relationships between the binary and ternary passages, but in practice they could be interpreted in a variety of ways depending on time, place and musical context, as well as on the notation itself.

By praising rulers, whose magnificence formed a crucial part of the world order, Pierre de Ronsard and his French colleagues in the second half of the sixteenth century often depicted the world not as it was but as it ought to be. This idea informs Margaret McGowan's book on ideal forms in the age of Ronsard, in which she explores the ways poets and painters extolled the virtues and the theatrical magnificence of perfect princes following the Horatian dictum ut pictura poesis: as is painting so is poetry. McGowan demonstrates the virtuosity of the painters and poets of the sixteenth century in shaping their hymns of praise from the subject matter and ideals of ancient Greece and Rome by following Horace's advice to regard paintings as mute poems and poems as speaking pictures. McGowan shows how artists and intellectuals pursued their goals by creating four kinds of ideal form: iconic forms, sacred images derived from classical literary sources offering princes some guarantee of immortality; triumphal forms that evoke the heroic imperial past; ideal forms of beauty to be found in contemplating the beloved; and dancing forms that mirror rituals of celebration. McGowan claims that such ideal forms were intended to enlighten the ruler himself as much as they celebrated his grandeur in the eyes of others.

The thirteenth century was a time of turmoil in Occitania, starting with the buildup to the Albigensian Crusade during the first decade and its eruption in the second and third, which resulted in the establishment of the university in Toulouse in 1229, the founding of the Order of Friars Preachers a short time later and the unleashing of several decades of inquisition led by these Dominicans, and ultimately the dissolution of the powerful county of Toulouse. France profited both economically and politically from this plundering of the rich culture to its south: the consolidation of power by the late Capetian monarchy owed much to the absorption of Occitania into its holdings. The inhabitants of the Midi continued to demonstrate their fierce independence from their conquerors in myriad ways, some overt, some subversive. But the tempestuous events in their homeland caused some trauma among the troubadours, and although this did not necessarily result in a general deterioration in the quality of the songs that they produced, it probably is at least partly to blame for a decline in the number of both songs and composers.

Our picture of musical training in the Middle Ages and Renaissance is frustratingly generic and fragmentary. The musicians of that era – it is often stated – were well versed in the method of the so-called Guidonian hand, by which the twenty pitches of the gamut (often referred to as claves) were mapped onto the joints of the left hand along with the six voces ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, dating back to Guido of Arezzo’s Epistola ad Michahelem (c. 1033). Professional singers learnt how to group the claves into overlapping hexachords in the early stages of musical training and referred to the musical hand as a mnemonic aid while sight-singing. By the early fourteenth century at the latest, a sophisticated set of rules of behaviour was in place that allowed practical musicians and theorists to connect the six syllables to the claves and to perform hexachordal mutations smoothly and effectively.