It may not always seem obvious to begin a study of French music in the Renaissance with a reference from the theoretical field. By entitling his study ‘Ut musica poesis’ Howard Mayer Brown attempted to remedy this shortcoming. However, without in any way disparaging his work, this results in a series of paradoxes and uncertainties about the links which in France during the Renaissance period unite musical practice and musical thought, whether this be philosophical or theoretical. It is true that expressions like ‘musical renaissance’ or ‘musical humanism’, easy and pernicious terms, have a hard time in the French field. And it is precisely because these terms are easy and pernicious that they can be used in this way. For while there has never been any question of doubting the role of French composers in constructing the musical landscape of the Renaissance, it has never, on the other hand, been imaginable to write a history of humanism in French musical thinking of the Renaissance. It is rather as if, causing a sudden break in the course of history, French writers and theorists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had abandoned the art of sound to the practitioners, composers and performers alone. But no Western culture exists which can have a musical life without thought, and without the will to discover in it a pretext, a paradigmatic function or even an experimental field.

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.

The manuscript Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14274 (now also ‘Tresorhandschrift l’) is a large collection of mensural polyphonic music, mostly composed in the first half of the fifteenth century, although a few pieces date back to the late fourteenth. Apart from its importance as a musical source (more than half the compositions it contains are unknown from other sources), Clm 14274 is the geographically northernmost representative of the small group of manuscripts from northern Italy and southern Germany which contain the core of the surviving repertory of early-fifteenth-century polyphony, and, as such, provides potentially vital documentary material for the study of this repertory.

As the only late fifteenth-century picture book devoted to a ‘joyous entry’, inv. 78.D.5 of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Kupferstichkabinett is a source of singular importance, conveying a total of twenty-seven tableaux vivants staged for Joanna of Castile (‘the Mad’) on the occasion of her entry into Brussels, 15 December 1496, as duchess of Brabant. The present contribution focuses on two tableaux with musical subject matter, consciously displayed at the very beginning and at the very end: Jubal and Tubalcain, the biblical inventors of music, on the one hand, and St Luke portraying the Virgin Mary with Child, enriched by the means of angelic musicians, on the other. Besides iconographic issues, special emphasis is placed on Joanna, her musical inclinations, and the respective institutional background: whereas the St Luke tableau contributes to the corporate identity of Brussels's painters' guild, the biblical inventor of music allows for the self-presentation of the rhetoricians, who were in charge of ‘programming’ the joyous entry and its festive apparatus. In sum, political messages have been musically disguised; uncommon biblical or even extra-biblical subjects become vehicles for a complex layer of meaning that permeates the public space.

Any scholar involved in the study of sixteenth-century music printed in Venice is bound to be familiar with the phrase ‘con gratia et privilegio’; yet within the framework of music-printing as a whole, the uses and significance of the printing privilege have remained somewhat obscure. The Venetian prints on which the privilege indication appears now lie scattered across the globe, but Venice continues to guard part of her brilliant past – the archives of the Serenissima Repubblica still yield documents which clarify our understanding of the production and protection of prints during the Cinquecento.

Jacques de Liège was the first theorist to use the word cadentia in relation to harmonic theory, preceding later such uses, as far as survivals attest, by a century and a half. The concept he developed under this term (set out in Speculum musicae, IV. l) has been connected in recent times to ideas in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century discant theory now related to the notion of directed progression. While there are linguistic similarities in Jacques's exposition to that of this (mostly later) theory, there are also important discrepancies in the concept's content; and there is an ideological anomaly in viewing Jacques as the exponent of an important idea of Ars nova harmonic theory. This article proposes a different reading of the concept, one congruent with Jacques's conservative intellectual stance. It identifies two contrasting, though complementary, aspects within it, and examines the role of an expression of approximation (ea, quae prope sunt, sunt quasi idem) whose ultimate significance remains uncertain. What emerges clearly, however, is that Jacques regarded cadentia as a process whereby imperfect concords were redeemed for perfection, so that their presence in polyphonic music might be tolerable in an aesthetics of retrospection. His account of polyphony draws upon an established idea in mensural theory dating back at least to John of Garland; and it contrasts significantly with the contemporaneous but more modern account of Marchetto of Padua's Lucidarium.

It was Charles Hamm who first formalised the distinction between fifteenth-century manuscripts whose contents are arranged primarily according to liturgical type (introits, Kyrie settings, Gloria settings, etc.), in a more or less predetermined succession of gatherings, and those in which the repertory is more arbitrarily organised through small clusters of related works and in which gatherings tend to form separate and independently conceived entities. Trent 87 and 92 (hereafter Tr87 and Tr92) belong primarily to the second category. Haberl first distinguished them from the later Trent codices as an older group of manuscripts of independent origin; but it was Adler and Roller who recognised their important subdivisions. The main section of Tr92 (fols. 1–143) and the latter part of Tr87 (fols. 219–265), they noted, had each once formed a separate book,6 while the remaining portions of the manuscripts, TY87, fols. 1–218, and Tr92, fols. 144–268 (here referred to individually as Tr871, and Tr922 but jointly as TR?), were so closely related as to suggest that they belonged together.

During the Middle Ages, the construction or renovation of a great church was a vast undertaking in terms of time and of money. An array of cathedrals that still rise above the cities and towns of northern France bears witness to medieval ingenuity and industry. The first structure which embodies many of the elements that are now called Gothic was begun at St-Denis in 1140. The church as we know it, however, was not entirely the work of the twelfth century. Only much later, between 1231 and 1281, was St-Denis finally completed. Substantial evidence of the thirteenth-century rebuilding is found in the monument which stands just to the north of Paris. But the stones of St-Denis do not tell the entire story: a small handful of documents refer to stages of the fifty-year reconstruction of the abbey, and now, new witness exists in the form of the liturgical manuscripts which have survived from the thirteenth century.

Historians of plainchant continue to puzzle over the existence of two monophonic repertories, each with claims to Roman origin.The ‘Gregorian’ chant (GREG) is spread throughout Europe: there are thousands of manuscripts and printed editions; the earliest, lacking neumatic notation, reach back to the late eighth century; with notation they date from the late ninth century; the repertory has remained in continuous use. The ‘Old Roman’ chant (ROM) is found in fewer than half a dozen complete manuscripts and a handful of fragments; they date between the eleventh and early thirteenth centuries, and nearly all are from the region of Rome. GREG and ROM are very similar in their verbal texts and liturgical provisions. But ROM has the more archaic Roman traits and clearly represents the city's usage, while there is little trace of GREG's use at Rome before the thirteenth century. As for the music, where there are corresponding liturgical texts, they tend to share some underlying musical substance. But the nature and patterns of the musical sharings are not clear, and how the relationships came about has not been satisfactorily explained.

This essay examines the role of music in the late-medieval and Renaissance response to plague. According to doctors, the mere thought of plague could bring on the disease; they therefore prescribed joyful music to distract the mind from insidious imaginings and to counteract the harmful effects of fear. The prescription for music, however, was not unequivocal. Some spiritual authorities looked suspiciously upon music's role as anti-pestilential remedy. These competing discourses inform a reading of Johannes Martini's and Gaspar van Weerbeke's settings of O beate Sebastiane, motets that petition St Sebastian, the premier plague saint of the Renaissance, for divine intervention against pestilence.

Any assessment of a fifteenth-century court musician failing to take account of those extra-musical activities – be they juridical, administrative, liturgical or whatever – which almost invariably constituted an intrinsic part of that musician's overall function must be deemed at best flawed, at worst a chronic perpetuation of that romanticising instinct to dislocate music from its integral rôle as a morally and spiritually heightening force in the court's social structure. This is not, of course, to deny the acceleration in the emergence both of the ‘professional’ musician and of a more autonomous musical language, together with the potential for a similar though less tangible degree of autonomy in the public and private response to that music, all of which undoubtedly seems to have taken place in the fifteenth century. But, to take the practical case of Tinctoris, it is clear that, aside from his musical skills and the political attractions to Naples of forging cultural links with the Burgundian—Netherlandish circles of influence, a high-level training in canon and civil law would have contributed in no small measure to the securing of his post at the Neapolitan court of King Ferrante, and, more specifically, was probably a major factor in his being commissioned by royal mandate, soon after his arrival in Italy, to translate into Italian the statutes of the Order of the Golden Fleece for his new employer, on the occasion of Ferrante's election to knighthood of the order.

Sopra i sedili di questo coro vi sono due pergoli di marmo uno per lato, posti sotto due volti piccioli uno sopra l'altro, i quali formano, anco nelle braccia per traverso, la Chiesa in tre navi con mirabile, & inesplicabile architettura. In questi veggonsi sei quadri d'historie, tre per pergolo, scolpite in bronzo con bellissimo artificio da Giacomo Sansovino.

In 1550 Antonio Gardano's printing shop issued a collection of psalms entitled Di Adriano et di Jachet: I Salmi appartinenti alli vesperi per tutte le feste dell'anno, parte a versi & parte spezzadi accomodati da cantare a uno & duoi Chori. Half of the works included were compositions for eight voices, designated for cori spezzati. Composed by Adrian Willaert (c. 1490–1562), maestro di cappella at St Mark's from 1527 until his death, they are the first published salmi spezzati known to us. The performance of Vespers psalms in polyphony was reserved for particularly important moments in St Mark's liturgical calendar, and both of the main ceremonial books in use at the basilica, the Rituum ecclesiasticorum caerimoniale (1564) of Bartolomeo Bonifacio and the Ceremoniale magnum sive Raccolta universale di tutte le ceremonie spettanti alla ducal regia cappella di San Marco (1678) of Giovanni Pace, include precise instructions concerning the performance of Vespers by two choirs on specific days of the year.

Music of the Renaissance abounds in instances of successive and simultaneous use of perfect and imperfect time. When they occur simultaneously, the intended relationship can usually be determined without much difficulty. It cannot be assumed, however, that horizontal relationships of mensurations were always identical with the vertical ones. On the contrary, we know, for example, that many theorists advocated that major prolation signify augmentation only when it occurred simultaneously with minor prolation in another part, and not when minor and major prolations followed one another in the same part. Similarly, the sign of diminished perfect time always indicated diminution by half when it occurred simultaneously with undiminished perfect time; otherwise it might also indicate diminution by a third. Consequently, when imperfect time is followed by or follows perfect time, the question arises which value should remain equal under both tempora: breve, semibreve or minim? It is striking that not a single modern scholar considers the possibility of semibreve equivalence. It will be readily seen that semibreve equivalence is an independent possibility only when combined with different prolations (see Example lc–d); when prolations are the same, it is indistinguishable from minim equivalence (see Example la–b). Anticipating the results of the investigation that follows, I should say at once that I have not found a single theorist who would advocate semibreve equivalence in . The fact that modern scholars do not consider semibreve equivalence either means, presumably, that notational practice of the Renaissance does not suggest it.

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 146 (fr. 146), a manuscript well known for its inclusion of the Roman de Fauvel, also provides an important, albeit understudied, contribution to the history surrounding the allegorical ‘flower of the lily’, or fleur-de-lis – a floral symbol central to fourteenth-century theology and French royal heraldry. In medieval France, the fleur-de-lis emerges through text and music as a symbol capable of invoking, and being invoked by, the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary and the Virtues, all in the interest of supporting the religious and monarchical well-being of France. This study argues that the persistent return to the fleur-de-lis throughout the dits, the Chronique metrique and most especially the music and text of Fauvel in fr. 146 offers a necessary link between sacred and heraldic symbology both within the manuscript as well as within the larger historical development of this allegorical flower.

‘… Squarcialupi, a famous organist, but who remains a rather mythical figure’. Of course we know that Antonio degli Organi, as he was called throughout his life, was a real person, and if we trust in the verisimilitude of Benedetto da Maiano's portrait bust of him (made ten years after his death, strongly classicising in design, and altered at least once in the early sixteenth century), we have an idea of what he looked like. Antonio degli Organi (1416–80) was not born with the surname Squarcialupi, nor do we know precisely when or under what circumstances he took this name (but see below). We have enough information about his life to form a preliminary notion of his character, but the mental image we create is not altogether a coherent one. He was organist at Santa Maria del Fiore, the Florentine cathedral, for an extraordinarily long period, from 1432 until his death. This alone makes him a ‘famous organist’; but a good deal of the fame is posthumous, and there is next to no meaningful comment from contemporaries about his playing. He judged the quality and state of repair of organs but is not known to have had organ-building expertise. Antonio presumably taught his son Francesco, who succeeded him at the cathedral on his death and served until his own death in 1509. His only other student of note is the Greek organist Isaac Argyropoulos, whose playing was much admired in Naples, Bologna, Florence and Milan in the 1470s.

In March 1152, the German princes gathered in the city of Frankfurt and elected Frederick ‘Barbarossa’ of Hohenstaufen (r. 1152–90) their new king. The dynamic young Swabian duke took the throne with a sense of entitlement unknown since the days of the Emperor Henry III (r. 1039–56). Shortly after his election, he confidently notified Pope Eugenius III of his new station. Seeking neither warrant nor approval, Frederick informed the pope of a new relationship between the imperium and the Roman Church. Barbarossa portrayed his election, as well as his subsequent anointment by Pope Hadrian IV in 1155, as the fulfilment of preordained circumstances. The new king was determined to make the imperial title more than a hollow honour, and from the first years of his reign he sought to strengthen his position by adding to his dominion the wealth and resources of Italy, riches he deemed the rightful assets of his office.

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.

The earliest operas are few, and their history is a history of particulars: of the interests of individual Renaissance humanists; of the ways in which certain musicians sang; of the development of Italian poetry for music; and of the theatrical traditions within which the new genre was accepted and propagated. Recent music history has tended to stress the sixteenth-century antecedents for these aspects of opera, without forgetting, however, that the common inspiration for Dafne, Anima e Corpo and Euridice – as well as for some earlier Florentine intermedi – was the desire to emulate the effects of the music of the ancient Greeks and Romans. In Florence this was realised at the granducal court with the help of its satellite circles of educated nobles. In Rome, knowledge of the ancients was the province of professional scholars, the priests and religious who taught in the seminaries and colleges, and for whom Seneca and Terence would have been more familiar fare than Tasso and Guarini. Thus after Cavalieri staged his Rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo under the auspices of the Oratorians, it is not surprising that the next Roman musical drama is a carnival school play given by boys and composed by their professor. In Rome, furthermore, the princes and prelates of the Church exercised their tastes for fine literature with transformations of Pindar and Horace designed to inspire Christian devotion.

In a rich and learned article, Lawrence Gushee explored the tabula monochordi of Magister Nicolaus de Luduno. The tabula, which was copied into a music theory manuscript of c. 1400 of southern Italian provenance (Rome/St. Paul), consists of three associated parts. The first and third I shall call, following Gushee, the tabula figurarum (an elaborate musical example) and the tabula numerorum (an extremely elaborate table of corresponding information). Between them lies the enigmatic text of a six-stanza musical puzzle poem, ‘Ut pateat evidenter’, with which Gushee wrestled inconclusively. A concordance to the poem unknown to Gushee in an English music theory manuscript of about the same age (Bodley 842) associates these cryptic verses with a polyphonic chanson, a two-voice ballade that has never been published. The ballade is a sophisticated demonstration piece for tonal and mensural behaviours, and I believe that this song is the original complement and key to the poem’s meaning. It also offers a significant new point of entry into the complicated world of Anglo-French tonal theory as it developed in treatises and compositions of the fourteenth century.

Of the three most important Spanish composers of the Renaissance – Morales, Guerrero and Victoria – it is undoubtedly Guerrero who has attracted the least musicological attention. The complete edition of his works begun in 1949 is still little more than half complete, and the only substantial published account of his life and output is over thirty years old. As this article will show, at least one major work by Guerrero has managed hitherto to slip almost entirely through the musicological net, thanks to the general concentration on printed sources of his music at the expense of manuscripts.