The thirteenth-century motet repertory has been understood on a wide spectrum, with recent scholarship amplifying the relationship between the liturgical tenors and the commentary in the upper voices. This study examines a family of motets based on the tenors IOHANNE and MULIERUM from the feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist (24 June). Several texts within this motet family make references to well-known traditions associated with the pagan festival of Midsummer, the celebration of the summer solstice. Allusions to popular solstitial practices including the lighting of bonfires and the public criticism of authority, in addition to the cultural awareness of the sun's power on this day, conspicuously surface in these motets, particularly when viewed through the lens of the tenor. The study suggests the further obfuscation of sacred and secular poles in the motet through attentiveness to images of popular, pre-Christian rituals that survive in these polyphonic works.

Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese composer and theorist Vicente Lusitano wrote a manuscript treatise on improvised counterpoint which constitutes the most thorough and detailed explanation that has survived on the subject. This manuscript has long been overlooked by music historians, despite being easily accessible at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris). The manuscript is described and its history traced. Lusitano's rules, techniques and stylistic advice are investigated and compared with contemporary theory. The extraordinary complexity of the contrapuntal lines singers were expected to invent extempore calls for a reappraisal of the relationship between improvisation and composition, also discussed by Lusitano. Historical evidence is adduced to provide a context for this document; far from being disconnected from the real life of sixteenth-century music, Lusitano's manuscript counterpoint treatise provides a key to understanding the oral tradition of Renaissance art music.

When a practical way of recording music in writing was invented in the early ninth century, it defined neither the pitches of specific notes in a melody, nor the intervallic relations between successive notes. Nineteenth-century views of such notations considered them primitive; more recent descriptions have recognised that precise pitch notation was not a basic aim. But how did ninth-century neumatic notations deal with pitch, and, if the role of memory was not usurped by written records, what role did notation fulfil? In this study, the interaction of memory and writing is explored. Notations written by a French and by a German scribe (F-La MS 239 and S-SG MS 359) are seen to follow different strategies for the arrangement of signs above the text, striking divergent visual balances between pitch information and the text–music link. In each notation the reader is led along a path of recall, with more or less emphatic written signals provided as required.

The expansive tradition of Renaissance L'homme armé masses often prompts considerations of how composers competed with, imitated or emulated one another. For fifteenth-century settings, written in close chronological proximity, such comparisons have yielded important channels of influence. But they are less effective in explaining L'homme armé masses from the mid-sixteenth century, written after this tradition's heyday and less immediately concerned with proximate influence. This article addresses the relationships between two pairs of L'homme armé masses by composers of two separate generations: Cristóbal de Morales and Josquin des Prez. Besides uncovering close links between these works relating to source tune treatment, mode, texture and overall style, it offers a new contextualisation for these practices. Morales does not compete with, imitate or emulate Josquin; rather, he reanimates the L'homme armé tradition by adapting features from its most renowned practitioner and translating them into a contemporary musical language.

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.