7 - Italy to 1300

Summary

We still know very little about medieval music in Italy: our knowledge of the repertory performed at that time is based on a very small number of surviving sources. Only a minuscule part of the repertory of Christian liturgical chant is documented, and, even then, only partially; there are no in-depth studies about the pieces collected in more recent codices and early printed editions; and the greatest part of music, of so-called ‘popular’ song and the global ‘sound landscape’, is beyond investigation. We also know very little about the nature of the creation and transmission of the main kinds of musical practice in the Middle Ages, that is, about the mainly oral tradition of songs, performance practices (both vocal and instrumental) and the occasional recourse to writing (which is a very unusual event in a culture based on memory on account of the scarcity of books).

What follows must, therefore, be read with the awareness that it is a series of necessarily fragmentary observations, which should be considered within a very rich and complex cultural and social frame, furthermore, a frame which does not have, and may never have, well-defined boundaries. Too many cultural connections escape us, too many songs have disappeared forever, and too many musical details of the few sources that do survive are irremediably lost (the kinds of temperament used, the different kinds of pronunciation of Latin and of the vernaculars, the different kinds of vocal technique, the extempore inventions of added voices, the embellishments used by singers, the role of instruments, and so on).