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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music
  • Cited by 3
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
July 2015
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781139057813
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139057813
Subjects:
Medieval and Renaissance Music, Music, History, Music: General Interest, Music Performance
Series:
The Cambridge History of Music
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Music
Information

Book description

Through forty-five creative and concise essays by an international team of authors, this Cambridge History brings the fifteenth century to life for both specialists and general readers. Combining the best qualities of survey texts and scholarly literature, the book offers authoritative overviews of central composers, genres, and musical institutions as well as new and provocative reassessments of the work concept, the boundaries between improvisation and composition, the practice of listening, humanism, musical borrowing, and other topics. Multidisciplinary studies of music and architecture, feasting, poetry, politics, liturgy, and religious devotion rub shoulders with studies of compositional techniques, musical notation, music manuscripts, and reception history. Generously illustrated with figures and examples, this volume paints a vibrant picture of musical life in a period characterized by extraordinary innovation and artistic achievement.

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Contents

Page 2 of 3

Contents
  • 17 - Liturgical humanism: saints’ Offices from the Italian peninsula in the fifteenth century
    pp 311-330
  • View abstract

    Summary

    One of the most puzzling questions for scholars of fifteenth and sixteenth-century music is how composers went about creating polyphonic compositions. The training in grammar and arithmetic was based on memorization. Training in music was based on exactly the same principles: students would begin by learning the musical gamut through the Hand. The most important part of counterpoint instruction consisted of the systematic memorization of interval progressions. The central fact about visualization of sights is that the pitch on which the added part is visualized through a number is then transposed up by a fifth, an octave, or a twelfth. Composers of isoryhthmic motets chose to organize their pieces in tightly organized structures because it allowed them to work out the pieces in their mind and make them memorable to performers. There is little doubt that oral composition continued throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Writing did not replace oral composition, but could be used side by side with it.
  • 18 - Architecture and music in fifteenth-century Italy
    pp 333-360
  • View abstract

    Summary

    By the early fourteenth century, at the latest, most of the polyphonic music became the territory of specialists who underwent rigorous training inmensural notation. All fourteenth- and fifteenth-century composers of polyphony were literate, and they knew their mensural notation well. There is one exception, however the last great Minnesinger, Oswald von Wolkenstein. Oswald was born around 1376 and died in 1445 in Meran in South Tyrol. To be sure, it took scholars a long time to identify the models of Oswald's songs. All the same, given that so many of his compositions are contrafacta, one has to ask to what extent Oswald was an original composer of polyphonic music. There is general agreement among Oswald scholars that he was introduced to many of the models from which he made contrafacta at the Councils of Constance and Basel. Oswald's song is completely dominated by the text and the tenor melody.
  • 19 - Music and feasts in the fifteenth century
    pp 361-373
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The quest for facts about Josquin des Prez's Ave Maria virgo serena narrows down to study of the work itself - its words and its musical content. The words in particular demand attention especially when aligned with known biographical, liturgical, political, or historical facts. The text of Josquin's Ave Maria is seemingly unique to Marian motet; no composer before Josquin is known to have set precisely these words, nor has the text as a whole been found in any independent literary source. There are good reasons for believing that Josquin began work on his motet by pondering the opening of Regis's Ave Maria. Regis had discovered that the first segment of the plainchant melody can be superimposed on itself to generate fuga (imitation) that answers at the unison. If discoveries can still be made about pieces as familiar as Josquin's Ave Maria, then vast possibilities surely remain for probing the inner workings of fifteenth-century polyphony at large.
  • 20 - French lyrics and songs for the New Year, ca. 1380–1420
    pp 374-400
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Pervasive imitation became the dominant musical texture in sacred music of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In pervasive imitation all of the voices are involved in repeating the same melodic material, and many or all of the phrases in the work begin with imitation. This chapter describes imitation in the early fifteenth century, and focuses on how pervasive imitation developed from the mid to the late fifteenth century. It shows how some patterns arise out of improvised practices, and tally imitative patterns of Petrucci motet prints, considering the contrapuntal constraints of imitative textures, with respect to both time and pitch intervals of imitation. The chapter discusses the different procedures and types of imitation, and shows the gradual emergence of patterns of imitation over the course of the fifteenth century. It describes two-voice, three-voice and four-voice stretto fuga. One of the attractions of longer time intervals is escaping the melodic restrictions imposed by stretto fuga.
  • 21 - Musical institutions in the fifteenth century and their political contexts
    pp 403-426
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Of all the varied strands woven into the cultural fabric of Renaissance Italy, the most vivid in the quattrocento was that associated with the study of ancient literature christened "humanism" by nineteenth-century scholars. Aristotle's analysis set the agenda for humanist debates about the role of music in elite education. The idea that the history of music could be represented as a narrative of progress from generation to generation is only one example of the ways in which rhetorical literature was to influence how humanists understood and analyzed music. The earliest humanist criticism arose in the mid-fifteenth century from efforts to establish moral criteria for distinguishing good and bad music. Johannes Tinctoris's impressive musical scholarship probably played some role in winning acceptance for famous composers and singers as artists worthy of respect. The music being sung in courts, whether monodic, homophonic, or polyphonic, was increasingly written by professional composers and sung from printed books.
  • 22 - Music and musicians at the Burgundian court in the fifteenth century
    pp 427-445
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The picture of Italian humanism radiating out to other countries and innovating their intellectual climates is an attractive one. It conforms to historical image of the Italian Renaissance itself - an innovative, expansive, and persuasive cultural campaign. If a fifteenth-century musical "rebirth" or even "Renaissance" can be diagnosed outside Italy, it was originally unaided by humanism, let alone Italian humanism. Musical humanists of the period working outside Italy had in common that they applied classical modes of thinking to musical practices around them, rather than advocating new types of music or exploring music theory. Three topics of the humanist engagements with music have left a trail in music history. The first was a so-called "musical rhetoric". Second, humanist influence encouraged musicians to set a greater variety of Latin poetic forms. Finally, northern humanism developed the modern understanding of composed music as a "completed and independent work".
  • 23 - The papal chapel in the late fifteenth century
    pp 446-462
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines the effect of humanism on the Latin poetry set by fifteenth-century composers, primarily from the formal point of view. By the early sixteenth century, humanism had made quantitative meters almost the only acceptable vehicle for Latin poetry and encouraged the composition of music that at least to some extent respected the meter of the texts. Guillaume Du Fay's Latin motets have texts of varied styles and merit; the only one that speaks in his name is in elegiac couplets, and the quantitative poems likeliest to be his own work are by no means the worst. The setting of classical poetry revived a practice known from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, which would be much favored in the sixteenth, especially with passages from the fourth book of the Aeneid relating to Dido and Aeneas.
  • 24 - The beneficial system and fifteenth-century polyphony
    pp 463-475
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Oral poetry in fifteenth-century Italy thrived in a dynamic environment created largely by the advent of humanism. While the fifteenth-century canterino was the successful descendant of the joculatore who had worked the public spaces and private palazzi of Italian cities. The natural habitats of the civic canterino were the republican city-states of central Italy. The recasting of solo singing to the lira da braccio as a humanist enterprise unfolded during the second half of the century in multiple center. During the fourteenth century, canterini had been active in most northern Italian courts and cities, and their pattern of ad hoc employment and itinerancy continued in the fifteenth century. Beginning with de facto Medici rule in the 1430s, a vital tradition of vernacular poetry rooted in the legacy of the tre corone, and a thriving culture of civic humanism favorable to the practice of vernacular eloquence. The improvvisatori associated with vernacular poetry in Florence overlapped to some extent with Ficino's circle.
  • 25 - Professional women singers in the fifteenth century: a tale of two Annas
    pp 476-485
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Civic rituals that centered on saints constituted one of the most widely shared and generally positive experiences that humans could have in late medieval and Renaissance Europe. This chapter describes humanists' commemoration of saints in the official ritual of the liturgy. For the humanists, the Office was also a form of public oratory, local history, rhetorical display, and civic education that stood to profit from their professional attention. The Italian peninsula is a logical place to look for the classicizers' efforts at liturgical revision. The part of the Divine Office that especially attracted humanist attention was the day's first round of prayer, known as Matins. The officiant could find the Matins texts gathered in the Sanctorale, a specially designated part of the breviary. Fifteenth-century humanists' ideas about the liturgy are usually discussed in light of two early sixteenth-century texts. Finally, the chapter describes four Matins offices: Maffeo Vegio's Office, Tommaso Schifaldo's Office, Pietro Ransano's Office and Raffaele Maffei's Office.
  • 27 - Music and ritual
    pp 511-527
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The association of music-making with dining is not difficult to understand: both activities occur in "real time" and are dynamic or kinetic in nature. Both banqueting and music-making involve similar creative processes. Both originate in raw material: undifferentiated pitches and pitch durations in the case of music-making; more or less undifferentiated foodstuffs in the case of banqueting. The fifteenth century inherited particulars of the practice of convivial music-making from the earlier Middle Ages. Consistent with the larger program of the Italian Renaissance, convivial music-making in fifteenth-century Italy either imaginatively resuscitated ancient Greek and Roman tradition or reframed and reinterpreted medieval tradition, overlaying it with a classicizing veneer. A well-known poetic description of the wedding banquet for Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti by Francesco Filelfo's contemporary Antonio Cornazano depicts a performance by the celebrated lutenist-singer Pietro Bono. Banqueting was a time-honored occasion for music-making during the fifteenth century.
  • 28 - Marian devotion in the fifteenth century
    pp 528-544
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores a lyric tradition that had flourished in France and other Francophone centers from at least 1380. It examines aspects of the sizeable corpus of lyrics with and without music that survives in sources from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The chapter discusses how the new order of "fixed form" lyric and polyphonic chanson that crystallized in 1340 quickly became a locus for competitive demonstrations of lyric ingenuity and allusive play held at court and in urban contexts. It describes how the New Year repertory demonstrates a similarly strong sense of lyric community in its texts. Most of the lyrics and songs serve not only to transmit New Year greetings but also to present a gift. The most common kind of gift is immaterial, comprising a pledge of love, loyalty, or devotion.
  • 30 - Measuring measurable music in the fifteenth century
    pp 563-586
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Valois dukes of Burgundy established a rich system of patronage that extended continuously from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the modern era. Their wide-ranging cultural influence makes the primacy of the court's musical life of great interest to the history of music. Ruling over most of the territories where the Franco-Flemish singers and composers who dominated European art music from 1400 to 1550 were born and trained, the dukes of Burgundy supported the most distinguished musicians of their time. The organization of musicians employed at the Burgundian court remained remarkably consistent from the 1380s and the 1500s. Music historians must connect dense archival materials about performers with musical sources that reveal little about the creation or development of the repertories they transmit. Born out of the French crown at the end of the fourteenth century, the court of Burgundy and its historical continuity left a substantial mark on the following century.
  • 31 - The transformative impulse
    pp 587-601
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The origins of the papal chapel begins with the end of the Great Schism in 1417, as the papacy institution developed for the popes in Avignon was adapted to the new circumstances of life in the Vatican. This chapter concentrates on the institution as it existed at the end of the fifteenth century. Study of the papal chapel as an institution in the fifteenth century is hampered by the loss of all the internal documents of the chapel for that period. Sometime in the late fifteenth century or the early sixteenth, the papal master of ceremonies, Johannes Burckard, made sets of notes about the organization and personnel of the papal chapel. The mixture of history and wishful thinking is to be seen in Burckard's placing the sacristan above the maestro di cappella and his placement of the masters of ceremonies immediately after the maestro.
  • 32 - Transformations in music theory and music treatises
    pp 602-614
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter discusses the evolution of the medieval beneficial system and its culmination in the fifteenth-century. It demonstrates how the system worked. The chapter also discusses the salutary effects of the system upon musicians, patrons, rulers, and the papacy, as well as one's understanding of music and musicians of that century. The fifteenth century saw the flowering of secular princely chapels, staffed with musicians adept at the performance, and frequently the composition, of sacred polyphony. The chapel served as the most visible emblem of political power and authority, impressing visiting diplomats, courtiers, and nobility with courtly civility and wealth represented by a sacred establishment highlighted by the performance of polyphony. The possession of one or more benefices served musicians as comfortable retirement plans, when it was time to end active service as a salaried member of a music chapel.
  • 33 - Polyphonic sources, ca. 1400–1450
    pp 617-640
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Girolamo Savonarola's three-pronged program focused on political, social, and religious reforms. He turned his attention to the social realm, to the reform of public morals, and he organized the boys of Florence to enforce these reforms. Music played a central role in promoting social bonding of the youths, and the texts of newly composed songs helped spread the message of change. This chapter presents a better understanding of Florentine traditions that roused his ire, by taking a brief look at Carnival and its music during the 1470s and 1480s, and examines Savonarola's transformation of civic life. After Lorenzo de' Medici's death, Savonarola mobilized the boys of Florence to perform laude written by the friar himself and his followers. The chapter takes a brief look at their place in Florentine society, and focuses attention on the musical activities of the boys.
  • 35 - The polyphonic mass in the fifteenth century
    pp 665-700
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Marian texts, devotional themes, and symbolism were prominent in all the major genres of fifteenth-century sacred music, and even secular genres sounded symbolic echoes of the Virgin. A review of the basic elements of Marian devotion and their musical manifestations can give a sense of Virgin Mary's central place in fifteenth-century music. Musicians in the fifteenth century spent considerable time singing and composing Marian music on behalf of others, but this did not stop them from seeking her intercession for themselves as well. Over the course of the century, Mary was praised with high church polyphony and music in the style of secular song. This stylistic range reflects a central paradox of Marian devotion that she was simultaneously both the exalted Queen of Heaven and a humble lady of this earth. The musical genre most closely aligned with Marian devotion in the early fifteenth century, which is called the "cantilena motet", points more to her humility than to her exaltedness.
  • 36 - The fifteenth-century motet
    pp 701-718
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The touching episodes of Jesus' Nativity were memorialized visually in illuminated books of hours, in sculptures of the scene in the stable in Bethlehem and in the architecture of countless churches dedicated to the Mother of God. One experience that was common was the reading of sacred affective literature. Affective treatises required the reader to immerse herself in the details of Jesus' life and that of the Virgin. A single treatise of affective devotion from the fourteenth century served as the basis for almost every aspect of devotional piety in the late Middle Ages. Another category of affective writing that helped mold sacred music in the fifteenth century is important because of its early date and the special relationship it bears to mass and motet. Scores of dramatic works composed in the vernacular helped make the lives and attributes of Christ and the Virgin more comprehensible while also facilitating the flow of ideas between the sacred and secular spheres.
  • 38 - Instrumental music in the fifteenth century
    pp 745-754
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The mensural system of rhythmic notation used in the fifteenth century, musica mensurabilis, was largely inherited from earlier centuries. This chapter focuses on aspects of the mensural system that led to the most interesting features of fifteenth-century rhythmic style. It describes current scholarly arguments about aspects of fifteenth-century notation. Students who learned mensural notation in the fifteenth century most likely did so from a textbook that was a century old, the Libellus cantus mensurabilis attributed to Johannes de Muris. For the modern musician reading fifteenth-century notation, imperfect notes are very close to modern note shapes, since they are the origin of binary system. Johannes Tinctoris's highly polemical remarks about improper use of proportion signs in Proportionale musices are both entertaining and enlightening for the modern reader. By the early fifteenth century, successive diminution of a tenor line was generally not written out but signaled by a verbal canon.
  • 39 - Sacred song in the fifteenth century: cantio, carol, lauda, Kirchenlied
    pp 755-770
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Rooted in musical language itself, the transformative impulse emanates from a drive to explore the semiotic potential of written song. Before about 1430, composers had written out series of intended mensurations in sometimes lengthy verbal instructions; thereafter they began to indicate mensural reinterpretation by using a different mensuration sign for each iteration. Mensuration was more often signaled intrinsically, through coloration, the grouping of note shapes, and dots of division and perfection, rather than a dedicated mensuration sign. Notes rely on metasigns to activate their meaning. A simple change of metasign has the potential to recast the pitch or rhythm of every note it governs. The aesthetics of notational fixity fueled the transformative impulse, evincing a fifteenth-century interest in things sounding other than what they seem. Canons specified the meaning of red notation, indicated mensural reinterpretation, and clarified individual signs.

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