On 11 November 1417, the election at the Council of Constance (1414–18) of Oddo Colonna as Pope Martin V brought to an end a period of almost forty years of instability and crisis within the Church, which had begun with the outbreak of the Schism in 1378. After his consecration, the new pope set out to return to Rome, intending to re-establish there the Holy See, while the Council continued. Martin V entered Rome in September 1420, after travelling through Geneva, Pavia, Mantua, Milan and Florence. In the latter city he resided for almost two years, from 26 February 1419 to 9 September 1420. It was most likely during the pope's residence there that an Italian student in law, Antonio Baldana, wrote and dedicated to him a peculiar work: a narrative of the Schism written in the form of prophecy, in a mixture of prose and verse, Latin and Italian, and accompanied by thirty watercolour illustrations. The only known surviving version of this work is contained in a manuscript now preserved in Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, as MS Parmense 1194. The manuscript has been studied primarily for its iconography, while its musical implications, which form the subject of the present study, have so far passed unnoticed. In fact, as we shall see, Baldana's work is also designed as a framework for a discussion encompassing the disciplines of trivium and quadrivium – a small encyclopedia, where a distinctive connection is drawn between rhetoric, astrology and music.

Among the manuscript fragments in the Archivio comunale of Sutri (Province of Viterbo), Italy, are four consecutive folios of an Old-Roman antiphoner of the later eleventh century. The two bifolios are now identified as fragments 141 (Frammenti teologici 40) and 141bis (Frammenti teologici 41). These fragments, which preserve music for the feasts of Sexagesima, Quinquagesima and Ash Wednesday, are remnants of what appears to be the oldest witness of Old-Roman music for the office. When added to the two surviving antiphoners (London, British Library, Add. MS 29988, of the twelfth century, and Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS San Pietro B 79, of the end of the twelfth century) and two recently discovered fragments (in Frosinone and Bologna), the Sutri fragments bring to five the number of Old-Roman antiphoners of which at least some evidence survives. It begins to appear that manuscripts of this music were once not so rare. The Sutri fragments show some unusual liturgical characteristics that provide new information on the Roman liturgy; I will discuss these aspects shortly.

In his first major published monograph, Music in the French Secular Theater, 1400–1550 (Cambridge, MA, 1963), Howard Mayer Brown skilfully plotted the development of musical practices in the traditions of farces, sotties, moralities and monologues until the middle of the sixteenth century, by which time the ‘influence of works from the ancient world and from Italy’ had turned the ‘current of educated opinion … against the older French forms’. Thus he chose to terminate his study just as the new forms of neo-classical comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy and pastorale were emerging, although he did allude fleetingly to the Protestant dramas of Louis des Masures in citing one of three cantiques from the Bergerie spirituelle (Geneva, 1566) as one of his two examples of ‘new music for the stage’. Des Masures's play is only one of a number of dramatic or quasi-dramatic pieces published with music as well as spoken text during the period 1550–1600, reflecting a fashion for new music specifically composed for the theatre. In the present paper I propose to examine this considerable repertory, which has largely escaped the attention of modern scholars.

The term ‘Old Beneventan’ describes the archaic non-Gregorian chant found chiefly in two eleventh-century Graduals in the chapter library at Benevento. This is perhaps in part a translation of Dom Hesbert's ‘Ancien rit bénéventain’, with a hint of analogy to the ‘Old Roman’ chant. The term means that this chant is ‘Old’, that is, that it pre-dates the introduction of Gregorian chant into southern Italy; and that it is ‘Beneventan’. But both words need to be evaluated carefully.

We know only two things with certainty about the life of Roger de Chabannes. He was a monk at the abbey of St Martial in Limoges by the year 1010, at which time he served as the teacher of his nephew, Adémar de Chabannes. And when he died, on 26 April 1025, he held the position of the abbey's cantor. Both pieces of information come to us from Adémar, monk at St Cybard in Angoulême, historian, homilist and tempestuous polemicist in the campaign to win recognition for St Martial as an apostle. Other evidence, which also may well originate from Adémar, attests to Roger's death date and office.

On 15 June 1442, Frederick, the Habsburg Duke of Austria soon to be crowned King of the Romans, entered the city of Aachen amidst a notably diverse and sonorous cortège:

I. THE MUSIC: GALL-TO-GREG-TO-ROM

For archaeologists of plainchant - those who deal with the music before there are notational records - the focus has been on the repertories ROM-11 and GREG-8/10.Thanks to Susan Rankin and David Ganz for many improvements. Abbreviations for repertories: ROM = Old Roman; GREG = Gregorian; GALL = Gallican; MOZ = Old Hispanic or Mozarabic. Numerals indicate a century or range of centuries: GREG-8/10 = Gregorian recension, text witnesses of the late eighth century, as represented in R.-J. Hesbert, Antiphonale missarum sextuplex [hereafter AMS] (Brussels, 1935), with first musical witnesses of the tenth century, as in Graduale triplex, ed. M.-C. Billecocq and R. Fischer (Solesmes, 1979); ROM-8 = Old Roman states of the eighth century; ROM-9/11 = Old Roman states of the ninth through eleventh centuries, that of the eleventh century in Die Gesänge des altrömischen Graduale Vat. Lat. 5319, ed. B. Stäblein and M. Landwehr-Melnicki (Monumenta monodica medii aevi, 2; Kassel, 1970). Each represents a ‘Roman’ practice. ROM-11 appears in a handful of manuscripts from the region of Rome, dating from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries; the liturgical usage is Urban. GREG-8/10 appears in hundreds of manuscripts from all over Europe, with verbal texts reaching back to the late eighth century, and with neumatic notations to the late ninth. In liturgical and textual respects GREG is a near twin of ROM, yet it has clear marks of formulation in the Frankish north. In musical respects, what is most significant about the repertories is that they share certain amounts of modal-melodic substance, yet they differ markedly as to process, style and detail. It has been a major challenge to define those relationships and determine what they mean about earlier musical developments.D. Hiley, Western Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford, 1993) summarises earlier positions (pp. 561-2); recent book-length contributions include P. Bernard, Du chant romain au chant grégorien (Paris, 1996); M. Haas, Mündliche Überlieferung und altrömische Choral (Bern, 1997); T. Karp, Aspects of Orality and Formularity in Gregorian Chant (Evanston, 1998); J. W. McKinnon, The Advent Project: The Later Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Mass Proper (Berkeley, 2000).

In the tenth century, when the earliest chant books were being compiled in the heart of the Carolingian Empire and polyphonic music was entering the realm of theoretical speculation in the anonymous writings of Musica enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis, organa were also being notated for performance outside music treatises. We would not know this, were it not for a two-voice organum on an antiphon for Saint Boniface written in the first decades of the tenth century on the last page of a long-neglected manuscript, now in the British Library. A second notated antiphon, Rex caelestium terrestrium, provides elements for a reconstruction of a further, ‘hidden’, organum. These newly identified organa shed light on a significant phase in Western music history, being the sole evidence from the tenth century of a polyphonic practice before the great eleventh-century collection of organa from Winchester.

The papacy and cardinalate in the period between Innocent III (1198–1216) and Benedict XI (1033–1304) can be shown to have had a wide range of musical interests. Papal inventories, testamentary legacies, chronicles and understudied visual evidence allow the piecing together of a lively and wide-ranging concern with music, liturgy and performance. The development of polyphonic music, the growing popularity of bells, and a lively interest among artists in portraying liturgical ceremonies and musical performance at the behest of their ecclesiastical clientele allow us to form a far more nuanced picture of the musical life of thirteenth-century Rome.

Placing amateur performers and their instrument of choice at the forefront of inquiry, this article makes a case for the Spanish guitar as an instrument through which knowing subjects sought an epistemology of musical practice, a way-of-knowing-and-doing that could even surpass other musical epistemologies already in circulation during the seventeenth century. Leading this investigation is a handwritten book of lessons wherein there emerges a preference for learning the violin using the principles of guitar playing. Next, I discuss the appearance of annotated guitar tablature in the copy of Giulio Caccini’s Le nuove musiche held in the Library of Congress, which edits Caccini’s songs to purpose their accompaniments for easier guitar playing. Together, these two documents reveal earnest attempts at being musical with a guitar in the hands or guitar playing in the mind, opening us to a world-view that hinges on the guitar as the locus of musical knowledge.

Pietro Aaron (c.1480-c.1550) is the author of five music treatises. The first, Libri tres de institutione harmonica (Bologna, 1516), was composed in Italian and then translated into Latin by the humanist Giovanni Antonio Flaminio (1464-1536); the other four appeared in Italian, which made Aaron a pioneer in this regard. The Thoscanello de la musica, the first of the vernacular treatises, proved very successful and was reissued three times in the course of the sixteenth century under the title Toscanello in musica (Venice, 1529, 1539, 1562). These reissues are very similar to each other, but are clearly distinct from the first edition, in particular by the addition of an appendix (aggiunta) on various questions concerning musica ficta and the modes of Gregorian chant.

Since Edmond de Coussemaker published the texts and melodies of ten liturgical dramas in 1860, the fundamental role of music in these ceremonies has been recognised. Regrettably, however, apart from a few isolated and restricted studies, amid a wealth of general literature on the subject there is still no comprehensive critical account of the musical content of these medieval ceremonies, nor of the ways in which it changed over the long period during which the genre was cultivated. Precise and detailed musical studies have tended to discuss individual examples of varied types of liturgical drama, rather than make a systematic study of a chosen layer or tradition in the repertory; and enquiries into the manner of composition of the music have been directed towards looking for dramatic or emotive features, to establishing motivic connections between the various melodies of a given ceremony, or to postulating motivic connections between the melodies of a given ceremony and the Gregorian chant. All these studies neglect one of the most important compositional aspects of the liturgical drama — the re-use of old material — and thereby fail to offer true insights into exactly how the melodies in any ceremony or group of ceremonies were composed. Only in three essays by Walther Lipphardt – on the introductory scene of the Visitatio sepulchri ceremonies, the Magi ceremonies, and the Mainz Visitatio sepulchri tradition – has an attempt been made to trace the paths of certain melodies through different sources.