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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 1685, the Portuguese Jesuit Thomas Pereira was ordered by the Qing Kangxi emperor to write books on Western music theory in Chinese. Presented in the books were seventeenth-century practical and speculative music theories, including the coincidence theory of consonance. Invoking the concept of ‘boundary object’, this article shows that the cultural exchange, which gave rise to new knowledge by means of selection, synthesis and reinterpretation, was characterised by a lack of consensus between the transmitter and the receivers over the functions of the imported theories. Although the coincidence theory of consonance could potentially effect the transition from a pure numerical to a physical understanding of pitch, as in the European scientific revolution, it failed to flourish in China not only because of different theoretical concerns between European and Chinese musical traditions, but also because of its limited dissemination caused by Chinese print culture.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘… 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 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.

Late in the year 1028, Adémar de Chabannes embarked on an ambitious and audacious project to create a new liturgy for the Feast of Saint Martial that would venerate its honoree as an apostle. It is difficult to exaggerate the monstrous nature of the venture and the claim it supported. The historical Martial was well known from the works of Gregory of Tours, the sixth-century historian, as a third-century Roman missionary to Aquitaine and first bishop of Limoges. There his burial place became an important pilgrimage destination and the eventual site of a Benedictine monastery founded in Martial's memory. Adémar, with the full support of the abbot, Odolric, and monks of the abbey of Saint-Martial, and Bishop Jordan of Limoges, sought to transform the historical Martial into a first-century Jew, younger cousin of Simon Peter, an intimate of Jesus himself, whom he served at the Last Supper, Saint Peter's personal delegate to Gaul, and a saint of apostolic rank.

Of all the musical traditions in the world among which fruitful comparisons with medieval European chant might be made, the chant tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church promises to be especially informative. In Ethiopia one can actually witness many of the same processes of oral and written transmission as were or may have been active in medieval Europe. Music and literacy are taught in a single curriculum in ecclesiastical schools. Future singers begin to acquire the repertory by memorising chants that serve both as models for whole melodies and as the sources of the melodic phrases linked to individual notational signs. At a later stage of training each one copies out a complete notated manuscript on parchment using medieval scribal techniques. But these manuscripts are used primarily for study purposes; during liturgical celebrations the chants are performed from memory without books, as seems originally to have been the case also with Gregorian and Byzantine chant. Finally, singers learn to improvise sung liturgical poetry according to a structured system of rules. If one desired to imitate the example of Parry and Lord, who investigated the modern South Slavic epic for possible clues to Homeric poetry, it would be difficult to find a modern culture more similar to the one that spawned Gregorian chant.

The libraries of Jesus College and St John's College, Cambridge, preserve two fragmentary motets of thirteenth-century English origin which bear witness to the veneration in which Simon de Montfort, the Earl of Leicester, was held by many in the years immediately following his death in 1265. One of these motets, Miles Christi from St John's, provides two new texts for Simon's hagiology, though they are both unfortunately incomplete. The other motet, Salve Symon from Jesus College, also incomplete, is a previously unnoticed setting of the Latin poem on Simon which is the last entry in the Evesham collection of Simon's miracula. These two motets are among the very few polyphonic compositions from England that refer directly to contemporary events of the later thirteenth century. The unusually precise terminus ante quem which they share provides the music historian with one of the few firm guideposts to the chronology of the contemporary musical repertory and its notation. In addition, the decoration of Simon's feast-day with polyphony, for which there is evidence here, emphasises not only the specific regard in which the earl was held by the religious establishment, but more generally the functional context of the English motet in the liturgy of services dedicated to the saints and Mary. These motets are also witnesses to the familiar insular patterns of preservation and destruction of polyphonic music from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

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.

One of the most challenging problems in the performance of sixteenth-century music is the interpretation of tempo relationships between passages of duple and triple time. After c. 1520 binary signatures became standard for most pieces, and ternary passages within them were notated as sesquialtera or triple proportions. The signs of these proportions ostensibly specify precise tempo relationships between the binary and ternary passages, but in practice they could be interpreted in a variety of ways depending on time, place and musical context, as well as on the notation itself.