Our picture of musical training in the Middle Ages and Renaissance is frustratingly generic and fragmentary. The musicians of that era – it is often stated – were well versed in the method of the so-called Guidonian hand, by which the twenty pitches of the gamut (often referred to as claves) were mapped onto the joints of the left hand along with the six voces ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, dating back to Guido of Arezzo’s Epistola ad Michahelem (c. 1033). Professional singers learnt how to group the claves into overlapping hexachords in the early stages of musical training and referred to the musical hand as a mnemonic aid while sight-singing. By the early fourteenth century at the latest, a sophisticated set of rules of behaviour was in place that allowed practical musicians and theorists to connect the six syllables to the claves and to perform hexachordal mutations smoothly and effectively.

Machaut's balades Il mest avis (hereafter B22) and De fortune (hereafter B23), adjacent in the music section of the Machaut manuscripts, form a diptych on the theme of Fortune. In relation to each other, their poetic texts offer complementary perspectives on the power of Fortune: B22 is static, detached in tone, a clerk commentating in a public sententious statement upon the political manifestations of Fortune; conversely, B23 is personal and dynamic, a spurned lady's personal testimony to the power of Fortune to change happiness into sorrow. Despite these contrasts, the two poems share a diction markedly different from that of the twenty-one balades that precede them in the music section.

The name of Virginia Vagnoli, a renowned Sienese singer who was active for several years at the court of Guidubaldo II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, is known thanks to research carried out by scholars as well as to some fortunate circumstances. She was the most prominent musician at Guidubaldo II's court at Pesaro, and her name appears in several mid-sixteenth-century documents: Francesco Sansovino's Le cento novelle (second edition, 1562), the title page of Giovanni Maria Rosso's Il primo libro di madrigali a quattro voci, published and dedicated to her by Claudio Merulo; the dedication to Guidubaldo II of the treatise De origine et dignitate musices, by Pietro Caetano, singer at St Mark's; and, above all, the literary works of the poet Lodovico Agostini.

Despite the diligent efforts of archivists, there are a number of fifteenth-century composers for whom are lacking most or all of their biographical details. Not all of these are minor figures. Caron, Hayne van Ghizeghem and Loyset Compère were all active composers who achieved a large degree of contemporary esteem, evidenced not only by the number of concordances but even by direct references. Yet Caron has become so obscure that not even his forename is certain. Hayne van Ghizeghem disappears from Burgundian records while still a relatively young man. There are no records at all for Compère's early years, and his later career is plagued by gaps. At this point, it is not likely that much more documentation will be found to shed light on any of these individuals.

With some justification musicologists have virtually ignored the group of writings by the Parisian chancellor Jean Gerson (1363–1429) entitled De canticis. The title notwithstanding, these three treatises, written between 1423 and 1426, provide much more commentary on the affects of the soul than on the effects of the vocal cords. Gerson, a reform-minded mystical theologian active at the Council of Constance, had no intention of becoming a music theorist; at times in these treatises he explicitly precludes any explanation of technical musical terms. Though many such terms are used, the reader is presumed to understand their literal meaning. It is the allegorical meaning that Gerson purports to explicate. Indeed the allegorical level is the most appropriate one for treating musical instruments, for the organ is virtually the only instrument from biblical times that was still used in late-medieval churches. Yet by the fifteenth century the treatment of instruments as symbols of states of the soul had long been commonplace, and Gerson fails to arouse new interest. Even less attractive to the modern reader is the spiritualisation of Guido's hexachord. By deleting one of the As (by changing fa to mi in mutation from soft to hard hexachords), the six syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la can be reduced to the five vowels A, E, I, O, U, which in turn signify the five primary affections or emotions: joy, hope, compassion, fear, sorrow.

In September of 1536, the papal singer and composer Costanzo Festa wrote a letter to his Florentine patron Filippo Strozzi. Festa, having heard about a music printer in Venice, hoped to contact him there through one of Strozzi's agents. He continued:

Have him [the printer] understand that if he wants my works, that is, the hymns [and] the Magnificats, I do not want less than one hundred fifty scudi and, if he wants the basse, two hundred in all. If he wants to print them, he can place the hymns and Magnificats in a large book [choirbook format] like that of the fifteen Masses [Antico's Quindecim missarum, RISM 1516], so that all choirs would be able to make use of them. The basse are good for learning to sing in counterpoint, to compose and to play all instruments.

The two folios which are the subject of this study are the property of the vicar and churchwardens of the parish of St Botolph, Saxilby-with-Ingleby, some six miles west of the city of Lincoln. The leaves are of parchment, are adjacent and may once have been conjoint, but are now disjunct. The overall dimensions of each leaf are approximately 430 × 325 mm; each has four good margins, leaving a music area of 358 × 247 mm. Each side is ruled with twelve five-line staves in red ink, apparently without the use of a rastrum; the staves are a little less than 20 mm high. On all four sides each of the two voices was supplied with an initial letter executed in blue paint with red tracery. Each initial is a single staff in height, and is similar in style to the subsidiary capitals of Old Hall and many other English manuscripts of the fifteenth century. In its surviving state the manuscript has undergone a sad mutilation: a rectangle four staves deep has been cut away from the top left-hand corner of folio 1v, removing the initial ‘E’ of the top voice complete with the red tracery trailing from it down the edges of the staves below. In so doing, the vandal also removed a good deal of music from both sides of the leaf.

A number of scholars have begun to explore the activities of music-printers in sixteenth-century Italy. The first music-print produced by movable type was issued by Ottaviano Petrucci in 1501, and by the 1540s improvements in printing techniques, and particularly the introduction of single-impression printing, had set music-printing on a firm commercial footing, first and foremost in Venice, the centre of the printing trade on the peninsula. The two chief Venetian music-printers in the mid-century, Antonio Gardano and Girolamo Scotto, headed commercial enterprises the organisation of which merits close study by economic historians. But the activities of these and other music-printers must also be examined for their effect on contemporary musical culture. Through their editorial policies and commercial strategies, printers such as Gardano and Scotto had an undeniable influence on the composition and dissemination of music in this period, creating and defining a market or markets for their wares which increasingly directed the activities of contemporary composers.

Jacques de Liège was the first theorist to use the word cadentia in relation to harmonic theory, preceding later such uses, as far as survivals attest, by a century and a half. The concept he developed under this term (set out in Speculum musicae, IV. l) has been connected in recent times to ideas in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century discant theory now related to the notion of directed progression. While there are linguistic similarities in Jacques's exposition to that of this (mostly later) theory, there are also important discrepancies in the concept's content; and there is an ideological anomaly in viewing Jacques as the exponent of an important idea of Ars nova harmonic theory. This article proposes a different reading of the concept, one congruent with Jacques's conservative intellectual stance. It identifies two contrasting, though complementary, aspects within it, and examines the role of an expression of approximation (ea, quae prope sunt, sunt quasi idem) whose ultimate significance remains uncertain. What emerges clearly, however, is that Jacques regarded cadentia as a process whereby imperfect concords were redeemed for perfection, so that their presence in polyphonic music might be tolerable in an aesthetics of retrospection. His account of polyphony draws upon an established idea in mensural theory dating back at least to John of Garland; and it contrasts significantly with the contemporaneous but more modern account of Marchetto of Padua's Lucidarium.

The Treaty of Brétigny, concluded in May 1360, inaugurated the longest period of peace between England and France that the century had yet seen. Although the English success in this agreement later turned out to be less than complete, the king and higher nobility in England could now look to the consolidation of their position in the overseas dependencies of Brittany, Gascony and Ponthieu, to the enjoyment of their new-found wealth at home, and to a superficially more amicable relationship with French magnates. External relations were thus transformed, and the period between 1360 and 1369 also saw a fundamental change in the accessibility in England of French musical culture and in the opportunities for contacts with French musicians.

Recent years have witnessed a steady flow of newly discovered sources of late-medieval English sacred music. These have served both to document familiar repertories and practices more fully, and also to establish the identity and character of those that are more peripheral and idiosyncratic. Five of these new sources are described here. Four contribute to the hitherto relatively poorly represented indigenous sources and repertories of Mass music of the middle and the second half of the fifteenth century; one, Lincoln Cathedral MS 52, supplements the known body of fourteenth-century polytextual music.

The literature on the problem of Arabic influence on the music and poetry of western Europe in the Middle Ages is vast. The aim of this article is modest. It seeks to draw together some passages on music and musical instruments in Arabic texts that were translated into Latin in the Middle Ages. These texts were not specifically on music, and may have escaped the notice of musicologists for that reason. However, they are interesting in their own right, for they show the role of music in other contexts, such as medicinie, astrology and philolsophy, and exemplify the modifications that took place when texts were transferred from one culture to another.

One of the most famous – and unusual – carnival songs from Renaissance Florence is ‘Dolor, pianto e penitentia’, variously entitled Carro della morte, Trionfo della morte, Canzona de' morti, or Canzone a ballo della morte. Unlike the majority of Florentine canti carnascialeschi, it is a spiritual text, so resembling a lauda spirituale that the Dominican Serafino Razzi and others could include it virtually unchanged in collections of laude. Shortly after its performance, its text was published in Florence, probably towards the end of the first decade of the Cinquecento, in the chapbook titled La canzona de' morti. This small pamphlet also included a woodcut depiction of the carro (Figure 1) and four other texts, all equally penitential: Castellano Castellani's Lauda della morte, ‘Cuor maligno e pien di fraude’, modelled on the Dies irae; a Sonetto di messer Castellano, ‘Voi che guardate a questi morti intorno’; a Canzona del carro del travaglio, ‘Perché el tempo dà e toglie’; and a lauda, ‘O mondana sapienza’, which closely imitates ‘Dolor, pianto e penitentia’, including even the word ‘penitenza’ at the end of each stanza.

The extraordinary dissemination of the Parisian repertory, resulting in its establishment in the thirteenth century as a kind of ‘Classical’ style (and later as an ars antiqua), was greatly abetted – if not made possible in the fist place – by what may have been an exclusively written mode of transmission. This is apparently the earliest body of polyphony to have been conceived, preserved and circulated entirely in writing. Equally important for the impact of the music of Paris, however, is the fact that it spawned a didactic tradition. It provided the foundation for a group of treatises that were the first to elucidate an already existing polyphonic repertory. Rather than instructing the singer how to generate polyphonic embellishments of plainchant ex tempore, these theoretical texts provided him with the information he needed to transform the written symbols in the manuscript before him into sounding music consistent with the intentions of the composer (or, at least, of the scribe), and they offered guidance to the organista wishing to create other works in a similar idiom. To be sure, these treaties did not transmit the Paris style intact.

Early Italian opera with its diverse roots, streching into the history of music, Classical and Renaissance literature, and the culture of the late Cinquecento, continues to attract historians of culture and musicologists. If one only glances over the work done in this area during the last twenty-five or so years one cannot fail to be impressed by the important writings on early opera by Nino Pirrotta, on the Florentine Camerata by Claude Palisca, on the Classical literary tradition in the early librettos by F. W. Sternfeld and on early Mantuan opera by Iain Fenlon. We also owe a detailed account of the first performance of Peri's and Caccini's Euridice to Claude Palisca, and a study of Peri's Euridice to Tim Carter. In the latter two studies the stress was on the final result of the collaboration between Ottavio Rinuccini, Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini. It seems, however, that a detailed look at one of the components, Rinuccini's dramatic poem Euridice, may offer some valuable insights into the very foundation of Peri's and Caccini's completed artistic effort and also throw new light on some aspects of Striggio's Orfeo.

Musicians have recognised distinct national styles of musical composition and performance for centuries, and even today our understanding of the development of musical style in virtually every period rests in large part on observations of the contact and melding of national idioms. From the suppression and absorption of Gallic chant by Roman plainsong during the time of Charlemagne, through the wedding of French, Italian and German styles accomplished by Bach, to the joining of north Indian classical musical elements with modern avant-garde music by Philip Glass and other minimalist composers, our telling of music history is in large part analysis of a continuing process of musical colonialisation.

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 one of the more striking contrapuntal devices of late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century polyphony, the hocket has been studied at great length. Until recently, however, little attention has been paid to the question how this texture accommodates the verbal text with which it often appears: as it breaks up a musical phrase into small segments separated by rests, it often necessitates a breaking up of the words themselves. Already some contemporaries had condemned this as one of the principal defects of the hocket, and most modern editors (implicitly or explictly agreeing with these comments) have sidestepped the issue by moving the text as much as possible to non-hocketed sections of the music. This article attempts to take a positive view of the ways in which words were matched to notes in the hocket. It distinguishes between ‘unbroken hockets’ – where the words and the notes are devised and deployed in such a fashion that word breaks and rests coincide – and ‘broken hockets’. In the latter, it is argued that the way in which words are split up is by design and not happenstance; taking the etymological meaning of ‘hocket’=‘hiccup’ as a point of departure, it is shown that the most logical way to bridge the rests is not between syllables, but in the middle of syllables. This solution is corroborated not only by etymology, but also by the underlay in the sources, by the compositions themselves (in which by virtue of this ‘hiccup underlay’ musical phrases and text phrase match seamlessly, as elsewhere in the repertory) and by some theoretical evidence as well.

Whilst scholars often rely on a close reading of the score to understand English musical style at the turn of the fifteenth century, a study of the compositional techniques composers were taught provides complementary evidence of how and why specific stylistic traits came to dominate this repertory. This essay examines the relationship between practical and theoretical sources in late medieval England, demonstrating a link between the writings of two Oxford-educated musicians, John Tucke and John Dygon, and the polyphonic repertory of the Eton Choirbook (Eton College Library, MS 178), compiled c. 1500–4. Select case studies from this manuscript suggest that compositional and notational solutions adopted at the turn of the fifteenth century, having to do particularly with metrical proportions, echo music-theoretical concepts elucidated by Tucke and Dygon. These findings impinge upon the current debate concerning the presence of a network between educational institutions in the south-east of England during this period.