In the decades around 1600 many privileges for printed music were issued by the Holy Roman Emperor and the Elector of Saxony. Such privileges gave a bookseller or author an exclusive right to publish specified works for a limited period (usually ten years). The privileges threatened confiscation of any unauthorised copies, and fines for anyone caught printing or selling them. This article offers the first systematic study of archival material documenting the privileges for music, as preserved in the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna, and the Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Dresden. It reconstructs the ritualistic procedure for obtaining a privilege, analyses how composers justified their applications for privileges, and asks whether privileges gave effective protection against unauthorised editions. Revising previous interpretations of the privilege system as an early form of copyright, I instead argue that privileges enhanced the commercial and symbolic value of printed music.

Codex latinus monacensis 14274 of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, the so-called St Emmeram codex, has been well known to musicologists since its discovery and description by Karl Dèzes in the late 1920s. Since Dèzes's very perceptive study, however, its contents have been explored only insofar as individual pieces were related to a particular task: the study of another manuscript, the preparation of an edition, or the exploration of a genre. In this way much has been learned about the works of major composers such as Dufay and Dunstaple and the manuscript has been seen as similar in many ways to other contemporaneous manuscripts in its presentation of a collection of works by major continental and English composers within a context of music of its more immediate surroundings. These more immediate surroundings, the place of origin of the manuscript, have yet to be securely established.

In the introduction to the second volume of the series Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi, devoted in the main to a transcription of the Old Roman gradual Vat. lat. 5319, Bruno Stäblein drew up a perceptive assessment of the native Italian chant style, contrasting it with the melodic style of Gregorian chant, a repertoire considered by many scholars to be the result of a process of local ‘editing’ of the Roman chant introduced north of the Alps in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Stäblein quoted a remark about the singing of ‘alleluia’ from Cassiodorus' commentary on Psalm 104: ‘The tongues of cantors are adorned with [alleluia], and the Lord's basilica joyfully responds with it. Innovations are always being introduced to it with varying tropes’ (tropis semper variantibus innovatur).

This study focuses on the ritual ‘conservatism’ of Henry VIII's Reformation through a new look at biblical exegeses of the period dealing with sacred music. Accordingly, it reconsiders the one extant passage of rhetoric to come from the Henrician regime in support of traditional church polyphony, as found in A Book of Ceremonies to be Used in the Church of England, c.1540. Examining the document's genesis, editorial history and ultimate suppression by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, it is shown that Bishop Richard Sampson, Dean of the Chapel Royal (1522–40), was responsible for the original drafting of the musical paragraph. Beginning with Sampson's printed commentaries on the Psalms and on the Epistles of St Paul, the literary precedents and historical continuities upon which Sampson's topos in Ceremonies was founded are traced in detail. Identified through recurring patterns of scriptural and patristic citation, and understood via transhistorical shifts in the meaning of certain key words (e.g. iubilare), this new perspective clarifies important origins of the English church's musical ‘traditionalism’ on the eve of the Reformation. Moreover, it reveals a precise species of exegetical method – anagogy – as the literary vehicle through which influential clergy were able to justify expansions and elaborations of musical practice in the Western Church from the high Middle Ages to the Reformation.

The ‘León Antiphoner’, León, Cathedral Library, MS 8, is the most complete manuscript containing Old Hispanic chant, comprising Office and Mass chants for the whole church year. As such, the León Antiphoner is the most studied Old Hispanic manuscript. Despite this, its dating is controversial and hypotheses have ranged from c. 906 (Menéndez Pidal) up to the eleventh century (Zapke and others). In this article, the dating and early history of the manuscript are reconsidered and an entirely new perspective is brought to bear on the questions of when, where, and for whom the manuscript was written. The reinterpretation of the cryptographic inscriptions found at the bottom of fols. 128v and 149r has made it possible to identify the patron of the Antiphoner as San Froilán, Bishop of León, and to date the manuscript’s production to the years 900–5. The scriptorium of the monastery of SS Cosmas and Damian in Abellar is suggested as the likeliest place of production of the Antiphoner.

On 20 February 1469, the cathedral canons of Lucca appeared before the general council of their city to plead on behalf of their choirmaster of less than two years, John Hothby. Warning that this Englishman and Carmelite friar might accept a more lucrative post elsewhere, they asked the council to supplement his salary provided by themselves and the local nobleman, Nicolao da Noceto. Such support, they assured, would guarantee Hothby’s continued residence in Lucca and thus his cultivation of ‘so many talented students in music and in the practice of it that he will not only be useful to the clergy but also the highest consolation and praise to the entire people’. Their predictions had the desired effect, as the council granted the choirmaster a monthly stipend of 2 ducats.

Though recent discoveries have improved our understanding of big, melismatic hockets from the late thirteenth century, there remains a pervasive uncertainty as to how hockets should be defined and identified on the small scale at which they characteristically manifest in thirteenth-century motets. In revisiting the mensural theorists up to Franco of Cologne, it was found that only Franco defines hockets as multi-voice phenomena: earlier texts define the hocket at the level of a single perfection, and as it reveals itself in the breaking of a single performing voice. Under a revised definition, 138 motet texts that use hockets have been identified in the Ars antiqua repertory. It was also found that another way of hearing the hocket, compatible with the first, is implied by Lambertus and pursued at length by the St. Emmeram Anonymous. These writers acknowledge but depart from the consensus that the hocket is sonically fragmented, also hearing it as a promise of the coordination achievable when musical time is measured. For St. Emmeram especially, the hocket has a dual character: its sonic fragmentation is contrived through integrated planning. To hear hockets integratively is difficult, and requires an effort of will that for this theorist has moral stakes.

The final sections of the article analyse the musicopoetic games of the motet Dame de valour (71)/Dame vostre douz regart (72)/Manere (M5). Similarly to the St. Emmeram theorist, the piece self-consciously highlights the difficulty and worth of close listening (a theme inspired by its tenor’s scriptural source), and does so with a hocket that marks a complementarity of breaking and integration, of a formal sort, several decades before Lambertus and St. Emmeram would reflect on the hocket’s dual character theoretically. The motet poses artfully some of the same questions about the audibility of form that preoccupy modern scholarship. These voices from the thirteenth century might remind us that ethical debates about correct listening are much older than current disciplinary concerns. But recognising the longevity of the debates does not force us to agree with old positions.

The celebration of Christmas in Early Modern Europe underwent a significant transformation in the second half of the seventeenth century. Even after the Protestant Reformation, European Christmas traditions maintained numerous features of their medieval practices, such as carnivalesque celebrations, processions, masks, and riotous behaviour. This changed during the seventeenth century. Popular carnivalesque Christmas plays were prohibited and replaced with a more internalized devotion that emphasized the individual’s relationship with the newborn Child. This transformation was part of a larger paradigm shift in seventeenth-century religiosity, which replaced external and physical displays of piety with internalized devotional practices. These shifts also included new theologies of corporeality and gender, which likewise had an impact on the ways in which Christmas was celebrated. The theological shifts correlate with the rejection of the carnivalesque in the Early Modern period, as it was analysed by Mikhail Bakhtin.

Most of these changes took place in the 1670s and 1680s. Schütz’s Christmas Historia – which was composed before 1664 – represents a transitional phase and retains some earlier views of Christmas. The most obvious example is the Kindelwiegen (rocking of the child), the physicality of which was highly suspicious to theologians in the later seventeenth century. Schütz not only refers to this practice but incorporates it in the texture of his music.

New light is shed on the song culture of Sankt Gallen almost a century before its earliest notated sources through consideration of the poetic section of a manuscript copied at the Abbey shortly after the year 800, i.e. the second part of Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek Vossianus Lat. Q. 69. The predominantly Merovingian accentual Latin verse (rhythmi) and metrical verse by the late-antique poet Prudentius (his Liber Cathemerinon and Liber Peristephanon) were written out in song forms. It is newly proposed that Prudentius’ verse from the Liber Peristephanon was arranged into a liturgical cycle. The poetic section of the Leiden manuscript is accordingly understood as a collection of songs, which prompts reflection on the way in which earlier sung versus at Sankt Gallen may have provided models for the later Liber ymnorum. Witnesses to the song culture of Sankt Gallen in the first half of the ninth century are re-examined and a leading role during this period for the nearby Abbey of Reichenau is proposed. Finally, it is suggested that Iso’s advice to Notker that singulae motus cantilenae singulas syllabas debent habere was at least partly informed by the existing tradition of sung versus at both abbeys.

Most music historians would probably have little trouble accounting for the normative formal principles of a fourteenth-century rondeau or isorhythmic motet. A topic that has occasioned much less notice, however, is the question of formal articulation in the parallel corpus of liturgical works produced in no small quantity through to the end of the century, from the Tournai Mass to the earliest layer of works contained in fifteenth-century sources such as Bologna Q 15. What relatively little the scholarly literature offers on this subject has tended to portray the composition of masses either as being wholly derivative of secular forms (the typical view), or at best as reflecting some sort of murky attempt at through-composition.

John Playford dominated the commercial music publishing trade of mid-seventeenth-century England, encouraging musical literacy and supplying beginner books for the growing domestic amateur musical class. Playford was clearly aware of the need to attract as many customers as possible in order to succeed in a commercial business; however, very little is known about his customers. This article identifies the contemporary audiences of seventeenth-century English printed music books, building on previous scholarship including Alec Hyatt King’s Some British Collectors of Music c. 1600–1900 (1963), and provides an initial record of provenance marks in surviving copies of the publications. Placing the printed book and its customer within the wider context of music-making and bookselling in seventeenth-century England develops our understanding of the social dimensions of the printed music trade, including dissemination and distribution networks.

David S. Chambers's provocative study of the cardinalate in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is rich in implications for music historians. A document of December 1509 suggests that at that time a cardinal's household averaged 144 familiares, and the 1526 census revealed similar figures. Moreover, the corporate income of the College of Cardinals had been regulated since 1289 by a Bull of that year that decreed that a half of certain items of papal revenue was to be divided among cardinals resident in Rome, although the actual amounts that individual cardinals received fluctuated in response to changes in the size of the college. There were other sources of income: Roman residents were entitled to the revenue of their ‘title’ church, and those few who held office in the Roman bureaucracy commanded extraordinary salaries. For cardinals with musical interests, the institutional and economic conditions necessary to sustain a musical establishment therefore existed, and despite the relative absence of information on such establishments, we may assume that there were singers and instrumentalists among the familiares of many cardinals' households.

As a person, Oswald von Wolkenstein (1375/8–1445) is a more tangible figure than almost any of his contemporaries. The numerous extant biographical documents enable us to trace his life in minute detail. His autobiographical songs reveal him as a widely travelled knight, a liegeman of his king, but also as a poet and singer performing his own works. His travels took him not only to distant countries but also to places of political importance within the empire – to the Council at Constance, the Reichstag at Nuremberg and Ulm, the royal court at Pressburg, the Council at Basle. Four portraits and a sculpture tell us what he looked like: robust in physique, and with his right eye missing. The numerous reports of quarrels with his neighbours, bishop and duke give the impression of an irascible, pugnacious character. Nonetheless he is one of the greatest Germanic poets of the late Middle Ages (possibly even the ‘most significant lyric poet writing in German between Walther von der Vogelweide and Goethe’, as Ulrich Miiller put it). He was, moreover, a poet with an exceptional flair for combining his words with music. And something else that makes him unique in the German-speaking world is the fact that his works have been handed down as a self-contained collection, in manuscripts devoted to him alone.

Thanks in part to a fine translation by Oliver Strunk, the Ars cantus mensurabilis of Franco of Cologne is a treatise we all think we know. It is perhaps for this reason that Franco's treatise has been all but ignored in most of the recent discussions of the rhythm of Notre Dame organum. The one noteworthy exception to this is Fritz Reckow's discussion of organum purum in his dissertation on Anonymous iv and in his various articles on organum and related topics in the Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, in the Schrade Gedenkschrift, and elsewhere. But for Reckow, and presumably for most other scholars as well, Franco's description of organum is strongly coloured by his theories of mensuration, appearing to place even organum purum under the heading of ‘mensurable music’. This in turn seems to distance Franco from the earliest layer of organum composition at Notre Dame, rendering his ideas of little value in arriving at an interpretation of the rhythmic character of this music.

The German singer, composer and writer Johannes von Soest (1448–1506), also referred to as Steinwart or Steinwert, is the author of a vernacular autobiography in verse. One of the very few such documents written by a musician, it gives a highly personal insight into his career, which extended from his training as a chorister in Soest to the ducal chapel in Cleves and afterwards to Bruges (in the company of two unnamed English musicians), Aardenburg (Overijssel), Maastricht, possibly Cologne, Kassel and finally Heidelberg, where he was appointed as Kapellmeister. He subsequently decided to become a physician. The article includes a complete transcription of the text, whose original was destroyed during the Second World War, but has been preserved in Johann Carl von Fichard's rare edition of 1811, and a translation of the sections of musical interest. In an introduction his training and career choices are discussed, and his observations concerning musical practice are analysed.

It has often been noted that Pietro Aron's Trattato della natura et cognitione di tutti gli tuoni (1525) links traditional eight-mode theory with polyphony by naming actual compositions and asserting the modal categories to which they belonged. The significance of Aron's connection of mode and polyphony has been the subject of a wide variety of historical and theoretical interpretation: in particular, Leeman Perkins based a study of modality in the masses of Josquin on the Trattato, while Peter Bergquist argued that Aron's classifications were essentially irrelevant for polyphony. The most recent interpretation of Aron's text appeared in an article by Harold Powers provocatively entitled ‘Is Mode Real?’ There, Powers proposed understanding Aron literally and deduced Aron's methods of modal categorisation from a close reading relying solely on the internal evidence of the treatise.

This essay presents a close examination of the Gregorian eighth-mode tracts in Old Roman transmission. Its main objective will be to show that the apparent diversity of the genre as a whole is due largely to conditioned variation, and that within subsets characterised by identical textual conditions, melodic shape is uniform, or thrifty, to a degree that is as remarkable as it is unexpected. Particular attention will be paid to the regular and, in some cases, predictable ways in which the accentuation, phrasing and syntax of the text determine melodic form. The essay will take up the subject of text expression in its classic formulation by Dominicus Johner and show how he was prevented from arriving at a satisfactory result by the very terms in which he framed the question. Finally and incidentally, some comparative observations will be made about the counterparts of the Old Roman tracts in Frankish transmission (i.e. Gregorian chant in the narrow sense) with a view to showing the aesthetic superiority of the Old Roman versions in certain respects.

During the seventeenth century, the growth of opera created the need for a large number of artists to perform in theatres throughout Italy and, increasingly, in much of Europe. The biographies of nearly all the singers who performed in Venice, the centre of opera during the middle of the century, and in other cities of Italy remain unwritten and, in most cases, unwritable. For some singers, including Giovanni Antonio Cavagna, Nicola Coresi and Vincenza Giulia Masotti, letters survive that convey something of their personalities. Yet, for the most part, we know nothing of their families and the early years of their careers, nor of their lives as performers. This article will explore several episodes in the career of the Roman singer Silvia Gailarti Manni, whose operatic appearances during three decades have been known to scholars through librettos, but whose life has never before come into focus.

Lorenz Welker kindly allowed me to see the typescript of his paper just as I was embarking on an attempt to list the polyphonic song repertory of the years 1415–80. With the startling knowledge that some of Oswald's music originated as late as 1420, my ear was obviously alert for more such pieces. Sure enough two additional polyphonic songs by Oswald turned out to have music taken from the French repertory of the early fifteenth century. They are Sag an gesellschaft/Von rechter lieb kraft and Kom liebster man.

There is a passage in Willi Apel's discussion of the Alleluia of the Mass that nicely epitomises several of the difficulties that music historians have experienced with the genre. Apel found himself faced with a dilemma: on the one hand there was that undeniably late characteristic of the Alleluia, its notorious instability of liturgical assignment; and on the other hand there was literary evidence of the Alleluia's antiquity, its appearance in fourth-century patristic literature as the melismatic jubilus, and Gregory I's late sixth-century letter in which he admitted to extending the use of the Alleluia beyond Paschaltime.