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).

Writing about a late-fourteenth-century ballade in honour of Mathieu de Foix, Howard Mayer Brown candidly aired his uncertainty about the proper theoretical perspective from which to engage the music. ‘How should we in the twentieth century interpret this music: from the point of view of emerging tonality, as an example of polyphonic modality, or of the influence the extended system of hexachords had on compositional decisions, or should we use some other conceptual framework?’ In his catalogue of choices, Brown alludes to a variegated lot of modern approaches that range across appropriation (sometimes formal, sometimes casual) of terms from functional tonality, modal descriptions founded on octave species and finals, mappings of hexachordal areas, empirical observation of pitch emphases and tonal orientations.

Although a number of motet, madrigal and lute collections supported by local Milanese patrons were printed in Milan and Venice during the first half of the sixteenth century, modern scholars continue to regard this period in Milanese history as fallow in musical activity. This phenomenon has resulted from a lack of documentary evidence regarding both the activities of the musicians who contributed to these collections and the musical institutions with which these musicians and their patrons were associated. While several studies on music at the Duomo of Milan during the first half of the sixteenth century do esixt, Guglielmo Barblan's poineering study remains the only comprehensive survey of civic and courtly music of the period, and it focuses primarily spon instrumental musicians, thus leaving largely unanswered the questions of where and by whom the aforementioned Milanese motests and madrigals were performed.

Sometime between the years 1330 and 1343, Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita in Castile, included this maxim in his literary masterpiece, the Libro de buen amor. This verse, like others in the poem, attributes an ethnic identity both to objects and to vocal music, a form of ethnic marking that has been preserved in Spanish culture by linguistic usage: the Arabic particle a[1] in the prefix to words for musical instruments such as adufe (square tambourine), ajabeba (transverse flute) or anafil (a straight trumpet four feet or more in length) is a possible reminder of this phenomenon. About a century later, the chronicler Alonso de Palencia (d. 1492) applied similar ethnic markings when speaking of the music of a young Castilian converso who was to become one of the most powerful courtiers of King Enrique IV, Diego Arias Dávila: ‘per rura segobiensia…cantibusque arabicis advocabat sibi coetu rusticorum’.

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 Hebrew Old Testament contains, besides prose narratives and laws, a considerable amount of poetry. The books of Lamentations, Proverbs and Psalms and the Song of Solomon, together with the prophetic oracles that make up the books of Amos, Habakkuk, Joel, Micah, Nahum, Obadiah and Zephaniah, consist entirely, or almost entirely, of poetry. In several other books, especially Job and the books of the prophets Haggai, Isaiah and Jeremiah, poetry predominates, while in the books of history and law, although prose predominates, poetry is never entirely absent, brief though its manifestations sometimes are. The vast majority of the poetry is sacred, as would be expected from texts that occur within religious writings. The relatively small amount of profane poetry consists of a handful of short examples and the Song of Solomon.