The legacy of Pierre Attaingnant, Royal Printer of Music, has done much to clarify our knowledge of the French polyphonic chanson during the first half of the sixteenth century. The great Parisian printer's invention and introduction of music printing with movable type in 1528 contributed to an increasing coalescence in the style of the chansons composed in France between 1530 and 1550. By midcentury, composers at the French royal court and throughout the provinces, too, routinely composed what came to be known as Parisian chansons, the genre most clearly exemplified in the works of Claudin de Sermisy.

A surprisingly large number of early madrigals carry conflicting attributions in the printed sources of the 1530s and early 1540s. For example, twenty-four of the ninety-five settings listed in Hans Musch's recent book on Festa appear in various sources under at least two composers' names; among other pieces in the same position are some ascribed to Arcadelt or Verdelot – or at least appearing in volumes dedicated to those composers and carrying no other names at the head of the page.

Music historians are virtually unanimous in attributing the source of early Christian psalmody to the synagogue. In this they follow the vast majority of liturgical scholars, Protestant and Catholic alike. There is, after all, considerable plausibility to the view: nascent Christianity was a Jewish sect and its first liturgical gatherings shared with the synagogue its most revolutionary characteristic – the coming together of co-religionists in a meeting room rather than the witnessing of sacrifice in a temple court. Moreover, the liturgical practices of these gatherings resembled those of the synagogue; in particular the so-called ‘liturgy of the Word’ that preceded the Eucharist appears to have been modelled after the scripture-centred order of synagogue worship. And when one observes that the principal vehicle of early Christian chant was the Old Testament Book of Psalms it seems a natural assumption that the singing of those psalms was a practice borrowed from the synagogue. The present author shared this assumption until coming to question it when pursuing a related topic. The study that follows is a fulfilment of the intention stated then to explore the subject more thoroughly. In doing so it is necessary to begin with a general examination of Jewish liturgy in the time of Jesus, both the liturgy of the Temple and that of the synagogue.

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.

The relationship of mass composition to the study of rhetoric has occupied many writers interested in perceiving the two as analogous in organisation, vocabulary and persuasive goals. Grammar belonged to the choirboy's education but, more importantly, the method of grammar permeated the general teaching method for other subjects as well. Material, such as questions or disputations, was organised into the similar and the dissimilar, so that working from a model and transfer by analogy were the principal means of making connections between statements and ideas. This essay is concerned with the opportunities available in sixteenth-century Spain for the study of grammar and music and how these possibilities affected the leading Spanish composer of the time, Cristóbal de Morales. In this discussion, Juan Bermudo's treatise Declaración de instruments is important. Not only does it name leading humanists and composers, and present its theoretical remarks in the language of rhetoric; Morales, who had been in close contact with Bermudo at the Marchena estate of the Duke of Arcos, recommended the treatise. Thus Bermudo, a young Minorite monk, reveals a good deal about Morales by both direct quotation and analogy, and in effect provides a more rounded intellectual impression of the composer, who otherwise expressed himself only in his musical works and their dedications. It can be deduced from musical quotations that Morales is Bermudo's model composer, and by analogy that Morales, versed in rhetoric and imitation, understood the application of these rules in musical composition. In his thorough appraisal of musical tradition, theory and practice, Bermudo assumes the function of a critic in the modern sense.

In their pioneering study of the Trent codices, Adler and Koller divided the six manuscripts then known to them into two distinct and separate groups: a younger group, Tr88–91, which they believed to have been compiled ‘in or for Trent’ by the scribe Johannes Wiser; and an older group, Tr87 and Tr92, which they described less specifically as ‘unquestionably north Italian’ in origin. Recent findings have tended to confirm Trent as the place of origin of the former group, while at the same time indicating that the blanket description ‘north Italian’ can no longer suffice for the latter. This group comprises in effect three sources which once existed independently of each other: a principal source divided into two parts, Tr871 and Tr922, here referred to jointly as TR; and two smaller sources, Tr872 and Tr921. The few attempts that have been made to determine the individual provenances of these manuscripts rest more on informed hypothesis than hard fact, with the result that their precise origin and the reason for their association with the later codices have remained as much of a puzzle as they were when the first six manuscripts were rediscovered just over a century ago.