Was music notated at Rome before the St Cecilia gradual, finished in 1071, was begun? If so (as seems likely), does the common wisdom hold true that no examples of such notation have survived? And if a search through sacramentaries, lectionaries, evangeliaries, bibles and homiliaries written in urban and suburban Rome before 1071 should disclose bits of such notation, what would they reveal? An earlier stage of music writing indigenous to Rome, or a borrowed technique recently imported? And if borrowed, borrowed from where?

Throughout history, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has taken on the connotations of its specific cultural contexts. Interpreters of the myth have invested the figure of Orpheus with symbolism to suit their own rhetorical purposes. Each retelling has emphasised certain elements of the myth to make it conform to the intended meaning. In all accounts of the story, Orpheus is a musician who charms animals and inanimate objects with his song. In the fifth century B.C., the death of his wife, Eurydice, and his attempt to rescue her from the underworld became part of the mythographic tradition. According to the best-known version of this story, Orpheus persuades the inhabitants of the underworld to return Eurydice to him, but then loses her when he looks back at her, violating the rule imposed by the underworld.

Like her crown, which according to the story shines in a constellation, L'Arianna as a work of art shimmers as a distant and mysterious object, and the loss of Monteverdi's score, apart from the famous lament, makes it one of the great ‘if onlys’ of the history of music. Artistic responses to L'Arianna range wide. In Gabrielle d'Annunzio's novel Il fuoco, Stellio Effrena and his group of aesthetes in fin de siècle Venice embrace Monteverdi, and Arianna's lament in particular, as a home-grown antidote to Wagner, elevating ‘Lasciatemi morire’ to the status of an Italian precursor of the ‘Liebestod’. Recently Alexander Goehr gave a new lease of life to Ottavio Rinuccini's libretto in his opera Arianna, first performed in September 1995, and, as if not to desecrate a hallowed object, he included in the opera a recording of the opening of Monteverdi's surviving fragment sung by Kathleen Ferrier.

These lines adorned one of the triumphal arches built in honour of Ferdinand of Aragon's ceremonial entry into Valladolid on 5 January 1513. This event, like so many other such entries throughout Europe during the sixteenth century, was intended to recall the Triumphs of the Roman emperors, though it was also embedded in a long-established entry ritual. The ephemeral buildings all'antica, the apparati, street decorations, pageants with allegorical, mythological and historical figures, as well as music and dancing of various kinds all formed part of a royal spectacle devised according to the political process of image-making.

The beginning of the second half of the fifteenth century marks the appearance of Jean de Ockeghem at the French royal court. Apparently he was the first composer to be involved in the chapel of Charles VII, at the time when this institution, which had previously included only a few chaplains, began to expand. We owe our knowledge of Ockeghem's biography to three particular studies. The first is that of Michel Brenet (Marie Bobillier), whose ‘biographical study following unpublished documents’ laid the foundations for subsequent research on the royal chapel of the Valois monarchs. The second is an article by Jean-Michel Vaccaro published nearly thirty years ago, which reveals the precise date of the composer's death.

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.

In his Prologue, Guillaume de Machaut lists the ballade entée, or ‘grafted ballade’, as one of the many genres he is inspired to write to praise and honour all ladies. It is unclear from this fleeting reference, however, exactly what type of work Machaut meant by this term and whether he was referring to a purely poetic form or to one that involved music. That the practice of citation in lyric poetry was well established at this time is demonstrated by Machaut's own output, which reveals him to have been a master of this art; this literary tradition was to continue to thrive in the later fourteenth century.