How and when did Josquin’s Ave Maria … virgo serena become one of the most famous Renaissance motets? It is widely held that the motet’s modern standing is directly rooted in its Renaissance reception. And yet beyond its relatively robust circulation and placement at the beginning of Petrucci’s first printed book of motets, little evidence remains as to how Josquin’s now-famous motet was perceived during and shortly after the composer’s life. In responding to this paucity of information, Part I of this article traces a reception history for Ave Maria that considers how the motet was reworked in parody masses and motets, analysing the specific ways in which later composers both engaged with and departed from Josquin’s techniques. Part II turns to the work’s modern reception, mining the scholarly literature, survey texts and recordings for clues as to how the motet’s significance has shifted throughout the twentieth century. The article concludes by proposing that this site-specific approach may be useful in comprehending the extensive stylistic changes that occurred between c. 1480 and the mid-sixteenth century.

In 1685, the Portuguese Jesuit Thomas Pereira was ordered by the Qing Kangxi emperor to write books on Western music theory in Chinese. Presented in the books were seventeenth-century practical and speculative music theories, including the coincidence theory of consonance. Invoking the concept of ‘boundary object’, this article shows that the cultural exchange, which gave rise to new knowledge by means of selection, synthesis and reinterpretation, was characterised by a lack of consensus between the transmitter and the receivers over the functions of the imported theories. Although the coincidence theory of consonance could potentially effect the transition from a pure numerical to a physical understanding of pitch, as in the European scientific revolution, it failed to flourish in China not only because of different theoretical concerns between European and Chinese musical traditions, but also because of its limited dissemination caused by Chinese print culture.

The summer of 1602 featured a soggy ‘progress’ by Queen Elizabeth to various noble households in the vicinity of London, interspersed with elaborate royal entertainments. In the midst of the formal festivities occurred an enigmatic and apparently distressing incident involving the Queen, her Principal Secretary Robert Cecil, and his niece Elizabeth, Countess of Derby. Cecil hastily used songs to try to win back the lost favour of his Queen, and though his long-mislaid lyrics were identified a quarter-century ago, their music has remained unknown. This article reviews evidence of music for the songs, and for other events during that summer's progress.

Many studies have been devoted to the producers of Lutheran music in seventeenth-century Germany – composers, editors, publishers and printers. Little attention, however, has been paid to the tastes and preferences of the consumers of this music. This article represents the first study of this subject, and draws on music inventories and account books to examine the Lutheran market for sacred music during this period. It presents a number of key findings, all of which relate to purchasing patterns: that community members donated a considerable amount of music to Lutheran institutions; that music prices remained quite stable for decades; that Lutherans cultivated the older motet alongside the newer sacred concerto throughout much of the century; that Lutherans sought out music by Italians and northern Catholics as well as by Lutherans; and that after c. 1640, the composer Andreas Hammerschmidt dominated the Lutheran market for sacred music, outselling all of his contemporaries.

It has long been surmised that the Paduan singer, lutenist and composer Angelo Notari (1566–1663) was employed as a spy after immigrating to England circa 1610. In examining Venetian counterintelligence papers previously neglected by musicologists, I here confirm that Notari was indeed an intelligencer. More specifically, he was a paid informant for the Venetian State Inquisitors between 1616 and 1619 and participated in a contentious international trial concerning the Venetian ambassador to England, Antonio Foscarini. I argue that Notari's work as a musician was inextricable from his identity as an intelligencer and former Venetian citizen and demonstrate that Italian musicians in Jacobean London significantly influenced international diplomatic relations. By identifying intersections between the two highly social practices of music-making and intelligence-gathering, I encourage greater musicological attention to political networks that transmitted music across borders and, conversely, musical networks that transmitted political intelligence. I thus situate seventeenth-century musical transculturation within its broader diplomatic, confessional and economic contexts.

Machaut's set of complete works manuscripts forms a central pillar of our understanding of musical and generic developments and their courtly reception in fourteenth-century France. By applying the continuing scholarly advances made during the study of courtly practice and the professional Parisian book-trade to the earliest of these artefacts, this contribution reassesses the creation-history of the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 1586. The results tap into a number of enduring discussions within Machaut scholarship. These range from questions of patronage, to aspects of Machaut's authorial control and involvement in the production of his books, to the importance of order on the single-work level within a generic grouping, and to the practicalities of manuscript creation and intentionality. Finally, proposed adjustments to the dating of some compositions call for a review of existing notions of generic development and polyphonic composition in the early part of the century, thus resonating beyond Machaut's personal output.