The appearance of a consistent repertory of polyphonic settings of single vernacular texts, governed by a coherent set of conventions and a shared understanding of compositional ambition, was one of the lasting achievements of the composers of the fourteenth century. Although fully formed products of this accomplishment did not emerge until the century’s fourth decade, the concept of the marriage of a single vernacular poem to the type of polyphonic music previously associated with the caudae of conducti, clausulae and polytextual motets had by then been a topic for exploration for at least fifty years. It is not too much to claim that the period from Adam de la Halle to Guillaume de Machaut saw a series of changes in the relationship between vernacular poetry and polyphony that had consequences for the history of music at least up to and probably beyond Le nuove musiche (1601).

The naming of John Dowland as ‘Author’ on the title page of his publication The First Booke of Songes or Ayres (1597) suggests a proprietary relationship between the composer and his work. This proprietary relationship is, perhaps, reinforced with the alignment of Dowland’s intellectual activities as ‘author’ with the notions of ‘composition’ and ‘invention’ in the same passage. All three terms could be used by the late sixteenth century to refer to notions of creativity, individual intellectual labour or origination. While many early examples of the use of ‘author’ refer specifically to God or Christ as creator, such as Chaucer’s declaration that ‘The auctour of matrimonye is Christ’, by the sixteenth century it was increasingly used to refer to an individual originator of intellectual or artistic creation closer to the modern sense of the word. Its sixteenth-century usage is, for instance, reflected in the title ‘A tretys, excerpte of diverse labores of auctores’, or as in a reference in 1509 to ‘The noble actor plinius’. Likewise, ‘invent’ or ‘inventor’ could be used to refer to the process of individual intellectual creation, exemplified by its use in 1576 ‘Your brain or your wit, and your pen, the one to invent and devise, the other to write’, while ‘compose’ could mean to make, to compose in words, ‘to write as author’ or, more specifically, to write music.

Among the manuscript fragments in the Archivio comunale of Sutri (Province of Viterbo), Italy, are four consecutive folios of an Old-Roman antiphoner of the later eleventh century. The two bifolios are now identified as fragments 141 (Frammenti teologici 40) and 141bis (Frammenti teologici 41). These fragments, which preserve music for the feasts of Sexagesima, Quinquagesima and Ash Wednesday, are remnants of what appears to be the oldest witness of Old-Roman music for the office. When added to the two surviving antiphoners (London, British Library, Add. MS 29988, of the twelfth century, and Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS San Pietro B 79, of the end of the twelfth century) and two recently discovered fragments (in Frosinone and Bologna), the Sutri fragments bring to five the number of Old-Roman antiphoners of which at least some evidence survives. It begins to appear that manuscripts of this music were once not so rare. The Sutri fragments show some unusual liturgical characteristics that provide new information on the Roman liturgy; I will discuss these aspects shortly.

In a rich and learned article, Lawrence Gushee explored the tabula monochordi of Magister Nicolaus de Luduno. The tabula, which was copied into a music theory manuscript of c. 1400 of southern Italian provenance (Rome/St. Paul), consists of three associated parts. The first and third I shall call, following Gushee, the tabula figurarum (an elaborate musical example) and the tabula numerorum (an extremely elaborate table of corresponding information). Between them lies the enigmatic text of a six-stanza musical puzzle poem, ‘Ut pateat evidenter’, with which Gushee wrestled inconclusively. A concordance to the poem unknown to Gushee in an English music theory manuscript of about the same age (Bodley 842) associates these cryptic verses with a polyphonic chanson, a two-voice ballade that has never been published. The ballade is a sophisticated demonstration piece for tonal and mensural behaviours, and I believe that this song is the original complement and key to the poem’s meaning. It also offers a significant new point of entry into the complicated world of Anglo-French tonal theory as it developed in treatises and compositions of the fourteenth century.

Our picture of musical training in the Middle Ages and Renaissance is frustratingly generic and fragmentary. The musicians of that era – it is often stated – were well versed in the method of the so-called Guidonian hand, by which the twenty pitches of the gamut (often referred to as claves) were mapped onto the joints of the left hand along with the six voces ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, dating back to Guido of Arezzo’s Epistola ad Michahelem (c. 1033). Professional singers learnt how to group the claves into overlapping hexachords in the early stages of musical training and referred to the musical hand as a mnemonic aid while sight-singing. By the early fourteenth century at the latest, a sophisticated set of rules of behaviour was in place that allowed practical musicians and theorists to connect the six syllables to the claves and to perform hexachordal mutations smoothly and effectively.

A general assumption persists among musicologists and dance historians that dance in seventeenth-century operas was a French phenomenon, with Italians only occasionally staging a final ballo. In large part the assumption is the result of lack of information concerning dance in seventeenth-century opera, due, particularly in comparison with other periods, to limited source material and limited research. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that when Italian operas included balli at the end of one or more acts, dance indications in the librettos tended to be brief, and the dance music appeared only rarely in scores.