The fuging psalm or hymn tune is a form whose existence one would hardly suspect from any history of English music. Yet is was a product of the Church of England, and there are more than six hundred and fifty specimens in English eighteenth-century printed sources alone. Its neglect is readily explained by the fact that it lies on the borderline of art music: the musicians who developed it were obscure country singers without professional training; but at the same time it does not fall within the definition of ‘folk music’ that we have inherited from the Cecil Sharp era, for it is written music designed for rehearsed performance. We may or may not wish to hear or sing these tunes today. But our understanding of eighteenth-century English musical life must be incomplete if it does not take into account a form that was so distinctive and so widely appreciated at the time.

Although in recent years there has been a marked increase in performances and recordings of fifteenth-century music, with a consequent focusing of interest on the performance problems presented by this repertory, a number of fundamental notational ambiguities remain that have received little systematic attention. Among them a particularly pressing problem is that of the relationship between tempus perfectum and tempus imperfectum diminutum in a considerable number of works written between 1440 and 1520.

The rarity of thirteenth-century manuscript sources containing representative examples from both musical and theoretical traditions is a notorious disadvantage to any study of the polyphony of the ars antiqua. Such a source is the earliest recension of Lambertus's Tractatus de musica, now housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris under the shelf number 11266, which transmits seven thirteenth-century double motets. However, one ought not simply to assume that the musical compositions illustrate the practice of the treatise, as both Coussemaker (1865, 169ff) and Ludwig (1910, 1/2, 590ff) did. Even since then, most critics have followed the assumptions of these two authors (Gennrich 1957, XLII; Anderson 1971, 39; Norwood 1978, 80; Baltzer 1980). An examination of the data on which these hypotheses are based may lead to a re-assessment of the relationship between music and theory in this manuscript and may suggest alternative interpretations.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries Venice was primarily known as a centre of opera, with several flourishing opera houses. The most prestigious of these was the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo, named like the others after the parish in which it was located. It had been built by the brothers Giovanni, Carlo and Vicenzo Grimani, whose uncle Giovanni Grimani had built the Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo (1639) and the Teatro San Samuele. The oldest public opera house in Venice, the Teatro S.Cassiano (1637), was owned by the Tron family. In 1640 Almoro Zane had opened a small theatre called San Moise, later distinguished by a famous impresario, Francesco Santurini. The latter in turn built a theatre of his own in the parish of Sant' Angelo; operas were produced at this theatre from 1677 to 1752. Another small house, San Fantino, opened in 1699, only to close in 1719. The Teatro San Salvatore, owned by the Vendramin family, was also known as the Teatro San Luca; this name was changed twice again in its three-hundred-year history (to Teatro Apollo and Teatro Goldoni; see Wiel 1897, XLIV). All in all, sixteen Venetian theatres had opened by the end of the seventeenth century, eight of them serving both for straight comedy and opera (Galvani 1879, 13).

As a member of a family some of whose members were employed within the Roman Catholic church and supported by various cardinals, Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder must have given his relatives some cause for concern in 1562 when, at the age of nineteen, he became a retained musician at the court of Queen Elizabeth. During the next sixteen years Alfonso's behaviour in England and on the Continent threw further doubt on his political and religious convictions, and he was finally imprisoned by the pope. This new information about Ferrabosco along with other recently discovered evidence about his life is discussed below in the course of a reassessment of his biography.