When discussing varietas Tinctoris cites six works that exemplify the concept, of which four survive. Chapter 6 considers up to what point these pieces, which span the major genres of the day, illustrate Tinctoris’s ideas. The chapter analyzes this music at different levels of zoom, and in light of the relevant compositional parameters.

Chapter 4 argues that varietas in Tinctoris’s usage gestures toward an esthetics of opposition. The chapter situates Tinctoris’s discussion in the context of The Art of Counterpoint as a whole, while showing how the individual components of varietas – melody, rhythm, texture, and so on – give teeth to the concept.

Chapter 1 introduces three esthetic paradigms – kaleidoscopic, alternatim, and oppositional – that can help ground discussions of musical flow. Using examples spanning Gregorian chant through mid sixteenth-century polyphony, the chapter makes a case for a shift to and from an esthetics of opposition in the years surrounding the period at the heart of the book.

This section of the book takes a holistic approach by exploring elements of the compositional lingua franca that catalyzed a new musical poetics. Chapter 7 identifies approximately eight parameters (e.g., text-setting, cadences, and harmony) that in tandem can be used to create dramatic arcs.

Textural contrast might well drive an esthetics of opposition more than any other compositional technique. Chapter 8 asks what is new in the fifteenth century about vocal ranges and scoring, and how composers manipulate changes in texture to pull back the throttle or produce calculated bursts of intensity.

Beginning with the problem of historical distance, the introduction charts a path from notes on the page to potent sound experiences, taking as a representative example the modern performance of a mass by Johannes Okeghem. In addition to defining counterpoint and explaining the term’s relevance to this study, the introduction sets up some of the book’s main questions while laying out a ground plan for what follows.