In September of 1536, the papal singer and composer Costanzo Festa wrote a letter to his Florentine patron Filippo Strozzi. Festa, having heard about a music printer in Venice, hoped to contact him there through one of Strozzi's agents. He continued:

Have him [the printer] understand that if he wants my works, that is, the hymns [and] the Magnificats, I do not want less than one hundred fifty scudi and, if he wants the basse, two hundred in all. If he wants to print them, he can place the hymns and Magnificats in a large book [choirbook format] like that of the fifteen Masses [Antico's Quindecim missarum, RISM 1516], so that all choirs would be able to make use of them. The basse are good for learning to sing in counterpoint, to compose and to play all instruments.

There is a passage in Willi Apel's discussion of the Alleluia of the Mass that nicely epitomises several of the difficulties that music historians have experienced with the genre. Apel found himself faced with a dilemma: on the one hand there was that undeniably late characteristic of the Alleluia, its notorious instability of liturgical assignment; and on the other hand there was literary evidence of the Alleluia's antiquity, its appearance in fourth-century patristic literature as the melismatic jubilus, and Gregory I's late sixth-century letter in which he admitted to extending the use of the Alleluia beyond Paschaltime.

Any explanation of the emerging polyphonic chanson in the years before 1330 must negotiate varied repertories and compositions. One of the central genres in such a study would be the polyphonic rondeau. It is characterised by a musico-poetic structure more or less analogous to the rondeau of the later fourteenth century, but also by three-part music – mostly syllabic, note-against-note – that is copied in score. Our view of these sorts of compositions is dominated by the works of Adam de la Halle, whose sixteen score-notated polyphonic settings of vernacular lyrics are preserved in a manuscript now in the Bibliothèque Nationale (F-Pn), MS fr. 25566.

During the seventeenth century, the growth of opera created the need for a large number of artists to perform in theatres throughout Italy and, increasingly, in much of Europe. The biographies of nearly all the singers who performed in Venice, the centre of opera during the middle of the century, and in other cities of Italy remain unwritten and, in most cases, unwritable. For some singers, including Giovanni Antonio Cavagna, Nicola Coresi and Vincenza Giulia Masotti, letters survive that convey something of their personalities. Yet, for the most part, we know nothing of their families and the early years of their careers, nor of their lives as performers. This article will explore several episodes in the career of the Roman singer Silvia Gailarti Manni, whose operatic appearances during three decades have been known to scholars through librettos, but whose life has never before come into focus.

The seven Trent Codices preserve much of the sacred vocal polyphony that has survived from the middle decades of the fifteenth century. With some 1500 individual pieces, the collection is a rich compendium of liturgical and paraliturgical genres, large and small. The codices are perhaps most valuable, however, as sources for the cyclic mass Ordinary, the most ambitious of fifteenth-century polyphonic forms.

The great ceremonies of the Middle Ages and Renaissance have an uncomfortable position in music history. Contemporary descriptions of such events have survived from all over Europe through the centuries, and they are often full of vivid and quotable detail. For all its rich abundance, however, the documentation surrounding these large ceremonies has proved in a number of ways difficult to interpret. First, it is usually impossible to connect the official ceremonial accounts securely to specific, known pieces of music. Second, it is the nature of secular documents to omit as beneath their purview many of the musical details that we today regard as indispensable – the chroniclers were always maddeningly more interested in the musicians' clothing than in, say, their instrumentation. Third, and perhaps most important as we strive towards a balanced, street-level view of music in medieval and Renaissance life, the ceremonies that got the biggest descriptions tended to be the most extraordinary events of their day, unique by definition and held for the most rarefied and least representative audiences. The people who attended the Feast of the Pheasant or the meetings of the Order of the Golden Fleece were no cross-section of their society, and it is hard to know exactly how much of what we learn about their music can be applied to anything we might call real life.

It has often been noted that Pietro Aron's Trattato della natura et cognitione di tutti gli tuoni (1525) links traditional eight-mode theory with polyphony by naming actual compositions and asserting the modal categories to which they belonged. The significance of Aron's connection of mode and polyphony has been the subject of a wide variety of historical and theoretical interpretation: in particular, Leeman Perkins based a study of modality in the masses of Josquin on the Trattato, while Peter Bergquist argued that Aron's classifications were essentially irrelevant for polyphony. The most recent interpretation of Aron's text appeared in an article by Harold Powers provocatively entitled ‘Is Mode Real?’ There, Powers proposed understanding Aron literally and deduced Aron's methods of modal categorisation from a close reading relying solely on the internal evidence of the treatise.

We know only two things with certainty about the life of Roger de Chabannes. He was a monk at the abbey of St Martial in Limoges by the year 1010, at which time he served as the teacher of his nephew, Adémar de Chabannes. And when he died, on 26 April 1025, he held the position of the abbey's cantor. Both pieces of information come to us from Adémar, monk at St Cybard in Angoulême, historian, homilist and tempestuous polemicist in the campaign to win recognition for St Martial as an apostle. Other evidence, which also may well originate from Adémar, attests to Roger's death date and office.

Professional musicians first appeared in medieval Europe during the tenth century. These jongleurs, or minstrels, earned a precarious living by travelling alone or in small groups from village to village and castle to castle, singing, playing, dancing, performing magic tricks and exhibiting trained animals. These itinerant performers were often viewed as social outcasts, and were frequently denied legal protection as well as the sacraments of the church. With the revival of the European economy and the growth of towns during the twelfth century the opportunity for more stable living conditions emerged, and the minstrels began to organise themselves into brotherhoods or confraternities, eventually developing guilds of musicians. By forming corporations and thus voluntarily placing themselves under the power of rulers or civic authorities, the musicians could achieve a modicum of social acceptance and legal protection.

One of the most challenging problems in the performance of sixteenth-century music is the interpretation of tempo relationships between passages of duple and triple time. After c. 1520 binary signatures became standard for most pieces, and ternary passages within them were notated as sesquialtera or triple proportions. The signs of these proportions ostensibly specify precise tempo relationships between the binary and ternary passages, but in practice they could be interpreted in a variety of ways depending on time, place and musical context, as well as on the notation itself.

In calling for a new history of French music and musical life of the second half of the sixteenth century, Howard Mayer Brown's paper has presented scholars with a number of formidable challenges. It admonishes us to re-examine nearly every facet of what remains largely an enigma of music history. Simultaneously exacting and encyclopedic, it considers in turn each of four themes: the relation of words and music; the means and character of print culture; musical styles and genres; and (perhaps most important of all) the social context of the chanson itself – what Brown called ‘the anthropology of the French chanson’. His essay concerns the problems and perspectives of Renaissance musicology: how we hear and how we explain the music of the past in relation to those who first made and heard it. It thus requires us to reconsider our assumptions about the nature and workings of historical change, the status of canonical styles and those who promoted them, and the very place of music in culture.

In section iii of his paper ‘Ut musica poesis’, Howard Mayer Brown remarked upon Italian musical presence in France in three main areas: music theory, techniques of composition and interpretation, and poetry. The works of Claude Le Jeune (c. 1530–1600) seem to me to illustrate his comments in a particularly striking fashion, and although my study of Italian influence on Le Jeune's work is incomplete, I think it is possible to make some preliminary observations.

By praising rulers, whose magnificence formed a crucial part of the world order, Pierre de Ronsard and his French colleagues in the second half of the sixteenth century often depicted the world not as it was but as it ought to be. This idea informs Margaret McGowan's book on ideal forms in the age of Ronsard, in which she explores the ways poets and painters extolled the virtues and the theatrical magnificence of perfect princes following the Horatian dictum ut pictura poesis: as is painting so is poetry. McGowan demonstrates the virtuosity of the painters and poets of the sixteenth century in shaping their hymns of praise from the subject matter and ideals of ancient Greece and Rome by following Horace's advice to regard paintings as mute poems and poems as speaking pictures. McGowan shows how artists and intellectuals pursued their goals by creating four kinds of ideal form: iconic forms, sacred images derived from classical literary sources offering princes some guarantee of immortality; triumphal forms that evoke the heroic imperial past; ideal forms of beauty to be found in contemplating the beloved; and dancing forms that mirror rituals of celebration. McGowan claims that such ideal forms were intended to enlighten the ruler himself as much as they celebrated his grandeur in the eyes of others.

The conditions of artistic production in late sixteenth-century France required musicians and poets, composers and painters, choreographers and performers to work together. They shared the same objectives and they worked from the same aesthetic principles. Their common experience suggests that, as historians and analysts, we can enlighten the study of one art form – music or the dance, for example – by placing it within the context of others, assessing their interaction and their shared purpose. If this assumption is accepted we must consider issues of production, that is those practical matters concerning technique and the varied conditions of performance; we must examine the audience's expectations of those events which drew together the arts into a single spectacle or in a sequence of festivals and which relied for their inspiration on intellectual currents nourished through renewed acquaintance with ancient sources; and we need to assess the nature of the works themselves, their impact on the status of the artist (broadly defined), and on the social and political benefit for the patrons. There is inevitably much overlap across these three areas of production, expectation and outcomes, yet, in the discussion which follows, attempts will be made to keep them separate.