This article was first planned in 1976. It owes its existence to Pierluigi Petrobelli who, charged with organising a round table on seventeenth-century music drama for the Twelfth Congress of the International Musicological Society, Berkeley 1977, invited the authors to prepare a paper as a focus for discussion and offered them constant encouragement throughout its preparatory stages. It is our pleasant duty to mention that during the time of preparation of the paper Lorenzo Bianconi held scholarships from the Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani and the Istituto Storico Germanico of Rome.

About the year 795, Charlemagne wrote to Baugulf, the Abbot of Fulda,

It has seemed to us and to our faithful councillors that it would be of great profit and sovereign utility that the bishoprics and monasteries of which Christ has deigned to entrust us the government should not be content with a regular and devout life, but should undertake the task of teaching those who have received from God the capacity to learn … Doubtless good works are better than great knowledge, but without knowledge it is impossible to do good.

Topography and its metaphors have long dominated the historiography of towns and they continue to do so in the modern renaissance of what might be called ‘urban musicology’. Maps, plans and townscapes – likewise ‘soundscapes’ – have proved valuable in representing the diversity and disposition of activity, alongside the interplay of time and space and of private and public spheres. Yet at the same time a number of implications present in these constructs have yet to be fully explored, with consequences in turn for the ways in which we theorise the structures and dynamics of musical cultures. In this article we propose a redrafting of the institutional and historiographic ‘map’ of church music in English towns during the century or so before the Reformation. This serves as a preliminary to two larger questions, to be more fully investigated elsewhere but inevitably also touched upon here.

Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese composer and theorist Vicente Lusitano wrote a manuscript treatise on improvised counterpoint which constitutes the most thorough and detailed explanation that has survived on the subject. This manuscript has long been overlooked by music historians, despite being easily accessible at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris). The manuscript is described and its history traced. Lusitano's rules, techniques and stylistic advice are investigated and compared with contemporary theory. The extraordinary complexity of the contrapuntal lines singers were expected to invent extempore calls for a reappraisal of the relationship between improvisation and composition, also discussed by Lusitano. Historical evidence is adduced to provide a context for this document; far from being disconnected from the real life of sixteenth-century music, Lusitano's manuscript counterpoint treatise provides a key to understanding the oral tradition of Renaissance art music.

Between the late sixth and mid-ninth centuries the lengthy process unfolded that brought substantial unity to the liturgical-musical practice of the Western Church. The Roman-Benedictine liturgy of Gregory the Great was taken to England in 596–7 by the Italianborn Augustine, prior of the Monastery of St Andrew on the Caelian hill. His purpose was to substitute Roman observance for entrenched Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Gallican rites as well as pagan customs. Yet when Augustine questioned Gregory about the variety of Christian usages he found, the pope was unwilling to offend local sensibilities and impede the Anglo-Saxons' conversion. Augustine was told to leave in place whatever of the local rites seemed desirable. During the seventh and early eighth centuries an accelerating missionary activity spread the Roman liturgy through France, Germany and northern Italy. Yet wherever it arrived it became similarly intermixed with local material, and it was not until the mid-eighth century that vigorous measures were taken to impose a purer Roman usage. The change came about not through ecclesiastical initiative but through the practical politics of a pious Frankish monarch. Pepin the Short (714–68) sought to increase unity throughout his domain by imposing the Roman rite. He asked Stephen iii (752–7) for clerics to teach the musical rite, and Stephen's successor Paul i (757–67) sent Roman chant books, an ‘antiphonale et responsale’, presumably without notation.

The Order of the Golden Fleece, a chivalric order that flourished in Burgundy and the Low Countries from 1431 to 1559, has attracted the attention of historians of politics, culture and art since the nineteenth century, but it has been little explored by music historians, who have contented themselves with a mention of the order's existence and with descriptions of one of its more famous, but less characteristic, events: the Feast of the Oath of the Pheasant. Nevertheless, the order had a strong influence on sacred music during the period of its greatest activity, requiring polyphonic music for many of its functions and perhaps commissioning works by such composers as Josquin Desprez and Alexander Agricola. This influence is intimately tied to the structure of the Order of the Golden Fleece and to the desire of the successive sovereigns for ostentatious display when the group met.

In the years since Craig Wright published his study of Du Fay at Cambrai interest in the composer has grown apace. In his recent study of the composer David Fallows has given us a ‘rich harvest of “adjusted” information’ concerning Du Fay's life as well as valuable insights into the music. This study is a continuation of the process of adjusting details in our view of Du Fay's life and his work. It presents new documents and some hypotheses based upon them and upon consideration of the cultural and liturgical traditions that shaped Du Fay's life and his work. I shall start with what is perhaps the most tenuous of these hypotheses because it comes chronologically at the beginning: it concerns the matter of Du Fay's birth date.

‘Nous avons encore d'anciennes Chansons de Thibault, Comte de Champagne, l'homme le plus galant de son siècle, mises en Musique par Guillaume de Machault.’J.-J. Rousseau, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768), p. 81. Rousseau may have been misled by the registration of the manuscripts C and A in seventeenth-century catalogues of the royal library, respectively as: ‘les chansons de Thibault, comte de Champagne, roy de Navarre, mises en musique. Diverses chansons antiennes’ and ‘Les amours de Guillaume de Machaud, en rimes. Poésies de Thibaud, roy de Navarre. La Prise d'Alexandre et autres romans anciens.’ See for these references L. Earp, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (Garland Composer Resource Manuals, 36; New York and London, 1995), pp. 78 and 89. With this naive confusion in his Dictionnaire de musique Jean-Jacques Rousseau was not as far off the mark as it might seem; although Machaut (c. 1300-77) certainly did not set to music entire chansons of his famous predecessor, he did quote several times from chansons by Thibaut (1201-53) as a springboard for his own poetical and musical thoughts.In motets 3, 4, 5 and 15, as will be seen in the following discussion.

Kevin Brownlee's essay is a welcome addition to current studies that apply literary, textual and historical insights to fourteenth-century motets. The opportunity to comment on his paper before publication stimulated these observations; he graciously agreed that I should offer them as a coda.

The twelve extant treatises of Johannes Tinctoris offer a wealth of insight into almost every aspect of fifteenth-century music theory. A graduate of the University of Orléans and a doctor of canon and civil law, Tinctoris was an expert in both the language arts of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and the mathematical arts of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). Such was his erudition that he was extolled by Johannes Trithemius, one of the leading German humanists of the fifteenth century, as ‘a man very learned in all respects, an outstanding mathematician, a musician of the highest rank, of a keen mind, skilled in eloquence’. Given Tinctoris’s towering intellect, it is no surprise that frequent citations from many of the major thinkers of antiquity – Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, Virgil, Cicero and Quintilian – appear in his theoretical discussions on mode, mensural notation and counterpoint.

The tiered structure of Machaut's motets is often taken for granted: the tenor is the lowest voice, the motetus is in the middle, and the triplum is highest. While this is mostly true of Machaut's work and of Ars nova motets more generally, there are a number of significant exceptions – passages in which the upper voices switch roles and the motetus sings at the top of the texture. The most striking of these are consistently linked with the goddess Fortuna. In Motets 12, 14 and 15, moments of voice-crossing serve to illustrate the actions of the goddess, who traditionally raises the low and lowers the high. While they are certainly symbolic, these instances of voice-crossing are also audible: since the voices retain their distinct rhythmic and textual profiles even while their relative ranges are reversed, voice-crossings allow the listener to hear a musical world turned on its head.

When a practical way of recording music in writing was invented in the early ninth century, it defined neither the pitches of specific notes in a melody, nor the intervallic relations between successive notes. Nineteenth-century views of such notations considered them primitive; more recent descriptions have recognised that precise pitch notation was not a basic aim. But how did ninth-century neumatic notations deal with pitch, and, if the role of memory was not usurped by written records, what role did notation fulfil? In this study, the interaction of memory and writing is explored. Notations written by a French and by a German scribe (F-La MS 239 and S-SG MS 359) are seen to follow different strategies for the arrangement of signs above the text, striking divergent visual balances between pitch information and the text–music link. In each notation the reader is led along a path of recall, with more or less emphatic written signals provided as required.

The Rule of St Benedict (c. 520) mentions a cantor only once. The celebrated twelfth-century Liber ordinis, a book of monastic regulations compiled at the Abbey of St Victor in Paris, requires several folios to outline all the duties of the cantor's office. During the six centuries separating these two sources, the monastic cantor had become one of the most important persons in the religious community: he supervised all aspects of music-making, he was in charge of the library and the scriptorium, and he oversaw and directed the celebration of the liturgy. Yet even though the cantor had a crucial role in the performance and transmission of medieval liturgical music, very little scholarly attention has been given to his office. This study offers some theories concerning the evolution of the cantor's office, and a description of that office during the late eleventh century, the period in which it reached its zenith. Many issues will be raised that, it is hoped, will suggest directions for further research.

This is a preliminary study of how what we call pitch was conceptualised in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Its central concern is with vocally conceived, contrapuntally based polyphony around 1500, and our notational access to it. It does not deal directly with monophony (which only rarely compels a distinction between relative and fixed sounds) or with instrumental music and tablatures (which, for practical reasons, had to work with a preselected repertory of sounds). It attempts to combine some realities of performance with the testimony of contemporary theorists.

Around 1600, students in France learnt to read with printed primers. They began with the letters of the alphabet, learning them by playing with little wooden or cardboard tablets or picking them out of books, and then moved on to syllables, which were learnt from syllabaries printed in large letters and containing the Pater noster, Ave Maria, Credo, Confiteor and the Benedicite. When they began to spell out whole words, children moved on to another syllabary containing the Magnificat, the Nunc Dimittis, Salve Regina, the Seven Penitential Psalms and the litanies of the Saints, all of them common prayers. Two pages from Jacques Cossard's Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a escripre, chanter le plain chant, et compter (Paris, 1633) can give us some idea of what these early modern primers looked like (see Figures 1–2). In the first lesson the text of the Pater noster is broken into syllables, whereas in the second lesson the students must discern the syllables of the Ave Maria themselves, a task aided by the small numbers Cossard has placed beneath the text to show how many letters should be read together as a syllable.

The development of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sacred polyphony is linked closely not only to the Mass and divine services of the Roman Catholic Church, but equally to the rise of lay devotional congregations who sponsored their own services, often musically elaborate, at private chapels and altars. Within this popular phenomenon of lay devotion in the Low Countries, several northern confraternities can be cited for their very early regular use of polyphony. A polyphonic Salve service was established in 1362 by the Marian confraternity at St Goedele in Brussels, and Reinhard Strohm has shown that, by 1396, the Marian Guild of the Dry Tree (Ghilde vanden droghen Boome) in Bruges sponsored weekly masses sung in polyphony by its guild members. That polyphony was central to some fourteenth-century confraternity services is confirmed by the records of the Illustrious Confraternity of Our Lady in 's-Hertogenbosch, founded in 1318 in St John's Church.

How did Latin neumes begin? And what developments lie between those beginnings and the first plentiful documents of neuming which date from about 900? A long line of speculations has failed to produce generally credited answers to these questions. Figure 1 shows a stemma by Joseph Froger that can serve as orientation to the problem. This does not address ultimate origins. Its ‘original’ is the archetypal neumation of the Frankish–‘Gregorian’ mass propers, a lost formation compiled some time after neumatic beginnings. It goes on to the regional neume-species of 900, all ostensible outgrowths of that archetype: Ept – German; Cla – north Italian; Clu – Cluny; Dij – Burgundian; Den – St Denis; Lan – Lorraine or ‘Metz’; Mur 3 – St Gall or ‘Alammanian’; Cha – Breton; Alb – Aquitanian; Ben – south Italian/Beneventan. Between the unknown ‘original’ and the multiple neume-species around 900 an obscure evolution takes place. There is, in Froger's words, ‘une sorte de nuée opaque… [une] zone brumeuse’.

Early-fifteenth-century music seems to be different from that of previous ages not only in that it contains new stylistic elements, but also in the way in which its novelty was brought about. Perotinus composed in a more advanced style than Leoninus, Philippe de Vitry superseded Petrus de Cruce: in such cases a renewal takes place within a tradition, or even a ‘school’, which may be unrelated to the state of music-making in other areas. The novelties introduced in the music of certain centres (which were emphasised by the musicians who belonged to these centres), could then spread to other areas and affect more traditionally minded musicians elsewhere. A distinction between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, between ‘creation’ and ‘distribution’ can be suggested, although it may have to be modified by assuming polycentrism, that is, several centres, and several networks of distribution.

In 1957 Nino Pirrotta expressed his view of Palestrina's music and the Tridentine reforms as follows:

The composers were directed to avoid too open an intrusion of secular elements, and to preserve the comprehensibility of the text so far as possible. That the latter would have been attainable through the avoidance of canons and other developed contrapuntal procedures (Animuccia, preface to Laude, Libro ii, 1570) is only in part true, if the noteworthy complexity of Palestrina's polyphonic composition is taken into account. In fact the problem had to be solved more from the spiritual than from the purely technical side. The true contribution of Palestrina and some of his contemporaries (e.g. de Kerle and Animuccia) to its solution — dramatised in anecdotes which do not withstand historical criticism — consists in the deep and inner religiosity which his works unquestionably express. This religiosity, joined to the responsibility for interpreting the official attitude of the Church, influenced the style in that it led to extreme circumspection in taking up the new means of emphasis and expression, be it because they had arisen from secular music (above all after the rise of the madrigal) or because they seemed incompatible with the restraint becoming to the divine service (since they tended towards the description and expression of personal feelings).

In 1450 Giovanni Rucellai, a Florentine visitor to Rome, counted 1022 inns ‘with signboards’, and a quantity of other hostelries. For centuries, Rome had been a magnet that drew the faithful by the tens of thousands to its venerable walls. The reason, of course, was that it was the ancestral home of the Holy See – the centre of the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Although urbs Roma could not boast of this honour throughout the entire Middle Ages, by the middle of the fifteenth century, with the reign of Nicholas V, the Holy See was securely re-established at Rome, never to depart again.

The flood of religious pilgrims to the Holy City, during Jubilee years and at other times, certainly accounted for a large part of the crowds of visitors to Rome. It is not, however, the Rome of the pilgrim that will concern us here, but the city that housed the papal Curia, the vast bureaucracy established to assist the pontiff with the temporal and spiritual responsibilities of his office. Thousands of petitioners came to Rome not to seek plenary indulgence but to secure for themselves a particular and specific papal Grace.