At the heart of the biography of Guillaume de Machaut as currently understood there lies an inconsistency so great as almost to present a paradox, for it seems irreconcilable with the evident content of his surviving output of musical works. From 1338 until his death in 1377 Machaut possessed a canonry and prebend of the cathedral and metropolitan church of Our Lady of Reims. Conventionally it has been assumed that soon after his receipt of this benefice, and certainly by 1340, he had taken up residence within one of the prebendal mansions located in or near the precinct of the cathedral, and that he made this his permanent domicile for the remainder of his adult life – a period little short of forty years.

William Byrd's Gradualia is a collection of polyphonic Mass propers and related pieces, 109 items in all, covering the major feast days of the Roman liturgy as well as a number of votive Masses and miscellanea. Byrd published it in two volumes, the first in 1605 and the second in 1607. The ink was barely dry on Gradualia I when the Gunpowder Plot was revealed, an event which understandably soured the English market for Catholic books. Gradualia II appeared some eighteen months later, with a pointed remark in the dedicatory preface that these pieces had been ‘long since completed by me and given to the press’ (iamdudum a me peractas, ac Prelo commissas) – the unspoken complaint being that Byrd was either forced to delay publication in self-defence or held off by a nervous printer.

Most music historians would probably have little trouble accounting for the normative formal principles of a fourteenth-century rondeau or isorhythmic motet. A topic that has occasioned much less notice, however, is the question of formal articulation in the parallel corpus of liturgical works produced in no small quantity through to the end of the century, from the Tournai Mass to the earliest layer of works contained in fifteenth-century sources such as Bologna Q 15. What relatively little the scholarly literature offers on this subject has tended to portray the composition of masses either as being wholly derivative of secular forms (the typical view), or at best as reflecting some sort of murky attempt at through-composition.

Sopra i sedili di questo coro vi sono due pergoli di marmo uno per lato, posti sotto due volti piccioli uno sopra l'altro, i quali formano, anco nelle braccia per traverso, la Chiesa in tre navi con mirabile, & inesplicabile architettura. In questi veggonsi sei quadri d'historie, tre per pergolo, scolpite in bronzo con bellissimo artificio da Giacomo Sansovino.

In 1550 Antonio Gardano's printing shop issued a collection of psalms entitled Di Adriano et di Jachet: I Salmi appartinenti alli vesperi per tutte le feste dell'anno, parte a versi & parte spezzadi accomodati da cantare a uno & duoi Chori. Half of the works included were compositions for eight voices, designated for cori spezzati. Composed by Adrian Willaert (c. 1490–1562), maestro di cappella at St Mark's from 1527 until his death, they are the first published salmi spezzati known to us. The performance of Vespers psalms in polyphony was reserved for particularly important moments in St Mark's liturgical calendar, and both of the main ceremonial books in use at the basilica, the Rituum ecclesiasticorum caerimoniale (1564) of Bartolomeo Bonifacio and the Ceremoniale magnum sive Raccolta universale di tutte le ceremonie spettanti alla ducal regia cappella di San Marco (1678) of Giovanni Pace, include precise instructions concerning the performance of Vespers by two choirs on specific days of the year.

One of the most famous – and unusual – carnival songs from Renaissance Florence is ‘Dolor, pianto e penitentia’, variously entitled Carro della morte, Trionfo della morte, Canzona de' morti, or Canzone a ballo della morte. Unlike the majority of Florentine canti carnascialeschi, it is a spiritual text, so resembling a lauda spirituale that the Dominican Serafino Razzi and others could include it virtually unchanged in collections of laude. Shortly after its performance, its text was published in Florence, probably towards the end of the first decade of the Cinquecento, in the chapbook titled La canzona de' morti. This small pamphlet also included a woodcut depiction of the carro (Figure 1) and four other texts, all equally penitential: Castellano Castellani's Lauda della morte, ‘Cuor maligno e pien di fraude’, modelled on the Dies irae; a Sonetto di messer Castellano, ‘Voi che guardate a questi morti intorno’; a Canzona del carro del travaglio, ‘Perché el tempo dà e toglie’; and a lauda, ‘O mondana sapienza’, which closely imitates ‘Dolor, pianto e penitentia’, including even the word ‘penitenza’ at the end of each stanza.

In the early seventeenth century many Lutheran composers produced music in printed pamphlets for weddings, funerals and other ceremonies. Johann Hermann Schein, Thomas-Kantor in Leipzig, said that he composed and performed pieces for ‘various occasions’, admitting that some had been ‘completed in haste’. At least eighty-eight pieces by Schein survive in pamphlets from his tenure of the Thomas-Kantorate between 1616 and 1630, and more such pieces are known to be lost. Other musicians in Leipzig such as Georg Engelmann and Samuel Michael wrote occasional pieces at a lesser rate, as did students from the university. And this repertory of occasional music was but part of the vast quantity of printed ephemera from the period, including thousands of poems, sermons and orations.