Using well-known texts by Augustine, Jacques de Liège and Guido of Arezzo, this article tries to show that, despite prior misunderstandings, medieval authors of music theory considered it a given that sensuous pleasure was the ultimate goal of music. Only by way of anachronistic readings of the sources have historians constructed an aesthetics that blended aesthetics with mathematical and theological ideas. A close reading of the sources, taking into account their cultural contexts, reveals the intentions of the authors that are at the root of the texts. Those intentions, it is argued, were not aesthetical, and any attempt to interpret them from such a perspective would be misleading. Yet careful consideration of those intentions opens the view for remarks that are truly aesthetical as well as for hints suggesting that aesthetical judgements, while self-evident, were not considered matters for written discourse but for orality.

Included in the collection of cantiones and Benedicamus tropes copied at the end of the Moosburger Graduale (München, Universitätsbibliothek, CIM 100 [olim 2o Cod. ms. 156], ff. 30v–250v) are five songs attributed to ‘Johannes Decanus’ (Johannes de Perchausen, †15.VIII.1362). In his preface to the song collection, Johannes describes three distinct repertoires (those ‘sung from antiquity’, ‘a few modern songs’ and ‘some of my own [songs]’) and through the examination of concordances it is possible to sort the songs into each of Johannes's categories. Against this background, three of Johannes's songs (Mos florentis venustatis, Flos campi profert lilium and Ad cultum tue laudis) demonstrate the consistent use of melodic rhyme, internal repetition of phrase units in both the verses and the refrains, and clear modal centring, found in most of the other Latin songs in the Moosburg collection. Two songs (Castis psallamus mentibus, and his Benedicamus trope, Florizet vox dulcisonans), however, represent a radical departure from these ‘norms’, through the unusual structuring of their melodies. These anomalous songs may reflect Johannes's desire to stretch the training and musicality of the young students of the Moosburg church with more modern melodic concepts.

The cantus project, begun more than twenty years ago, provides observations about medieval musical sources for the Office and the melodies they contain in a web-based, freely available format. The record for a single chant has always contained information about the feast to which it belongs, its placement within that feast, its text, its mode and its appearance. Owing to the recent introduction of the music font Volpiano into cantus records, information regarding pitch is now also available. Wherever feasible, records now include melodic incipits encoded as strings of letters and dashes which appear as note-heads on a five-line staff in Volpiano font. Melodic incipits increase the appeal of cantus as a research tool.