Based on principles found in fourteenth-century counterpoint treatises, this study divides Machaut's balades with four voices into three groups according to their performance possibilities. The pieces of group 1 (Se quanque amours, Il mest avis, De toutes flours, and Quant theseus/Ne quier) can be performed either in all four parts or in three parts by omitting the triplum. Group 2 (De petit po and De Fortune plus Vg's redaction of Se quanque amours) includes those pieces that can be performed in three parts with either contratenor or triplum but not with all four parts. Pieces in this group are often found with all four parts copied together, thus highlighting the difference between the presentation of a piece in the sources and its performance options. The pieces in group 3 (En amer and Dame de qui) are less clearly delimited in their performance possibilities.

John Dunstaple's reputation as the most famous English composer of the Middle Ages has stood almost unchallenged since his death. Two epitaphs attributed to one of his patrons, John Wheathamstead, Abbot of St Albans between 1420–40 and 1452–64, give him equal credit as a mathematician and astronomer (or rather, astrologer). Dunstaple was evidently proficient in the quadrivial arts of music, astronomy and mathematics (arithmetic and geometry), but only his musical activities have been thoroughly explored. At least two books that were in his library may provide hints about the level of his attainment in mathematics and astronomy. One is a fascicle within another volume that carries the often quoted ‘Iste libellus pertinebat Johanni Dunstaple cum duci Bedfordie musico’. The other and more extensive of the two manuscripts, Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS 70, contains treatises on astronomy and astrology by standard authors in various hands. Some of these have what must be a scribal signature (often in the form ‘deo gratias quod Dunstaple’), apparently signalling his own hand for those treatises. If this is indeed the case, we have dozens of folios of closely written Dunstaple autograph and several signatures. His copy of the older astrological treatise by Bartholomew of Parma is copiously illustrated by excellent line-drawings of zodiacal signs and constellations. If these drawings are also in his hand (and they are harmonious with the surrounding script), we must add fine draughtsmanship to his known accomplishments.

The feast of the Crown of Thorns was one of the most important and enduring among the numerous cults that arose in medieval times, focusing on the supposed relics of Christ's Passion. As such, the feast provided the stimulus for the wide dissemination of a succession of liturgies, often with sections in picturesque devotional language. Very few sources of these liturgies survive complete with music. One of them, Liverpool University Library manuscript F.4.13, a 14th-century antiphoner from Pisa, is the principal subject of the present article. The Liverpool manuscript contains what we believe to be the only extant complete text with music of this version of both Office and Mass. As will become clear, the version is neither of the two commonest extant offices, which are Parisian and Dominican respectively; instead, it appears to reproduce an earlier and fuller form of the Dominican office than can be found in other Dominican books. We examine the texts and music of the Liverpool manuscript, together with associated evidence, and provide a discussion of the history of the feast and its special promotion by the Dominican order.

The present bibliography was originally compiled to provide a basis for my research into the relationship between words and music and the social context of the medieval European planctus. The planctus, a lament normally written at the death of an important historical, biblical or classical personage, or at the destruction of a city, has featured prominently in discussions about the development of liturgical drama and the possible origins of the Passion play; in studies of funeral verse; and in histories of the interrelation of European verse and musical forms. The relationship between the Marienklage and German Passion plays, the sequence and lai characteristics of Abelard's six planctus and the melodic style of the sequence melody planctus cygni have to some extent been studied by both musical and literary scholars. It has not, however, been possible to estimate the significance of these three issues in the history of either the planctus or of medieval monophonic song, since the planctus has never before been considered as a whole, in a comparative study which investigates both words and music. In fact, it has never been established that the planctus constitutes a genre in the first place, in what way this might be, and whether the surprisingly numerous musical settings which survive are composed in a consistent style.

After listening to reports from two observers sent to Vietnam, Kennedy responded with a question. ‘Did you two both go to the same country?’ The reader may ask the same of the two editions to be reviewed here. Each consists of two volumes, all of the same trim size and thickness; but one set is red, the other blue, and the differences go on from there. It is necessary to reassure the reader that both concern the same four documents said to contain ‘Aquitanian polyphony’, and in addition one document known as the ‘Codex Calixtinus’ – more precisely the Liber Sancti Iacobi (of Compostela). The contents include a determinate number of musical compositions, in an indeterminate number of variant versions, all dated to the twelfth century, in France.

In many surviving thirteenth-century romances, short segments of lyric poetry, called ‘refrains’ by present-day scholars, interrupt the narrative with the implication of song. In the romance Renart le nouvel, attributed to Jacquemart Giélée (fl. 1290), refrains take their place among a wide variety of literary registers and forms. Renart le nouvel is a late derivative of a long and international tradition of adapting, elaborating and making reference to the stories from the Roman de Renart. The Roman de Renart refers to a collection of approximately fifteen Old French verse narratives, written between 1174 and 1205, that recount the exploits of the cunning fox Renart and various other anthropomorphized members of the animal kingdom.

This article investigates the methods of elaboration used in making organum at the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Its aim is to show how and why tripla and quadrupla came to be composed as an expression of their cultural context and to investigate conditions determining the elaboration of these virtuosic pieces destined for the celebration of the greatest feasts in the new cathedral.

The changes in the chant and liturgy which took place in northern Europe during the eighth and ninth centuries affected not only those portions of the rite based on biblical texts, but also included modifications of portions using non-biblical texts. These texts were generally in the form of poetry or rhythmic prose – such as the hymns of the office, processional chants for Sundays and feast days between Terce and Mass, and (in the ninth century) the sequence following the alleluia of the mass.

Johannes de Garlandia is one of the most important theorists of measurable music during the thirteenth century, yet the study of his writings has always been frustrated by a problematic biographical situation. Not only is the history of manuscript transmission and attribution regarding Johannes de Garlandia's writings complicated, but both Johannes and de Garlandia were popular and common names in medieval Paris, where the theorist is thought to have lived.

The study of the medieval motet in France has recently been rejuvenated, in part by returning to the motet's point of origin – its tenor. Some scholars have focused on the tenor's pitch content, showing how it shapes the motet's harmonies, and how it is in turn shaped by local chant variants; others, by considering the tenor's text and the origin of that text in the liturgy and frequently in the Bible, have shown the motet to be perhaps the quintessential musical manifestation of medieval intertextuality. By bringing together sacred and secular, Latin and vernacular, the motet, better than any other musical genre, exemplifies both the Boethian ideal of music as something much larger than sound and the interconnectedness of all things in the medieval mind. The discovery of hitherto unknown chant sources for motet tenors is therefore an opportunity to reinterpret the texts of the motets they underpin.

The discovery of a musical source is always something of an event. This volume of keyboard music dated 1540 and printed in Lisbon was discovered – appropriately for an Iberian source – in 1992 by Alejandro Iglesias who announced his find at a conference held at the Institution ‘Fernando el Católico’ in Zaragoza in the autumn of that year. It was heralded in the Castilian rhetorical style as the ‘discovery of the century’, and it provided a moment of high drama, especially when it became clear from Iglesias's brief description of the source that it included works by Franco-Netherlandish composers such as Josquin, Ockeghem, Compère, Agricola, Caron and Obrecht. The volume is indeed of considerable interest, not only because it offers keyboard intabulations of previously unknown works by both Franco-Netherlandish and Spanish composers, but also because it is the earliest surviving source of keyboard music from the Iberian peninsula and a rare example of printed instrumental music from the first half of the sixteenth century. Manuel Carlos de Brito, making an assessment of Renaissance Portuguese music in 1989, was perfectly justified in thinking that new music sources were unlikely to appear, and that lack of musical texts to confirm or refute the historical context suggested by documents would limit the history of Portuguese music to the realms of speculation. This discovery, surprising though it is, rescues something from that shadowy kingdom.

On 29 June 1909, a jury of six scholars decreed that Pierre Aubry (1874–1910), in his book Trouvères et Troubadours, had stolen the ‘modal’ interpretation of medieval monophony from the young doctor Jean-Baptiste Beck (1881–1943). Aubry was to make amends for his plagiarism in two ways: first, by destroying copies of the book's first edition and issuing an emended one; second, by publishing the trial's verdict in twenty scholarly journals at his own cost. An only slightly emended Trouvères et Troubadours did appear the following year (1910), but Aubry failed to publish the jury's verdict in a single journal. A little over a year after the trial, in August of 1910, he died of a fencing wound. The following year, Beck emigrated to the United States.

A model for the Roman liturgical order for processions on Sundays was Easter, the festal day described in Ordo Romanus I, rather than the preceding Sunday, perhaps a more obvious pattern for a procession within the Proprium de tempore.Michel Andrieu, ed., Les Ordines Romani du haut Moyen Age, 5 vols. (Louvain, 1931, 1948–61) II, 68–9, Ordo I, 5: ‘nam prima feria regio tertia, id est paschae, secunda feria’, etc. ; I, 7: ‘Diebus itaque sollemnibus, id est Pascha’. ‘Id est’ might be interpreted ‘for example’. Note that Easter is only one example of the papal processional procedures found only in this ordo. See John F. Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 228 (Rome, 1987), 131–2. The present study originated as a paper for the session ‘Music for Festal Days’ at the 34th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May, 1999. The singing by the Hebrew people of Hosanna and Benedictus qui venit to acclaim the one progressing into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday would seem to be the ideal archetype for a procession with song to replicate a biblical event, reported uniformly in all four Gospels.Matt. 21:8–9; Mark 11:8–10, Luke 19:36–8 (with different wording); John 12:12–13. The Old Testament presaging of Benedictus is Psalm 117:26. The visual replay with the symbols of olive branches and palm fronds and the commemorative Palmesel, integral to the procession, have been studied in critical detail by Karl Young and many who have followed in the wake of his pathbreaking The Drama of the Medieval Church. Much of the music has been expertly studied by Terence Bailey. On musical and prayer formularies from the typikon and early Western patristic citations (i.e. Bede, Aldhelm, Amalarius and Drogo of Metz), see Hermann J. Gräf, Palmenweihe und Palmprozession in der lateinischen Liturgie (Kaldenkirchen, 1950), 10–15, 30–2. See also Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1962), I: 90–8, 519, 527, 533, 549; Terence Bailey, The Processions of Sarum and the Western Church (Toronto, 1971), 33–40 (Examples 6–14); 166–7 (Table 2). (The acclamation Benedictus qui venit–Hosanna in excelsis that follows the Sanctus of the Mass precluded movement by its position within the liturgy.) By the time of the pilgrim Egeria, who visited Jerusalem in the early 380s, the commemoration of the Evangelists' historiae had engendered a meeting at the very spot where in biblical times infants, strewing palms sang the celebrated Benedictus verse, now converted into a refrain.‘Et jam cum coeperit esse hora undecima [die dominica] legitur ille locus de evangelio, ubi infantes cum ramis vel palmis occurrerunt Domino, dicentes: Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Et statim levat se episcopus et omnis populus; porro inde de summo monte Oliveti totum pedibus itur. Nam totus populus ante ipsum cum hymnis vel antiphonis, respondentes semper; Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini’. [Peregrinatio ad loca sancta] Itinerarium 31, 1, ed. Pierre Maraval, Egérie: Journal de Voyage, Sources Chrétiennes 296 (Paris, 1982), 274; trans. John Wilkinson, Egeria's Travels to the Holy Land (Jerusalem, 1981), 133. Other translations and descriptive material are found in Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources, rev. and trans. William G. Storey and Niels Krogh Rasmussen (Washington, DC, 1986), 11. On the date of Egeria's report, see Peter Jeffery, ‘The Earliest Christian Chant Repertory Recovered: The Georgian Witnesses to Jerusalem Chant’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 47/1 (1994), 2–3. Perhaps a half-century before, Chrysostom (Homilia habita in magnum hebdomadam 2) had allied the Hosanna exclamation with the exhortation ‘Praise the Lord, O my soul!’ of Psalm 145. See James McKinnon, ed., Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge, 1987), 83 (no. 175); cf. Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (Collegeville, MN, 1991), 186. For the Palm Sunday agendas according to other Eastern practices (e.g., Armenian, Georgian and the Anastasis Typikon) see Baldovin, The Urban Character, 77, 80–1, 98.

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus. MS 3154 folios 47v–48r preserves the unique text of Busnois' motet In hydraulis, reproduced by D. Plamenac in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart IX Tafel 116.

Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut.29.1 (F) is considered the earliest extant manuscript to preserve a collection of motets, with two fascicles devoted to this new genre. Scholars have long emphasised the strict liturgical sequence of the first motet fascicle, in contrast to the seeming lack of order in the second. This article engages with questions of liturgical arrangement in F, exploring the possibility of a liturgical function for motets in this source. It undertakes a re-examination of the ordering of motets in F, proposing two new organisational principles applicable across both fascicles: first, that the arrangement of motets may have been influenced by an awareness of related clausulae and discant materials extant elsewhere in F; and second, that ordering of the collection reflects the relative dissemination or ‘popularity’ of motets and their related materials.

Friedrich Ludwig's appointment in medieval music at the University of Straßburg came at a crucial time for German musicology, then a new discipline in a flourishing academic environment. Upon entering his post at Straßburg in the autumn of 1905, Ludwig delivered a formal lecture, here translated, in which he outlined the goals for twentieth-century medieval musicology. While many of these goals, in particular the editing of certain theorists and late medieval repertories, have been achieved, other directions implied in Ludwig's synthetic approach have received less attention. Ludwig's own musicology was a creative combination of forces: on the one hand, a reaction to earlier French scholarship in archaeology and philology; on the other, a borrowing of recent German trends in historiography, philosophy and music. Most notable is the influence of Ranke and Hegel on Ludwig's then new concept of latent rhythm (i.e., ‘modal rhythm’) in medieval music. A century of scholarship later, Ludwig's vision for musicology as an innovative interdisciplinary conjunction has much to teach us.

This article traces the early reception of Ludovicus Decus Regnantium, the most common Proper Office for Saint Louis, King of France, canonized in 1297. It is generally considered a Dominican Office thought to have been produced on commission by the Dominican, Arnaud DuPrat, after his Order instituted Louis’ feast day. A number of factors confuse this attribution, including the existence of an earlier, rare Office for Louis, Nunc Laudare. A close examination of the extant evidence for the attribution and early reception of the Office leads to the conclusion that the Office was not celebrated by most, or even many, of the Dominican convents in France. It can thus be better understood in its Parisian and royal milieu within the context of the close relationship between the royal court of Philip the Fair (r. 1285–1314) and the Dominican convent of the Rue St-Jacques in Paris.

One theory of the origin, development and structure of the chant repertoire is that the thousands of individual pieces in it arose from the adaptation of new texts to a small number of melodies, or melodic ‘themes’. First put forward by Gevaert, this theory, which will be referred to here as the thematic theory, has, in different forms, been the basis of studies of the transmission of antiphons, and is now being applied to the repertories of Old-Roman and Ambrosian chant. The main demonstration of the validity of the theory must take place, of course, in studies of the repertoire itself; we shall be convinced if musical and liturgical evidence supports the idea of adaptation and suggests a chronological development. It is nevertheless important to examine music-historical witnesses ancillary to the chant repertoire, for it is often the case that related documents reveal something unexpected about the main repertoire, or serve as a means of confirming points for which evidence is lacking.

No bibliographical information has survived regarding the anonymous treatise Capitulum de vocibus applicatis verbis, the only treatise of the Trecento that provides a description of the musical genres of Italian secular music. The problem of dating the Capitulum is the more challenging for scholars, given the absence of unequivocal points of reference of known date (the presently accepted dating, since Debenedetti’s first description of the source in 1906, is ‘between the years 1313–1332’). The Capitulum and Antonio da Tempo’s Summa artis rithmici vulgaris dictaminis (1332), are connected by the phrase ‘nova sunt pulchritudine decorata’, which appears in the final section of the Capitulum and at the very beginning of da Tempo’s Summa. The original source of this phrase, which does not appear in any other medieval source, is the Constitutio Omnem, a letter written by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I (527–65) on 16 December 533. Antonio da Tempo, who was a judge in Padua, was evidently the first to extract this quotation (with a slight change in the word order) from Justinian’s Constitutio for use in his treatise on poetic forms. For his part, the author of the Capitulum, apparently a simple teacher of grammar and music, took the statement ‘nova sunt’ not directly from Justinian’s Constitutio, but verbatim from da Tempo’s Summa, a source that was closer to his field of professional activity. Therefore, it can be concluded that the Capitulum was compiled not at the beginning of the Trecento but after 1332, the year in which da Tempo completed his Summa.