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.

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 earliest operas are few, and their history is a history of particulars: of the interests of individual Renaissance humanists; of the ways in which certain musicians sang; of the development of Italian poetry for music; and of the theatrical traditions within which the new genre was accepted and propagated. Recent music history has tended to stress the sixteenth-century antecedents for these aspects of opera, without forgetting, however, that the common inspiration for Dafne, Anima e Corpo and Euridice – as well as for some earlier Florentine intermedi – was the desire to emulate the effects of the music of the ancient Greeks and Romans. In Florence this was realised at the granducal court with the help of its satellite circles of educated nobles. In Rome, knowledge of the ancients was the province of professional scholars, the priests and religious who taught in the seminaries and colleges, and for whom Seneca and Terence would have been more familiar fare than Tasso and Guarini. Thus after Cavalieri staged his Rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo under the auspices of the Oratorians, it is not surprising that the next Roman musical drama is a carnival school play given by boys and composed by their professor. In Rome, furthermore, the princes and prelates of the Church exercised their tastes for fine literature with transformations of Pindar and Horace designed to inspire Christian devotion.

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.

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.

This article presents descriptions of four newly discovered sources of English late-medieval polyphony. Three concern music for the celebration of Mass; the fourth expands the known repertory of Latin and vernacular carols.