In the second decade of the sixteenth century some musicians began to tire of teleologies. Chapter 15 describes a “new sonorousness” that would soon flourish in music by composers such as Jean Richafort and Adrian Willaert. Whereas their settings of the Pater noster embrace continuous musical flow, Josquin’s reaches new heights in projecting an esthetics of opposition.

In a passage in his famous Art of Counterpoint (1477) devoted to the widely diffused concept of varietas, Johannes Tinctoris offers a prototheory of musical pacing and flow. Chapter 3 surveys the terms that for Tinctoris underpin this concept before describing how a modern tendency to make too much of the false friends varietas/variety has impeded our understanding.

Powerful conclusions are central to the esthetic world this book describes. Many pieces trade on the so-called drive to the cadence; others feature deliberate ratchetings down. This chapter discusses seven heterogeneous examples, each extraordinary in its own right: songs by Johannes Okeghem and the little-known Malcort, a motet by Johannes Regis, and mass music by Jacob Obrecht, Josquin des Prez, Alexander Agricola, and an anonymous composer.

We all know what early music is supposed to sound like – or at least we have good reasons to think we do. The modern performance tradition has established a remarkably resilient sonic imaginary that can be indexed as easily as by calling to mind a hooded monk bathed in ethereal light or one of Botticelli’s beflowered maidens. Chapter 16 connects performance instructions from a little-known musical edition of the 1840s with prevailing performance norms today, arguing that we moderns have tended to conceal the musical poetics described in this book by neglecting documentary evidence about tempo, acoustics, timbre, and the somewhat slipperier “intensity.” However scary, resetting our esthetic compasses and engaging more empathetically with the past can have the side benefit of making our present-day sounds more inviting and more inclusive. The book concludes by offering a path out of elitism, anachronism, and inhibition and toward full-blooded engagement.

Chapter 13 identifies a special kind of Osanna setting that surfaces in music by Antoine Busnoys and clusters in masses by Josquin des Prez. Characterized by a kind of breathless energy, these “hurricane” Osannas are compelling on their own and as they relate to the rest of the formally tumultuous Sanctus.