Journal of the Alamire Foundation

The sources of song to survive from thirteenth-century Britain are difficult to interpret. None is properly a ‘songbook’; rather, all the manuscripts are of mixed contents, in which music forms only a small part of the total. In some cases, songs were added to these books in spaces left blank after the original contents had been compiled, but in others the songs were present from the earliest stages of copying, jostling incongruously beside a range of texts, including sermons and other preaching materials, and historical and hagiographical items. From the point of view of mise-en-page these sources raise special questions, because their pages were frequently not designed from the outset to incorporate music, and existing layouts and rulings had to be adapted for the songs. Furthermore, a scribe copying only a few songs in a book otherwise devoted to unnotated texts had no opportunity to develop consistent approaches to matters of musical layout or notation, so these sources offer a unique perspective on the scribal decision-making process. Through a case-study of London, British Library, Arundel Ms. 248, this paper explores what we can learn of how such song sources were compiled and prepared, and the implications of this evidence for our understanding of how they were used.

Many music manuscripts surviving from the period c. 1460-1530 in Italy are adorned by some level of decoration. Such decoration has often proved helpful in connecting manuscripts to particular patrons and institutions, and in suggesting the ways in which a manuscript may have been used. In this article I suggest that, by reconstructing some of the visual habits and assumptions that musicians in Renaissance Italy would have shared, it is possible to address a different kind of question: the relationship between visual decoration and the act of reading music from a manuscript. With the help of case studies, I will argue that visual decoration had the capacity to intervene in musical performances undertaken from a manuscript, shaping aspects of their character and quality.

The manuscripts created in the workshop of Petrus Alamire engaged the efforts of some of the best Flemish artists and workshops of the period. Recently, these illuminations have rightly begun to garner significant attention. This article studies the unusual case of Jena, Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Ms. 4. This manuscript is the largest and most ambitious of the Alamire manuscripts, indicating that it served a special function or was created to commemorate a particular occasion. Its series of portraits focussing on the links between the families of the Holy Roman Emperor and the English monarch have puzzled scholars trying to date the manuscript. At least three artists contributed to its completion: one from the workshop of Simon Bening; another from the workshop of the Master of James IV of Scotland; and the Master of the David Scenes in the Grimani Breviary. A careful consideration of the manuscript’s codicology, iconography, secondary decoration, and division of hands help date the manuscript and reveal a distinct change in the manuscript’s plan during its production. This in turn sheds light on its original intended owner and the circumstances under which it was initially created.

In a 1532 letter to Pietro Aron, Giovanni Spataro cites an unusual ligature in the Tenor of the Patrem in Isaac’s Missa de Je ne fays’. The mass, probably based on Gilles Mureau’s famous chanson Je ne fays plus, has up to now been considered lost. This study identifies Mureau’s chanson as the model of an anonymous Missa Sine nomine in the Kodex Leopold (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus. ms. 3154), and demonstrates that this is mass is identical to that described by Spataro: although the manuscript abandons the unusual ligature, it preserves its rhythm and melody, resulting in errors consistent with Spataro’s identification. Shared stylistics with Isaac’s Missae Argentum et aurum and Et trop penser and his motet Salve regina strongly favour Isaac’s authorship of the mass. The article also considers stylistic features that align the mass with works of Isaac’s thought to be early, as well as with pieces by his German contemporaries Fulda and Finck, and with Obrecht. All features taken together argue for adding this Missa Je ne fay plus to Isaac’s canon with confidence and suggest that it belongs to an early period of his career. This conclusion raises the question of whether it is possible to differentiate between career-long stylistic traits and those from different periods in Isaac’s works.

The importance of an oral and aural understanding of counterpoint in the fifteenth century has been widely recognized by both scholars and performers of early music. In this essay I reflect on the way I have attempted to ‘reconstruct’ an itinerary for teaching the skill of extemporizing simple two- and three-voice types of fifteenth-century counterpoint, based on a close reading of Guillelmus Monachus’s treatise De preceptis artis musicae and a comparative analysis of extant compositions. De preceptis informs us that the learning of counterpoint can start from the singing of simple parallels in imperfect consonances, called gymel. These gymels can be combined into different types of simple three-voice counterpoint (fauxbourdon) or in a horizontal way, alternating between different parallels. To this technique of ‘mixed gymel’ elements of fourteenth- and fifteenth- century discantus teaching, such as singing by neighbouring consonances, may be added to achieve a freer type of counterpoint.