oa Form and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Music: Problems, Fallacies, New Directions

What did it mean to have a real-time experience of polyphonic music in the fifteenth century? Given a dearth of documentary evidence about listening practices and an abundance of through-composed works lacking in large-scale repetition, what can we say about how listeners heard musical ‘form’? To approach these questions this essay reasons by analogy with other artworks, contemporary descriptions of which can offer a model for talking about music. Focusing on mass settings by Du Fay and Josquin, the article imagines a kind of analytical discourse that must have orbited polyphonic works, while at the same time addressing head-on the evidentiary lacunae and methodological pitfalls that confront us today. The essay tells a story about what it meant for a certain kind of listener to hear music by Du Fay and Josquin, and proposes that our best hope of accessing fifteenth-century musical experiences lies in immersive engagement with the details of compositional practice.