Jean des Murs and the Three Libelli on Music in BnF lat. 7378A: A Preliminary Report

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Desmond
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Preliminary Report ◽  
San Lorenzo ◽  
Ars Nova

Within the mid-fourteenth century Parisian manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, latin 7378A, three as yet unedited music treatises are found, copied in a tiny, highly abbreviated script in a section of the manuscript devoted mostly to the music treatises of Jean des Murs. The incipits of the three treatises are as follows: ‘Omnes homines natura scire desiderant’, ‘Partes prolationis quot sunt’, and ‘Celebranda divina sunt officia in ecclesia’. Lawrence Gushee suggested that Jean des Murs may be their author, since Jean listed a book loan of a work authored by him with incipit ‘Omnes homines’ in the manuscript El Escorial, Real Biblioteca de San Lorenzo, O.ii.10, that contains his autograph annotations. This article focuses on the content of the second treatise, which appears to be closely related to Jean des Murs’s own Compendium artis musicae. The Compendium begins: ‘Partes prolationis quot sunt? Quinque’, whereas the answer to the same opening question posed in the BnF lat. 7378A treatise is ‘Quattuor’. The text of this treatise is considered as a witness to early ars nova theory as it relates to the theories propagated in Jean des Murs’s early works, and to the transmission of these texts within the layer of BnF lat. 7378A that is devoted to works by Jean des Murs and his contemporaries on music and astronomy.

Mozarabic preces in Ars Nova notation: a new fourteenth-century fragment discovered in Spain

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID CATALUNYA ◽  
CARMEN JULIA GUTIÉRREZ
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Musical Analysis ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Digital Restoration ◽  
Ars Nova

ABSTRACTThis article reports the discovery of an early fourteenth-century manuscript fragment (two small snippets from the same folio) of Castilian origin. One side of the original folio contained a monophonic piece in Ars Nova notation whose text has been identified as Mozarabic preces, a musical repertoire that was suposed to lack written transmission from the twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries. The fragment thus throws new light on the survival of the Mozarabic rite through the late Middle Ages. The backside of the folio contains music written in an old mensural system based on undifferentiated semibreves and puncta divisionis. In this regard, the manuscript may represent the earliest known Spanish source to employ the Petronian system described in the mensural treatise in Barcelona Cathedral (misc. 23). The study includes a detailed codicological examination of the manuscript (including the digital restoration of a palimpsest), transcriptions and musical analysis.

Hockets as Compositional and Scribal Practice in the ars nova Motet—A Letter from Lady Music

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Zayaruznaya
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Guillaume De Machaut ◽  
Ars Nova ◽  
French Composers ◽  
Epistolary Exchange ◽  
Fresh Insight ◽  
Compositional Approaches ◽  
Insight Into

The whimsical upper-voice texts of the anonymous fourteenth-century motet Musicalis/Sciencie stage an epistolary exchange between Rhetoric, Music, and a long list of French composers and singers. The letters complain that these musicians, whose ranks include Guillaume de Machaut and Philippe de Vitry, split words with rests when they write hockets. The critical tone of Musicalis/Sciencie implies that some ars nova composers must have regularly split words with hockets, while others—the motet’s composer, for one—held this to be bad practice. But since modern editions and medieval scribes alike are imprecise in the placement of text around hockets, the existence of such opposing camps seems difficult to substantiate. An analysis of text-note alignment in four sources for Apta/Flos reveals that some scribes were prescriptive in their texting of hockets, while others, like the scribe of the important Ivrea codex, were pragmatic. An awareness of these differences can lead to alternate modes of interpreting ambiguous text underlay. In the case of Philippe de Vitry’s Petre/Lugentium, shifting syllables adjacent to hockets can transform the work, highlighting carefully differentiated textural zones that are key to its structure. Such editorial intervention can in turn yield fresh insight into competing compositional approaches.

The Dream of Oresme

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Pesic
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Web Browsers ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Music Of The Spheres ◽  
Ars Nova

As the leading natural philosopher of the fourteenth century, Nicole Oresme’s references to music show its continuing importance as part of the quadrivium; his arguments concerning geocentric cosmology considers its musical correlates and consequences. Music also figured importantly in his arguments about whether or not cosmic cycles can actually recur, reflected in the debate he staged between Arithmetic and Geometry. This chapter argues that Oresme finally sided with Geometry and in favor of incommensurability in the cosmic design, reflecting the biblical preference for a “new song” over incessant repetition. Oresme’s friendship with the eminent composer Phillipe de Vitry (a leading exponent of the ars nova) also marked his astronomical views. Oresme argued that issues of incommensurability ruled out cosmic recurrences such as the Platonic Year and also ruled out the simplest versions of the “music of the spheres.” Throughout the book where various sound examples are referenced, please see http://mitpress.mit.edu/musicandmodernscience (please note that the sound examples should be viewed in Chrome or Safari Web browsers).

Cantus figuratusand monastic re-figuration in the late medieval Veneto

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-75
Author(s):  
JAMIE REULAND
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Musical Expertise ◽  
Liturgical Manuscripts ◽  
Ars Nova ◽  
Material Evidence ◽  
Polyphonic Music

AbstractIn 1409 Ludovico Barbo arrived at the monastery of Santa Giustina in Padua, intent on its reformation. Since the late fourteenth century, the scriptorium at Santa Giustina had produced some of the most significant collections of polyphonic music to survive from the period, specialising in copying the avant-garde repertories of the Ars nova. Yet the reforms Barbo sought to introduce – reforms based on ideals he and a cohort of Venetians had been living out on the island of S. Giorgio in Alga – eschewed outward ostentation, and centred on prayerful engagement with the scene of Christ's Passion. Barbo's initiatives would seem at odds with the tradition of secular polyphony cultivated at the monastery in the years before his arrival. Official documents from the reform prohibit the practice of cantus figuratus and paint a picture of a uniformly spare music aesthetic.Manuscript and material evidence from Santa Giustina and dependent houses tells a different story, and suggests that communities found use for the monastery's musical past within the reformed practice of prayer and meditation. Vestiges of this past appear in the most unlikely of places: the Good Friday rituals that Barbo himself worked to strip of polyphonic accoutrement. The efforts of individual monks, musicians and scribes – here Rolando da Casale, whose musical expertise Barbo enlisted in the copying of new liturgical manuscripts, and Johannes Preottonus – emerge as telling examples of the ways in which institutional histories come under the pressure of their individual actors.

Did Vitry write an Ars vetus et nova?

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 441-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Desmond
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Personal Relationship ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Single Author ◽  
Ars Nova ◽  
Music Theorist

In book 7 of his Speculum musicae, the fourteenth-century music theorist Jacobus structures a defense of music as it had been practiced in the thirteenth century by such eminent musicians and theorists as Lambertus, Franco, and Petrus de Cruce against the practices of certain unnamed moderni active at the time of Jacobus’s writing. While Jacobus’s quotations from various theoretical works by Jehan des Murs have long been recognized, it previously had been supposed that the remaining quotations were jumbled references from many different theorists. With specific reference to Philippe de Vitry only two quotations from the text edited in vol. 8, Corpus scriptorum de musica, had been identified previously. In fact, there is substantial sustained treatment of a single author, whom I have termed the doctor modernus and who is not Jehan des Murs, that occupies at least five contiguous central chapters of book 7. Following Jacobus’s practice in the previous six books of commentary on a handful of specific works, the writing of Book 7 appears to have been structured around the written works of just four theorists: Lambert, Franco, Jehan des Murs, and the doctor modernus. Furthermore, Jacobus’s vehemence toward the doctor modernus was particularly pronounced and may indicate a personal relationship between the two men. His treatise is quoted with reference to some fundamental ars nova theories, such as extension of long notes beyond the duplex long, remote imperfection, the use of imperfect longs, and imperfect measure in general, and his treatise is described as outlining the precepts of both the old and new arts. The similarities between the treatise of the doctor modernus and many ars nova theory texts (some of which were attributed to Vitry) hints at the possibility that the treatise of the doctor modernus may have been the ancestor text that these other texts had in common, and hence also that Philippe de Vitry may have been the author of the text known to Jacobus, whose subject was the Ars vetus et nova.

Citation and allusion in the late Ars nova: The case of Esperance and the En attendant songs

1999 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 287-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yolanda Plumley
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Guillaume De Machaut ◽  
Ars Nova ◽  
The Many

In his Prologue, Guillaume de Machaut lists the ballade entée, or ‘grafted ballade’, as one of the many genres he is inspired to write to praise and honour all ladies. It is unclear from this fleeting reference, however, exactly what type of work Machaut meant by this term and whether he was referring to a purely poetic form or to one that involved music. That the practice of citation in lyric poetry was well established at this time is demonstrated by Machaut's own output, which reveals him to have been a master of this art; this literary tradition was to continue to thrive in the later fourteenth century.

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