Chapter 6: French and Italian Music in the Fourteenth Century – Flashcards

Treatise by Philippe de Vitry (and his contemporaries) in 1322 describing a "new" form of polyphony and notation. Earliest examples of new techniques found in Roman de Fauvel manuscript (1316; it's a medieval French story poking fun at the church and contemporary society). In general, this 'new' style referred to 1. use of minims 2. use of both duple and triple divisions of notes 3. mensuration signs 4. note shapes retain value regardless of context

In Western notation, the note that is half the value of a semibreve and twice the value of a crotchet. In American usage it is called the half note. It was the shortest of the 5 notes of medieval music; first found in the 14th century.

In 14th century, indicated divisions of time and prolation. Time was indicated with a complete or incompolete circle. Prolation was indicated by presence/absence of a dot. Perfect tempus/major prolation: 9/8 Perfect Tempus/minor prolation: 3/4 Imperfect tempus/major prolation: 6/8 Imperfect tempus/minor prolation: 4/4

A modern term for the periodic repetition or recurence of rhythmic configurations, often with changing melodic content in tenors and other parts of 14th and 15th century compositions, especially motets. In medieval theory, was only described in terms of color and talea.

Medieval term usually understood to denote a freely invented rhythmic configuration, several statements of which constitute the note values of the tenor of an isorhythmic motet (or of its first section, if diminution is later applied to the tenor)

A medieval Latin term used from the mid 13th century to mid 15th to signify embellishment and more specifically repetition; latter describes modern use to designate melodic repetition in the tenors of medieval motets.

the name given in the 14th and early 15th centuries to a polyphonic line composed in the same range as the tenor. The practice of writing a part "against the tenor" superseded the typical 13th c. process of adding parts above a tenor line. The first theoretical mention of the word 'contratenor' occurs in the treatise *In arte motetorum* (14th-15th c) and its earliest known appearance in a musical source is fragmentary motet from Venice (1315-19)

One of the three formes fixes that dominated French song and poetry during the 14th and 15th c. Its musical structure is essentially ABBA, regardless of subtleties of rhythm and metre in the superimposed text. The virelai has a long and complex history, closing interwoven with the general history of early song and dance. First direct polyphonic setting of a virelai like piece is Adam de la Halle's *Fines amoure tes ai*; 14th c. use complex metrical patterns.

Poetic forms, particularly of the 14th and 15th centuries, that directly affected the musical forms of practically all song settings of the period. Main French forms: ballade, virelai, rondeau. All three involve complex repetition patterns with a refrain and muic in 2 main sections. Sometime very late in the 15th century, all 3 were abandoned by composers, though traces can be heard throughout the 16th century

Any lyric composition set to French words; more specifically, a French polyphonic song of the late MA/Ren. In a general sense the word 'chanson' referes to a wide variety of compositions: the monophonic songs of the MA, court songs of the late 16th/17thc., popular songs of music halls in the 18th, 19th, and 20th c. In MA, written in treble dominated style, meaning upper voice (cantus) carried the melody of a tenor that was without text.

The medieval and Ren word for melody; more specifically, the highest voice in a polyphonic compositions. Tinctoris (1415) mentioned four uses of the word 'cantus'. In the widest sense, it could refer to any vocal composition; the three volumes of the Odhecaton, published by Petrucci, are designated *Canti A, Cant B, Canti C.* In Tinctoris' time, the term was occasionally used also for top voice in polyphonic composition.

One of the three forme fixes that dominated French song and poetry in the 14th/15th centuries. In its standard late medieval shape the ballade text falls into three stanzas, sharing the same metrical and rhyme scheme and ending with the same refrain. Music follows overall pattern AAB (Bar form).

One of the three formes fixes in French poetry of the 14th/15th c. Typical layout as a single stanza poem of four couplets. The first couplet, known as the refrain, is repeated at the end. In addition, the first line of the refrain is always used as the second line of the second couplet. The musical setting of a rondeau is divided into two sections (a and b), each of which carries one of the refrain lines. AB aA ab AB

The highly refined music of the 14th c., centered primarily on the secular courts of south France, Aragon, and Cyprus. The term was introduced to vocabulary by Ursale Günther and derives from references in Phillippus de Caserta's *Tractatus de diversis figuris* to composers moving away from the style of the Ars Nova motets and developing an 'artem magic subtilter' as exemplified in the motet "Apta caro"

Italian for 1300; describes Italian music of the 14th century. Polyphonic songs coming from central and northern Italy (esp. Florence). One important distinction between French Ars Nova/Ars subtillior and Trecento is notation: semibreves could be broken down to may multiples and groups of notes marked by a dot (sort of like a modern day barline). Popular pieces were the madrigal, caccia, ballata. See Squarcialupi Codex.

song for two or three voices without instrumental accompaniment. All voices set to the same text; usually subject is pastoral, satirical, or a love poem. Structure is 2 or 3 stanzas set to the same music, followed by a ritornello (refrain) set to different music with a different meter.

A diminutive of the word 'ritorno,' which means return. Basically, a refrain.

Poetic and musica genre, in use in Italy in the 14th/15th centuries. Musically, the caccia may be defined as a texted canon for upper voices to which is added an untexted tenor. Its development ran parallel to the madrigal in that the canon between upper voices provides framework while untexted tenor in an accessory.

Italian dance song and poetic musical form in use from the second half of the 13th century until the 15th c and beyond. Consists of the following parts: ripresa, 2 symmetrical piedi or mutazioni, volta, and ripresia. Musica form is AbbaA, where A is ripresa, b is piedi, a is volta.

The medieval term for a contrapuntal technique of manipulating silence as a precise mensural value in the 13th and 14th centuries. It occurs in a single voice or, most commonly, in 2 or more voices, which display the dovetailing of sounds and silences by means of staggered arrangement of rests.

refrain sung before and after a stanza in a ballata. In between ripresa were 2 piedi and a volta

a line within the stanza of a ballata in AbbaA form (b being the piedi--always paired).

closing lines of text sung to the same music as the ripresa in a ballata.

terms used by theoriests from the late 12th to 16th centuries, at first as opposition to musica recta or musica vera to designate 'feigned' extensions of the hexachord system contained in the Guidonian hand. In other words, to express the F# needed for the G hexachord, you had to 'pretend' there was a false D hexachord to make it work.

both tonic and fifth have a leading tone stepping up in cadential pattern.

These motets, written during the Ars Nova period of the 14th century, feature the isorhythmic principles of talea and color. Composers include Machaut and Philippe de Vitry. An example of an isorhythmic motet is Garrit Gallus/In nova fert/Neuma, attributed to Philippe de Vitry in the first half of the 14th century.

cadence in Phrygian mode where ^7 steps up (whole step) to ^1 and ^2 steps down to 1^ and ^4 steps up to ^5

French composer and theorist. Music occupied only a small place in his career as a diplomat, political adviser, and administrator, a career that led in 1351 to his being created Bishop of Meaux. His compositions frequently allude to contemporary political issues, and they powerfully illustrate how musical works, motets in particular, could be used as a medium for comment on current events. There is considerable uncertainty about which works Vitry actually wrote, let alone their dates of composition, their intended audience, and their precise meaning, and it is easier to be confident about Vitry's general significance as both a poet and a composer than it is to credit him with specific pieces. Doubts have also been raised about his precise role as a music theorist, and the treatise Ars nova, long thought to be his own work, is now recognized to be a digest of ideas by both Vitry and his contemporaries. Notwithstanding these difficulties, however, Vitry emerges as a dazzling intellectual, a major innovator in the genre of the motet, and a composer at the cutting edge of notational developments.

French theorist. A student in Paris from 1318, he spent periods also at Évreux, Fontevrault, and Mézières-en-Brenne and wrote at least three highly influential treatises on music in the early 1320s: Ars nove musice (c. 1321), on definitions and acoustics; Musica pratica (c. 1322), on notation; and Musica speculativa (1323), a distillation of Boethian theories of consonance. He also wrote works on mathematics and astronomy.

Treatise by Johannes des Muris. Describes definitions and acoustics of Ars nova music.

Treatise by Johannes des Muris. Descrbies notation in Ars nova period.

Treatise by Johannes des Muris. Distillation of Boethian theories of consonance.

Franco-Flemish theorist. His principal work, the Speculum musice, is the largest surviving medieval treatise on music, containing 521 chapters arranged in seven books. The first five books deal with speculative music, the sixth with ecclesiastical chant and the seventh with discant in refutation of Ars Nova teaching on rhythm and notation. The Speculum is thus an encyclopedic work in the tradition of Hieronymus de Moravia and Walter Odington. It is without parallel, however, in its scope and cogency as a statement of the theory and practice of the Ars Antiqua.

The largest surviving medieval treatise on music, containing 521 chapters arranged in seven books. The first five books deal with speculative music, the sixth with ecclesiastical chant and the seventh with discant in refutation of Ars Nova teaching on rhythm and notation. The Speculum is thus an encyclopedic work in the tradition of Hieronymus de Moravia and Walter Odington. It is without parallel, however, in its scope and cogency as a statement of the theory and practice of the Ars Antiqua.

English musical theorist and scientist. His treatise on music, the Summa de speculatione musice, is the most systematic and comprehensive English work of its period. It exists in a complete version, and a recently discovered major fragment. The Summa was a significant source for later English theory including the Regule of Robert de Handlo, the Breviarium of Willelmus and the Quatuor principalia of John of Tewkesbury, and it continued to be copied into the 15th century. Odington further explored the Quadrivium in treatises on arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. His alchemical treatise, the Ycocedron, seems to have been the most widely disseminated of his works.

The most systematic and comprehensive English work of its period. It exists in a complete version, and a recently discovered major fragment. The Summa was a significant source for later English theory including the Regule of Robert de Handlo, the Breviarium of Willelmus and the Quatuor principalia of John of Tewkesbury, and it continued to be copied into the 15th century.

The most important poet and composer of the 14th century, with a lasting history of influence. His unique oeuvre, contained, thanks to the composer's own efforts, in manuscripts that include only his works, stands in many respects for itself: in terms of its volume, its poetic and compositional formulation and quality, but also in the number of genres in whose development he played a crucial role. In the compilation and ordering of his works as well as in the testimony of the texts themselves there is a wealth of information about his self-awareness and about the production of his works and manuscripts. This ranges from general remarks about poetics and other aesthetic concepts to details about the composition of particular pieces, questions about their fixing and transmission in writing and their realization in sound. Biographical details also allow the works to be placed in a social context. The greater part of the manuscripts containing his works is taken up by poetry that is not set to music. This comprises over 15 lengthy narrative dits (each with up to 9000 lines) and a collection of lyric poetry known as Loange des dames. Most of the dits are concerned with those members of the high nobility with whom he was in close contact. They bring together allegorical representation, in the tradition of the Roman de la rose, and additional exempla related to historical events and individuals (for example, from the Ovide moralisé), in an instructive framework, to which the author's repeated designation of the works as 'traité' corresponds. Thus the Remede de Fortune (written before 1342) contains nine compositions presented as paradigms of lyric genres. The collection of lyrics 'ou il n'a point de chant' ('where there is no music') - its title of Loange des dames comes from a rubric given in one of the posthumously copied complete-works manuscripts - contains about 280 poems from the tradition of amours courtois, its content occasionally overlapping with the collection of musical works and dits. It is made up principally of approximately 200 ballades and exactly 60 rondeaux. In the history of polyphonic music, he is the first artistically important composer of polyphonic music to be known by name. His output holds a key position in the transition between the new ideas that took hold in the decade around 1300 and the music of the late Middle Ages; as a poet-musician he brought together the traditions of secular monophony and the new techniques of the Ars Nova. His 19 extensive lais are a high point in the - by then - long history of this form; the 23 motets take up the achievements of Philippe de Vitry; his Mass is the first cyclic, through-composed setting of the Ordinary. As with the Hoquetus David, the Complainte and Chanson royale (the latter two set to music only in the Remede de Fortune) represent a paradigmatic involvement with older forms. It is critical for the assessment of his historical position that for the first time French texts are set in subtly-composed works of distinctive and individual character and that functional and structural differentiation between the three so-called formes fixes is now evident: the new polyphonic ballade, of which he wrote 41, making up the bulk of his lyrics set to music, the 22 polyphonic rondeaux and the virelai, called 'chanson baladee' and, in the case of the monophonic works, linked with dance-song. How much these new departures had been instigated by Vitry is unclear, owing to the small portion of his works that is now extant. In any case, however, Machaut must have played a decisive role in shaping these genres of the later Middle Ages.

lengthy narrative poems (over 9000 lines) by Machaut that provide biographical and allegorical stories about his relationship with nobility in 14th century France

Collection of lyric poetry by Machaut.

An extended song form cultivated particularly in the 13th and 14th centuries. The stanzas - if the poem can be divided in that way - are each in a different form and therefore have different music. Though the number of surviving examples is small compared with the total extent of medieval song these works occupy a special position for several reasons: the very irregularity of the poetic form led to large metrical and rhyming patterns that have caused the lai and its German equivalent the Leich to be described as the major showpieces of medieval lyric poetry; and there is much truth in Spanke's useful distinction (1938) between songs that are primarily metrical in their formal concept (i.e. nearly all medieval strophic song) and those that are primarily musical (the lai and the sequence), a distinction that almost inevitably brings with it the suggestion that the lai and related forms represent by far the earliest surviving attempts at continuous extended musical composition outside the liturgy. In general it is true to say that in the 13th century the form could be extremely free, with highly irregular rhyme schemes and lines of uneven length, but that in the 14th century lais became enormously longer, with the French tradition developing a standard pattern with each stanza following a double-versicle scheme (often refined to an apparent quadruple-versicle) and a 12-stanza form in which the first and last could be related musically or even have the same music at different pitches.

Franco-Flemish composer, active principally in Italy. More music by him survives, with more stylistic variety, than by any other composer active around 1400. His secular works are diverse in genre (madrigal, virelai, ballata, canon), language (French, Italian, Latin), and above all in the wide range of musical stylistic features. Most survive, many uniquely, in the fragmentary Lucca manuscript (see Nádas and Ziino), which contains repertory from both the Pavian and Paduan courts of the years around 1400 and was probably compiled in Padua during his lifetime. Other manuscripts are widely distributed, with often unclear transmission patterns; some of the songs survive in widely differing versions.

Italian composer and music theorist. He belonged to the first generation of Italian trecento musicians. Despite his important and influential position in early trecento music, no archival information has come to light about him. 34 works can be attributed confidently to him: 25 two-voice madrigals, seven three-voice madrigals and cacce, a lauda-ballata and a motet. To these may be added several madrigals of doubtful authenticity, and a motet fragment (Laudibus dignis merito, see PMFC, xiii, 1987) which is very probably his and whose text incorporates an acrostic on the name of 'Luchinus dux'. his works were in very wide circulation; they are found in northern Italian as well as Tuscan sources. The richest sources for his music are I-Fl 87 (27 pieces), Fn 26 (22 pieces) and F-Pn 6771 (20 pieces, of which at least 18 occur together in the first fascicle). The continuing popularity of his works in the first two decades of the 15th century is attested by the citation of at least two works in Prudenzani's Saporetto (see Debenedetti) and of five intabulated pieces in I-FZc 117. The appearance in Italian literary sources of the Quattrocento of many poems set by him also testifies to this popularity.

Italian composer. He was known during his lifetime above all for his liturgical compositions, but of these only two mass movements have survived. His secular works are found exclusively in Tuscan manuscripts; the section of the Squarcialupi Manuscript (I-Fl 87) devoted to his music has at its head a portrait which may be of the composer (see CACCIA, [not available online]). Other works by him are known only from literary references. His style is closely related to that of Giovanni da Cascia's more mature work. The division of the madrigal lines into melismatic and syllabic sections is more marked in his work than in Giovanni's. The frequent changes of mensuration in the stanza part, the texting of both voices in the madrigals (which are always for two voices), and the treatment of the lines of verse as self-contained units, usually by means of cadences in the music, are characteristic features of his work and follow the older Trecento style. Monophonic transitional passages between the lines occur rarely. Canonic sections - probably adopted from the style of the caccia - are to be found at the beginning of Intrando ad abitar and in La bella e la vezzosa. The surviving ballatas are monophonic throughout. In contrast to the madrigals, they contain few extended melismas. It is interesting that, even though they are monophonic (and in contrast to the ballatas of I-Rvat 215), the 'under-3rd' cadence appears at the end of the piedi - though never at the end of the ripresa. The two surviving mass movements are modelled on the madrigals in their style. Their construction is clearly different from that of the Credo of Bartholus de Florentia, who was also in the employment of Florence Cathedral.

Italian composer, poet, organist, singer and instrument maker of the second generation of Italian Trecento composers. His style has many facets. It ranges from the simple dance-song to the highly stylized piece with canonic or isorhythmic structure. It stretches from the Italian style of his precursors Jacopo and Lorenzo, across the infiltration of French influences, to an ultimate synthesis of French and Italian elements of style. Most immediate in its impression is his gift for melody - distinctively shaped and at the same time expressive. At phrase-ends the under-3rd cadence (the so-called _____ CADENCE) figures frequently in the upper voices.

The _____ is one of the most notable fifteenth-century Italian music anthologies. Its 300 pieces represent nearly all of the most renowned composers of the fourteenth century. The codex is richly illuminated with gold and pigment. The miniatures and illuminations originated in the Florentine scriptorium of Santa Maria degli Angeli between 1410 and 1415. An inscription states that the codex once belonged to the Florentine organist Antonio _____ (1417-1480). It was later owned by Giuliano de' Medici and subsequently passed to the Palatine Library; at the end of the eighteenth century it was transferred together with other volumes to the Laurentian Library.

The ______(1360) is a music manuscript of the 14th century. It contains the earliest surviving music written specifically for keyboard.

The ______ (Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale 117) abbreviated as "(I-FZc 117)", and sometimes known as Codex Bonadies, is a late 15th-century musical manuscript containing some of the oldest preserved keyboard music along with additional vocal pieces. The manuscript is still held at the Biblioteca Comunale de Faenza, near Ravenna, but facsimiles are held in other libraries in Italy and overseas.

Source of the "ars subtilior" name for Ursula Gunther