Fragments of Polyphonic Music from the Abbey of S. Giustina: Codices, Composers, and Context in Late Medieval Padua

by Michael Scott Cuthbert presented to the Department of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the A.B. degree with Honors. Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 7, 1998

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S ❧

I am indebted to many people and institutions for their aid in various aspects

of the writing of this thesis. Phi Beta Kappa’s Alpha-Iota chapter of Massachusetts

provided the funding for the earliest stages of my research, allowing me to remain in

Cambridge during the summer to explore the literature and manuscript facsimiles at

Harvard. Additional funding for my early research was provided by the Dean’s Summer

Research Award. Financial support at a critical point in the middle of writing came

from the Wesley Weyman Fund. I am grateful to Professors Thomas Kelly and Dean

Christoph Wolff for their aid in obtaining this grant which enabled me to examine the

fragments on the scene in Padua.

I wish to thank the Department of Music, especially for its 24-hour access

policy in the last months of thesis writing. The Loeb Music Library’s term circulation

of books to thesis writers was a godsend, a policy I hope continues and spreads to other

libraries. Virginia Danielson and Doug Freundlich of the Isham Memorial Library

advanced my research in countless ways with their willingness to place their time and

resources at my disposal. To them I owe a great debt of gratitude. The staff of the

Biblioteca Universitaria at the Università degli Studi di Padova were extremely helpful

in granting me access to the Paduan fragments and in bringing me supplementary

materials despite my terribly broken Italian.

Augusta Ridley brought a wealth of knowledge of medieval art and life to the

reading of my draft, in addition to catching a host of little errors. The people of

nose.support.thesis provided me with much advice, Ally, and late-night e-mail to keep

the project going. My greatest debt, though, is to my parents, without whose

continuous support and understanding not a single page would have been written.

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Professor Robert Kendrick encouraged my idea of looking at music within a

city through his class on music in urban life in the Renaissance low countries.

Professor Katarina Livljanic’s assistance in reading some of the more difficult French

texts was only matched by her ability to track down in five minutes a chant I could not

find after five hours of searching. Professor David Cohen, despite pleading no know-

ledge of Italian treatises on rhythm, gave great aid to the theoretical issues of my work.

Professor Lewis Lockwood aided me on issues of patronage and gave helpful comments

on my draft copy. Professor Anne Stone of Queens College gave me advice on rhyth-

mic relationships between tempus types and provided support and enthusiasm through

her interest in my work. It is also to her and Professor Jeff Nichols that I owe thanks

for the fonts used to write fourteenth-century notation.

Professor Reinhold Brinkmann advised the writing of this thesis in the winter

and spring and provided much practical advice, support, and comments on drafts as he

got back in touch with his medieval roots. Professor Thomas Kelly guided this project

from the beginning as its principal advisor. In addition to his help in pointing me to

the most relevant literature and deciphering text and notation, Professor Kelly made

sure at each step in writing that I pulled myself away from the details and looked at the

bigger picture of the musical environment of the late Middle Ages.

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Ta b l e o f C o n t e n t s

Introduction ........................................................................................................................1

Manuscript Sigla.................................................................................................................6

1. Music in Paduan city life, c. 1400................................................................................9 Secular and sacred patronage...............................................................................................10 Paduan musical traditions ....................................................................................................12

2. Composers and Contents ............................................................................................. 17 Composers in the Paduan fragments .................................................................................18 Filiation, contents, and concordances ................................................................................29

3. Manuscript Examination ............................................................................................ 38 Notation types in late medieval Italy .................................................................................38 Codicological structure of the Paduan fragments ...........................................................47 Paleography.............................................................................................................................49

4. PadB: Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria MS 1115..................................................... 52

5. PadC: Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria MS 658....................................................... 69

6. PadA: GB-Ob 229, I-Pu 1475, I-Pu 684 ............................................................. 79 GB-Ob 229 (Oxford, Bodleian Library Canonici Pat. Lat. 229)...................................83 I-Pu 1475 (Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria MS 1475) ..................................................89 I-Pu 684 (Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria MS 684).......................................................92

Conclusions ...................................................................................................................... 95

Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 99

Appendix: Transcriptions .............................................................................................. 108

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Ta b l e o f P l a t e s

Plate 1. I-Pu 1115 (PadB), f. A: following p. 38. Plate 2. I-Pu 1115 (PadB), f. AV: following p. 52. Plate 3. I-Pu 658 (PadC), back cover: following p. 69. Plate 4. I-Pu 1475 (PadA), f. B: following p. 79.

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I n t r o d u c t i o n

The late fourteenth century was a time of great change and turmoil in Western

Europe. Outbreaks of the bubonic and pneumonic plague were common into the early

decades of the 1400s. War was ubiquitous throughout Europe, both on national levels,

as in the Hundred Years’ War, and in fierce, concentrated rivalries between independent

city-states in Italy. It was a time of spiritual division; a time when two, and later three,

rival popes lay claim to God’s authority. There was the possibility of hope for brighter

developments ahead. Early humanist writers such as Petrarch were prompting the

rediscovery of classical texts in the European universities. Other writers and artists

such as Chaucer and Lorenzo Monaco were also flourishing, ushering in new styles in

their fields. In music, major transformations could be seen as well. The ars subtilior

movement produced compositions of ever-increasing complexity while emigrant

composers to Italy from the Low Countries were espousing in most of their works a

move toward more simple styles.

One of the toughest challenges in examining music of such a changing period is

deciding how to classify the large and disorganized collection of works produced or

copied at the end of the fourteenth century. Musicologists have usually approached

this repertory by defining it first by region. Before any other question, most writers

ask whether the music is French, Italian, British, or from a less prolific region. While

this categorizing serves to break down to manageable chunks the vast literature of

music for more than one voice, it can hamper our understanding of musical repertories

at the crossroads, either geographically or culturally, of two regions.

This problem of classification becomes acute when applied to Italian music of

the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries. At the time a collection of

autonomous city-states on the Apennine peninsula, Italy’s lack of a unifying and

overarching political system is mirrored by the absence of any single unifying con-

ception or definition of Italian music. To define Italian music as music with Italian

texts would exclude the great multitude of works by native Italians written in French

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(to say nothing of the sacred Latin repertory). To define it as music written in Italian

styles would prove extremely difficult since so many musical styles were international.

I have until now neglected the one of the most obvious definitions of Italian

music: music written within the borders of what is now Italy. Although, for

convenience, this definition will be used in this paper, a significant portion of this

study will focus on why this usage is inadequate for describing the musical life of

Italians around 1400. This paper examines a group of works seen in the context of the

musical life of Padua in the late trecento.1 It does not attempt to explore all aspects of

Paduan music; only written polyphonic music with at least one vocal line is studied.

The core of this paper is an examination of five fragments which originally formed

parts of three manuscripts of polyphonic music copied in the Abbey of Santa Giustina

in the first decades of the fifteenth-century. An examination of the repertory

contained in these fragments will show that separation of music into Italian and French

music based on some conception of the nationality of the composer would be

inconsistent with evidence for the blending of many musical styles and traditions which

formed the musical culture of late medieval Padua.

The five fragments in this study are part of a small body of music clearly

traceable to late fourteenth century Padua. I-Pu 1115 and I-Pu 658 each comprise two

folios of secular polyphonic music. They are commonly referred to as PadB and PadC

respectively. The other three fragments to be studied, GB-Ob 229, I-Pu 1475, and

I-Pu 684, are fragments which originally belonged to a single larger manuscript

designated PadA. PadA, PadB, and PadC, together with I-Pu 656, I-STr 14, and the four

parts of PadD (I-Pu 675, I-Pu 1106, I-Pu 1225, and I-Pu 1283) form the body of

manuscripts collectively known as the Paduan fragments. These five fragments were

1 Fourteenth-century is not used in a strict literal sense in this paper or in much of the literature about these musical repertories (c.f. the series Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century and titles such as “The Transmission of Trecento Secular Polyphony” which both deal with much music of the early fifteenth century). The trecento referred to in this paper runs from c. 1330-1430.

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chosen to give a mixture of secular and sacred manuscript fragments while keeping the

examination to a reasonable length. Because there is evidence based on concordant

readings between PadD and PadA that the first was copied from the latter, and because

the paleography of PadD and I-STr 14 has already been examined by Giulio Cattin, I

decided to focus on the more neglected fragments.2

Although PadA, PadB, and PadC have been known by scholars since the first

quarter of the twentieth century, no examination of these fragments as documents of a

Paduan musical tradition has yet been published. Anne Hallmark has come the closest

thus far in examining the Paduan music tradition via the various Paduan fragments.

Her examination of French influence on Paduan composers is probably the most

important starting place for any study of late trecento Paduan music.3 However, these

examinations, including the one mentioned above, have tended to focus on Paduan

music either which is related to, or dissimilar from, the musical tradition of Florence

and other Tuscan cities. Pieces are often discussed without reference to their position

in the manuscripts in which they are found.

To explore the rich information of the Paduan fragments, techniques from the

ancillary disciplines of codicology, paleography, and filiation will be used extensively.

This examination of Paduan trecento music via the Paduan fragments will begin by

exploring the musical life of the city which provided the context for the production of

the manuscripts. This paper will then examine the composers whose music appears in

the fragments to see both how biographical information on the composers can aid our

understanding of the composers’ music and how the music can reveal important

information about the lives of the composers. Following this, the details of the

2 See Giulio Cattin, “Ricerche sulla musica a S. Giustina di Padova ill’inizio del Quattro cento: Il copista Rolando da casale. Nuovi frammenti . . . ,” Annales Musicologiques 7 (1977), pp. 17-41. 3 Anne Hallmark, “Some Evidence for French Influence in Northern Italy, c. 1400,” in Studies in the Performance of Late Mediaeval Music, edited by Stanley Boorman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 193-226.

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structure of the fragments and particularly their notation will be examined. The final

three chapters look at some of the more dense details of the fragments. Those chapters

examine each of the fragmentary manuscripts separately so that on the basis of

historical context, biographical information, codicological and paleographical features,

and attention to musical styles, some of the traditions surrounding each manuscript

can be reconstructed.

In order to examine the music of the five Paduan fragments, I have undertaken

a new transcription of the fragments. The transcriptions, which form Appendix A of

this paper, are of the music as it is found in the fragments. Rather than try to create a

critical reading of each piece by comparing across concordant sources, this paper

presents the music as it would have been known in Padua. Or at least, the music as it

would have been known by one particular scribe or copyist in Padua.4 While creating a

definitive edition of a composition can be a great assistance to modern performers,

such an edition sometimes removes the work from the local tradition to which it was

previously attached.5

Four plates of facsimiles from the Paduan fragments are given at the

beginnings of chapters 3-6. While these plates will be useful in illustrating some of the

details of paleography, notation, and manuscript structure in these chapters, they

should prove especially helpful in the earlier chapters for readers not familiar with

fourteenth century music manuscripts.

It is hoped that providing an edition of the music of a fragmentary manuscript

can undermine the bias seen in trecento scholarship toward viewing fragments as

sources of interesting, but optional, variant readings for concordances in more

4 Only the most obvious and most serious errors have been fixed in the transcriptions. These corrected errors primarily consist of omissions or incorrect note values which cause voices to become unaligned and finish at different times. 5 In order to limit the scope of this examination, texts of the compositions were not examined except where particularly important to the discussion of the music. Additionally, a less detailed study of PadA was conducted than of PadB and PadC, omitting some of the most fragmentary of compositions, damaged due to the vertical cutting of the manuscript.

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important, complete documents. Manuscript examination is usually conducted first on

the most beautiful and most comprehensive codices before smaller documents are

examined. This is particularly true in the case of Italian trecento music. Leo Schrade

begins his edition of the works of Francesco Landini by describing him as “long

recognized as Italy’s greatest composer of the fourteenth century.”6 Schrade continues

by saying, “Perhaps as a result of such a recognition, the music of Landini has been

more comprehensively preserved than the music of any other Italian musician.” While

not disputing the quality of Landini’s music, this study will assert that the compre-

hensive preservation of a composer’s works often tempts us into creating (and

projecting back) the greatness of a composer.7

The exploration of the Paduan fragments reveals the extent to which influence

from and interest in the music of other regions was a part of Paduan life. It shows how

the Paduan fragments were a product of the tumultuous period spanning the fall of the

Carrara dynasty, the installation of Venetian rule over the city, and the subsequent rise

in the monastic chapter of Santa Giustina. The examination of sources suggests some

of the influences upon composers in Padua by the music heard around them. This

study also details the notation and arrangement of music on the page, which allows us

to reconstruct larger portions of the structure of the original manuscripts.

6 Leo Schrade, The Works of Francesco Landini, in Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, vol. 4, (Monaco: L’Oiseau-Lyre, 1958), p. i. 7 The view, that a composer’s greatness is measured by his presence in the tiny percentage of manuscript sources which survive, was not an isolated opinion in mid-century scholarship. In the fifth edition of Grove’s dictionary, Erna Dannemann writes, “That Ciconia ranks as the most remarkable composer in Northern Italy in the period between Landini and Dufay could be gathered from the number of manuscripts containing compositions of his, even if there were no other proof.” (“Ciconia,” in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, fifth edition, edited by Eric Bloom, 9 vols., (London: Macmillan and Co., 1954), vol. 2, p. 296.)

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M a n u s c r i p t S i g l a

B-Bc II Brussels, Bibliothèque du Conservatoire, fonds St. Gudule, fragment II.

CS-Pu XI E 9 Prague, Universitni Kninovna MS XI E 9.

D-Mbs 29775 Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 29775.

D-NST 9a Nuremburg, Staatsbibliothek, fragment lat. 9a.

E-Bcen 853 Barcelona, Biblioteca de Cataluña (olim central), MS 853.

E-Bcen 853c Barcelona, Biblioteca de Cataluña (olim central), MS 853c.

E-Bcen 971 Barcelona, Biblioteca de Cataluña (olim central), MS 971 (olim 946).

F-APT 16bis Apt, Cathédrale Sainte-Anne, Bibliothèque du chapitre, MS 16bis.

F-CA(n) 1328 Cambrai, Bibliothèque communale, B 1328.

F-Pn 568 Paris, Bibliotèque Nationale, MS fonds italien 568. (Pit.)

F-Pn 1584 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS fonds françaises 1584 (Machaut A)

F-Pn 1585 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS fonds françaises 1585 (Machaut B).

F-Pn 4379 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS nouvelles acquisitions francaises 4379.

F-Pn 6771 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS nouvelles acquisitions francaises 6771 (Reina Codex, R).

F-Pn 9221 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS fonds francaises 9221 (Machaut E).

F-Pn 22546 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS fonds francaises 22546 (Machaut G).

F-Pn 23190 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS nouvelles acquisitions fracaises 23190 (olim Angers, Château de Serrant, Duchesse de la Trémoïlle).

F-Sm 222 Strasbourg, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 222.C.22 (destroyed).

GB-Lbm 29987 London, British Library, Reference Division, Department of Manuscripts, MS Additional 29987 (Lo.).

GB-Ob 229 Oxford, Bodleian Library Canonici Pat. Lat. 229 (PadA, Ox).

I-BC Q 15 Bologna, Civico museo bibliografico musicale, MS Q15.

I-Fasl 2211 Florence, Archivio di San Lorenzo, MS 2211.

I-Fl 87 Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, MS Mediceo Palatino 87 (Squarcialupi Codex, Sq.).

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I-Fn 26 Florence, Biblioteca nazionale centrale, MS Panciatichiano 26. (Pan, FP, Fl.).

I-FZc 117 Faenza, Biblioteca communale, MS 117 (Fa.).

I-GR 197 Gottaferrata, Biblioteca della Badia Greca, MS Collocazione provisoria 197.

I-IV Ivrea, Biblioteca capitolare, MS fragment without shelfmark.

I-IV 115 Ivrea, Biblioteca capitolare, MS 115.

I-Las 184

Lucca, Archivio di stato, MS 184 (Man, Mancini Codex, Lucca).

I-MOe 5.24 Modena, Biblioteca Estense e universitaria. MS α.M.5.24 (ModA).

I-Pc 55 Padua, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS C.55.

I-Pc 56 Padua, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS C.56.

I-Pc 553 Padua, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS C.553.

I-Pu 658 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 658 (PadC).

I-Pu 675 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 675 (PadD).

I-Pu 684 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 684 (PadA).

I-Pu 1115 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 1115 (PadB).

I-Pu 1225 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 1225(PadD).

I-Pu 1283 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 1285 (PadD).

I-Pu 1475 Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 1475 (PadA).

I-PSac 5 Pistoia, Archivo Capitolare del Duomo, fragment 5.

I-Rvat 171 Rome, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Barb. lat. 171.

I-Rvat 215 Rome, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Rossi 215, (Rossi Codex).

I-STr 14 Stresa, Biblioteca Rosminiana, , Collegio Rosmini al Monte, MS 14 (olim Domodossola Convento di Monte Calvario).

I-Tnu T.III.2 Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, MS T.III.2.

NL-Lu 2515 Leiden, Bibliotheek der Universiteit, MS fragment in group BPL 2515.

NL-Uu 1846 Utrecht, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, MS 1846.

US-CAh 122 Cambridge, Mass., Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Typ. 122.

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US-NYw (MachVg) New York, Wildenstein Collection, MS without shelfmark.

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1 . M u s i c i n Pa d u a n c i t y l i f e , c . 1 4 0 0

Padua in the late fourteenth century was a flourishing independent city-state.

The ruling Carrara dynasty from 1318 until 1405 waged continuous warfare with

neighboring powers. The late fourteenth century was an era of immense non-military

competition among the autonomous city-states in the Italian peninsula as well. The

rulers of these city-states would compete in displays of conspicuous consumption to

demonstrate the power, prestige, and wealth of their domain.8 An examination of

Paduan music, particularly the learned vocal polyphony of the Paduan fragments, must

take into account the environment in which music was produced.

Padua had four rulers during the time this study concerns. Francesco I da

Carrara (“il Vecchio”) was the ninth Carrara to rule Padua in the fourteenth century.9

Il Vecchio reigned from 1350 until his abdication in 1388 after which time he was

imprisoned by the Visconti of Milan until his death in 1393. The Visconti controlled

Padua until 1390 when Francesco II da Carrara (“il Novello”) brought control of

Padua back to the Carrara dynasty. Il Novello’s rule was a time of constant war and

high taxation until he was deposed by the Venetians in 1405.10 After 1405, Padua

became for the following centuries part of the growing Venetian republic which was to

encompass much of the Veneto.

8 A new look at this era, Padua under the Carrara, 1318-1405, by Benjamin G. Kohl is slated to be published in April 1998 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Unfortunately, it was not available in time for the present survey. 9 Three members of the Scala family of Verona ruled Padua from 1328-1337. The number of rulers in the first half of the fourteenth century is so high because of the great number of assassinations of Carrara despots; these assassinations were often funded by jealous members of other branches of the Carrara family. 10 Il Novello also ruled for six months in 1388. He was murdered in 1406. When Il Vecchio died, Paduan people openly celebrated his long reign (see Cesare Foligno, The Story of Padua, London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1910, p. 134); public outpouring at the death of Il Novello was not permitted by the Venetian rulers. This contrast is important to our attempts to date Ciconia’s arrival in Padua based on textual references to the death of a Paduan ruler in Con lagreme bagnandome (see chapter 2).

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Secular and sacred patronage

The Carrara rulers, and Il Novello in particular, had reputations for producing

numerous magnificent cultural artifacts to show off the abundance of their lands.

These signs of patronage were more important to despotic courts such as those of the

Carrara or the Milanese Visconti families than to the republics of Florence or Venice.11

The amount of surviving artifacts from the Carrara reign is not commensurate with

accounts of Carrara munificence. Since these artifacts were testimonies to the power

of the rulers who commissioned them, they were probably destroyed by Padua’s

conquerors.12 It is probable that manuscripts, particularly manuscripts dedicated to a

specific patron, would be destroyed with larger monumental artifacts.13 Anne Hallmark

writes, “It seems ironic that Padua has been cited as a musical centre mainly during the

times when outsiders ruled the city.”14 It should thus be questioned whether the

surviving manuscripts, particularly those manuscripts which survive wholly intact, are

actually representative of the musical tradition which existed prior to the establishment

of Venetian rule.

Although musicians were not considered very respectable, nevertheless there are

accounts of patronage by the Carrara court of instrumentalists and singers as well as

11 Hallmark, “Some evidence,” p. 194. Nino Pirrotta, “Novelty and Renewal in Italy: 1300-1600,” Studien zur Tradition in der Musik (Kurt von Fischer zum 60. Geburtstag), ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht and Max Lütolf, (Munich: Musikverlag Katzbichler, 1973), p. 52. 12 Hallmark suggests that some of the destruction after the fall of Il Novello may have even been at the hands of the Paduan populace who were angry at the high taxation necessary to support Il Novello’s grandeur (“Some evidence,” p. 194). This would not explain destruction of internal court records of patronage, which are also lacking. It is conceivable that the back-stabbing Carrara rulers themselves were responsible for some of the destruction earlier in the fourteenth century. The tiny room given to trecento art in the Museo Civico Padova is a tangible witness to the destruction of artifacts of the fourteenth century (and most of this art is from the early fourteenth century). Earlier centuries even fare better than the fourteenth century in Padua; the percentage of space devoted to collections of trecento art in comparable museums in Verona and Venice is substantially higher. 13 A fire in 1420 in the building housing official public records compounds the difficulty in finding records of civic patronage (Cesare Foligno, The Story of Padua, p. 82). 14 Hallmark, “Some evidence,” p. 195.

11

other artists. In the treatise “On the proper love due princes,” written in 1399, the

chancellor of Il Novello’s court, Giovanni Conversini da Ravenna writes, “in the art of

ruling . . . it is fitting that various and diverse classes of person be kept on hand,” in-

cluding servants and people of respectability such as doctors and writers; he continues:

Many others, however, such as [harp players], singers, actors, painters, and other foolish people are acquired at court more for the pleasure they give than for anything else; they are people who should earn regard not so much for their intrinsic value, but for their very numbers.15

The production of dedicatory motets suggests patterns of patronage. These

motets are found far more commonly in the works of northern Italians than those of

Florentines. The motets of Johannes Ciconia suggest a pattern of patronage by three

Paduan bishops, and the Abbot of Santa Giustina, and, in particular, Francesco

Zabarella, later the Archbishop of Florence.16

Church and state were inexorably linked in late fourteenth-century Padua, more

so even than in most other Italian cities. At the end of the 1400s, the Carrara family

held not only the high secular posts but also the top positions in the Cathedral and in

the Abbey of S. Giustina. Francesco il Novello’s two illegitimate sons, Stefano da

Carrara and Andrea da Carrara held the posts of bishop and abbot pronunciatus (and later

abbot) of the Cathedral and Abbey respectively. 17 Thus, it would not be surprising if

some money for the patronage of musicians at the Cathedral and Abbey had roots in

the Carrara dynasty’s coffers.

15 Giovanni Conversini da Ravenna, “De dilectione Regnantium,” in Two Court Treatises, translated and edited by Benjamin G. Kohl and James Day, (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1987), pp. 8, 167. 16 Giulio Cattin, “Church Patronage of Music in Fifteenth Century Italy,” in Music in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Patronage, Sources, and Texts, edited by Iain Fenlon, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). p. 21. 17 Anne Hallmark, “Gratiosus, Ciconia, and other Musicians at Padua Cathedral: Some Footnotes to Present Knowledge,” In L’ars Nova Italiana del Trecento, no. 6, edited by Giulio Cattin, Atti del congresso internazionale “L’europa e la musica del Trecento,” (Certaldo: Polis, 1992), p. 75.

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It should be noted that the era of large-scale patronage did not begin until the

middle of the fifteen century, so even were it not for the destruction of records,

documentary evidence of this time would be incomplete. Other northern Italian courts

record only one or two musicians in residence at any time; the remainder were hired as

needed for specific occasions.18 These special occasions would probably have included

funerals, for which there is substantial evidence that other artists were employed, and

the many celebrations which took place in the great hall of Padua’s Palazzo della

Ragione in the Piazza dell’Erbe.19 Long distance patronage at this time was particularly

rare, since permanent ambassadorships in other cities had not yet been established.20

Paduan musical traditions

The music found in the Paduan fragments represents a diverse collection of

styles of polyphonic music for voices and voices with instruments. However, vocal

polyphony was only a small part of musical life in Padua. Sacred and secular

monophonic music played perhaps the largest role in musical city life. Secular

monophonic music was primarily an unwritten tradition of which there are few details,

thus making reconstruction extremely difficult. Contrary to popular belief, the

monophony was not scorned by the educated elite: by the third decade of the fifteenth

century, we have examples by many writers, especially humanists, such as Ambrogio

Traversari, praising singers of solo song accompanied by an instrument as being

18 William F. Prizer, “North Italian Courts, 1460-1540,” in Man and Music: The Renaissance, edited by Iain Fenlon, (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1989), p. 133. 19 Diana Norman, Siena, Florence, and Padua: Art, Society, and Religion 1280-1400: 1. Interpretative Essays, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 156-157. Colin Cunningham, “For the honour and beauty of the city: the design of town halls,” in Siena, Florence, and Padua: Art, Society, and Religion 1280-1400: 2. Case Studies, (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 50-53. 20 Lewis Lockwood, conversation, 25 March 1998. For information about patronage in northern Italy later in the fifteenth century, see Jonathan Glixon, “Music at the Venetian Scuole Grandi, 1440-1540” and Lewis Lockwood, “Strategies of music patronage in the fifteenth century: the cappella of Ercole I d’Este,” both in Music in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Patronage, Sources, and Texts, edited by Iain Fenlon, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

13

superior to singers of polyphony.21 In the literary tradition, the texts by such great

writers as Petrarch and Boccaccio (in “Il Decamerone”) which mention music describe

unwritten monophonic music, probably related to the troubadour art of southern

France.22

Paduans in the late fourteenth century held a strong interest in the popular

music of Sicily and southern Italy.23 Sicily songs were adapted to fit local taste into a

type of polyphonic two-part strophic composition called a “siciliana”. These sicilianas

were not notated in their original forms, but their Sicilian melodies can be partially

reconstructed from the siciliana-ballate found in the Reina codex, the Paduan

fragments, and other manuscripts of Paduan provenance (for a probable example, see Se

per dureça in PadB, chapter 4, reproduced in facsimile in appendix B). The largely

unwritten tradition of instrumental music presents a difficulty for the understanding

of this facet of trecento music. Instrumentalists were probably employed for the

procession of the relics of Saint Anthony, still major festival in Padua. The fragment I-

Pc 553 contains an incomplete organ intabulation of a mass and is possibly the remains

of a body of music for organ at the Cathedral; other archival evidence points to the

performance of the organ in the Cathedral during the second half of the fourteenth

century.24 The constant clanging of bells in the towers of various church and

government buildings, while perhaps not normally considered music, were an

omnipresent part of the urban soundscape.25

When the average person did hear polyphonic vocal music in Padua, it was more

likely to have been on special occasions in church than in a secular environment. The

21 Pirrotta, “Novelty and Renewal,” p. 55. 22 Ibid., p. 53. 23 Nino Pirrotta, “New Glimpses of an Unwritten Tradition,” in Words and Music: The Scholar’s View. A Medley of Problems and Solutions Compiled in Honor of A. Tillman Merritt, edited by Laurence Berman, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 271-291. 24 Hallmark, “Some Evidence,” pp. 197-198. 25 For more information on the use of bells as signals in the late medieval city, see Reinhard Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 3-4.

14

role of polyphony at the Cathedral can be gathered from evidence in two notated

antiphoners written in the early fourteenth century. These manuscripts, I-Pc 55 and I-

Pc 56 contain “omnia officia et processiones que sunt in ecclesia paduana per totum

circulum anni,” according to f. 1 of I-Pc 55. The manuscripts were prepared in the

early fourteenth century. Two-voice polyphonic compositions are part of the standard

music for certain offices and processionals in the Paduan church year. These

compositions have text indicating specific dates to be sung and details of the mode of

performance.26 Additional polyphonic music was added in the middle of the fifteenth

century, suggesting an unbroken tradition of use during that span.

From the thirteenth-century until the present, the university has played an

enormous role in Paduan life. The ”Bo” was founded in 1222 and is second in age

among Italian universities only to the University of Bologna. Although the university

was one of the centers of Italian humanist thought (especially in the fifteenth century),

the humanistic writings of Petrarch (who spent his last years in Padua), Boccaccio, and

Veronese did not concern themselves with music, especially practical concerns in

music.27

During the late fourteenth-century the first stream of immigrant composers

from the Low Countries reached northern Italy. This flow of talent from the

Burgundian lands would increase to torrent by the middle fifteenth century, when

northern immigrants were viewed as the best composers in Italy.28 After the Great

Schism in 1378, clerics from the Low Countries, to retain their benefices, would travel

26 Anne Hallmark, “Gratiosus, Ciconia, and other musicians at Padua Cathedral: Some Footnotes to Present Knowledge,” in L’ars Nova Italiana del Trecento, no. 6, edited by Giulio Cattin, Atti del congresso internazionale “L’europa e la musica del Trecento,” (Certaldo: Polis, 1992), pp. 70-71. 27 Iain Fenlon, “Music and Society,” in Man and Music: The Renaissance, (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1989), p.2. Fenlon does mention as an exception, the Paduan teacher Petrus de Abano (1250-1315) who wrote commentaries on music. 28 It is likely that Guillaume Dufay even stayed in Padua for some time c. 1450. It is for the cathedral in Padua that he wrote his Saint Anthony Mass. (Maria Nevilla Massaro, “Padua,” in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, second edition, edited by Ludwig Finscher, (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1997), vol. 7, p. 1314.

15

to Italy for their education, rather than France. During 1380s and 90s, we see greater

numbers of northerners emigrating to Italy. These musicians include Egardus, Ciconia,

a singer in the Paduan Cathedral chapter named Guillelmus de Linden de Alemania, and

possibly a composer from Saint Omer, west of Bruges.29 The return from France of

prelates loyal to the Roman pope during the Great Schism brought French music to

the fore in northern Italy during this time as well.30

The examination of trends in Padua may give a partial explanation as to why we

begin to see a sizable growth in the amount of musical material coming out of the

Abbey of Santa Giustina. The explanation offered here is a simple one: from 1405

until 1420, when the Paduan fragments were most likely to have been written,31 the

congregation of monks at Santa Giustina swelled in size and education, providing a

much greater base of manpower for the copying of music manuscripts.32 In the years

from 1408, when Ludovico Barbo took control of the monastery, until 1419, he

transformed “a handful of lax monks ruled by a worldly abbot” into a congregation of

200 pious monks, many of whom were university graduates, following strict Benedic-

tine rules.33 Although this explanation shows why there would be a greater chance of

the production of these manuscripts, it cannot fully explain their appearance. First, if a

major part of the reason is a larger labor force, we should expect to see evidence of

greater production of manuscripts of all types; such a comparative study has not yet

been carried out. Secondly, there is a general increase in the number of surviving music

manuscripts from other parts of Italy at this time: can the rationalization of an

increased labor force be used there as well? Finally, if more scribes were the only factor

in production of music manuscripts, one would expect that as the congregation at

29 Hallmark, “Gratiosus, Ciconia, and other musicians at Padua Cathedral,” p. 70. 30 Pirrotta, “Novelty and Renewal,” p. 55. 31 PadA may have been written slightly earlier. If a date of post-1405 can be securely estab-lished for the fragments then the explanation given above becomes even more compelling. 32 Barry Collett, Italian Benedictine Scholars and The Reformation: The Congregation of Santa Giustina of Padua, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 2-3. 33 Ibid., pp. 2, 4.

16

S. Giustina continued to grow during the 1430s and 40s, the production of manu-

scripts would also expand. The surviving fragmentary evidence instead shows a

decrease in music manuscript production during the middle decades of the fifteenth

century.

Throughout the course of this study these elements of Paduan city life will be

used to give a framework for the examination of finer and finer details of codicological

structure, notation, and paleography. Issues of patronage, unwritten musical traditions,

and developments in Padua civic and religious circles will continue to shape how we

approach this repertory.

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2 . C o m p o s e r s a n d C o n t e n t s

The lives and works of composers represented in the Paduan fragments reveal

the diverse backgrounds from which they came and illuminate the variety of musical

styles known and appreciated in late fourteenth-century Padua. Fourteen composers

are represented by twenty-eight compositions in the sixteen folios of PadA, PadB, and

PadC. There are also fifteen anonymous compositions in the fragments.34 The

composers here represent the spectrum from the extremely famous and well-

represented in the other surviving manuscripts to the virtually unknown and unique to

the Paduan fragments. Composers thought to be contemporaneous with the early 15th

century copying of the manuscripts are found alongside works by composers such as

Jacopo da Bologna, who was active before the middle of the fourteenth century. Local

composers, members of the chapter of Padua’s cathedral, are represented, as are

composers from the rest of northern Italy, Tuscany, France, and the Low Countries.

Pirrotta’s assertion that northern sources practically ignore Florentine music

except for a few works by Giovanni da Firenze and Francesco Landini (works he

presumes to have been written in northern Italy) cannot be disputed by this study,

though there does not seem to be evidence that the compositions of Landini found in

these fragments were composed in the north.35 Pirrotta claims that the inclusion of

music by Jacopo da Bologna and Bartolino da Padova in Florentine manuscripts

suggests the Florentines had a more cosmopolitan view of Italy. However, since these

are only two of the many northern composers found in the Paduan fragments and other

northern sources, this view can be called into question.36

34 Numbers do not add to the number given in the table of compositions (later this chapter) because there are two compositions which appear twice (O cieco mondo, and Et in terra pax . . . Clementie) and Gratious’s Sanctus is split between two fragments. 35 Nino Pirrotta, “Novelty and Renewal,” p. 49. 36 One might also question the “northern-ness” of Bartolino da Padova since none of the securely traceable Paduan fragments (PadA, PadB, PadC, PadD, I-Pu 656, and I-STr 14; I-Pc 553

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Composers in the Paduan fragments

The information about the composers below does not attempt to present

complete biographies. In the case of Ciconia, Landini, Jacopo da Bologna, and

Guillaume de Machaut, so much has been written about their lives (with much

controversy surrounding many of these biographies) that only the most important

information relevant to this study has been mentioned. For composers about whom

little has been written, a greater amount of detail about their lives and compositional

style is warranted.

Johannes Ciconia

The Johannes Ciconia we know today is not the same Ciconia we thought we

knew twenty years ago. Ciconia was a composer from Liège in modern day Belgium

who emigrated to Padua near the beginning of the fifteenth century. It was previously

thought that Ciconia was born c. 1335 and remained there as part of the chapter of St.

John the Evangelist until at least 1372 and, after composing most of his works around

the age of 60 in the 1390s, possibly returned to his birthplace after 1411.37 David

Fallow’s article, “Ciconia padre e figlio,” first put forth the possibility that a choirboy

mentioned in a 1385 Liège document named Johannes Ciconia is more likely the

composer Ciconia.38 This new interpretation, widely accepted today, would place

Ciconia’s birth around the year 1370.

Evidence based on references to the passing of a Paduan leader in Con lagreme

bagnandome, suggests the possibility that Ciconia could have been in Padua as early as

1393 since the passing of the next leader, the disposed Francesco Il Novello in 1406,

was not available to be examined in this study) include his music. He does however have a gathering of works in the (possibly Paduan) Reina codex. 37 Suzanne Clercx, Johannes Ciconia: Un musicien liégeois et son temps, (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1960), vol. 1, p. 5. George Louis Nemeth, “The Secular Music of Johannes Ciconia,” (Ph.D. diss.: Stanford University, 1977), p. 18. 38 David Fallows, “Ciconia padre e figlio,” Rivista Italiana di Musicologia 9 (1976), pp. 171-7.

19

could not have been a time for celebration.39 However, the most securely traceable

references to Ciconia in Padua do not place him there until 1401. The virelais, Aler m’en

veus (en strangne partie) may have been written as a farewell to his homeland, in the same

way Dufay wrote Adieu ces bon vins de Lannoys, though with far fewer specific details. After

arriving in north Italy, Ciconia began a tradition of writing celebratory motets for

specific individuals, suggesting he may have had a number of patrons (see chapter 1).

The virelais Aler m’en veus and Sus unne fontaine are the only surviving French

texted works by Ciconia, both of which can be found in the fragments studied.40

Ciconia’s earlier works, such as Sus unne fontaine, seem to be more rhythmically complex

than his later, Italian texted works.

Francesco Landini

An extremely prolific composer of 140 ballate, Francesco Landini was born c.

1330 and died in 1397.41 The name Landini never appears in the musical manuscripts;

in the music, he is usually referred to as Magister Franciscus de Florentia, or some

variant on this name often with the additional information relating to his profession as

organist or his blindness (Franciscus Cecus Horghanista de Florentia).42 145 of

Landini’s compositions are found in five gatherings of the famous Squarcialupi codex

(I-Fl 87): a beautiful manuscript containing the works of many Florentine and two

northern composers (Jacopo da Bologna and Bartolino de Padova) prepared with

39 Anne Hallmark, “Some Evidence,” p. 213. 40 This does not include the opus dubium canon Le ray au soleyl. 41 Kurt von Fischer, “Landini, Francesco,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music, edited by Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London: Macmillan Publishers, 1980), vol. 10, pp. 428. 42 Interestingly, though Landini’s eleven madrigals and caccia studied by Fellin display variations in notation type between pieces, there is no variation in notation type between concordances of a single piece (table in “Notation-types,” p. 216). Could it be that because of his blindness, Landini relied on various scribes to record his work (explaining his lack of a single notational system across his output of madrigals) and that his compositions were only written down once, while other composers might have written several versions of their pieces in different notational styles. An examination of the notation of Landini’s ballate should be undertaken. In any event, studying the works of Landini in order to determine authorial intention in notation types seems somewhat futile.

20

elaborate decoration, including gold leaf and miniature portraits of the composers

whose works are found in the codex.

Landini is represented with seven compositions in PadA, PadB, and PadC; nearly

twice that of any other composer. Though Tuscan, Landini had some connections with

northern Italy. In the 1360s Landini is said to have been in Venice to receive the

“corona launda” by the King of Cyprus. It is also possible that an opus dubium motet

was written for Doge Andrea Contarini and that the madrigal Una colomba candida was

addressed to the Visconti of Milan.43 No connections between Landini and Padua have

so far been found.

Jacopo da Bologna

Jacopo da Bologna was the first important northern Italian composer of the

Trecento. Jacopo’s compositions represent the oldest music found in the Paduan

fragments, most of which was probably written between 1340-60.44 Of the 34 works

solidly attributed to Jacopo, three are found in the Paduan fragments, none of which is

unicum. The madrigal O cieco mondo is found in PadC with a different version of the

ritornello in PadA. The ritornello Si e piena la terra from Ogelletto Silvagio is also notated

in PadC. PadA contains the only complete version of Jacopo’s only sacred work, the

motet Lux purpurata/Diligite iusticiam.

Not much is known about the life of Jacopo. He was in service in the Visconti

court of Milan during the 1340s and again in the mid-1350s, though there is no

reason to assume that this would cause his music to have extra significance in Padua

despite Visconti rule in Padua from 1388-90. Jacopo wrote a treatise, L’arte del biscanto

misurato in which he stated that it is the breve which is the determinant of the tempus in

music, showing that modus in mensuration was not commonly used even by mid-century

43 Fischer, “Landini,” in New Grove, vol. 10, p. 428. Although the same term “madrigal” is used to refer to an Italian vocal form in both the fourteenth and the sixteenth century, the two forms have little in common. 44 Kurt von Fischer, “Jacopo da Bologna,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music, edited by Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London: Macmillan Publishers, 1980), vol. 9, pp. 449.

21

(see chapter 3).45 Jacopo da Bologna is the only composer of the trecento to set a text

by Petrarch and may have been a poet himself.46

Guillaume de Machaut

Guillaume de Machaut is the most well-known composer of the French Ars

Nova. Machaut was born c. 1300 and died in 1377 probably in Rheims. His output is

considerable: 23 motets, 42 ballads, 22 rondeaux, 33 virelais, 19 lais, a few secular and

sacred pieces in various other styles, and one mass, Le Messe de Nostre Dame, probably the

most famous medieval composition. Much of his popularity and the size of his output

can be attributed to his success as a self-promoter. Machaut supervised the copying of

several manuscripts devoted to preserving his works, without which much of his music

would be either unknown or unattributable. Machaut was also a renown poet and wrote

several monophonic songs and many pieces without music.

Machaut is represented in the Paduan fragments by two pieces in PadA, the

rondeaux Ma fin est mon commencement and the Ite missa est from his mass.47 Ma fin est mon

commencement is a secular composition for three voices. The first two lines of the

composition, “My end is my beginning and my beginning is my end,” give information

about the structure of the piece: it is to sound the same forwards and backwards. The

manuscripts containing the piece, including PadA (GB-Ob 229, f. D), notate a top voice

and half of the tenor. The fifth and sixth lines of text “Mes tiers chants trois fois

seulment/Se retrograde et einsi fin” gives a clue to the performer how the remainder of

the piece is to be created. The second voice is a retrograde canon of the first voice,

that is, the top part sung backwards. The tenor (the “tiers chants”) reverses itself

45 Quoted in W. Thomas Marrocco, editor, Italian Secular Music, by Magister Piero, Giovanni da Firenze, Jacopo da Bologna, in Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, vol. 6, (Monaco: Editions de l’Oiseau-lyre, 1967), p. xi. 46 Fischer, “Jacopo da Bologna,” in New Grove, vol. 9, p. 449. 47 In PadA, the composition appears to be called Ma fin est ma commencement, though the word “ma” may also be “mo,” which would be an abbreviation of “mon.” Since the paleography is unclear, I have chosen to retain the traditional spelling “mon commencement” for this paper.

22

halfway through when the notated music is exhausted. In the PadA however, only the

first two lines of Ma fin est mon commencement are given. It is probable that the piece was

appreciated for its canonic form and not necessarily for its uninspired text. In fact, it

is quite possible that the piece, if performed, was not performed with the repetition

scheme of a rondeaux.

The dismissing of the congregation with the intoning of the Ite missa est is the

final part of the mass. Though not normally set by composers, Machaut includes a

three voice setting of this short section in his Le Messa de Nostre Dame. Machaut is

usually recognized as the first composer of a unified mass cycle consisting of Kyrie,

Gloria (Et in terra pax), Credo (Patrem omnipotentem), Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and Ite missa est,

though the separation of the Ite missa est from the rest of the mass might be an

indication that Paduan musicians were not interested in the work as a unified poly-

phonic mass cycle. This notion is supported by the scarce settings of the Agnus Dei and

the extreme rarity of polyphonic Kyrie settings in late fourteenth-century Italian music.

Gratiosus de Padua

The complete extant works of Gratiosus de Padua are found in PadA, I-Pu 684,

with a continuation of one work onto a page of I-Pu 1475. His surviving works consist

of a Sanctus in three parts (no. 38-39), a Gloria in three parts (No. 45), and Alta regina de

virtute, a lauda-ballata in either two or three parts, of which only the top voice survives.

There is a possibility that Gratiosus is also the author of the motet Gratiosus fervidus/

Magnanissimus opere based primarily on the possible name in the incipit.

Archival work by Anne Hallmark has shown Gratiosus, or Grazioso, to have

been in the chapter of Padua cathedral.48 Documents from July 1391 in the Archivio di

Stato di Padova and June 1392 in the Archivio Capitolare di Padova refer to a

“presbiteris Gratioso” and a “presbitero Gracioso de Padua.” By June 1392, Gratiosus

held the position of mansionarius. Since this position would have given him charge

48 Anne Hallmark, “Gratiosus, Ciconia, and other musicians at Padua Cathedral,” p. 74.

23

over a large portion of church activities, it is thought that by the last decade of the

fourteenth-century Gratiosus could have been old enough to be a position to have

written his mature works. If the reference to the monk “Gracioso” is a reference to the

composer, then there is evidence to show that Gratiosus was a member of the Abbey of

Santa Giustina in 1398 and may have been present there when the manuscripts

(particularly PadB, PadC, and PadD) were produced.

Billy Jim Layton has suggested that the Sanctus and the ballata Alta regina

represent older, immature compositions while the Gloria was representative of

Gratiosus’ later style.49 I disagree with Layton’s assessment for two reasons. First, he

based his supposition on the notion that Gratiosus’ Gloria has more French traits, traits

which could have been learned from the venerable composer Ciconia. The new dates

for Ciconia suggest that if there was any influence between the composers it probably

went the other direction. Also there is no reason to assume that French style continued

to gain popularity in the last decades of the fourteenth century and the first decades of

the fifteenth. This is particularly true in Padua where Prosdocimus is advocating a

return to earlier Italian notational styles during the early fifteenth century.50 Secondly,

Layton cites a “poverty of melodic invention” as evidence for the Sanctus being an earlier

work.51 This claim seems untenable. Repetition of melodic motives is not common

only to immature works by a composer and there is not even an extraordinary amount

of this repetition in the piece. The simultaneous use of duple and triple divisiones is

reminiscent of some ars subtilior compositions, even if the notation in .o. and .i. is not.52

49 Billy Jim Layton, “Italian Music for the Ordinary of the Mass, 1300-1450,” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1960), p. 128. 50 Note that even the “French” Gloria uses divisio letters and hockets. 51 Layton, “Italian Music for the Ordinary of the Mass,” p. 121. 52 Polyphony composed prior to the fourteenth century is sometimes called ars antiqua polyphony. The fourteenth century ushered in the ars nova era in vocal polyphony, of which all compositions in this study are a part. In the late fourteenth century (c. 1370-1400), some ars nova composers began experimenting with increasing rhythmic complexity involving multiple meters between parts. These ars subtilior composers were primarily French. They manifested their love for complicated rhythm in the creation of new note-types and metrical symbols. The

24

Composers represented by a single work, only in the fragments

Four composers are represented by a single work in PadA (each one a mass

movement) and have no other surviving music: Barbitonsoris, Berlatus, Mediolano, and

Sant Omer. Evidently, there were a few big names and many smaller composers writing

music for the Church in northern Italy. What we know about the composers comes

almost entirely from analyses of their musical style, since archival research on the lives

of these composers has either not been undertaken or has proved fruitless.

In the Oxford fragment (GB-Ob 229), on f. CV (f. 55V) is a three part Sanctus

by Barbitonsoris. The Sanctus and first Hosanna are in triple meter with a switch to

duple for the Benedictus.53 Since the composition uses indications of Italian meters,

such as .q., without other important Italian devices (such as puncti divisiones), the

notation can be seen to mix French and Italian elements.

Next to the second voice (contratenor) of the Sanctus, the word “ambrosius” is

written. Ambrosius is most likely the name of the composer of the contratenor voice.

There was a tradition of composing substitute contratenors and of adding new

contratenors to compositions which previously had two voices. It is also possible that

not only was Ambrosius the composer of the contratenor, but also the name of the

scribe. It was not unheard of for scribes to compose their own contratenors to existing

compositions. In Panciatichiano 26 (I-Fn 26) the words “musicha mia” are written in

the final long of the contratenor to Jacopo de Bologna’s madrigal, Si Chome al Canto (f.

95). Kurt von Fischer and Michael Long have argued that this indicates that the scribe

himself added this voice.54 Even if Ambrosius was not the scribe or even the composer

only true ars subtilior work in the fragments examined is Ciconia’s Sus unne fontaine, in PadA (GB-Ob 229). 53 The Sanctus of the mass has the structure Sanctus, [H]osanna, Benedictus, second Hosanna. In music of this period, the second Hosanna is sometimes a repetition of the music of the first Hosanna (indicated by “Osanna ut super”) or sometimes new music. 54 Kurt von Fischer, RISM B/IV/4, p. 890. Michael Long, “Musical Tastes in Fourteenth-Century Italy: Notational Styles, Scholarly Traditions, and Historical Circumstances,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1980, p. 181. John Nádas prescribes greater caution regarding this issue in his dissertation, noting that the same contratenor appears in the Reina codex (F-Pn

25

of the contratenor, the position of the name of the page allows us to reject Layton’s

theory that Ambrosius is the first name of our composer, “Ambrogio del

Barbitonsoris.”55

The Sanctus and first Hosanna sections are isorhythmic with some minor

deviations. Isorhythmic compositions were most popular in the early fourteenth

century. Isorhythms are rhythmic patterns (talea), often on a large scale, which are

repeated to the same or different melodic patterns (color). Their use shows French

influence, though it does not argue for Barbitonsoris being a French composer.56 The

style of the opening section, from Sanctus to the end of the “Pleni sunt” contains many

parallel 6-3 sonorities.57 This harmonic movement and dependence on imperfect,

rather than perfect, consonances is somewhat reminiscent of the English sonorities of

the time (part of the so-called contenance angloise) and was to become prominent in the

music, particularly French and Burgundian music, of the fifteenth century. Since it is

the contratenor voice which often moves in parallel fourths below the cantus, we cannot

attribute these sonorities completely to Barbitonsoris. We may have evidence here for

another composer, Ambrosius, updating music of an earlier era.

The composer Berlatus is known to us only through the top voice of his Credo

in GB-Ob 229, f. BV. Since only a fragment of a work with a fixed text survives, it is

difficult to say much about his musical style and next to impossible to speculate about

his life. Toward the middle of the composition (mm. 75-85) there is a short section

which features breves imperfected both a parte ante and a parte post creating a series of

6771) (Nádas, “The Transmission of Trecento Secular Polyphony: Manuscript Production and Scribal Practices in Italy at the end of the Middle Ages,” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1985, pp. 89-90.). However, since no contratenor exists in the version in Lo (GB-Lbm 29987) or Sq (I-Fl 87), the issue is still not clear and probably will not become definitively answered until more information about the stemma of Reina becomes available. 55 Layton, “Italian Music for the Ordinary of the Mass,” p. 129. 56 The decoration in the writing of Barbitonsoris’s name recalls similar decoration on f. A. In chapter 6, I argue that f. A represents an interest in that which is older and French. It may be possible that a connection between Barbitonsoris is being drawn by this decoration, though this conjecture is tenuous. 57 The figure 6-3 means that the two upper voices are a sixth and a third above the lowest note.

26

very striking syncopations contrasted with breve-minim rhythms. This composition

seems to avoid suggesting the influence of the rhythmic modes. 58 The ascending

tetrachords (four note scales) from G to C on “resurexit [sic]” and “et ascendit”

suggest word painting by this composer. Word painting, though rare, is not completely

unheard of in music of this time (e.g., Ciconia’s Credo in I-Bc 15 and I-GR 19759) and

the examples in Berlatus’s Credo stand out as being particularly unambiguous.

A Sanctus by Mediolano is found on ff. AV-B of GB-Ob 229. The composer’s

name indicates he is from Milan. The composition is the only four-voice work in the

fragments studied. The top two voices and the tenor are fully texted; the contratenor

is incompletely texted, though since the text would have been so well known this does

not necessarily suggest instrumental performance. The composition is securely in the

dorian mode: every phrase begins and ends with the tenor on D.60 The opening motive,

D-A-B-A suggests that the tenor might be based on a chant in mode 1. If so, the

performer should examine the possibility that the B is actually a BΙ, which would make

the opening motive conform to the chant modal antiphon for mode 1. The use of so

many breves suggests that the longa may be the unit of metrical time. An

interpretation of modus perfectum (three measures per modus) yields a cadence on the

downbeat of the modus for every phrase until the Benedictus. These modus do not make

much musical sense as subdivisions, and there are syncopations across the modus (e.g.,

mm. 38-39) so their importance can be questioned. The Hosanna and Benedictus

58 The rhythmic modes were recurring rhythmic patterns, such as long breve long breve (mode 1), breve long breve long (mode 2), or perfect long, breve, imperfect long (mode 3). These modal rhythms were most common in thirteenth-century music, though vestiges can be seen in some compositions in the Paduan fragments, e.g., Benedicamus domino on f. AV of GB-Ob 229. Note that in all cases of modal rhythm a diminution has occurred: long-breve becomes breve-minim. The six rhythmic modes should not be confused with the eight modes used to classify harmony. 59 Bent and Hallmark, Works of Johannes Ciconia, p. 204. 60 There are eight “church” modes to which nearly all chants can be assigned based on their range and the note on which they end. Modes 1 and 2 are D or dorian modes. Mode 1 compositions are characterized by the majority of their notes lying above the final (D), while mode 2 compositions often descend below the final, often to A.

27

sections have overlapping phrase endings and unaligned text setting. Staggered

entrances in a quasi-canonic fashion (in the modern sense of the word) are found in

the second half of the composition, with the important pentachord from A to D

figuring prominently.

Sant Omer is more likely the name of the city of origin of the composer of the

Sanctus on f. B of I-Pu 1475 rather than that of the composer. Sant Omer was a city in

the low countries near the Straits of Dover (approximately 20 miles west of the Belgian

border, in modern day France), thus suggesting another link between Padua and the

North. The Sanctus is in three voices, but has been damaged by a vertical cut which

removes the right one-third or so of the folio. The tenor seems to be in transposed

dorian with all surviving cadences (and most entrances) on G.

Other composers represented in the fragments

The composer of A piançer l’oche, Antonelus Marot de Caserta (“tonelus” in

PadB) was active around the end of the fourteenth century, possibly in northern Italy.61

Antonelus’ French-texted compositions, ars subtilior in rhythmic complexity, survive

primarily in ModA (I-MOe 5.24). His Italian compositions can all be found in the

Mancini codex, I-Las 184. Because of the difference in style and complexity of the

French and Italian compositions, and because compositions written in the two

languages are preserved separately, it has been suggested by Nigel Wilkins that there

were two composers of the same name.62 The different scribal hand of A piançer l’oche

raises the possibility that it was inserted in the manuscript at a slightly later time. In

this case, Trowell’s argument for a single composer based on the presence of many

French texted works in PadB would be weaker. No tie between Antonelus Marot and

Padua has been found.

61 Brian Trowell, “Anthonello de Caserta,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music, edited by Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London: Macmillan Publishers, 1980), vol. 1, pp. 465. 62 Nigel Wilkins, “The post-Machaut Generation of Poet-Musicians,” Nottingham Mediaeval Studies, 12 (1968), pp. 40-84.

28

Johannes Baçus Correçarus was a saddler from Bologna whose surviving work

consists of the three voice ballata Se questa dea de vertue.63 The complete composition is

found in Reina (no. 68) and three staves worth of the contratenor are found in PadA.

The composition is written in Italian notation, including oblique stemmed semibreves

and puncti divisionis but without divisio letters. The composition seems to have originally

been in .o. but through the addition of extra puncti, often added higher than normal on

the staff, has been converted to .q., probably to bring it somewhat more up to date.

However, theories that these puncti were added later must be dismissed since the breve

is equal to two semibreves (as in .q.) rather than four normal semibreves, as would be

the case if the composition had been notated in .o. in PadA before the dots were added.

Johannes Ecghaerd, known as Engardus in PadA and Egardus in other sources,

was a northern composer active in Bruges in the 1370s and ’80s.64 He may have been

one of the musicians in the papal court of Bologna c. 1410; however, this is based on

his presence in gatherings of ModA whose connections to the court in Bologna have not

been securely established. Strohm suggests the Egardus may have been in Padua before

his time at the papal court in Bologna, c. 1400-1410.65 He also suggests a reason for

the first wave of migration of composers to Italy: the Great Schism (1378) forced

composers associated with Roman-supporting dioceses to study in Italy rather than

France if they wished to gain a benefice upon their return.66

Perrinet, or Perneth in PadA, was a French composer active around the turn of

the century and might be Perrinet Rino, an instrumentalist at the court in Barcelona in

1417.67 Two compositions of Perrinet’s survive: a three-part Kyrie and a Credo. The

63 Kurt von Fischer, “Johannes Baçus Correçarius de Bononia,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music, edited by Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London: Macmillan Publishers, 1980), vol. 9, p. 660. 64 Reinhard Strohm, “Magister Egardus and other Italo-Flemish Contacts,” in L’ars Nova Italiana del Trecento, no. 6, edited by Giulio Cattin, Atti del congresso internazionale “L’europa e la musica del Trecento,” (Certaldo: Polis, 1992), p. 44. 65 Ibid., p. 44. 66 Ibid., p. 52. 67 Gilbert Reaney, “Perrinet,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music, edited by Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London: Macmillan Publishers, 1980), vol. 14, p. 547.

29

credo is in four parts in concordant manuscripts, but the arrangement of the two

surviving parts in the version in I-Pu 684, f. CV strongly suggests transmission of a

three voice version, with one upper voice on each page of an opening and the tenor

running across the bottom staves of both pages. In F-APT 16bis, the composition is

attributed to “Bonbarde.” This might be a reference to Perrinet being a player of the

bombard (a tenor or bass shawm) or it might suggest performance by such instruments

in the Credo. Though there are many untexted transitional sections between phrases

that would seem well suited to instrumental playing, the use of shawms with voices

would violate the prohibition against mixing loud instruments with soft.

Senleches was a French composer whose works date from the last three decades

of the fourteenth century.68 He was a harpist (one composition is even written in the

shape of a harp) and spent some time at the court of Aragon. Of his six surviving

works, only En ce gracieux temps is not written with the rhythmic complexities of the ars

subtilior era (see chapter 4). Senleches was sent to Bruges in 1378 during which time it

is possible he could have met Egardus and Petrus Vinderhout, the possible composer of

Apolinis ecclipsatur (see chapter 5).69

Filiation, contents, and concordances

Since the documenting of sources from which these manuscripts were copied

would enrich our knowledge of Paduan music traditions and draw connections to other

traditions, this study identifies relationships between some compositions and

compositions in concordant sources. No one has yet been able to document a source

for the majority of the compositions found in PadA, PadB, and PadC. PadB and PadC

were not copied from any single currently known source. The four non-unica

compositions in PadB have a total of seven concordances, all of which occur with

68 Ursula Günther, “Jacob de Senleches,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music, edited by Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London: Macmillan Publishers, 1980), vol. 9, pp. 443-444. 69 Ibid., p. 443; Reinhard Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, p. 104.

30

different manuscripts. The concordances between PadC and other manuscripts can be

divided into two groups: concordances in the Jacopo compositions and concordances in

the French compositions. Only F-Pn 6771 (Reina) straddles the two groups, though it

is missing Apolinis ecclipsatur. The similarity in source readings of Or sus vous dormés with

Reina (particularly in which measures are omitted) leaves open the possibility that the

two manuscripts are closely related, even if no direct copying took place.

With so many unica compositions, it would be impossible to demonstrate that

PadA was copied in bulk from any surviving manuscript. It is more fruitful to examine

manuscripts which might have used PadA for their sources. The two fragments of PadD

which have concordant readings of Gloria by Egardus and Ciconia appear to have been

copied by Rolandus da Cassale from PadA. The omission of a necessary minim stem in

I-Pu 1283, but present in PadA is the strongest evidence for the direction of

dependence.70 That the two Gloria are on the recto and verso of the same folio in PadA

but in separate sections of PadD should not be taken as contrary evidence for this

stemma: in order to not have to wait while the ink on one side of a folio dried,

compositions were often copied on different folios, thus not preserving the order of

the manuscript being copied. However, the demonstration that parts of PadD were

copied from PadA should not lead us to discount PadD as a source for the

compositions. As Margaret Bent points out, unlike literary stemmatics where the

written text is the literary work, the notation of a composition is not the music.71

Thus, even a scribe unfamiliar with a composition can play the role of musical editor by

adding valuable information about performance practice though his choice in text

setting, layout of parts, and use of ligatures.

70 Hallmark, “Some evidence,” p. 207. Bent and Hallmark, Works of Johannes Ciconia, p. 204. 71 Margaret Bent, “Some Criteria for Establishing Relationships Between Sources of Late-Medieval Polyphony,” in Music in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Iain Fenlon, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 296.

31

Manuscript Contents

Pieces are numbered by the order in which they appear in the manuscript,

except in the case of I-Pu 1475, where one can only make sense of the document if the

pieces are rearranged according to the original foliation. # MS f. Title Composer Concordances 1 1115

(PadB) A Se per dureça anonymous unicum

2 1115 A Ay si anonymous unicum 3 1115 Av Aler m’en veus Ciconia I-BC 15, f. 266v-267 4 1115 B En ce gracieux Senleches I-MOe 5.24 (ModA), f. 25v

F-Pn 6771 (Reina), f. 58v F-Sm 222, f. 51

5 1115 Bv Dolçe fortuna Ciconia F-Pn 4379 (PC II), f. 48v-49

6 1115 Bv A piançer l’oche Antonelus Marot I-Las 184 (Man.), No. 36 I-PSac 5, No. 3

7 658 (PadC

)

A [Ogelletto Silvagio] Si e piena la terra

Jacopo da Bologna I-Fn 26 (Pan.), f. 72v-73 F-Pn 568 (Pit.), f. 5v-6 F-Pn 6771 (Reina), f. 8v-9 I-Fl 87 (Sq.), f. 13v

8 658 Av O cieco mondo Jacopo da Bologna I-Fl 87 (Sq.), f. 11v-12 F-Pn 568 (Pit.) f. 5v-6 F-Pn 6771 (Reina), f. 5v I-Fn 26 (Pan.), f. 65 I-FZc 117, f. 71-72 GB-Ob 229 (PadA), see no.

13, below

9 658 B [Or sus vous dormés] c’est pour vous dame

anonymous F-Pn 6771 (Reina), f. 78v-79

I-IV, f. 14v-15 F-Pn 568 (Pit.), f. 122v-

124 GB-Lbm 29987 (Lo.), f. 76v-

77 F-Sm 222, f. 76v

32

# MS f. Title Composer Concordances 10 658 Bv Apolinis ecclipsatur anonymous

(B. de Cluni?) I-IV, f. 12v-13 E-Bcen 971, f. 11v-12 E-Bcen 853, f. 1 NL-Lu 2515 F-Pn 23190 (Trem.) F-Sm 222, f. 64v-65 (5

voices)

11 229 (PadA)

A Sanctus anonymous unicum

12 229 Av Benedicamus domino anonymous unicum 13 229 Av [O cieco mondo]

Per chio te Jacopo da Bologna see no. 8, above

14 229 B Sanctus Mediolano unicum 15 229 Bv Patrem omnipotentem Berlatus unicum 16 229 C Et in terra pax anonymous unicum 17 229 C Sones ces nachares anonymous unicum 18 229 Cv Sanctus Barbitonsoris unicum 19 229 D Dona s’ i’to falito Landini I-Fn 26 (Pan.), f. 1

GB-Lbm 29987 (Lo.), f. 24 F-Pn 568 (Pit.), f. 85v-86 I-Fl 87 (Sq.), f. 158 F-Pn 6771 (Reina), f. 34 I-Las 184 (Man.), No. 19

20 229 D Ma fin est mon commencement

Machaut F-Pn 1584 (Machaut A), f. 479v

F-Pn 1585 (Machaut B), f. 309

F-Pn 9221 (Machaut E), f. 136

F-Pn 22546 (Machaut G), f. 153

US-NYw (Machaut Vg), (f. lost)

F-Pn 843 (Machaut M), no. 15 (text only)

21 229 Dv Sus unne fontaine Ciconia I-MOe 5.24 (ModA),

f. 28, 27v 22 1475

(PadA) B Sanctus “Sant Omer” unicum

23 1475 Bv Agnus dei anonymous unicum 24 1475 Bv Sanctus anonymous unicum 25 1475 F Et in terra pax Engardus I-Pu 1225 (PadD), f. 1

NL-Uu 1846, f. I Av

33

# MS f. Title Composer Concordances 26 1475 Fv,D Et in terra pax Ciconia I-Pu 1283 (PadD), f. 1r

D-NST 9a, f. 3

27 1475 D Ite missa est Machaut F-Pn 1584 (Machaut A), f. 451

F-Pn 1585 (Machaut B), f. 294

F-Pn 9221 (Machaut E), f. 170

F-Pn 22546 (Machaut G), f. 133v

US-NYw (Machaut Vg), f. 296

28 1475 Dv [Et in terra... Clementie]

...udetur in rubro anonymous see no. 32, below

29 1475 Dv [Giovine vagha I’ non senti’] ...rosa virtute

Landini I-Fl 87 (Sq.), f. 160

30 1475 C [Donna l’animo tuo] Landini I-Fn 26 (Pan.), f. 2v-3 I-Fl 87 (Sq.), f. 151v

31 1475 C Gratiosus fervidus/ Magnanissimus opere/ [Tenor]

anonymous I-MOe 5.24 (ModA), f. 51v

32 1475 Cv,E Et in terra pax...Clementie

anonymous I-Rvat 171, f. 225 see also no. 28, above

33 1475 Ev Qui pandis anonymous unicum 34 1475 Ev Se questa dea Johannes Baçus

Correçarus F-Pn 6771 (Reina)

35 1475 A Et in terra anonymous unicum 36 1475 A Die non fugir da me Landini I-Fn 26 (Pan.), f. 32

I-Fl 87 (Sq.), f. 144v F-Pn 6771 (Reina),

f. 50v-51

37 1475 Av Lux purpurata... Diligite iusticiam

Jacopo da Bologna I-Fasl 2211, f. 61v (frag.)

38 1475 Av Benedictus Gratiosus see no. 39, below 39 684

(PadA) A Sanctus Gratiosus unicum (cont. in no. 38,

above) 40 684 Av Gran pianto agli ochi Landini I-Fn 26 (Pan.), f. 26

GB-Lbm 29987 (Lo.), f. 29v-30

F-Pn 568 (Pit.), f. 67v-68 I-Fl 87 (Sq.), f. 133v F-Pn 6771 (Reina), f. 34v

34

# MS f. Title Composer Concordances 41 684 Av S’ i’ te so stato Landini I-Fn 26 (Pan.), f. 8

F-Pn 568 (Pit.), f. 89v-90 I-Fl 87 (Sq.), f. 142v F-Pn 6771 (Reina),

f. 48v-49 I-Las 184 (Man.), No. 71

42 684 B Et in terra...Qui sonita anonymous F-APT 16bis, f. 5v, 7 I-IV 115, f. 36v-37 US-R 44, f. 1v-2 F-CA(n) 1328, f. 3v-4 D-Mbs 29775, f. A-Av D-NST 9a, f. 2v, 3v (frag.) F-Sm 222, f. 40v-41

(incip.)

43 684 Bv Poy che partir Landini I-Fn 26 (Pan.), f. 23 F-Pn 568 (Pit.), f. 92v-93 I-Fl 87 (Sq.), f. 165v Cs-Pu XI E 9, f. 248

44 684 Bv Alta regina de virtute Gratiosus unicum 45 684 C Et in terra pax Gratiosus unicum 46 684 Cv Patrem omnipotentem Perneth F-APT 16bis, f. 29v, 32

F-Sm 222, f. 3v-4 E-Bcen 853c, f. 8-8v

(incmpl.) B-Bc II, (frag.) I-GR 197, f. 5 (frag.)

Concordances with other Manuscripts

In contrast to the high rate of concordance among Florentine manuscripts, the

high percentage of unica works (40% or 17 of 43) together with the low number of

works in common with other Paduan manuscripts, PadD in particular, points to a large

body of yet undiscovered northern Italian compositions.

35

Sources with concordant readings # Compositions Unica compositions: no other

manuscript contains these pieces. Notice that all but the first two are found in PadA. Mass sections are particularly likely to be found only in PadA.

17 1. Se per dureça 2. Ay si 11. Sanctus (anonymous) 12. Benedicamus Domino 14. Sanctus (Mediolano) 15. Patrem omnipotentem (Berlatus) 16. Et in terra pax (anonymous) 17. Sones ces nachares 18. Sanctus (Barbitonsoris) 22. Sanctus (“Sant Omer”) 23. Agnus dei (anonymous) 24. Sanctus (anonymous) 33. Qui pandis 35. Et in terra (anonymous) 39. Sanctus (Gratiosus) 44. Alta regina de virtute 45. Et in terra pax (Gratiosus)

F-Pn 6771 (Reina codex): A compi-lation, possibly made in Padua of music Italian and French music (in separate sections) of the fourteenth-century. Later, French music of the fifteenth-century was added to this source. The reading of Or sus vous dormés in Reina is particularly close to that of PadC.

9 4. En ce gracieux 7. Ogelletto Silavgio 8. O cieco mondo 9. Or sus vous dormés 19. Dona s’ i’to falito 34. Se questa dea 36. Die non fugir da me 40. Gran pianto agli ochi 41. S’ i’ te so stato

I-Fl 87 (Sq.): The Squarcialupi codex is a lavishly decorated manu-script of secular compositions compiled in Florence probably during the second or third decade of the fifteenth century. Works are separated by composer, with the music of Landini particularly well preserved.

9 7. Ogelletto Silavgio 8. O cieco mondo 19. Dona s’ i’to falito 29. Giovine vagha I’ non senti’ 30. Donna l’animo tuo 36. Die non fugir da me 40. Gran pianto agli ochi 41. S’ i’ te so stato 43. Poy che partir

36

Sources with concordant readings # Compositions I-Fn 26 (Pan.): Panciatichiano 26 is

another Florentine manuscript of secular polyphony. All of the concordances with the Paduan fragments are works by either Jacopo da Bologna (7 and 8) or Francesco Landini.

8 7. Ogelletto Silavgio 8. O cieco mondo 19. Dona s’ i’to falito 30. Donna l’animo tuo 36. Die non fugir da me 40. Gran pianto agli ochi 41. S’ i’ te so stato 43. Poy che partir

I-Pn 568 (Pit.): Pit. is another Tuscan secular polyphonic manuscript preserving a subset of the works also found in concordances with Pan. and Sq. The exception to this is Or sus vous dormés, which has quite a different reading from the version in PadC.

7 7. Ogelletto Silavgio 8. O cieco mondo 9. Or sus vous dormés 19. Dona s’ i’to falito 40. Gran pianto agli ochi 41. S’ i’ te so stato 43. Poy che partir

F-Sm 222: This Strasbourg codex was destroyed in a fire before any photographic facsimile could be made of it. An index of incipits along with a transcription of many works in the codex, including Apolinis ecclipsatur was made by Charles Coussemaker in the late 19th century.

5 4. En ce gracieux 9. Or sus vous dormés 10. Apolinis ecclipsatur 42. Et in terra. . . Qui sonita 46. Patrem omnipotentem (Perneth)

GB-Lbm 29987 (Lo.) 3 9. Or sus vous dormés 19. Dona s’ i’to falito 40. Gran pianto agli ochi

I-Las 184 (Man): The Mancini codex may have had some fascicles copied in Padua.

3 6. A piançer l’oche 19. Dona s’ i’to falito 41. S’ i’ te so stato

I-MOe 5.24 (ModA) 3 4. En ce gracieux 21. Sus unne fontaine 31. Gratiosus fervidus/Magnanissimus opere

D-NST 9a 2 26. Et in terra pax (Ciconia) 42. Et in terra. . . Qui sonita

F-APT 16bis 2 42. Et in terra. . . Qui sonita 46. Patrem omnipotentem (Perneth)

37

Sources with concordant readings # Compositions I-IV 2 9. Or sus vous dormés

10. Apolinis ecclipsatur

Machaut Manuscripts (A,B,E,G,Vg): The production of these manuscripts was overseen by Machaut himself.

2 20. Ma fin est mon commencement 27. Ite missa est

PadD (I-Pu 1225, 1283): These pieces are thought to have been directly copied from PadA.

2 25. Et in terra pax (Engardus) 26. Et in terra pax (Ciconia)

B-Bc II 1 46. Patrem omnipotentem (Perneth) Cs-Pu XI E 9 1 43. Poy che partir D-Mbs 29775 1 42. Et in terra. . . Qui sonita E-Bcen 853 1 10. Apolinis ecclipsatur E-Bcen 853c 1 46. Patrem omnipotentem (Perneth) E-Bcen 971 1 10. Apolinis ecclipsatur F-CA(n) 1 42. Et in terra. . . Qui sonita F-Pn 23190 (Trem.) 1 10. Apolinis ecclipsatur F-Pn 4379 (PC II) 1 5. Dolçe fortuna I-Bc 15 1 3. Aler m’en veus (contrafactum) I-Fasl 2211 1 37. Lux purpurata. . . Diligite iusticiam I-FZc 117 1 8. O cieco mondo I-GR 197 1 46. Patrem omnipotentem (Perneth) I-IV 115 1 42. Et in terra. . . Qui sonita I-PSac 5 1 6. A piançer l’oche I-Rvat 171 1 32. Et in terra pax. . . Clementie NL-Lu 2515 1 10. Apolinis ecclipsatur NL-Uu 1846 1 25. Et in terra pax (Engardus) US-R 44 1 42. Et in terra. . . Qui sonita

38

3 . M a n u s c r i p t E x a m i n a t i o n

The notation, handwriting, and physical structure of the Paduan fragments are

themselves important to our understanding of music in Padua in the late fourteenth

century. Compositions of this time are found with variants in notation in concordant

sources. These variations can tell modern readers what styles and regions were influ-

encing scribes in late fourteenth-century Padua as well as possible sources which copied

the fragments or from which the fragments were copied. A study of the transmission

of fourteenth century polyphony also requires a study of the physical aspects of the

manuscripts. From codicology we can determine the minimum possible lengths of the

original manuscripts and discover the layout of missing folios adjacent to those that

survive. Paleography enables us to determine what are the characteristics of a specific

scribe. Through these traits, we can determine if the scribe was responsible for the

copying of any other manuscripts. Giulio Cattin, for example, has been able to show

that Rolandus was the scribe of both PadD and I-STr 14.72 By understanding the details

of these manuscripts, their contents can be more easily placed in the context of the

surrounding musical world.

Notation types in late medieval Italy

The notational systems used to transmit the music of PadA, PadB, and PadC

vary from piece to piece, from manuscript to manuscript, and from scribe to scribe.

Musical notation of late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth century Italy is not character-

ized by the consistency and universality of interpretation which one would see in music

of, say, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Instead, it brings to mind the conflict-

ing notational systems found in experimental music of the twentieth century. The

meaning of symbols was modified to fit the needs of the specific composition; and

72 Giulio Cattin, “Ricerche sulla musica a S. Giustina di Padova ill’inizio del Quattro cento: Il copista Rolando da casale. Nuovi frammenti . . . ,” Annales Musicologiques 7 (1977), pp. 27-29.

����� �� �� ���� ������ �� �� ��� ��� ���� �� �� ��� ����� �� ����� � ��� ���� ��� ��� ���� ������� �������� ������� � � ����� ������ ���� �� � ��� ��� �� � �� � ��� �� ��� �� � ����� ����� ����� �� ��� � ���� �� �� � ������� ��� ���� � �� � ��! ���� ������ ��� �������� �� � � �� ��� �� ������ ����� "� ��� ��� �� ������ �� ��� � �� # ���� ����� ��� �������� ��������� � � � ��� ��$�������� �����!� %� ��� ��������� ��� ���� �� ��� � ������

�� ����� �� � ��� ���� ��� �������� � �� �� �� ��� ���� �M ������� �� ��� ����� �� � � �%������� ��� ��� ���� ������� ��� �� � � �! ����� ����� �� ���� ��������� ���� ���� �!��� � �� ����� ��� ������ ����� � ��� ������� �� �� �� ��� � ��� ���� � � ������� � �� �������� � &����� ���' " ������ �� ��� � � ���! �� ��� ���( � �� ���� ���� �� ����� ��� �������� ����� ��!�� ��� ���� �� �� �� ������ ��� ���! �� ��� � ������� � � �� ��� ��� �� ����� �� ����! ���� ��� ������ � ���� ��� �� ������ ������

39

when no existing symbol was suitable, the composer or scribe created new symbols to

fill this need. The proper interpretation of a symbol may change from piece to piece or

sometimes even within a piece.

Despite this fluidity of meaning of symbols, most compositions can be seen as

deriving their notation from one of two notational systems, French or Italian. The

differences between the two systems will be outlined below. The majority of pieces in

this study do not use “pure” French or Italian notation. Some French elements were

nearly always used in compositions primarily in Italian notation, and Italian traits can

often be found in compositions grounded in French notational principles.

The existence of different musical systems is primarily shown in the notation

of rhythm. Polyphonic music of the fourteenth century used four primary note values,

the long or longa, abbreviated L (L), the breve73 or brevis, B (B), the semibreve or

semibrevis, SB (S), and the minim74 or minima, M (M).75

The relationships between the different note values were not fixed. For

example, a breve could be divided into two, three, or four semibreves depending on the

73 The term “breve” meaning “short” is really a misnomer by the late 14th century. Although centuries earlier it did connote a short note, in the period in question it has a much longer duration. Willi Apel gives the tempo of the (perfect) breve of Machaut’s music as 27 per minute (The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900-1600, Cambridge, Mass.: The Medieval Academy of America, 1961, p. 343) while Alejandro Planchart bases a tempo of 216 minims per minute based on calculations by the theorist Johannes Vetulus (“Tempo and Proportions” in Performance Practice: 1. Music before 1600, London: Macmillan Press, 1989, p. 133). Anne Stone, in her study of the concept of tempus in late medieval Italy, withholds judgement on any fixed tempo heretofore indicated (“Writing Rhythm in Late Medieval Italy: Notation and Musical Style in the Manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, Alpha.M.5.24,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1994, chapter 6.vii). 74 Technically a semibrevis minima. Although by its name it should be the shortest possible note value, the semiminim was in widespread use by the early 14th century. 75 The notation of ligatures, or groups of longs, breves, and paired semibreves fused together, will not be discussed in this paper. The reasons for this are three-fold. First, except in the few cases of tenors which are lifted from the liturgy, they rarely constitute the main music notation of a piece. Second, the rules for determining the note values of ligatures are complicated and not at all intuitive for most modern musicians. Finally, the rules for the use of ligatures were so universal by the fourteenth century that regional variants are non-existent and little is gained by a study of them.

40

tempus or divisio of the section, two terms which will be defined shortly. A long could

similarly be divided into two or three breves depending on the modus of the section.

However, in the repertory of this study, nearly all pieces are written in modus imperfectum,

meaning each long is divided into two breves, and the variable relationships will be seen

between the other three note values.76

The notation of most piece of fourteenth-century music can be seen to have as

its roots one of two types of music notation: French or Italian. Understanding the

concepts behind the two notations is necessary for understanding the complexities of

the Paduan notational systems of the late fourteenth century. These notational

systems took some elements from both the French and Italian systems and invented

new elements as well, creating systems unique to each composition.

French notation divides the breve into two or three semibreves, depending on

whether the tempus is imperfect or perfect. The semibreves are then divided into either

two or three minims depending on whether the prolatio is minor or major. The

combination of tempus and prolation produces four possible mensurations: tempus perfectum

cum prolatione maiore (9 minims divided up as 3+3+3), tempus perfectum cum prolatione

minore (6M: 2+2+2), tempus imprefectum cum prolatione maiore (6M: 3+3), and tempus

imperfectum cum prolatione minore (4M: 2+2). These four mensurations can be indicated

by symbols P, O, c, C, respectively. Music of the fourteenth century, however, often

omitted these mensuration symbols and relied on groupings of notes within a

composition to indicate mensuration. For instance, the pattern:

B S S B S MMM L at the end of a composition would probably indicate tempus

imperfectum cum prolatione maiore, since it appears that the breve (B) is being divided into

two semibreves (S), one of which is further subdivided into three minims (M). In the

Paduan manuscripts in this study, only Sus une fontaine in GB-Ob 229 uses mensuration

76 In medieval music theory, a 1:3 relationship between elements is considered a “perfect” (complete) relationship, while a 1:2 relationship is considered “imperfect” (incomplete). Theorists tie some aspects of the perfection of three to the Christian trinity.

41

signs, and there they are used in a slightly different manner as will be seen in the

discussion of PadA in chapter 6.

The concepts of “imperfection” and “alteration” are crucial to any study of

notation of the late-fourteenth century. In major prolation, a single semibreve is

normally equivalent to three minims (S = MMM). However, a single minim placed in

front of a single semibreve can imperfect the semibreve so that the semibreve is equal to

two minims and the semibreve and the minim together are the same length as a perfect

semibreve (S M S M = ).

In tempus perfectum, the breve, which normally is equivalent to three semibreves,

can likewise be imperfected by a semibreve (B S B S = . . | . . ). The breve to be

imperfected is always the note preceding the shorter note, or imperfectio a parte post,

(B S B = . . | . .) unless a dot is placed after the first note, in which case the

first note receives its full duration and the note following the shorter note is

imperfected, or imperfectio a parte ante, (B· S B = . . | . .). The dot, or punctus,

has many other uses in the 14th century, as will be shown later. Rests can never be

imperfected, though a rest can cause imperfection by substituting for the imperfecting

note. These principles are also true with imperfections of the semibreve by the minim.

When two breves or semibreves are adjacent, the rule of similis ante similem perfecta

(s.a.s.) comes into play. This rule states that when a note comes before a note of the

same value, the preceding note must be perfect.77 For example, B· S B B would be

transcribed as . . | . . . . The dot means the first breve must be perfect (9

eight-notes in this reduction). The following semibreve receives 3 eighth notes and the

second breve, because of similis ante similem must be perfect (9 ) necessitating the tie.

In order to get realigned with the tempus, it is the following breve which is imperfected

by the length of the semibreve. S.a.s governs performance at the semibreve level as well

77 S.a.s. holds true for longs and minims as well, but will not be discussed because complex rhythms involving longs are rare in this period and imperfection of minims in practically non-existent.

42

(c S· M S S S = . ). Note that in this example, both the second and the

third semibreve must be perfect because of s.a.s. Thus, the lone minim causes an

imperfection of a semibreve three notes later.

The complement of imperfection is alteration. While imperfection can be

viewed as the shortening of one note so that two notes can fit in the place normally

occupied by one, alteration lengthens a note so that two notes can fit in the place

normally occupied by three. Like imperfection, alteration only occurs in sections of

triple time. So imperfection and alteration of the breve are found only in tempus

perfectum (modern day and ) and imperfection and alteration of the semibreve are

found only in prolatio maior ( and ). An altered note doubles in value, so that an

altered minim is the same length as a imperfected semibreve (2 ). So in tempus

perfectum, the rhythm B S S B would cause the second semibreve to be altered and thus

be expressed . . | . . | . . It may appear as if the rhythm could also be

expressing two measures of with imperfection of the first breve a parte post (i.e., after

the fact) and imperfection of the second breve a parte ante. However, in cases where the

breve is followed by two semibreves, alteration takes precedence over imperfection.

In duple time (tempus imperfectum when dealing on the semibreve level, or prolatio

minor at the minim level) French notation becomes somewhat simpler, since the lengths

of notes are fixed. The same rhythm B S S B, which in tempus perfectum required

alteration to realize, in tempus imperfectum becomes simply . | . . | . in major prolation

or | | in minor prolation. The dot in duple time is often used as a punctus

additionis, which makes the preceding note one and a half times as long. Thus, the

punctus additionis functions identically to the dot in modern musical notation (B· S =

. ).

Italian notation of the fourteenth century has its roots in the music notation of

Petrus de Cruce (fl. late 13th c.) who, according to the theorist Jacobus of Liège in

43

Speculum Musicae “was the first to put four semibreves in a perfect tempus.”78 To mark

the end of the tempus, Petrus de Cruce placed a dot, or punctus divisionis after the final

semibreve. The concept of placing varying numbers of semibreves within a tempus

survives in the various divisiones of Italian notation most of which are defined by the

number of minims per tempus (recall that a minim is technically a type of semibreve, a

semibrevis minima).

The concepts of Italian notation were put forth in Marchetto de Padua’s

Pomerium, written c. 1318-19.79 In strict Italian notation (Marchettian notation), the

lengths of the breve and the minim are fixed within a divisio. There were six divisiones in

practical use which had the following numbers of minims per breve: quaternaria (4),

senaria imperfecta (6), senaria perfecta (6), novenaria (9), octonaria (8), and duodenaria (12).80

These divisiones can be divided into two groups on the basis of the number of levels of

note values separating the breve from the minima. Quaternaria (.q.), senaria imperfecta (.i.

or .s.i.), senaria perfecta (.p. or .s.p.), and novenaria (.n.) each have one level of notes between

the breve and the minima. This level, not surprising, consists of the semibreves. In

transcriptions, the minima in these divisiones secundae is usually represented by the eighth

note. A breve followed by a tempus (or divisio to use the proper Italian term for the

space occupied by a breve) filled by minims in each of the divisiones secundae would be

noted as below.

.q. B · M M M M · = |

.i. B · M M M M M M · = |

.p. B · M M M M M M · = |

.n. B · M M M M M M M M M · = |

78 “Petrus de Cruce primo incipit ponere quatuor semibreves pro tempore perfecto.” Jacobus de Liége, Speculum Musicum, in Scriptorum de musica medii ævi nova series, vol. 2. Edited by Charles Edmond Coussemaker. (Paris: A. Durand, 1864-1876), vol. II, p. 401. 79 Jan Herlinger, The Lucidarium of Marchetto of Padua (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 3-4. 80 The division ternaria (no abbreviation) was also used, though far less important, and can be thought of as either senaria perfecta or novenaria without minims.

44

Note that these four divisiones are equivalent to the four combinations of

tempus and prolation in the French system. The punctus preceding or following a breve

is usually omitted, since the breve by definition takes up a whole divisio.81 A semibreve

would occupy the length of a quarter note in .q. or .p. or a dotted-quarter note in .i. or

.n. In .i. and .n., a semibreve, normally equivalent to 3 minims, can be made equivalent

to 2 minims, if followed by a lone minim. This process is identical to imperfection,

and will be also be called such in the remainder of this paper. Alteration, however,

never appears in the Italian notation system, since the minim is a fixed duration.

In the divisiones tertiae, .o. and .d. there are two levels of semibreves between the

breve and the minim. Both are represented by the symbol S. Context determines

which is used. For example, in .o., where there are eight minims to the divisio, the

following example shows the use of both types of semibreve:

B S S B S S MMMM B = | | | |

(in the divisiones tertiae, the minim is normally transcribed as a sixteenth note). If a

measure requires a mixture of the two semibreve types, as in the following .o. example,

the final semibreve or semibreves will be lengthened: B S S S B = | | The

lengthening of the final notes is called via naturae (the natural way) and has obvious

connections to the French conception of alteration.82

81 The punctus is also omitted after the ligature cum opposita proprietate because c.o.p. ligatures by are usually equivalent to a full divisio (except in some cases in .n. and .d.) Thus, in the two divisiones tertiae, to be discussed shortly, c.o.p. semibreves are always semibreves maior. 82 A theoretical answer to why the lengthening of the final note is most natural is a difficult question which is covered in treatises such as the Pomerium of Marchetto de Padua. Marchetto, writing in the first decades of the fourteenth century explains that since the right side of a person is more full and perfect that the left, since the right side contains the liver which preserves the blood, so art should imitate nature by having the right side of the tempus be longer and more perfect than the left (“The Pomerian of Marchettus of Padua: a translation and critical commentary”, edited by Ralph Clifford Renner, M.A. thesis, Washington Uni-versity (St. Louis), 1980, p. 26). A historical view of the phenomenon would emphasize the tradition of the last note in a group (especially a descending group) being the longest dating back to the conjunctura groups in Pre-Franconian motets of the early 13th century, the notation of Perotinian modal rhythm, and possibly even to rhythmic performance in plainsong.

45

Notation types in the Paduan Fragments

By the early fifteenth century many compositions were being written in a style

which combined elements from both the French and Italian notational styles. The

salient characteristics of this “mixed notation”, as Willi Apel called it, cannot be easily

stated as they varied from composition to composition. One finds pieces in what is

essentially French notation with Italian divisio letters. Also common are compositions

which were originally in .o. or .d., and which make the most sense in these divisiones, but

which have been rewritten as .q. (with or without letter indications). There are com-

positions, such as the A piançer l’oche, which are written in Italian .s.i. but use the

semibrevis caudata (N) to indicate a perfect semibreve. These compositions use the

normal semibreve to indicate imperfect, 2M, semibreves, eliminating the need for

imperfection. There are many more examples in the Paduan fragments which do not fit

into any of these categories.

Eugene Fellin studied the notation types of non-unica madrigals and cacce and

divided the notation into four categories: French, F1 (French modified to the first

degree: Italian divisio letters), F2 (French modified to the second degree: Italian divisio

letters and puncti divisionis), and Italian.83 Two madrigals did not fit into any of these

categories. Fellin’s study was limited by the nature of the repertory studied: madrigals

were rarely composed in the last decades of the fourteenth century, when one expects a

greater disintegration of Italian notational rules.84 Additionally, since the manuscripts

83 Eugene Fellin, “The Notation-Types of Trecento Music,” in L’Ars Nova italiana del trecento 4, Edited by Agostino Ziino, (Certaldo : Centro di studi sull'ars nova Italiana del Trecento, 1978). Idem, “A Study of Superius Variants in the Sources of Italian Trecento Music: Madrigals and Cacce,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1970). 84 Prosdocimus de Beldemandis’s Tractatus practicae cantus mensurabilis ad modum ytalicorum (c. 1410) states that its purpose is to bring native composers who recently had taken to writing in French forms back to the “notation which only Italians practice” (A treatise on the practice of mensural music in the Italian manner, translated and edited by Jay A. Huff, Dallas: American Institute of Musicology, 1972). Because we see exhortations in Padua for composers and scribes to return to Italian notation, we should be careful not to be prejudiced into thinking that purer Italian notation implies an older composition since just the opposite might be true.

46

studied, with the exception of the Rossi Codex (I-Rvat 215), were all from the turn of

the century, a study of other musical forms such as the ballata would have been a study

of music more likely to have been written nearer to the copying of the manuscripts.

More problematic is Fellin’s implication that fourteenth-century music nota-

tion can be plotted linearly on a scale from French to Italian. We cannot know where

to put a composition that uses imperfection and alternation (French elements) and

puncti divisionis without Italian divisiones letters. Placing the notation of Sus unne fontaine

on a scale from French to Italian would present particular difficulty since the notation

is purely French, but French prolation indications are used in such an unusual manner

that classifying the composition as merely French would lose this valuable information,

but calling it F1 or F2 would place it with a group of compositions with which it has

little in common.

Similarly, there are pieces in Italian notation which are modified from standard

Italian notation. Sones ces nachares, mentioned above, is one such example. O cieco mondo

(PadC, f. AV) uses notation that is almost purely Italian, except for a few sections in the

terzetti where notes are syncopated across the tempus (mm. 37-38, 54-55). While this

syncopation might seem a minor detail, the self-contained nature of the breve is one of

the most important differences between Italian and French notation.

A further argument against the designation of notational systems such as F1,

F2, etc. is that these distinctions create groups which would not have been recognized

by the scribes themselves. Although contemporary theorists discussed the differences

between Italian and French notation, they did not talk about French notation which had

been modified to better fit Italian musical styles. Instead it seems from the evidence in

the Paduan fragments and other late trecento Italian sources, that scribes decided what

notational system in which to write the composition (either through knowing the piece

or through examining other copies of the composition) and then modified the notation

to fit the idiosyncrasies of individual pieces. Essentially, a new sub-system of notation

was created for each composition.

47

To a modern reader, the necessity of creating new notational solutions for

difficulties in every piece might seem to suggest fourteenth-century notation was in

some way immature or broken. This is not the case. The notational systems uses in

the late trecento were extremely efficient at transmitting the music which was being

written. A 23x31.6 cm folio (9x12.4”), such as f. A of PadB, requires on average four

8.5x11” pages in modern notation to convey the same information. Since the frag-

ments are parchment, saving as much space as possible was probably a high priority.85

The saving of space is also because part notation, rather than score notation, is used

(though the equality of voice parts in most fourteenth-century compositions makes

this savings not so huge as one might expect).86 The use of textual abbreviations also

contributes to the efficiency. However, the notation itself, with its ligatures, closely

packed lozenges, and absence of ties, is responsible for much of the savings of space.

Codicological structure of the Paduan fragments87

The Paduan fragments studied in this thesis are the remnants of three larger

manuscripts whose total length cannot be determined. PadA contained at least 70

folios originally. This number is determined by examination of the foliation on the

surviving bifolios. Gathering 4 requires two additional bifolios to complete com-

positions which are incomplete. If these compositions were present, gathering 4 would

consist of 10 bifolios, which was as much of a standard for gathering size as existed in

fourteenth-century Italy. The next folio must begin a new gathering because it is

attached to a folio which could not be part of the previous gathering. Since the final

folio of gathering 4 is folio 50V (Pu 1475, f. A), the next gathering must begin on f.

85 Many estimates suggest that a single sheep could produce, on average, two quality parchment bifolios. 86 Score notation was actually used for the earliest polyphonic compositions but was discarded during the thirteenth century, probably because of its inefficiency for composition with long-note tenors. 87 Gathering structure diagrams are found in the discussion of each manuscript in chapters 4, 5, and 6.

48

51.88 If the gatherings are of consistent length in this manuscript, the folio connected

to f. 51 would be f. 60 and 60V. Folio 60V contains an incomplete composition,

Gratiosus’s Alta regina, which also must be continued onto the first folio of another

gathering. Again, if the size of the gatherings is standard, the necessity of f. 61 implies

folios up to f. 70.

The placement of folio C of Pu 684 as f. 52 is a logical guess but is not the

only place the folio could have originally been. Neither f. AV (51V) nor f. C have

incomplete compositions on them which would prevent them from being adjacent. In

preparing a parchment manuscript a rule known as “Gregory’s Law” states that the hair

side of one folio should always be adjacent to the hair side of the next, and vice versa

for flesh to flesh in order to have a uniform appearance across an opening.89 This is

preserved by having ff. A and C adjacent. Folio CV also requires 3 additional pages to

complete Perneth’s Credo, so it could not be f. 45 in gathering 4. Additionally,

fragments have tended to have all been taken from the same section of the manuscript,

so a placement in the same gathering as f. A and f. B is logical.90

The maximum size of the secular manuscripts PadB and PadC can only be

guessed at. PadB’s incomplete compositions Ay si and A piançer l’ochi both imply the

88 In this study, I have referred to the folios of the fragments alphabetically from front to rear as they appear in manuscripts now. These alphabetic foliations do not necessarily correspond to the order in which they originally appeared in the manuscripts. This is especially true for I-Pu 1475, whose original order was ff. B, F, D, C, E, A. Numeric foliations (PadA only) refer to the foliation of the original manuscripts. In order to reduce confusion, the foliation of GB-Ob 229 as currently found in the manuscript (ff. 53-56 = ff. A-D) has not been used. 89 Despite the informative, and highly amusing, suggestions given to me by Prof. Michel Huglo, I was unable to determine what type of animal was used to make the parchment of any of the Paduan fragments. This information would be useful in determining if all the parchment was manufactured in the same place, since each monastery likely only raised one species of animal for parchment production. Archival research would also reveal what sorts of animals were raised by the various centers of manuscript production and aid in determining the provenance of many other northern Italian fragments. Gregory’s Law is discussed briefly in Leila Avrin’s, Scribes, Script, & Books, (Chicago: American Library Association, 1991), p. 266. 90 Since reasons for the ordering of music in the Paduan fragments could not be determined, the actual contents of f. C (an anonymous Gloria and a Credo by Perneth) cannot be used to justify a position.

49

existence of at least one additional bifolio surrounding ff. A and B. If Aler m’en veus had

a notated second voice (see chapter 4), then at least one other interior folio would be

present. Of the parchment manuscripts studied by John Nádas, Pit. and Man/ManP

both have flesh side out consistently while I-Fasl 2211 has only one instance of hair out;

Sq. uses both hair and flesh out equally. 91 There is therefore some reason to speculate

that f. A and B represent the second folio from the outside of the gathering in which

they originally lay.

PadC tells us even less about its original length. Since f. A and f. B are not part

of a single bifolio, we cannot even know for sure if they were originally part of the same

gathering. Folio A is self-contained: it does not make any requirements on the

contents of folios around it. Folio B requires at one interior and one or two exterior

bifolios, the number varying depending on whether the lower voices of Apolinis ecclipsatur

were texted or not. For neither PadA nor PadB is there sufficient evidence to substan-

tiate or disprove a theory that these fragments, rather than being parts of larger

manuscripts, such as PadA are actually large portions of the type of small “fascicle-

manuscripts” which Charles Hamm has asserted constituted the bulk of music

distributed by the mid-fifteenth century.92

Paleography

Identification of scribal hands is important to the study of a manuscript since

discernment of sections of copying by different scribes can yield important

information about a scribe’s preferences and prejudices. For example, John Nádas

points out that some of the variants in notational systems in the pieces studied by

Fellin can be attributed to scribal predilection for one or the other notational type,

91 Nádas, “The Transmission of Trecento Secular Polyphony,” pp. 228-235 (Pit.), 345-349 (Man/ManP), 374-393 (Sq.), 463-477 (I-Fasl 2211). 92 Charles Hamm, “Manuscript Structure in the Dufay Era,” Acta Musicologica 34 (1962).

50

without regard to the composer.93 In I-Fn 26 (Pan.), Nádas notes that there is a perfect

correspondence between the notation of Giovanni da Cascia’s madrigals and the scribe

who copied them.94 Since scribal initiative has also been discovered in ModA, I-Bc Q 15,

and other manuscripts, an identification of scribal characteristics was undertaken for

PadB and PadC. 95

The details I focused on most carefully were those marks which scribes made

often and probably unthinkingly. Nádas asserts that it is in unconscious details, such

as clefs and custos rather than ornamental endings with which the scribes distinguish

themselves.96 Since it focuses on many details, the bulk of this discussion has been

placed with the discussion of the compositions and manuscripts themselves in the

following chapters. Because of the brevity of the manuscript fragments, the presence of

a single scribe in PadC and particularly because the second scribe of PadB copied only

one composition, differences in layers of scribal hands cannot be discerned.

One important detail gained from a study of scribal marks, related to notation,

concerns final ligatures. Many pieces and sections of pieces end with a three or more

note ligature in one voice. A ligature is a collection of semibreves, breves, and longs

connected into a single note to be sung to a single syllable. It appears based on

evidence from the Sanctus of f. A in GB-Ob 229 that the scribe intended for the final

note of the ligature on the ninth staff to be sung to a different syllable than the rest of

the ligature. The ligature appears alone on a new staff just before a vertical line

93 Fellin while admitting that scribes had some limited initiative in choosing which type of notation to use, writes that “if all Trecento sources were available for examination, the actual amount of transformation from one notation-type to another would be found to be relatively minimal,” (“Notation-Types”, p. 220). The notion that undiscovered sources would make stemma of sources more pure seems unsustainable. 94 Nádas, “Transmission,” p. 95. 95 For ModA, see Stone, “Writing Rhythm in Late Medieval Italy,” and for I-Bc Q 15 see Margaret Bent, “A Contemporary Perception of Early Fifteenth-Century Style: Bologna Q15 as a Document of Scribal Editorial Initiative,” Musica Disciplina 41 (1987), pp. 183-201. Owing to the length of the fragments and limitations in time, an extensive paleographical examination of the PadA fragments was not undertaken. 96 Nádas, “Transmission,” p. 80.

51

indicating the end of the section to be set to the last two syllables of the word

“excelsis”. Although text alignment is sometimes quite bad in late fourteenth-century

manuscripts, the text would always at least appear on the same line as the music to

which it is to be sung. Supporting evidence, though not convincing in itself, can be

found in numerous places in the fragments where a long final ligature has text

underlying the end, rather than the beginning of the ligature. Additionally, it seems

more musical that all voices should begin sounding the final syllable of a piece together,

though today’s musical tastes cannot be submitted as evidence for medieval practice.

52

4 . Pa d B : Pa d u a , B i b l i o t e c a U n i v e r s i t a r i a M S 1 1 1 5

PadB comprises a single parchment bifolio of secular polyphony used as front

flyleaves for a 15th century manuscript, I-Pu 1115. This manuscript, rebound in

modern covers, contains the Sermones of Hieronymus and treatises on morality.97 The

two folios contain the complete music for three polyphonic vocal compositions and

single parts for three additional pieces. There are three pieces with Italian texts and

two with French texts, with one, Ay si, whose language is unclear. PadB testifies that

musicians in Padua at this time were interested in music from other parts of Northern

Italy, France, and very probably Sicily.

The first folio in the present ordering, designated folio A, bears on its recto

side the call number of the manuscript from a catalogue of the manuscripts and books

in the library of Saint Giustina in Padua compiled from 1453-84.98 The call number,

found in the top and bottom margin of the page, is “yy.2.n.23” with “AC 3” added as

an additional designation in the bottom margin. In the space below the final stave,

probably at the same time as the call number was added, judging by the handwriting

style, is an index of the works of the manuscript as it currently survives. The index is

signed by Bachinus, who also indexed I-Pu 658 and I-Pu 684 and probably prepared the

library catalogue. The cover of the manuscript has been replaced by modern cardboard

and the spine of the manuscript has become detached from the end gatherings of the

manuscript, allowing easy examination of the gathering structure. There are thirteen

gatherings in the main manuscript. The manuscript lacks a consistent layout,

suggesting it was the work of several scribes.

97 Kurt von Fischer, editor, Répertoire International des Sources Musicales, Handscriften Mit Mehrstimmiger Musik des 14., 15., und 16., Jahrhunderts (RISM B/IV/4), (Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 1972), p. 995. 98 Dragan Plamenac, “Another Paduan Fragment of Trecento Music,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 8 (1955), p. 167.

����� �� �� ��� ������� �� ��� ��� ��� ��� �� ���� ���� �� � ����� ����� �� ��� ��� �� ��� ������� ��������� �� �������� � ������ ������� ��� ����� ���� �� ��� ����� ��� ��� ������ �� ����������� �� ���� ���� ����� �� ��� ���� ��� ��� ������ �� ����� ���� �� ��� ������ �� ��� ���� ���� ���� ���� ������ ���� �� ��� � ����� ��� ��� ��� ������ ��������� ���� �� ���������� � !���� �� "#$$ ������� ���� ����� ��� ����� ��� �� ����� �� ���� � ���� ��� ���������� �������� �������� ��� ������ �� ��� ����� ��� ������ �� ��� ����� �� � ��� ����� � �� �� ���� � ��������� ��� � �������� ��������� �������� ���� ���� ���� �� � � %���� ������� �� ������ �� ��� ����� �� ���� �� ����� ��� �� ��� ���� ���������� � ��� ������ ��� ��� �����

������&����� ����� '�( � ��� ����� ������ )���� ����� ��� � ��� �� ��������� � ������ �������

��� '�( �� ����� � ������ *��������� ����� ����� ������� ������ �+� ��� ������� �� �������� ��� ���,���� ��� ���������� �� � ����� ���� ������� �����&������

53

The two folios of music give no indication as to their original foliation. The

current foliation found in the upper-right corner of the versos is A and B. Because the

majority of polyphonic music manuscripts of this time bear some sort of original fol-

iation, it is possible that the folios have been trimmed along their outer edges to the

width of the main corpus of the manuscript, losing this valuable information. The top

and bottom edges of the folios have probably not been trimmed since the fragment is

smaller than the parchment of the rest of the manuscript. Folio A is 23.0 cm in width

and 31.6 cm in height. Staves measure 1.4 cm across the five lines.

Each page is ruled with 10 five-line staves. The staff lines begin at nearly the

same distance from the left margin on every staff of each page. The exception to this is

found on folio BR where the first staff has been indented to allow room for the large

initial letter E, which was never added. There are also slight variations which indicate

the left margin was not carefully laid out. For example, the tenth stave on folio AR

begins several millimeters farther in than the other staves on the page.

The staff lines on the right sides of the first folio end at various distances from

the right margin. The sixth staves of folio AR and AV, for example, end farther from the

right than any of the other staves on their respective pages. The composition at the

top of f. AR, Se per dureça, ends on the sixth line of the manuscript. It is possible that

the scribe was more careless with this staff, knowing that it would not be used

completely. The same argument can be made for the similarly shortened sixth staff of

the verso of folio A. However, in this case, the scribe of the music has managed to fit

all the music onto the top five staves though he had to extend the fifth staff into the

margin when he added the music.

Each of the four pages in this manuscript has a different musical arrangement.

Because the arrangement of musical voices is important to the discussion of Aler m’en

veus, a staff by staff description of the manuscript follows:

f. AR staves 1-3: Se per dureça superius (texted). 4-6: Se per dureça tenor (texted). 7-9: Ay si contratenor (untexted). 10: blank. f. AV 1-5: Aler men veus superius (texted).

54

6-10: blank. f. BR 1-3: En ce gracieux superius (texted). 4-5: En ce gracieux tenor (untexted) and text residuum of superius. 7-8: En ce gracieux contratenor (untexted). f. BV 1-3: Dolçe fortuna superius (texted). 4-6: Dolçee fortuna tenor (texted) and text residuum. 7-10: A piançer lochi superius (texted).

Two of the pages, f. AR and f. BV have a single complete composition at the

head of the page, with a single part of a second piece at the bottom of the page. Folio

BR contains a single composition which takes up all but the final two staves of the page.

Except for some of the shortest tenors, a voice from another piece could not fit in the

space at the bottom of BR. Folio AV is the only page not to contain a complete

composition and is the only page to leave more than two staves blank. Explaining this

layout will only be possible after a detailed look at the style, notation, and paleography

of each of the compositions in the fragment.

The gathering structure is as follows: F Ay si [C,T]

Se per dureça [C,T] – Ay si [Ct]

H H

AR

Aler men veus [1] Aler men veus [2, ? ]

F F

AV

H H

F F

H H

En ce gracieux [C, T, Ct]

F F

BR

Dolçe fortuna [C, T] – A piançer l’ochi [C] possible short composition – A piançer l’ochi [T, Ct]

H H

BV

F

1. Se per dureça (anonymous)

Folio AR begins with the two voice anonymous ballata Se per dureça. This unicum

composition has most of the features of a siciliana, a compositional style involving the

55

recasting of text and music of Sicilian (or southern Italian) unwritten traditions into

the more conventional Tuscan and Northern Italian form of the ballata.99 These pieces,

many of which can be found in the fourth gathering of the old section of the Reina

Codex, were probably composed based on second or third hand knowledge of the

Sicilian songs.100 Although I cannot comment on the provenance of the text, the

prominent use of parallel octaves and fifths, especially in the beginnings and endings of

phrases, the varied repetition of material, and the use of short phrases separated by

rests points toward a connection to this tradition.101 The simultaneous declamation of

text at the beginnings of phrases, though shorter than in the examples Pirrotta gives, is

also characteristic of music of this tradition.

The music for Se per dureça is written in Italian notation with puncti divisionis but

without divisio letters. The composition uses semibreves maior and minor. The maior type

of semibreve is twice as long as the minor. Under standard Marchettan notational rules,

when two semibreves are used to fill a tempus which takes six minims (three beats), the

“natural way,” via naturae, to sing this rhythm is minor then maior:

· S S · =

However, a downward pointing tail or cauda can be added to the first semibreve

indicating that the via naturae should not be used and instead the “artificial,” via artis,

rhythm of maior followed by minor should be used:

· N S · =

The scribe of the tenor voice of the ballata places an unnecessary cauda on a

semibreve in the antepenultimate tempus of Se per dureça:

· S S S · S N · S S S · = | |

99 c.f. Nino Pirrotta, “New Glimpses of an Unwritten Tradition,” in Words and Music: The Scholar’s View. A Medley of Problems and Solutions Compiled in Honor of A. Tillman Merritt, edited by Laurence Berman, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 271-91. 100 Ibid., 279. Pirrotta points to the Venetian inland as the most likely place where these second and third hand performances would first be recorded on paper. 101 Nádas, “Transmission of Trecento Secular Polyphony,” p. 208.

56

The line would have the same rhythm even if the cauda were not present. Choices like

this can been seen as evidence of a scribe unfamiliar with the notational system. But

because this is an isolated violation of Marchettus’ rules, I wish to look for other

reasons why the scribe could have chosen to write this cauda. One compelling explan-

ation is that in the previous four instances of two semibreves in a divisio, extending back

to the second line of text, are all to be sung via artis. Thus, the scribe could have added

the cauda as a warning to the singer that the rhythm of the measure was different than

what the singer might expect given what came before.

Since it is notated in Italian notation, Se per dureça has minims of fixed duration.

The ballata does not use any semiminims but is free in the superius part with its use of

triplet minims, often directly before or after duple minims and once, on “uero” in the

superius part, syncopated by a duple minim rest (m. 17). The flags on the triplet

minims hang to the right in this piece. Kurt von Fischer considers this less usual in

Northern Italian manuscripts. In his Studien, he writes that the left-hand tail on the

triplet is a northern idiosyncrasy while the right-hand tail is more often seen in Tuscan

manuscripts.102 In the superius, the scribe often grouped the normal minims in groups

of three (e.g., mm. 2 and 14) temporarily giving a triple, senaria perfecta ( ) feel to a

piece which is otherwise senaria imperfecta ( ).

While the positioning of the puncti divisionis makes clear that the meter is senaria

imperfecta, this piece, like all of the pieces in PadB, lacks divisio letters. These indications

became less common as the fourteenth century gave way to the fifteenth. The scarcity

of divisionis indicators may be owing to the decline in prominence of the madrigal after

the 1360s, a poetic form that when set to music often had a change in meter before the

ritornello.103 Without this internal change in time signature letter indications became

less necessary. Pieces with complex changes of meter in the late fourteenth and early

102 Kurt von Fischer, Studien zur italienischen Musik des Trecento und frühen Quattrocento, (Bern: Verlag Paul Haupt, 1956), p. 119. 103 Kurt von Fischer, New Grove, “Madrigal,” vol. 11, p. 462. See also the discussion of madrigals in PadC in chapter 5.

57

fifteenth centuries were more often written in French notation with changing prolation

signatures and coloration.

The music on the first staff, though not the staff itself, is indented, to leave

room for a large S. No initial capitals are found in PadB. Instead, there is a small S

inked into the margin, probably as a guide for the illuminator.

It is most likely that a single scribe copied the entire ballata and the text. This

scribe will be designated Scribe A. The width of Scribe A’s strokes are generally

uniform. The spacing is tight between minims within a group; between a group of

minims and the notes which precede and follow, though, there is usually a small gap.

However, the third and fourth custos on the page seem to have fatter front sides than

the first two do. The writing of the capital letters is very similar between the superius

and tenor voices. The scribe places light double-slashes at the ends of lines 2, 3, and 4

of the text in the cantus. The scribe only uses such marks in the tenor at the end of

the ballata. After the first three lines, he uses a punctus in the text to divide the lines, a

mark used at the end of the first line of text by the scribe of the top voice. In the

music, the four lines are divided with vertical lines running through the staff. Again,

there is an inconsistency in usage between the voices. The upper part uses a single

vertical line at the end of the third line of text and thin double vertical lines at the end

of lines 1, 2, and 4. The tenor part uses these same lines, but in exact opposite order:

single lines appear at the ends of lines 1, 2, and 4 while double lines are present only

after the third line.

The paleography of the text gives some difficulties. The scribe of Se per dureça

writes, with a few exceptions, letters that are unornamented. The scribe gives the “h”

of “chel” on the second staff an ornamented stem which is not seen in the

corresponding text in the tenor voice. In the tenor, the letter “d” of dureça has a

similarly ornamented stem. The fanciest and most seemingly out of place “d” comes at

the end of the text in both voices on the syllable “da.” Here the top of the “d” extends

leftward nearly horizontally before returning to the right in an exaggerated flourish.

The flair of the “d” may be because it is at the end of the voice and can be seen as

58

similar to the decorated double-longs with which scribes ended pieces. Inconsistencies

within the writing of a single scribe such as these make scribal identification in general

difficult.

Stylistically, Se per dureça shows an interesting recurring voice exchange in

measures 5, 17, 29, and 39; occurring once per phrase near the middle of the phrase,

this gesture, along with the descending three minims in the second measure of each

phrase unifies the melodic material of the composition. The rhythm of a three triplet

minims syncopated by a normal minim rest (m. 17) is also unusual and not seen any-

where else in the fragments examined. Two of the cadence formulas in this ballata are

rather normal and made by condensing a 3rd to a unison (third phrase, mm. 32-33;

final phrase, mm. 43-44), or by expanding a 3rd to a 5th (first phrase, mm. 10-11),

while a third cadence type by parallel motion to a unison after the condensation of a

3rd to a unison (second phrase, mm. 22-23). The ballata begins on a C-G fifth and

cadences on A, C, E, and D, making it nearly impossible to speak about modality in this

piece.

Although as said above, I cannot comment about the provenance of the text, I

have presented it below, with all variations and some general observations in hopes of

aiding others in the classification of this ballata.

Se per dureça tu morir me fay Dona da cui merçe104 trouero may E me credua chel mio gran fer uire Ta uese uenta se may fusti105 cruda.

The rhyme scheme is aabc.106 The ballata may be classified as a ballata minore since it has

a two-line ripresa (the first two lines).107 The ballata is also missing the text for the

second piede and the volta (which would have the same music as the ripresa). Each line

104 The superius omits the cedilla on “merçe,” found on the tenor. 105 superius: “fosti” 106 The final word of the first two lines should be read as two syllables, which precludes a rhyme scheme of aaab. 107 von Fischer, New Grove, “Ballata.” vol. 2, p. 87.

59

of text can be read as having eleven syllables, though it is possible that by reading

“mio” in the first half of the first piede and “may” in the second half of the first piede as

having two syllables each (as indeed one must when reading “may” at the end of the

second line) the piedi can be seen as rarer, but still known, twelve syllable lines. When

performed, the first two lines of text with their accompanying music would be repeated. Range: C: b3-c5; T: g3-e4. Clefs108: C: C1; T: C3. Edition: Marrocco, PMFC 11, no. 71.

2. Ay si (anonymous)

The second piece on folio AR which has the incipit Ay si, is of a very different

style than Se per dureça. It is a composition in two parts, the first of which is definitely

repeated, since it has both open and close endings (first and second endings in modern

parlance). The second part is designated “Secunda pars.”109 It is the only composition

in this study to use both void notes and red notes, and it uses both types. Because only

the contratenor survives, it is difficult to discern much about the over-all style of the

composition. The incipit suggests that it was a French texted piece, possibly a virelai,

though the incipit could also be Italian (a variant of “Ahi si”). This piece may have

been an ars subtilior composition, especially if the cantus voice was more active and had

rhythmic cross-relations (duple vs. triple) with the other voices.

Ay si begins in duple time, expressed through the use of red, void notes. The

note values used are entirely breves and semibreve notes and rests. These void notes are

often combined into ligatures the most common of which is the two-note ligature cum

opposita proprietate yielding two semibreves. At the end of the first line of music, the

notation switches to black notation with the heretofore unseen minim suddenly

becoming the dominant note value. The relationship between the value of the void

108 Clefs are numbered from bottom to top. 109 The word “pars” is abbreviated with a horizontal slash through the stem of the p, usually used as an abbreviation for “per” rather than “par”.

60

notes and the value of the black notes can only be conjectured, since the usage of void

notes varied from composition to composition in this time. A constant semibreve

(s=S) can be ruled out, since otherwise there would be no need for the change in

notation. The most logical relationship between the two note values would seem to be

a 3:2 ratio (sss =SS). However, if this were the case, there would be no distinction

between the red, void notation used at the beginning of the composition and the solid

red notation used later in the piece. While there are some pieces which use two differ-

ent symbols to mean the same interpretation, I am reluctant to apply that here without

more evidence. The next most probable interpretation, and the one which I have used

in the transcription is a 2:1 ratio between the void semibreve before and the solid

semibreve later (implying a 2:3 ratio between the void semibreve and the solid

minim).110 As mentioned above, solid red notes are used to indicate a 2:3 ratio with

the black semibreve. The six notes beginning the second part of the composition are all

red and occupy the space normally filled by four semibreves. More interesting is the

use of a single red note in a c.o.p. ligature in m. 42. A punctus before the minim rest

prior to the ligature indicates that the rest along with the ligature must be fitted into a

single breve. Thus the first note of the ligature is perfect while the second is imper-

fect. When this pattern reoccurs at mm. 56 and 75, the second note of the ligature is

not red. It is an interesting dilemma which note should be imperfected. On the one

hand, the use of a fully black ligature rather than a half red ligature should signal a

difference. On the other hand, imperfection of a ligature a post ante is unheard of in the

other Paduan sources and would violate the rule of similis ante similem perfecta (see chapter

3). In the end, I decided on the first interpretation aided by evidence in m. 38, where

the scribe presses two minima together to form the same note value as a red semibreve,

110 This interpretation for the hollow red semibreve is supported by an example in Apel, The Notation of Polyphonic Music, p. 406. Apel also suggests that a void red minim, if one were to appear in another voice, would probably imply a 4:3 ratio with black minims.

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that the scribe’s command of red mensural notation might not be very great. Further

evidence of this will be seen in the discussion of Dolçe fortuna.

The notational system used in Ay si is primarily French. There are very few

puncti divisiones and there are notes which are sounded across the division between two

tempora. Alteration of minims is present as can be seen by the first two notes of the

second staff of music (m. 31 in transcription). The same scribe who copied Se per

dureça probably copied Ay si. However, some important paleographical differences leave

open the possibility of different scribes. In Ay si, the long span of minims on the

second line of music features equal spacing between the minims. The minims in Se per

dureça are much more tightly spaced and arranged into groups of two, three, or more

notes. Ay si uses lozenges that are more oblong than the rounder note heads of Se per

dureça, particularly that scribe’s semibreves.

One piece of evidence that undermines a dual-scribal view of this page is the

position of the clefs in relation to the left margin. After the fifth staff, the clefs begin

drifting in from the left side of the staff (half of this is because the staves are also

drifting to the left). One would expect if the scribe changed between staff 6 and staff

7 that the new scribe would not continue the trend of moving rightward. However, a

single scribe writing down both of these pieces in the same sitting would logically

account for this.

More significant are some of the differences in the writing of the text.111 Ay si’s

letter “d” has a stem which is so bent forward it is nearly horizontal (see in “contra-

tenor de” and “secunda”). The counter on the top of the “a” is so curved that it

almost forms a closed bowl on the top of the letter. This curve is in contrast to the

upper stroke of Se per dureça “a” which is like a horizontal arm. However, we have seen

even within Se per dureça enough variations in the writing of the letter “d” that we must

111 John Nádas and others have argued persuasively for considering the text and music to have been written by the same scribe in the absence of evidence to the contrary. I agree with his argument and hope to bring more evidence to support it in the course of this thesis.

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tolerate small inconsistencies in scribal writing unless we are willing to accept a twenty-

scribe explanation for every fragment encountered. Range: Ct: f3-g4. Clefs: Ct: C3. Edition: no edition.

3. Aler m’en veus (Ciconia)

The verso side of folio A contains a single voice of a virelai, Aler m’en veus,

attributed to “Johes” which on the basis of an attributed Latin contrafactum of the

piece found in I-Bc 15 f. 266v-267 can be traced to Johannes Ciconia, who was in

Padua in the first decade of the fifteenth century.112 The Latin version of this piece

has two voices while only one voice survives in this French version. It has been

presumed that the second voice is on the missing folio which would be adjacent to f. AV

in the original manuscript. There are some reasons to question this assumption based

on evidence of norms of layout in the Paduan fragments.

The piece is in two sections the second of which is repeated with open and

closed endings. The closed ending is unusual in that it adds more text than the first

ending. With the ars subtilior composition Sus unne fontaine (c.f. chapter 6), Aler m’en veus

is one of only two known French-texted pieces by Ciconia. Its unusual extension of the

closed ending causes Hallmark to identify it as in a class of its own.113

The text primarily consists of 8 syllable lines, with some lines, such as the first,

probably being sung with 9 syllables and with a 6 syllable line ending the first half of

the piece. The rhyme scheme of the text is aabbaab dbdb dbaba although more definite

conclusions about the rhyme scheme can only be said when an appropriate reading for

the end of the 6th line is found.

112 The breaking up of long notes into repeated notes in I-Bc 15 is the strongest evidence that the French version was written first. However, the order of writing does not have any other secure basis, besides the tradition of Latin contrafacta. In fact, the presence of the unusually long second ending in Aler m’en veus may present evidence for the Latin version, which lacks a endings, being the original. 113 Hallmark, “Some Evidence,” p. 209.

63

The music for Aler m’en veus is written without puncti divisionis.114 Because it is

written in tempus imperfectum cum prolatione minore, there is only one form of the semibreve

here, and all note values indicate exactly one duration (like common practice western

music notation). Syncopation abounds in this piece, with minim-semibreve-minim or

minim-semibreve-semibreve-minim being the most common forms of syncopation (1:8

reduction):

M S M M S M =

M S S M M M =

These syncopations occur both within a single long (as shown above) and less

frequently between two longs, as at the beginning of the virelai. In this piece we begin

to see a cadential suspension formula that would become popular centuries later.

Measures 2-3 in the transcription show the descent from f through a syncopated

semibreve e then a syncopated semibreve d then a minim cΤ (Presumably the sharp on

the breve at the beginning of the measure is still in effect) back to the cadential d.

The setting of the text is primarily one to three notes to a syllable, except for a

single long melisma on “merchi”. With regard to setting the end of a line of text, this

piece is more true to its French text and structure than to its Italian provenance: long

melismatic flourishes on the penultimate syllable are not to be found.

The top voice of Aler m’en veus is laid out on the first five staves of f. AV while

the remaining five staves are blank. Since the two voices are equal, one would presume

that the second voice would occupy five staves as well and therefore could easily have

been placed on f. AV as well. Unless the text residuum for the missing fifth section

(same music as the first section) was particularly long, it could be made to fit on the

final staff by an enterprising scribe. Even if it were long, the lower margin would have

provided ample room for additional text.

114 Puncti additionis are used in the composition.

64

One might suggest that the layout of one voice on top of each of the pages

would be a logical layout for a composition. However, this arrangement of voices was

not used elsewhere in the Paduan fragments studied. A composition was not broken

across a page in any of the five fragments unless it was necessary because of the length

of the composition or the presence of other compositions (on a single page) above it

on the same page. While this might be a meaningless aberration, one would think the

cost of parchment would have kept the scribe of a utilitarian manuscript, such as this

one, conscientious of ways of optimizing layout. There is only one other page in the

fragments studied which contains a substantial amount of unused space, f. A of I-Pu

658 (PadC).

Particularly puzzling is why, if the two voices were laid out one on top of each

page, would another piece not be added across the bottom of the two pages, as A piançer

l’oche was to f. BV or Alta regina was to f. 60v of PadA. One explanation for this is that

there was a third voice to Aler m’en veus below the second voice on the facing page, and

thus the composition could neither fit on one page, nor fit another composition on the

two pages combined. There are three problems with this explanation though. First, it

relies on an unequal distribution of voices which favors the second page, which would

also be unusual. Second, the top two voices of the composition are lower than most

upper voices and would require a quite low tenor voice. Finally, although Bent and

Hallmark remark that imitation and rhythms of the top voices is similar to the upper

voices of a motet, the two voices show no signs of requiring a lower voice. There are

no perfect fourths on strong beats, which would suggest the need for a voice a perfect

fifth lower. Many cadences are bare octaves, but this is not uncommon and the

imposition of a third voice between these two voices would be hard to believe. The

possibility of two more voices relieves the harmonic problems but exacerbates the

imbalance of voice parts on the page. It may be possible that only the top voice was

ever present in the manuscript. Imitative as the second voice is though, it could not

have been generated canonically from the first voice.

65

In lieu of strong evidence for any alternate theory, for now the standard two

voice explanation seems most likely. One further piece of evidence to support this is

the presence of the first name “Johes” at the top of the page, possibly suggesting

“Ciconia” at the head of the second. Range: C: d3-f4 (lower than most upper voices). Clefs: C: C4, C3 (final line of text). Editions: Bent and Hallmark, PMFC, vol. 24, no. 44. Nemeth, The Secular Music of

Johannes Ciconia, pp. 239-241. ClercxC, no. 17.

4. En ce gracieux (Senleches)

The French texted three-part composition, En ce gracieux relies on complex

syncopations far more than any other work in PadB (only Sus unne fontaine comes close

in the music studied) and yet is much less rhythmically complex than the rest of

Senleches’s output. The composition consists of a texted cantus with untexted

contratenor and tenor voices.

The composition is notated in French notation, without mensuration signs or

points of division. There are a number of errors where notes which need to be dotted

are found without, possibly indicating a this piece was never performed from this

manuscript by people who were not already familiar with the work. The top two voices

have a b-flat in their key signature while the tenor voice has a single e-flat as its

signature. It is very probable that the b’s are flatted as well (c.f. m. 3 where a bϑ would

cause a melodic augmented-fifth, and m. 13 which would have an augmented octave

between outer voices). However, since the scribe indicates the bΙ in m. 7, and similarly

dissonant intervals appear at other places in the score, the possibility of bϑ’s in the

tenor voice cannot be fully ruled out. The scribe of the composition is Scribe A, with

features very similar to Aler m’en veus.

The piece is written in French notation, tempus imperfectum cum prolatione minore, so

there is no need for imperfection or alteration. Points of addition are used, even on

ligatures c.o.p. Interestingly, the second ending is marked with the Italian “chius” rather

than the French “clos.”

66

The text of the composition describes good times in which birds are heard to

sing to the speaker. The songs of the nightingale (oci oci) and cuckoo (cocu cocu)

prominently figure into the composition. Indeed, the text of the entire second half

almost seems an excuse to work in the cuckoo’s song: this is pure poesie pro musica. The

song of the nightingale does not seem to have a definite pattern to it, except a slight

predilection for rising minor thirds and major seconds from the first to the second

syllable. The song of the cuckoo, on the other hand, is presented in hockets between

the top two voices. Hocketting is a way of presenting a single musical line in more

than one voice by alternating parts. The cuckoo is represented by a minim rest, minim,

and a semibreve a minor third lower, from g to e. This is the same melodic pattern

used by the cuckoo in Italian madrigals of later centuries and given in the first

collection of notated birdsong, Musurgia universalis by Athanasius Kircher (1650).115

Below the hockets, the tenor sustains a double-long C. Typical for compositions of

this time, the second ending is one note lower than the first ending, though there is a

voice exchange in the upper parts so that the music is not literally moved down a step.

The bottom two voices are untexted probably indicating instrumental

performance. In the cuckoo section of the contratenor, the text “cocu cocu cococu

cocu” is written. It is unclear whether this is a guide to the player as to what the top

voice is performing; one would think this section to be least likely to need such a guide.

Is the player supposed to stop playing and sing this section? This does not seem likely

either. An adequate explanation for the presence of this text has yet to be found. Range: C: f3-g4; Ct: f3-g4; T: c3-c4. Clefs: C: C3; Ct: C3; T: F3

(116). Edition: Green PMFC vol. 21.

115 Quoted in Richard d’A. Jensen, “Birdsong and the Imitation of Birdsong in the Music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” Current Musicology 40 (1985), pp. 50-65. I am grateful to Roe-Min Kok for pointing out facets of the birdsong tradition to me. 116 The tenor voice is the only use of the f-clef in PadB. The shape of the f-clef differs between staff 4 and staff 5, probably because staff 5 was originally written as a c-clef which, rather than erasing, the scribe incorporated into the c-clef.

67

5. Dolçe fortuna (Ciconia)

The second composition by Ciconia in PadB, the ballata Dolçe fortuna (or Dolçe

dolçe fortuna in the manuscript) is stylistically very different from Aler m’en veus. The

composition is in a triple meter, either .i. or tempus imperfectum cum prolatione maiore.117

The French use of alteration and imperfection and lack of points of division are

present in this composition. The main interior cadence gives a textbook example of the

so-called Landini cadence: sixth, decorated by an incomplete lower neighbor in the top

voice, expanding outward to an octave with the rhythm of alternating minims and semi-

minims in the upper voice.118 Many of the other cadences approach a unison through

the motion inwards of a third. The top voice often has a lower auxiliary, creating a

temporary minor second (or in cadences on e, major second, since the d would not be

raised to dΤ) as an added touch of dissonance before the perfect consonant resolution.

Where dragma, or double tailed semibreves (D), are used in PadB, the concor-

dance in the later manuscript F-Pn 4379 (PC II) has void semibreves.119 Because the

same scribe used red and red void notation in Ay si, one wonders why he would use

dragma here unless he were merely copying the pieces and not acting as a scribal-editor

which would, as Nádas has suggested, be more common. Textual variants occur

between the two voices which would not be worthy of comment were it not for their

consistency. Three times, the text of the upper voice uses “y” (may, costey, y foragi)

where the tenor voice has “i”. This raises the possibility that perhaps the scribe was

copying from a source where the tenor voice was untexted as it is in F-Pn (PC II). Range: C: c4-e5; T: g3-a4. Clefs: C: C1; T: C3.

117 Since senaria imperfecta was so closely tied to French styles even from early in the Italian fourteenth century, it makes little sense to try to determine whether the Italian divisio or the French prolation is implied by these compositions. 118 David Fallows argues for removing the “so-called” from descriptions of the Landini cadence despite its absence from contemporary sources, since Landini was the first composer to systematically use the cadence formula. “Landini cadence,” in New Grove, vol. 9, p. 435. 119 Clercx, Johannes Ciconia, vol. 2, p. 12.

68

Edition: Bent and Hallmark, PMFC, vol. 24, no. 30. Nemeth, pp. 204-206. ClercxC, no. 9.

6. A piançer l’oche (Antonelus Marot)

Only the top voice of A piançer l’oche by Antonelus Marot survives, copied at the

bottom of f. BV of PadB. The piece is copied in Italian notation, in octonaria though

with no divisiones letters. Semibrevis caudata (N) is used extensively in the piece to

denote the maior semibreve, even in the one instance (m. 3) where it would not have

been necessary by the rule of via naturae. Oblique stemmed semibreves make their only

appearance in PadB and are equal to 3 minims, as expected. In m. 49, the group of four

semiminims should probably be four minims to complete the tempus.

The fragmentary composition A piançer l’oche was probably copied by a different

scribe than the other compositions in PadB, though the similarities between the decor-

ation of the final longs, the angle of the custos, and the shape of the clefs makes a firm

determination difficult. The lighter hand and extensive text decoration are the

principal arguments for the designation of a separate Scribe B. These arguments are

summarized in the table below: scribe A scribe B range of copying AR-BV (Se per dureça - Dolçe fortuna) BV (A piançer l’oche) accidentals flats are dotted, slope upward.

sharps written as sharps (not naturals)

none

custos single, straight, 45 degree (plus or minus)

similar to A

triplets/Sm trip- right flag Sm - right flag also (never in same piece)

trip - flared right flags Sm - left flags, not flared

pen size moderately large lighter on text, somewhat smaller on noteheads

ink color varies, even within a composition (Se per dureça has C: black, T: light brown)

similar to dark ink of A

character features hooked stem on “h”. some flourishes on “d”

extensive decoration of almost all letters. flourishes on “d” the rule. Long tails on “s”. Fancy cedilla.

Range: C: d4-e5. Clefs: C: C1. Edition: Marrocco, PMFC 10, no. 1.

69

5 . Pa d C : Pa d u a , B i b l i o t e c a U n i v e r s i t a r i a M S 6 5 8

The small fragment, PadC comprises two single folios of secular compositions

which were formerly pasted down to the inside covers of MS 658. The folios have

been loosened from their covers to reveal music previously concealed, though not

without leaving a reversed impression of their contents on the wood of the inside

cover.120 The two folios contain a total of four secular compositions, one per side.

One composition, Jacopo da Bologna’s O cieco mondo, is preserved in its entirety. The

two compositions on the second folio, Or sus vous dormés and Apolinis ecclipsatur, are

missing their beginnings and endings, respectively. The final composition, found on

the recto of folio A, is the ritornello Si e piena la terra from Jacopo da Bologna’s Ogelletto

Silvagio whose terzetti probably were not present in the original form of the manuscript.

These compositions show a more conservative taste and more of an interest in the

music of older composers than do the compositions of the other Paduan fragments.

Since this manuscript was also copied at nearly the same time as the other fragments, it

expands our view of the range of music which formed the musical culture of early

fifteenth-century Padua.

Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria MS 658 is bound in what appears to be its

original leather binding with the image of a cross with faired ends tooled into the front

cover. The main corpus is written in an elegant hand on evenly sized parchment pages

with large, fairly-consistent margins. The beauty of the lettering, size of the margins,

and decoration of some pages combine to suggest that the manuscript was more than

simply utilitarian. The manuscript is not, however, extravagant, simply more

120 The leaves of PadC were probably detached from their covers between 1956 and 1967, since Fischer in 1956 describes O cieco mondo as the first composition in PadC (Kurt von Fischer, Studien zur italienischen Musik des Trecento und frühen Quattrocento. Bern: Verlag Paul Haupt, 1956), while in 1967, Marrocco’s edition of The Works of Jacopo de Bologna includes references to PadC in its examination of Ogelletto Silvagio (W. Thomas Marrocco, editor, Italian Secular Music, by Magister Piero, Giovanni da Firenze, Jacopo da Bologna, in Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, vol. 6. Monaco: Editions de l’Oiseau-lyre, 1967).

����� �� �� � � ������� ���� ����� ����������� ���� ��� ���� ��� � ��� � ���� ���� �� ������ ����������� �� � �� ���� ��� ��� � � ��� ���� �� � ��������� � ���� � ���� �������� � ���������� �� �� � ��� ���� � ���� �� � ��! ����� �� � ��� � ������������� ������ ���"� ���� �� � ����������� ����� �������� ����� �� � ������� �� ���� �� ����������� �� � ������� �� ��������� ���� � ������ ���� �� � ����� ���� �� � �� �"����� ����� ��� ����������� �� ���������� ��� " ��� � ����� �� � �����"� ���� � ����� �� � � �������� ���� ������� ����� ��� � ��� ��������� ����� ��������� ������� � ����� �� ��� ���� �� � #������ ��"���� �� $%% &������ ���' �� �� ���� ���������������� ��� ����������� ���� ������ (���� )��� �� ���� ��� ��*+��� ���� �� ����� �� ���+��� ���� �� ���� �� ����� �� ���� ����� "�� ��� �� � ���� �� � ���� * "���� �����"������ &�� �� �� �����"�'�

70

expensively made than average. The parchment measures 20.2 cm wide by 28.0 cm

high. Staves are 1.8 cm across six lines. Folio A was certainly trimmed on its outside

to make it fit the size of the remainder of the manuscript.

The manuscript as it is now has two front fly leaves, though only the

pastedown is ruled or has music. The second, unfoliated fly leaf, which I have

designated f. α, contains only the words “Iste liber,” or “this book” on its recto side.

This is probably a reference to the note added to the bottom of the verso of folio A:

“Iste liber est monachorum congregationis sancte.” This note specifies that the book is

from the monastery library. On the verso of f. α, the words “Di[single illegible

letter]as põd / Sequitur In diademate monachorum” appear indicating some other work

(Dicas pond?) follows the main treatise. The text of the main corpus, Diadema

monachorum, or “The crown of the monks,” is an exemplar on the monastic life.121

Both music flyleaves were sewn into the binding of the manuscript. Folios A

and α reveal approximately 1 cm of the other side of their bifolio between the end of

gathering 1 (f. 10V) and the beginning of gathering 2 (f. 11).122 Both strips of

parchment following gathering 1 are blank and thus reveal nothing about what was

originally on the lost folios. The same lack of writing is true for the 2 cm of the other

half of f. B which appears after the penultimate gathering between ff. 79 and 80.

A question about the purpose of flyleaves is raised by the placement of f. A.

The cover paste-down does not follow Gregory’s Law; a flesh side of a folio is exposed

to the hair side of the next. The other flyleaves obey the rule.123 This violation might

be the result of a careless scribe, a desire to have the more beautiful initial capitals of O

121 An edition of the Diadema monachorum is found in Italian translation as Corona de'monaci : testo del buon secolo della lingua compilato da un monaco degli angeli ora per la prima volta pubblicato, by Casimiro Stolfi (Prato: Tip. Guasti, 1862). 122 I have used numbers to indicate gatherings in the current manuscript (MS 1475) and letters to indicate reconstructed gatherings from the original manuscript. 123 I expect that the flyleaves of I-Pu 1475 were removed from the cover and placed in the front of the manuscript in modern times and thus have no reason to obey Gregory’s Law; see chapter 6.

71

cieco mondo visible to the reader, or even a care for preserving the more full of the two

sides of the folio. If the second or third explanation is true, then flyleaves might have

had slightly more value than just protection for inside folios.

Each of the two folios contains six-line staves of music written in black

mensural notation. Folios A, AV, and B have eight staves each while folio BV adds a

ninth staff partly by extending into the lower margin and, beginning with the sixth

staff, partly by compressing the space between staves. Since two operations were

required to make room for this staff, its addition was most likely intentional. Because

staves were often ruled across a single bifolio, the presence of the extra staff on folio

BV but not on f. A suggests more strongly that these two folios were never part of a

single bifolio.

My reconstruction of the original gathering structure is as follows:

Gathering A ?? (probably not Ogelletto Silvagio terzetti)

[Ogelletto Silvagio] Si e piena la terra [C, Ct, T]

AR

O cieco mondo (Jacopo da Bologna) [C, T]

AV

Gathering B Or sus vous dormés [C]

Or sus vous dormés [C (cont.), Ct, T]

BR

Apolinis ecclipsatur [C] Apolinis ecclipsatur

BV

The fragment was probably copied by a single scribe. On all the folios, the

clefs slant slightly downwards and lean against the inside of the two vertical lines

connecting the beginning of the staves. The recto and verso of f. B were certainly

72

copied by the same scribe since both share a distinctive, extremely concave custos. The

custos on f. AV match those of folios B and BV. The short composition on f. A, Si e piena

la terra, has no need for custos so this page cannot be compared. The text of the whole

fragment is somewhat heavier than that of most manuscripts of this time. The text

features rounded edges on letters such as “n” and “a” and a “d” with a forward curving

stem. Like the clefs, the semibreves and minims have a slight slope to the lower right.

Questions about apparent differences in spacing between notes can be resolved

by taking into account the effects of text alignment on the different pieces. Folio BV

has more space between notes than f. BR because Apolinis ecclipsatur has a primarily

syllabic text setting while the tenor and contratenor of Or sus vous dormés are untexted.

The neumatic (few notes per syllable) setting of Si e piena la terra falls somewhere

between these two extremes. When melismatic (many notes per syllable) sections of

Apolinis ecclipsatur and Si e piena la terra, such as their beginnings, are examined, their

similarity in spacing size to the untexted f. BR becomes apparent.

The first folio of the manuscript contains two works by the early-trecento

composer Jacopo da Bologna (see chapter 2). Both pieces are madrigals or fragments

of madrigals with terzetti in octonaria and ritornelli which switch to duodenaria ( to ).

The switching of meter at the ritornello, particularly from .o. to .d. is very common in

madrigals. This could be one folio in a section devoted to the works of Jacopo da

Bologna; however, from only two pieces, it is difficult to discover trends. The title of

the second piece does not follow that of the first alphabetically so this can probably be

ruled out as an organizational factor. The two pieces also have different numbers of

voices (2 vs. 3), so it is not clear, even if this were a section on Jacopo’s works, that

pieces were being grouped by number of voices.

If PadC were produced in the first decade of the fifteenth-century, as

manuscripts with similar characteristics have been dated, there is a separation of 60-70

years from Jacopo’s flourishing. For comparison, this is as large a gap as the time from

Robert Schumann’s early symphonies until the premiere of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du

Printemps. The change in styles over 70 years was just as pronounced in the fourteenth

73

century. With the exception of two sections in the tenor of O cieco mondo, the Jacopo

compositions are written such that they can be notated in strict Marchettian Italian

notation. There are no syncopations across the tempus and even the oblique-stemmed

semibreve (equivalent to a dotted-quarter note in modern transcription) is not used.

Within a tempus, however, Jacopo shows much rhythmic variety. In Si e piena la terra, he

weaves normal, duple minims against the simultaneous use of triplet minims in other

voices. He writes these rhythms often a close intervals alternating in similar and

contrary motion (cf. mm. 5 and 8) creating a complex network of short dissonant and

consonant sonorities. In O cieco mondo, much of the rhythmic interest comes in the

ritornello, where phrases of and in the tenor are contrasted with fluid lines of

minims in the cantus.

7. [Ogelletto Silvagio] Si e piena la terra (Jacopo da Bologna)

The recto of folio A contains music for three voices each of which requires

only a single staff. The music contains the ritornello for the caccia-madrigal Ogelletto

Silvagio by Jacopo da Bologna.124 With Aler m’en veus of PadB, Si e piena la terra is one of

two compositions in the studied Paduan fragments to be placed alone on a page with

much free space (five staves). Again, there is an unanswerable question of why the

remainder of the page was not filled.

It is unlikely that the terzetti of Ogelletto Silvagio were ever to be found on the

preceding page. Each voice of a ritornello normally follows the terzetti of that voice;

having all three ritornello voices follow each other would be highly anomalous. The

incipit on the tenor voice, “Tenor si é piena,” also points to the ritornello being

considered an independent composition.

124 I have chosen to refer to the full madrigal by the incipit as found in I-Pn 26 (Pan.), to prevent confusion with the two-part madrigal called Osellecto Selvaggio by Pan. found also in GB-Lbm 29987 (Lo.), F-Pn 6771 (Reina), and I-Fl 87 (Sq.). In I-Fl 87, the caccia-madrigal is called Ugelletto selvaggio while the two-part madrigal is called Oselletto selvagio. In Pit., the caccia madrigal is called Oselletto selvagio, while Reina betrays its Veneto origin by calling both compositions Oselleto salvaço using the cedilla on the c.

74

Si e piena la terra, with the independent ritornello Per chio te in PadA from the

madrigal O cieco mondo (see below), hints at a Paduan tradition of the performance of

ritornelli separate of the rest of the madrigal. The structure of GB-Ob 229 makes it

impossible that the terzetti of O cieco mondo could have been near Per chio te. How these

pieces, both only 12 breves long, would have been used in performance cannot be

answered. Several repetitions of the pieces may have been performed, but there is only

one line of text. There do not seem to be enough of these independent ritornelli to

suggest a performance practice involving the singing of many ritornelli consecutively.

They could have been used as intermezzi between compositions, though the placement

within PadA of Per chio te between a Benedicamus and a Sanctus should raise some eyebrows

at this theory. They could have also been used for purely didactic purposes.

There is enough variation between the ritornello of O cieco mondo in PadC, Pan.,

Pit., Reina, Sq., and Fa (I-FZc 117) and the ritornello in PadA to suggest that it might be

a substitute ritornello: either the standard or the PadA ritornello could be performed

with O cieco mondo. However, the few variants between Si e piena la terra and sources for

Ogelletto silvagio do not support such a hypothesis here.

Stylistically, the composition relies on a motion between normal and triplet

minims, often juxtaposed in different voices (see above). Measure 3 might be said to

introduce a slight hocket, though the contrary motion of the voices implies that they

should be thought of as independent lines. The composition is in duodenaria and

notated in Italian notation with puncti divisiones but without divisio letters. Semibreves

caudate are used in the tenor to indicate via artis notes worth 2/3 of a breve as well as

semibreves maiores worth 1/3 of a breve. Two such semibreves are used in the penultimate

tempus in the tenor to create a temporary senaria imperfecta feel. The top two voices are

reversed, that is, the second voice is the first and the first is the second, in all concor-

dant versions except Sq.; this may be because the voice which begins the terzetti is

lower in the ritornello than the second voice.

75

Range: C: c4-d5; Ct: d4-c5; T: f3-d4. Clefs125: C: C2; Ct: C2; T: C4. Edition: Marrocco, PMFC vol. 6, no. 18. Marrocco, The Music of Jacopo da Bologna, p. 71

8. O cieco mondo (Jacopo da Bologna)

The second madrigal by Jacopo da Bologna in PadC, O cieco mondo is written for

two voices. The two sections of the madrigal use the two Italian divisiones for which

there is no French equivalent: octonaria for the terzetti and duodenaria for the ritornello.

Puncti divisionis are used without divisio letters (the tradition of switching divisiones at the

ritornello was perhaps so well known that no indication was necessary). The only

violations of Marchettian notational principles are found in the tenor voice in mm. 17-

18, 37-38, and 54-55 and in the cantus in mm. 59 -62. The tenor uses a minor

semibreve to syncopate maior semibreve caudata across the tempus, while the cantus

syncopates breves by means of a maior semibreve. Italian notation in octonaria and

duodenaria does not distinguish between maior and minor semibreve rests. Thus when a

maior rest would be appropriate in a tempus which has minor semibreves, two minor rests

must be used. This is indicated in the transcription by the use of two separate eighth

rests, rather than a single quarter rest.

The terzetti of the madrigal consists of three phrases which overlap in such a

way as to create one long phrase cadencing just before the ritornello. At the ends of

the smaller phrases (mm. 16 and 35) the cantus rests while the tenor continues with

the syncopations across the breve mentioned above. Perhaps these sections were set off

as solos to demonstrate syncopations which, though mild by early fifteenth-century

Italian standards, may have been somewhat more exotic in the time just after the mid-

fourteenth century.

In the notation of the tenor of the ritornello, the scribe seems to be implying

groupings of notes which create a temporary or feel. He indicates this by using

125 Recall that PadC uses a six-line staff. Thus C2 is probably the familiar C1 cantus clef. Similarly with C4 for the usual C3 tenor clef.

76

much less space than normal between notes in maior/minor and minor/minim pairs. In

the transcription, these notes are beamed together.126 Range: C: c4-d5; T: f3-d4 (same as Si e piena, above). Clefs: C: C2; T: C4. Edition: Marrocco, PMFC vol. 6, no. 16.

9. [Or sus vous dormés] c’est pour vous dame (anonymous)

Folio C presents the second page of the three-voiced, anonymous French

composition Or sus vous dormés. The fragment preserves the complete tenor and

contratenor, with the final 10.5 measures of the cantus, beginning with “c’est pour

vous dame.” The lower two voices are untexted, and the sustained notes in the contra-

tenor suggest performance by a wind or bowed string instrument, while the figuration

in the tenor in mm. 57-67 (found also in the cantus of the concordances) suggests

performance by a wind instrument. It is interesting that although five sources of this

composition are known to exist (or have existed), no manuscript preserves the name of

this composer.

Anne Hallmark mentions the use of French mensural signatures and coloration

in this composition in PadC; this seems to have been a mistake.127 The composition is

in French notation, interpreted as a mixture of tempus perfectum and tempus imperfectum

with maior prolation. Puncti are used to indicate perfection and alteration.

Between the fourth and fifth staves is written “Denite L perimuL ,” though it

is difficult to determine exactly what is written. The phrase can possibly read as

“denique et perinnuet” which might suggest “and again [a composition by] Perrinet.”

Perrinet was a French composer of a three-part Kyrie and a two-part Credo, found in

PadA, attributed to Perneth.128

126 Se per dureça of PadB also prominently uses unusual spacing to indicate groupings of notes. Other examples can be found in the Paduan fragments. 127 Hallmark, “Some evidence,” p. 199. 128 Gilbert Reaney, “Perrinet” in New Grove, vol. 14, p. 547.

77

After the sixth staff someone, perhaps the same hand as above or the scribe of

the page using a finer pen, has written “.p.s.p.n.xxiij:----|:--” It is unclear what the 23

is referring to, although the reference to sleep in the first line and “he makes me lie

down” near the beginning of Psalm 23 might suggest a tenuous connection there. Range: C (fragment): d4-c5; Ct: f3-g4; T: f3-g4. Clefs: C: C1; Ct: C3; T: C3. Edition: Green, PMFC vol. 21, no. 48.

10. Apolinis ecclipsatur (anonymous)

A fragment of the top voice of the isorhythmic motet Apolinis ecclipsatur is given

on f. CV. The fragment presents most of the music of one voice, ending at “vox

quorum.” The composition survives in concordances in a three-voice and a five-voice

version. Since the five-voice version (found in F-Sm 222) has another voice equally as

rhythmically active as the top voice, it is most likely that the version originally

preserved in PadC was for three voices: in order for the remaining four voices to fit

their music up until “vox quorum” the second page would have to have almost three

times as many symbols per line as the first page, which is not possible even for

untexted voices. The three voice version however, would fit quite nicely on two pages,

giving an alignment of voices similar to that of Or sus vous dormés (though with a shorter

tenor voice).129 The motet is written in French notation without puncti divisiones or

mensuration symbols. Judging by the concordant sources in which it is transmitted and

the function of the other voices in those sources, the work is certainly of French origin.

The text of Apolinis ecclipsatur refers to many composers and theorists. Philip de

Vitry (“Phylippus de uitriaco”) is one of those mentioned among the college of

musicians in the text, though his contemporary, Guillaume de Machaut is not. Anne

129 Folio BV contains 317 elements (notes, accidentals, rests: anything which takes up more space than a punctus on a staff), averaging 35 per line. To notate the remainder of the composition (20 elements) would require half a line, which could be shared with the tenor (26 elements). The contratenor comprises 171 elements or 5 lines or 4 if untexted. These voices could easily fit on one more page. The fourth and fifth voices are have a total of 703 elements between them, requiring two whole pages in themselves.

78

Hallmark remarks that references to serious music and theorists in Apolinis ecclipsatur

and in the third terzetto of Ogelletto Silvagio are unsurprising considering Padua’s

tradition as a center of music theory.130 However, since the terzetti of Ogelletto Silvagio

are not present in PadC, one cannot take it for granted that the references to Phillip de

Vitry (Filipoti) and Marchetto there were known to the Paduan musicians.

It is likely that the motet either influenced or was influenced by the ceremonial

motet Comes Flandrie, flos victoris, composed for the church of St. Donatian in Bruges.131

The pieces are linked by similarities in text. Apolinis’s reference to “Petrus de Brugis” is

probably a reference to the composer and singer Petrus Vinderhout at St. Donatian

from 1381-82 who Strohm suggests may also have been the composer of Comes Flandrie.

The text of Apolinis ecclipsatur mentions Egardus who was also in Bruges during the

1380s. These are some of the many contacts with the Low Countries to be found in

the Paduan fragments. Range: C (fragment): a3-b4 (only piece in PadC which uses the lowest, sixth staff line). Clefs: C: C2. Edition: Harrison, PMFC vol. 5, no. 9.

130 Hallmark, “Some evidence,” p. 198. 131 Reinhard Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, p. 104.

79

6 . Pa d A : G B - O b 2 2 9 , I - P u 1 4 7 5 , I - P u 6 8 4

PadA was originally a manuscript of at least 70 folios containing secular and

sacred music compiled c. 1390-1415 in the Abbey of Santa Giustina in Padua. 132

Portions of the manuscript survive today in three separate fragments. Two bifolios

from the fourth gathering are found in the middle of Oxford, Bodleian Library

Canonici Pat. Lat. 229, a manuscript containing plainchant in addition to verbal works.

Three bifolios from gathering five were at one time used to strengthen the cover of

Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria MS 1475. These folios, three of which suffered severe

vertical cuts, are now sewn into the front of the manuscript. Padua, Biblioteca

Universitaria MS 684 preserves a complete bifolio and half of a second bifolio. The

complete bifolio is certainly from the gathering following I-Pu 1475, and it is not

unreasonable to speculate that the cut folio is also from gathering six.

Reconstruction of the gathering structure of PadA reveals no particular

ordering of the compositions within the manuscript. Sections of the mass, other

sacred compositions, and secular compositions in French and Italian are all

commingled. The lengths of all the gatherings have been assumed in this study to be

equal: this assumption holds true for many trecento manuscripts, though certainly not

all (Sq. is an important exception). Original foliation which is present on the

manuscripts has been underlined in the far right column of the gathering structure

diagrams. Other foliation is derived from the structure of the manuscript and

distribution of compositions also discussed in “Codicological structure of the Paduan

fragments” on pages 45-46. The position of I-Pu 684 f. C within gathering six is

conjecture.

132 PadA can be dated because quotations from dated compositions mentioned in Sus unne fontaine give us an earliest lower date while connections to dated concordances in PadD (copied from PadA) give a latest upper date. The other two fragmentary codices cannot be so securely dated.

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����� �� ������ #B$� ��������� #S$� �� ���� ��� ��� �� ����

80

Gathering 4 31

31v 32

Sanctus [C,T] Sanctus [Ct, T (cont)]

32v 33 (229 A)

Benedicamus domino [C, T], Per chio te [C, T] Sanctus (f. 34)[Ct] Sanctus (Mediolano) [1,2, T]

33v (229 Av) 34 (229 B)

Patrem omnipotentem (Berlatus)[C] Patrem omnipotentem [T]

34v (229 Bv) 35

35v 36

Et in terra [1, T], Sones ces nachares [C] Et in terra [2], Sones ces nachares [T, Ct]

36v 37 (229 C)

Sanctus (Barbitronsoris)[1, 2 (Ambrosius?), T] Dona si to falito (Landini)[C, T], Ma fin est mon commencement (Machaut), [1, 2, T]

37v (229 Cv) 38 (229 D)

Sus unne fontaine (Ciconia)[C, T, Ct]

38v (229 Dv) 39

39v 40

40v

81

Gathering 5 Sanctus (Sant Omer)[1, 2, T] 41 (1475 B) Agnus Dei [1, 2, T], Sanctus [2]

possible short composition, Sanctus [1, T]

41v (1475 Bv) 42

Et in terra (Engardus)[C] Et in terra (Engardus)[Ct, T]

42v 43 (1475 F)

Et in terra (Ciconia)[C, T] Et in terra (Ciconia)[Ct], Ite missa est

(Machaut)[Triplum, Motetus, T]

43v (1475 Fv) 44 (1475 D)

Et in terra... Clementi...udetur in rubrio, [Giovine vagna] rosa virtute [C]

??

44v (1475 Dv) 45

45v 46

possible short composition, Donna l’amico [C, T] Gratiosus ferridus/Magnissimus/[T], Donna l’amico [residuum]

46v 47 (1475 C)

Et in terra... Clementi [C] Et in terra... Clementi [Ct, T]

47v (1475 Cv) 48 (1475 E)

Qui pandis [C, Ct, T], Se questa dea de vertue [Ct] Se questa dea de vertue [C, T, Ct (cont.)]

48v (1475 Ev) 49

Et in terra [C] Et in terra [T], Die non fugir (Landini)[C, T]

49v 50 (1475 A)

Lux purpurata (Jacopo de Bologna)[C, T, Ct], Sanctus (f. 51) [Ct, cont (Benedictus)]

50v (1475 Av)

82

Gathering 6 Sanctus (Gratiosus)[C, T, Ct] 51 (684 A) Gran pianto (Landini)[C, Ct, T], S’i te so stato (Landini)[C, T]

Et in terra [C, T, Ct]

51v (684 Av) 52(?) (684 C)

Patrem omnipotentem (Perneth)[1, T] Patrem omnipotentem [2, T]

52v(?) (684 Cv) 53

Patrem omnipotentem (cont.) [1, T] Patrem omnipotentem (cont.) [2, T]

53v 54

54v 55

55v 56

56v 57

57v 58

58v 59

Et in terra... Qui sonitu [C] Et in terra... Qui sonitu [T, Ct]

59v 60 (684 B)

Poy che partir (Landini)[C, Ct, T], Alta regina (Gratiosus)[C] 60v (684 Bv)

Gathering 7 possible short composition, Alta regina (Gratiosus) [Ct (?), T] 61 61v

62 62v

The three fragments of PadA record 17 complete compositions. Of the 35

total compositions and fragments of compositions, 15 are unique to PadA. 21 of the

compositions have sacred texts. Of the remaining compositions, ten have Italian texts,

three have French texts, and one has a secular Latin text. Due to limits of time and of

the length of this study, only selected compositions in PadA have been examined, and

discussion of notation and paleography is limited. To further save time, compositions

by Landini will receive only the briefest of examinations.

83

GB-Ob 229 (Oxford, Bodleian Library Canonici Pat. Lat. 229)

The Oxford fragment of PadA, GB-Ob 229 consists of two bifolios containing

sacred and secular music.133 The call number ZZ.2.nO.111 is found on f. DV; since this

is a call number from a catalog of manuscripts at Santa Giustina in the middle of the

fifteenth century, we can assume this fragment did not leave Padua during the time

covered by this study. The layout of staves upon the page, the idiosyncrasies of the

scribal hand, and the position of folio numbers in the outside margin confirm the

linking of GB-Ob 229 with I-Pu 1475 and I-Pu 684 as part of the same original

manuscript.

Folio DV has been this fragment’s most examined folio, since it contains

Johannes Ciconia’s only surviving ars subtilior composition, Sus unne fontaine. The non-

standard use of French mensuration signs in Sus unne fontaine has been cited as a

peculiarity of the PadA version by many authors. However, it has not been mentioned

that in PadA, PadB, and PadC, Sus unne fontaine is the only composition to have French

mensuration signs of any sort. The evidence of interest in French styles by this Paduan

scribe is augmented with evidence based on decoration and layout in the first folio of

GB-Ob 229.

11. Sanctus (anonymous, f. A)

An upper voice and the second half of the tenor of an anonymous Sanctus are

found on folio A of GB-Ob 229. The top voice and first half of the tenor would have

been found on the previous folio in the original manuscript. The original layout was as

follows:

133 Examination of this fragment was conducted entirely via a facsimile copy, thus issues of binding, ink color, etc. cannot be discussed.

84

Sanctus 1 (f. 32V) Tenor

Sanctus 2 (f. 33) Tenor, “Pleni...”

The layout of parts and the florid vertical embellishments in the margins are

most commonly seen in French manuscripts of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth

centuries, such as the motet fascicles of the Montpellier and Bamberg codices.134

Letters with large vertical strokes, such as “l” and initial “s,” are much longer and more

highly decorated than in most Italian manuscripts. It is possible that the scribe is

trying to deliberately incorporate French elements into the copying of this page,

though it seems odd that he would choose a blatantly Italian composition to decorate

in this French manner.

The Sanctus changes meter six times during the piece; three of these meters, .o.,

.d., and .s.p., are closely associated with Italian compositions. The notation is strictly

Italian, with regular puncti divisionis and maior and minor semibreves. A peculiarity in the

texting of ligatures in the tenor was mentioned in the paleography section of chapter 3.

The placement of two syllables with the final ligature of the tenor’s first Hosanna

argues for treating the final note of a section as a separate note even if it is connected

to the previous notes of a ligature.

From the sonorities of the cadences between the surviving upper voice and the

tenor, we can deduce some information about the lost voice. In the cadences at the end

134 Although, it should be noted that in some of these older codices both voices and tenor are found on a single page rather than across an opening.

85

of the first and second Hosanna, the two voices move outwards from a major sixth to

an octave. This indicates that the missing voice is either below the second voice

(sounding the fifth of the triad) at both the major cadences of the second half of the

composition or is a very high voice sounding a perfect twelfth above the tenor. In

either case, the role of the top voice, which usually cadences above the second voice, but

no more than an octave above the tenor, is somewhat unusual. Range: 2: g3-b4; T: c3-b3. Clefs: 2: C2; T: F3. Edition: von Fischer and Gallo, PMFC 13 no. A11.

12. Benedicamus domino (anonymous)

The two voice Benedicamus domino on f. B is remarkable in several important

respects. The texture of the piece consists of a florid upper line over a liturgical tenor

written entirely with longs. The top voice is somewhat archaic, remaining in the first

rhythmic mode throughout most of the composition. In places where the top voice is

not in the first mode, it usually consists of three minims in a lower neighbor figure

(e.g., D-C-D in measure 2). This figure could originally have also been written in the

first rhythmic mode through the use of a plica. The notation of the tenor in longs

does not work perfectly; two of the longs in the tenor must be read as breves in order

for the voices to remain aligned.

The Benedicamus domino (“Let us bless the Lord”) text was often substituted

for the Gloria in the mass during Lent, when the Gloria is not sung. This Benedicamus

domino tenor is a textbook example of an (harmonic) mode two, dorian chant. Range: C: a3-c5; T: a2-a3 (lowest notes in the fragments studied). Clefs: C: C2, C1; T: F3. Edition: von Fischer and Gallo, PMFC 12, no. 26.

13. [O cieco mondo] Per chio te (Jacopo da Bologna)

This composition belongs to what seems to have been a Paduan tradition of the

singing of ritornelli without terzetti (see Si e piena la terra in PadC, chapter 5). For a

86

discussion of the musical aspects of this madrigal, see information under the

concordance, O cieco mondo, also in PadC, chapter 5. Range: C: c4-d5; T: f3-e4. Clefs: C: C1; T: C3. Edition: Marrocco, PMFC 6 (16). Marrocco, The Music of Jacopo da Bologna, p. 71.

14. Sanctus (Mediolano)

The Sanctus by Mediolano is the only four part composition found in the

Paduan fragments. It is discussed extensively in the section on Mediolano in chapter 2. Range: 1: c4-b4; 2: c4-b4; Ct: c3-d4; T: c3-b3. Clefs: 1: C1; 2: C1; Ct: C4-F2, C5-F3; T: C5-F3. Edition: von Fischer and Gallo, PMFC 12, no. 18.

15. Patrem omnipotentem (Berlatus)

The Credo by Berlatus is in tempus imperfecta cum prolatione maiore. In the transcrip-

tion, an attempt was made to notate the piece with the longa marking the bar, but this

works only sporadically. Longs and breves are imprefected by minims in this composi-

tion. There seems to have been a conscious avoidance of remaining in a single rhythmic

mode, though strings of minims are rarely used. Toward the middle of the composition

(mm. 75-85) there is a short section which features breves imperfected both a parte ante

and a parte post alternating with perfect breves and semibreves creating a strong series of

short syncopations. See the discussion of Berlatus in chapter 2 for more information

about this composition. Range: C: c4-d5. Clefs: C: C1. Edition: no edition.

16. Et in terra pax (anonymous, f. C)

Only a single voice, probably the contratenor, of this Gloria is preserved in GB-

Ob 229. The composition is written using pure French notation in tempus imperfectum

cum prolatione maiore. The recitation on a single tone in places such as “Qui sedes ad

87

desterra [sic]” is unusual and suggests an imitation of plainsong and psalm recitation.

The “Amen” of this fragment is quite extended. Range: 2: b3-c5. Clefs: 2: C1. Edition: von Fischer and Gallo, PMFC 13, no. A5.

17. Sones ces nachares (anonymous)

The lower two voices of the anonymous, probably three-part, composition Sones

ces nachares are found at the bottom of f. C. The piece is in two sections of about equal

length and is written in French notation, tempus imperfectum cum prolatione maiore. The

style of the voices implies not only instrumental performance, but possibly

performance by trumpet or other lip-reed instrument; there are many passages in both

the lower voices where a C-E-G triad is outlined with repeated notes in the manner of a

fanfare. “Nachares” may possibly be related to the English term “Nakers” for

kettledrums, allowing the incipit to be read “strike those drums,” which would concord

with the fanfare style of the piece.135 Range: Ct: g3-b4; T: f3-g4. Clefs: Ct: C3, C2, C1; T: C3. Edition: no edition.

18. Sanctus (Barbitonsoris)

The three voice Sanctus on f. CV is the only known composition by

Barbitonsoris. The piece can be divided into two parts on the basis of musical style

and notation. The Sanctus and first Hosanna are in ternaria, or senaria imperfecta

without minims (there is also the possibility that they are in novenaria; see “Notation”,

in chapter 3), with a switch to quaternaria (without puncti divisionis marks but with puncti

additionis) for the Benedictus and second Hosanna. In the first section, points of

division were used irregularly, while in the second they are almost non-existent.136

135 Suggested by Thomas Forrest Kelly in a conversation, 10 April 1998. 136 It should be noted that if this piece were written in a more “Italian” notational style, fewer rather than more puncti divisionis would be used in the first section. This is due to the presence

88

See “Barbitonsoris” in chapter 2 for more information about the Sanctus. Range: C: b3-d5; Ct: b3-c5; T: f3-f4. Clefs: C: C1; Ct: C1; T: C3. Edition: von Fischer and Gallo, PMFC 12, no. 19.

19. Dona s’ i’ to falito (Landini)

This two voice ballata is written in Italian notation without divisio letters.

Although the composition is in .q. in PadA, the strong modus perfectum feel suggests the

composition was originally conceived in .d. The oblique stemmed semibreve is used to

indicate a note worth three minims (dotted quarter note in the transcription). Range: C: e3-a4; T: d3-d4. Clefs: C: C3, C2, C3; T: C4-F2. Edition: Schrade, PMFC 4, no. 1.

20. Ma fin est mon commencement (Machaut)

The canonic three part rondeaux Ma fin est mon commencement by Guillaume de

Machaut is discussed in the section on Machaut in chapter 2. It should be reiterated

that we would have no idea this composition is a rondeaux were it not for readings in

concordant manuscripts. Range: 1,2: g3-a4; T: c3-a3. Clefs: C: C3, C2; T: F3. Edition: Schrade, PMFC 3, rondeaux 14.

21. Sus unne fontaine (Ciconia)

The three voice composition Sus unne fontaine uses completely different

mensuration signatures than any other composition in the Paduan fragments. While

other compositions use letters, Sus unne fontaine uses O, C, 4, and 3. The mensuration

signatures are used differently than in other compositions outside the Paduan context

which use the same shapes. They are also used differently than the way Ciconia himself

of puncti before and after breves, unnecessary in true Italian notation (and illegal in French notation).

89

defines them in his treatise De proportionibus. Unfortunately, a detailed discussion of the

composition and especially of authorial intention is far beyond the scope of this

study.137 The quotation in Sus unne fontaine of three texts from ballades by Philipoctus

da Caserta allows us to date PadA as being not before 1390.138

An aspect of Sus unne fontaine which has not been discussed is the use of clefs.

In both PadA and ModA, a C-clef on the fourth line is used for the contratenor while the

tenor uses an F-clef on the second line.139 These two clefs allow for an identical range

of music to be written (and indeed, the range of the contratenor and the tenor are very

similar), so why would different clefs have to be used? It is possible that the choice in

clef says something about the nature of the voice in addition to specifying a possible

range for the notes. This theory will have to be explored in a later study. Range: C: g3-a4; Ct: d3-e4; T: d3-d4. Clefs: C: C2; Ct: C4; T: F2. Edition: Bent and Hallmark, PMFC 24, no. 45. Nemeth, p. 232. Clercx, no. 16.

I-Pu 1475 (Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria MS 1475)

Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria MS 1475 contains three bifolios of music

which seem to have been removed from the front cover and have now been placed at the

beginning of the manuscript. The parchment of I-Pu 1475 is thinner than that of I-Pu

684. This is probably the effect of being stuffed in a book cover for so many centuries.

I-Pu 1475 is the only fragment where the prickings on the outside edges are still visible.

Parchment manuscripts often have one or two sets of small holes as guides to ruling

the pages. There is a single set of prickings per staff on the first two bifolios (ff. A-

D). The third bifolio has a second set of prickings, but these prickings are found

137 For more information see, Hallmark, “Some evidence,” pp. 207-209 and Stone, “Writing Rhythm,” chapter 2. Hallmark argues for PadA’s reading as being closer to Ciconia’s original intentions while Stone counters that there is no reason to suppose the version in ModA to have come after PadA. 138 Hallmark, “Some evidence,” p. 207. 139 The use of F2 without accompanying C4 is unusual in the Paduan fragments studied.

90

between the staves, so they were probably see as erroneous and not used. The pricking

is somewhat irregular on first bifolio.

Folios B, D, and F have been cut vertically causing the endings of each staff of

the rectos and the beginnings of each staff of the versos to be missing (see plate 4,

appendix B). Because of the limits of time and of the damage to the folios, only two

compositions from the manuscript will be discussed.

33. Qui pandis (anonymous)

Qui pandis is a three voice motet found on f. EV (f. 48V). This composition was

omitted from the RISM catalog of I-Pu 1475. To the best of my knowledge no edition

has been made of it despite its being complete in all voices. The motet is written with

French notation in the standard tempus imperfectum cum prolatione maiore. Alteration of

minims occurs in several places. Dots of division are used primarily to designate breves

to be imperfected both ante and post. When the movement is in semibreves and minims,

the majority of the rhythmic material is derived from the first rhythmic mode: long-

short-long-short. The lower voices are somewhat paired and move in slightly slower

note values. The phrase “Cum sancto spiritu” is shorter in the lower voices than it is

in the top voice; I have read one breve in each voice as if it were a long in order to make

the length of the lines equal.

The speaker in the text addresses himself or herself to Christ, imploring him to

send Mary as a blessed advocate for the people.140 The piece is divided into four parts

of roughly equal length: “Qui pandis,” “Tu solus dominus,” “Tu cuncta tenes fortiter

140 Many thanks to David Petrain for helping me translate this text. There are a number of problems with the text we were unable to solve. For example, the fourth word looks like, “federis,” but no possible translation of this could be found. I have chosen to go with the reading “sederis,” even though this also is not grammatically correct, and read the first phrase as “Qui pandis arcum sederis:” “He who is seated laying plain the rainbow,” a reference to Revelation 4:3. The text also borrows from the Gloria of the mass: “Tu solus dominus...Tu solus altissimus...Cum sancto spiritu.”

91

[you hold everything securely],” and “Cum sancto spiritu.” The piece concludes with

a short “Amen”.

Qui pandis begins on an A-C-E triad and is the only composition studied in the

Paduan fragments to begin with the third of the chord present. Even the 6-3

dominated Sanctus by Barbitonsoris moves into imperfect harmonies only after the

opening sonority. Qui pandis might be a presentation of the added tropes of a troped

Gloria. Other troped Glorias are found in PadA, (e.g., Et in terra...Qui sonitu and Et in

terra...Clementi) and Et in terra...Clementi is even presented a second time, without the

liturgical sections of the Gloria. The 6-3 opening would not be so unusual if Qui pandis

were an excerpt from a larger Gloria, and some of the so-called “dead intervals”

between phrases would be explained. If Qui pandis is part of a larger composition, it

would add weight to my hypothesis that there was a Paduan interest in excerpts

possibly for didactic reasons. Range: C: c4-c5; Ct: f3-g4; T: f3-g4. Clefs: C: C1; Ct: C3; T: C3. Edition: no edition.

36. Die non fugir di mi (Landini)

The two part ballata Die non fugir di mi is interesting particularly for its use of

single-note ligatures at the beginning and middle of the composition. The piece is in

.d. (though without divisio letters) and thus has two primary semibreve types, minor and

maior. However, since the breve cannot be imperfected in true Italian notation, as this

piece represents, the note worth the value of 8 minims must also be a semibreve. In

order to distinguish this third type of semibreve, the scribe has chosen to invent a

symbol consisting of two adjacent caudata semibreves (NN) known as a single-note

ligature. The invention of new notation types to solve particular compositional

difficulties testifies to the flexibility of the notational systems in use in late medieval

Padua. Range: C: f3-a4; T: d3-d4. Clefs: C: C2; T: C4-F2. Edition: Schrade, PMFC 4, no. 31.

92

I-Pu 684 (Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria MS 684)

Biblioteca Universitaria MS 684 contains a single bifolio of music at its front

and a single folio at the back.141 Two modern flyleaves have been added to the front of

this manuscript. The music fragments have been trimmed on their top and outside

edges to make them fit the dimensions of 21.2 x 31.2 cm manuscript. The trimming

of the right edge of the rectos has removed the original foliation. Since different edges

were trimmed between I-Pu 1475 and I-Pu 684, an estimate of the size of the original

folios of PadA can be determined. Each folio of PadA originally measured 21.7-

22.2 cm in length and 33.9-34.4 cm in height. It is hoped that measurements of GB-

Ob 229 would confirm these results.

38, 39. Sanctus (Gratiosus)

See “Gratiosus de Padua,” in chapter 2 for information on this composition. Range: C: b3-b4; Ct: d3-e4; T: d3-d4. Clefs: C: C2; Ct: C4; T: C4-F2, F2. Edition: von Fischer and Gallo, PMFC 12, no. 17.

40. Gran pianto agli ochi (Landini)

Gran pianto agli ochi is a three voice ballata by Landini. This composition in .q.,

like Dona s’ i’ to falito, may have been conceived as a piece in duodenaria. Although the

piece is securely in modus perfectum (three breves to the long), the concept of modus

imperfectum (two breves per long) is so pervasive in Paduan music at the end of the

fourteenth century that to indicate a perfect long here a dot of addition must be used.

Despite having letter indications of .q. in all voices, the composition does not use puncti

divisionis of any sort.

141 The front folios were previously numbered in pencil and with typed numerals 1 and 2 in the outside lower corner. The typed numerals continue throughout the main corpus. There are also penciled page letters A-D in the upper right-hand corner corresponding to ff. A-BV of this study.

93

Range: C: d4-d5; Ct: b3-c5; T: f3-f4. Clefs: C: C1; Ct: C1; T: C3. Edition: Schrade, PMFC 4, no. 104.

41. S’ i’ te so stato (Landini)

This two voice ballata, also by Landini, is copied directly below Gran pianto agli

ochi, but has no letter indication of its meter. It is in quaternaria, and, like Landini’s

other .q. ballate, S’ i’ te so stato may have originally been conceived of in duodenaria. Range: C: b3-c5; T: e3-e4. Clefs: C: C1; T: C4. Edition: Schrade, PMFC 4, no. 16.

42. Et in terra...Qui Sonita (anonymous)

The lower two voices of a Gloria with added tropes are found on f. B of I-Pu

684. The voices are nearly identical in range. This is the only composition in the

fragments studied to begin with long rests before all voice parts enter. Range: Ct: e3-g4; T: f3-g4. Clefs: Ct: C3; T: C3. Edition: Cattin and Facchin, PMFC 23B, no. 27.

43. Poy che partir (Landini)

The three voice ballata Poy che partir is written in French notation but with an

Italian indication of .i. at the beginning of the contratenor part. The piece has first and

second (chiuso) endings, which is a French influenced characteristic. The end of the

first section in the contratenor seems to violate similis ante similem. A punctus divisionis

would have been helpful here for deciphering what rhythm was intended. Range: C: f3-a4; Ct: e3-e4; T: d3-d4. Clefs: C: C2; Ct: C4; T: C4. Edition: Schrade, PMFC 4, no. 98.

44. Alta regina de virtute (Gratiosus)

Although it frequently switches from .p. to .o., Gratiosus’s Alta regina de virtute

does not use any divisio letters; one must count the number of minims between puncti

divisionis and adjust their length accordingly. The scribe uses a normal semibreve to

94

indicate an imperfect semibreve in .p. and a semibrevis caudata (N) to indicate a perfect (3

minim) semibreve. A more detailed discussion of Alta regina de virtute can be found in

chapter 2. Range: C: b3-d5. Clefs: C: C1. Edition: Marrocco, PMFC 10, fragment a.

45. Et in terra pax (Gratiosus)

See “Gratiosus de Padua,” in chapter 2 for an examination of style in

Gratiosus’s mass movements. Range: C: b3-a4; T: c3-d4. Clefs: C: C2; T: F3, C4-F3. Edition: von Fischer and Gallo, PMFC 12, no. 6.

46. Patrem omnipotentem (Perneth)

The layout of Perneth’s Credo is similar to that of No. 11 Sanctus in GB-Ob 229,

though without the French influence in decoration. The surviving page here is the first

page rather than the second. Although Perneth’s credo is in four voices in other

manuscripts, in order to have all the voices have page turns at the same place, the

version in PadA must consist of only three voices. This supposition is supported by

the amount of free space seen in the sixth and tenth staves of f. CV: the scribe is clearly

not concerned about trying to cram extra music onto the page.

A discussion of possible instrumental performance or instrumental doubling of

voices of this Credo can be found in the discussion on the life of Perneth in chapter 2. Range: C: b3-d5; T: d3-d4; Clefs: C: C1; T: C4-F2. Edition: Cattin and Facchin, PMFC 23B, no. 51.

95

C o n c l u s i o n s

The examination of the Paduan manuscripts required the use of many analytic

tools from other fields as well as a careful observation of details in the fragments. The

most meticulous scrutiny was found in the last three chapters focusing on the five

manuscript fragments. While the details of a composition or the observations of

notational systems can at times be interesting in themselves, it is when we step back

and see the relationship between these findings and the Paduan music tradition as a

whole that the full significance of each oblique-stemmed semibreve or untrimmed

bifolio reveals itself.

We have seen that the production of manuscripts of polyphonic music at Santa

Giustina during the first decades of the fifteenth century might have had more to do

with a general expansion of the monastery under a new Venetian-appointed Abbot than

it had to do with increased desire for music manuscripts. Patronage of the Paduan

composers whose works were copied into these manuscripts originally came from both

civic and religious structures–these structures being closely intertwined in Padua,

especially under Carrara rule. Although the records of patronage have largely been

destroyed, in the texts of celebratory motets we can reconstruct who the principal

patrons were of such composers as Johannes Ciconia.

Unwritten musical traditions were a large part of the musical life of late

fourteenth-century Padua. Although we were not able to examine traditions such as

instrumental performance and monophonic song, the tradition of popular songs from

Sicily can be seen in the Paduan fragments and in other manuscript sources connected

to Padua, such as the Reina codex. In PadB, the anonymous two-voice ballata Se per

dureça most likely has a Sicilian song at its root. This siciliana-ballata exhibits the

characteristic homophonic declamation of text at the beginning of phrases, short

phrases articulated by rests, and motion by parallel fifth, unison, and octave.

The Paduan fragments present works by local composers, composers from

other parts of Italy, French composers, and composers from the Low Countries. We

96

know that several composers represented in the fragments were in Bruges at the same or

nearly the same time. It is possible that Senleches, Egardus, and the composer of

Apolinis ecclipsatur (possibly Petrus Vinderhout) worked in the same musical circles; if

so, it is logical that some of their music would travel together. We have also seen a

possible attribution of Or sus vous dormés trop to Perneth, who is represented by the

fragment of a Credo in I-Pu 684.

Paduan musical interests as seen in the fragments covered a vast range of styles.

In GB-Ob 229, ff. CV and DV illustrate this range of interests well. Folio CV contains a

sacred composition, a Sanctus by Barbitonsoris. This piece has large homophonic

sections, particularly at the beginning. The Sanctus uses simple rhythms (even though

the structure is quasi-isorhythmic) and uses the imperfect consonances of the third

and the sixth. Two folios away, however, the same scribe has copied Ciconia’s Sus unne

fontaine. This ars subtilior composition displays three contrasting meters which change

throughout the piece. A greater contrast in styles could hardly be imagined. The

presence of Machaut’s Ma fin est mon commencement in PadA, and nowhere else outside the

Machaut manuscripts, suggests that interest in complex and intellectually challenging

compositions was not limited to the music of local composers such as Ciconia.

While compositions like Sus unne fontaine, En ce gracieux tamps, and Dolçe fortuna

suggest different styles all of which look toward the music of the present and future,

the Paduan fragments preserve much music from as far back as the first half of the

fourteenth century. Jacopo da Bologna, who wrote most of his works c. 1340-60, has

as many compositions in the fragments as anyone except Landini. The sacred

composition, Benedicamus domino also is from an earlier tradition. This composition in

PadA uses a liturgical tenor written entirely in longs with an upper voice whose rhythm

is clearly derived from the old rhythmic modes.

Si e piena la terra in PadC and Per chio te in PadA are evidence a tradition of the

performance of ritornelli independent of the terzetti of a madrigal. I have not seen

evidence of this tradition in the context of other cities or times. Machaut’s Ite missa est

preserved in PadA independent of the rest of Machaut’s mass suggests, with the

97

ritornelli above, that brevity did not prevent a composition from having use in Paduan

musical circles. The questions of performance practice of pieces less than thirty

seconds in length are enormous and will have to be examined in future studies.

The codicological examination of these Paduan fragments has enabled us to see

the layouts of large portions of three gatherings of PadA and a single gathering in PadB.

Examination of the arrangement of compositions on a folio has raised questions about

the contents of these manuscripts and the influences upon the scribe copying them. In

PadB, the blank space on the final five staves of f. AV no longer allows us to say with

total certainty that Aler m’en veus is a two voice composition whose second voice would

have been found on the adjacent page in the original manuscript. This is a discovery

which would not have been possible had Ciconia’s virelai been examined apart from the

norms of Paduan manuscript structure. The layout of voices along with the style of

decoration in the left margin of the anonymous Sanctus on f. A of GB-Ob 229 raises

questions of French influence on a scribe in Santa Giustina.142

Analysis of the arrangement of notes and parts tells us how many parts some

compositions originally had. An examination of the layout of pages caused the

determination that PadA originally contained a three-voice version of Perneth’s Credo

rather than the four voice version seen in concordant manuscripts. An approach similar

in philosophy though differing in methodology determined that a three-voice version

of Apolinis ecclipsatur was originally found in PadC. By counting the number of noteheads

the scribe could fit on a staff and comparing this to the number of noteheads which

would have been necessary to fit the five-voice Apolinis ecclipsatur, we know that a five-

voice version could not have had the concurrent page turns necessary for performance.

Gregory’s Law states that pages facing a single opening should both be from

the same side of the animal: flesh against flesh, hair against hair. In the course of this

study, it was shown that this rule was obeyed in Padua even in the case of flyleaves

142 Additionally, we know the name of this scribe may have been Ambrosius.

98

designed to protect manuscripts. An exception to this rule was seen in the pasting

down of the first folio of PadC, raising the possibility that the aesthetic quality of a

manuscript might have been an influence on fifteenth-century decisions to preserve

older music.

The study of paleography in the Paduan manuscripts showed that two scribes

were responsible for the production of different compositions in PadB. Since there is a

change in scribes after Dolçe fortuna on f. BV, we cannot tell if the use of strict Italian

notation in A piançer l’oche is because of scribal predilection or because this is the

notation in which the piece was transmitted.

The picture of Paduan music life and traditions revealed by the five

fragmentary manuscripts in this study is itself still somewhat fragmentary, though not

at all contradictory. Reconstruction of a greater portion of the Paduan musical

tradition could be accomplished by similar studies of the other securely attributable

Paduan sources of the late trecento and early quattrocento. This study applied tools

from the fields of paleography, codicology, filiation, notational study, and musical

biography toward deciphering seventeen folios of music prepared c. 1400 in Paduan

musical circles. These tools revealed the depth and richness of the Paduan musical

tradition preserved in fragments of disassembled manuscripts from the Abbey of Santa

Giustina.

99

B i b l i o g r a p h y

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Bent, Margaret. “New Sacred Polyphonic Fragments of the Early Quattrocento.” Studi Musicali 9 (1980). pp. 175-79.

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Bent, Margaret and Anne Hallmark. The Music of Johannes Ciconia, in Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, vol. 24. Monaco: Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, 1984.

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Cattin, Giulio and Francesco Facchin, editors. French Sacred Music, in Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, vol. 23 pt. A-B. Monaco: Editions de l’Oiseau-lyre, 1989-1991.

Clercx, Suzanne. Johannes Ciconia, un musicien liégois et son temps. 2 vols. Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1960.

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Coussemaker, Charles Edmond. Le manuscrit musical M. 222 C. 22: see Van den Borren, Charles.

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von Fischer, Kurt. “Grazioso da Padova,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music, edited by Stanley Sadie. 20 vols. London: Macmillan Publishers, 1980. vol. 7, p. 655.

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_____________. “Landini, Francesco,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music, edited by Stanley Sadie. 20 vols. London: Macmillan Publishers, 1980. vol. 10, pp. 428-434.

_____________. “The Manuscript Paris, Bibl. Nat. nouv. acq. frç. 6771.” Musica Disciplina 11 (1957), pp. 38-78

_____________. “On the Technique, Origin, and Evolution of Italian Trecento Music.” The Musical Quarterly 47.1 (January 1961). translated by Joel Newman. pp. 41-57.

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Foligno, Cesare. The Story of Padua. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1910.

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Green, Gorden K., editor. French Secular Music: Ballades and Canons, in Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, vol. 20. Monaco: Editions de l’Oiseau-lyre, 1982.

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______________, editor. French Secular Music: Rondeaux and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, vol. 22. Monaco: Editions de l’Oiseau-lyre, 1989.

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__________________, editor. Italian Secular Music, by Bartolino da Padova, Egidius de Francia, Guilielmus de Francia, Don Paolo da Firenze, in Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, vol. 9. Monaco: Editions de l’Oiseau-lyre, 1975.

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A P P E N D I X : T R A N S C R I P T I O N S

❧

108

A p p e n d i x : Tr a n s c r i p t i o n s

Transcriptions follow of all pieces in PadB, PadC, I-Pu 684, most pieces in

GB-Ob 229, and two pieces in I-Pu 1475 (see exclusa, below). The purpose of the

transcriptions is primarily to facilitate study of the music of the Paduan fragments:

text that does not underlay music has not been recorded.

For the fragmentary compositions, only sections which are actually in the

Paduan fragments have been recorded. PadB’s Aler m’en veus is the single exception to

this rule. The lower voice from the Latin contrafactum in I-BC 15 is given because the

structure of both voices is integral to the discussion of the composition in chapter 4.

In order to show the harmonic structure of the pieces more easily, the tenor voice has

been placed on the bottom even though it is often above the contratenor in the

manuscripts. The layout of voices in the fragments can be seen in the gathering

structures in chapters 4-6.

Text, punctuation, and capitalization are as they appear in the manuscripts

themselves. Abbreviations have been expanded when unambiguous, except in the case of

names (including Jesus Christ, which is often abbreviated with the Greek derived “yhu

xpe”).

Musica ficta has been used sparingly in the transcriptions. Only leading tones to

the octave at cadential points have ficta markings (small accidentals above the notes).

This rule is not observed for cadences on E. Leading tones to the fifth have not been

marked, though it appears they were often performed sharpened. In the case of

cadences on A, an F preceding the leading tone GΤ has been sharpened. Ficta to avoid

tritones, diminished and augmented octaves, and other dissonances has not been

indicated. Accidentals are sometimes added, again above the staff, to indicate the

preceding accidental is unambiguously still in effect.

Ligatures have been indicated in the transcriptions by solid brackets. In Ay si in

PadB, notes with coloration have a dashed bracket above them. Untexted compositions

109

have line breaks in the manuscript marked with arrows (↓) in the transcription. Page

breaks are marked with two arrows (↓↓).

The durations of final notes are given as they appear in the manuscripts,

without additional fermatas or attempts to equalize lengths in various parts.

Decorated final longs are indicated in modern notation by breves.

E X C L U S A

21. GB-Ob 229: Sus unne fontaine (Ciconia) 22. I-Pu 1475: Sanctus (Sant Omer) 23. I-Pu 1475: Agnus dei (anonymous) 24. I-Pu 1475: Sanctus (anonymous) 25. I-Pu 1475: Et in terra pax (Engardus) 26. I-Pu 1475: Et in terra pax (Ciconia) 27. I-Pu 1475: Ite misse est (Machaut) 28,32. I-Pu 1475: Et in terra...Clementie (anonymous) 29. I-Pu 1475: [Giovine vagha]...rosa virtute (Landini) 30. I-Pu 1475: [Donna l’animo tuo] (Landini) – only the text is present in the fragments 31. I-Pu 1475: Gratiosus fervidus/Magnanissimus opere (anonymous) 34. I-Pu 1475: Se questa dea (Johannes Baçus Correçarus) 35. I-Pu 1475: Et in terra pax (anonymous) 37. I-Pu 1475: Lux purpurata...Diligite iusticiam (Jacopo da Bologna)