Humanismo y Lenguaje de Tratados Musicales

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Humanism and the language of music treatisesLEOFRANCHOLFORD-STREVENS

The Renaissance demand that the learned man should adhere ever morestrictly to classical standards of Latinity imposed on writers about music theobligation of discussing in the language of one culture the phenomena ofanother.1 The present study is an attempt to follow the effects of this stylistic

obligation, to which I shall apply the term humanism without regard to theethical or political or metaphysical consequences of the New Learning, oreven to the consequences of humanism for musical thought or practice;2

rather, I have sought, by surveying a sample of writers from the fourteenthto the early sixteenth centuries, to explore the extent to which musicalwriters attained humanistic norms in overall style, in local syntax, and invocabulary.3

THE CLASSICAL LEGACY

Of the ancient writers who treat of music, the Middle Ages knew only thosewho wrote in Latin; of these by far the most important was Boethius, whose

Renaissance Studies Vol. 15 No. 1

2001 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Oxford University Press

I owe thanks to members of the Collegium Musicorum Oxoniense, and to all those who contributed to the

discussion after previous versions of this paper had been read at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds,

14 July 1998, the 65th Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Kansas City, MO, 6 November

1999, and at the Seminar in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Music, All Souls College, Oxford, 10 February

2000. Many helpful suggestions were made by the editor ofRenaissance Studiesand by Professor Jessie AnnOwens; Bonnie Blackburn gave valuable advice. This article could not have been written without theThesaurus

Musicarum Latinarumfiles of the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature, Indiana University; itwas improved by the fascicles so far published of the Bavarian Academy of SciencesLexicon Musicum Latinum

Medii Aevi, ed. Michael Bernhard (Munich, 1992), hereafterLmL.1 On the general question of Renaissance classicism, see now Jozef IJsewijn,Companion to Neo-Latin Studies,

2nd edn (2 vols, Leuven, 19908),II, 377419 and literature there cited. For the dates of musical authors citedbelow see Table 1, for brief definitions of technical terms Table 2, for pitch-notation Table 3.

2 See e.g. Edward E. Lowinsky, Music in the culture of the Renaissance, Music of the Renaissance asviewed by Renaissance musicians, Humanism in the music of the Renaissance, in id., Music in the Culture ofthe Renaissance and Other Essays, ed. Bonnie J. Blackburn (2 vols, Chicago, 1989), I, 1939, 87105, 154218;Nino Pirrotta, Music and cultural tendencies in 15th-century Italy,Journal of the American Musicological Society,19 (1966), 12761; Claude V. Palisca,Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought(New Haven, 1986); id.,Boethius in the Renaissance, Aristoxenus redeemed in the Renaissance, in id.,Studies in the History of Italian

Music and Music Theory(Oxford, 1994), 16888, 18999; Don Harrn,In Defense of Music: The Case for Music asArgued by a Singer and Scholar of the Late Fifteenth Century(Lincoln, Nebr., 1989), 5365; James Haar (tr. T. C.Schmidt), Humanismus, in Ludwig Finscher (ed.),Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd edn, Sachteil,IV(Kassel, 1996), cols 43954; Laurenz Ltteken, Renaissance, ibid. VIII (Kassel, 1998), cols 14356; KarolBerger,A Theory of Art(New York, 2000), 12033.

3 The reader may justly complain that the reform of orthography is not considered; that is because the

authors own spellings have very rarely been recoverable. Except in MS transcriptions, I have followed thevarious editions cited.


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De Institutione Musicaoffers a detailed discussion of pitches and intervals asdescribed by Greek theorists, organized according to tetrachords eachexhibiting the threegenera, diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic of whichthe latter two were not used by the Church.4 The tetrachords are combinedinto double octaves, each of which might start on any of eight pitches; these

double octaves were calledmodi, differentiated according to their species the relative placement of intervals within them and the pitches they con-tained were notated according to the two Greek systems of musical notation:vocal and instrumental. The intervals between pitches are explained withthe aid of lettered diagrams; the letters are never used as formal note-names,though they may, as in book 4, chapter 14, function as shorthand references.Nothing is said about rhythm, not even the little that we find in Greeksources,5 and nothing on the composition of actual music, a matter beneaththe authors philosophical concern. Writers on theoretical music, rehashing

Table 1 Post-antique authors and works mentioned (in approximate chronological order)

Hucbald of Saint-Amand c. 850930Remigius of Auxerre fl.862c. 900Guido of Arezzo d. after 1033Theotger (Theogerus) of Metz c. 10501120Aribo of Freising fl. 1068 1078Franco of Cologne fl. 1260? 1280?Lambertus (quidam Aristoteles) fl.1270

Jacques de Lige c. 1260?after 1330Marchetto of Padua fl.1305 1319Hugo Spechtsart c. 12851359 1360Philippe de Vitry 12911361

Johannes Vetulus de Anagnia fl.1372?Johannes Ciconia d. 1412Nicolaus de Buccellanito fl.?c.1450

Johannes Tinctoris c.14351511Florentius de Faxolis d. 1496Adam of Fulda c.14451505Franchino Gaffori or Gaffurius 14511522Giovanni Spataro 14581541

Jean Le Munerat c.1430 14401499Guillaume Guerson c.14701503Paolo Cortesi 14651510Biagio Rossetti d. after 1547

Johannes Frosch c.1470after 1532Henricus Glareanus 14881563

Athanasius Kircher 160180

4 Mater enim ecclesia de tribus his generibus solum dyatonicum ad omne quod canere velis aptissimumelegit, aliis reprobatis duobus: Johannes Gallicus,De Ritu Canendi1.7, ed. E. de Coussemaker,Scriptorum de

Musica Medii Aevi nova series[= CS] (4 vols, Paris, 186476), IV, 306. Tetrachords are regularly presented inGreek sources as descents: in the diatonic genus, through tone, tone, and semitone; in the chromatic, by minorthird, semitone, semitone; in the enharmonic, by major third, quartertone, quartertone.

5 For which see Aristoxenus,Elementa Rhythmica, ed. Lionel Pearson (Oxford, 1990).

416 Leofranc Holford-Strevens


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Boethius doctrine on intervals and interval species, could use the Greeknames, but from the practical standpoint his treatise was completely uselessfor either teaching or explaining the most important music of the Middle

Table 2 Brief definitions of terms used in medieval and Renaissance music

alteration:in perfect mensurations doubling the value of a note (e.g. under perfect tempus, inthe progression breve, semibreve, semibreve, breve, the second semibreve will be twice the

length of the first, unless the semibreves are divided)ars antiqua/nova:the musical practices respectively of the late thirteenth century and the

fourteenth century in France

ars Gallica/ars Italica:the musical practices respectively of France and Italy

diapente:the interval of a perfect fifth

diatessaron:the interval of a perfect fourth

division:separation by a dot of notes that would otherwise be taken together (e.g. in theprogression breve, semibreve, dot, semibreve, breve under perfect tempus the twosemibreves will each imperfect the adjacent breve)

hexachord:ascending sequence of six notes, with a semitone between the third and fourth

imperfect(adjective): containing two of the next lower note-valueimperfect(verb): shorten a note by one-third of its value

larga:another name for the maxima

ligature:a group of notes written as a combined character (often markedly different inappearance from the same notes written separately)

maxima:a note worth two, later also three, longs

mensuration:the underlying relation between each note-value and that below it

mode:(i) in Boethian theory, an octave species, later loosely equated with a psalm-tone; (ii) inNotre-Dame polyphony, a rhythmical pattern; (iii) in mensural music, the relation of thelong to the breve, either 3:1 (perfect) or 2:1 (imperfect); sometimes distinguished as minor

modefrom that between the maxima and the long (major node)musica ficta:notes not pertaining to the hexachord; sometimes extended tob.musica practica/speculativa:respectively (exposition of) actual musical practice and of theory

ultimately based on Boethius

organum:the addition to plainchant of a second voice singing a melody of its own, the earliestform of Western polyphony.

perfect(adjective): containing three of the next lower note-value

perfect(verb): cause a note to be perfect

perfectio:(among other meanings) a vertical stroke added to the last note of a ligatureindicating that it is a long

plica:ornamentation by means of a passing noteprolation:the relation between semibreve and minim, either 3:1 (major) or 2:1 (minor)

proportion:the shortening (or less often lengthening) of note-values with respect to the basicmensuration

proprietas:a vertical stroke added to the first note of a ligature indicating that it is a breve; inMarchetto also used forperfectio

reduction:the grouping together of notes, not necessarily contiguous, to form a perfect value,often involving imperfection of a longer note

solmization:the use of conventional syllables to designate pitches by their place in thehexachord, most frequentlyut re mi fa sol la

tempus:the relation between breve and semibreve, either 3:1 (perfect) or 2:1 (imperfect)

Humanism and the language of music treatises 417


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Ages, ecclesiastical plainchant. Even when the latter had been subjected to amodal thory, it was not his; even when, by imaginative reinterpretation, thechurch modes received Boethian names, they were wrong; for example thename Dorian, anciently the interval species from E to e (ee), was given tothat from D to d (dd).6

In the one matter for which Boethius treatise might have served, namelynotation, it proved too complex for its readers understanding; indeed, nota-tion was on the point of being forgotten altogether. Isidore of Seville acentury later could say that sounds meaning musical sounds could not bewritten down,7 and when notation was rediscovered, it was realized (despite

Table 3 Pitch names and notations

Greek Odonian Guidonian Helmholtzian

ee ee la eedd dd la sol ddcc cc sol fa ccbb bbmi bbb bb fa b

nete hyperbolaion aa aa la mi re aparanete hyperbolaion g g sol re ut gtrite hyperbolaion f f fa ut fnete diezeugmenon e e la mi eparanete diezeugmenon d d la sol re d

trite diezeugmenon c c sol fa ut cparamese b bmi btrite synemmenon b b fa bmese a a la mi re alichanos meson G G sol re ut gparhypate meson F F fa ut fhypate meson E E la mi elichanos hypaton D D sol re dparhypate hypaton C C fa ut chypate hypaton B B mi grave B

proslambanomenos A A re grave A ut G

(retropolis) F

The Greek names are those taken over by medieval writers, who assume the diatonic genus. TheOdonian notation is associated (incorrectly) with Abbot Odo of Arezzo (late tenth century); thetraditional ascription to Guido of the solmization syllables exceeds the evidence. Retropolis is alate addition to the scheme, nor do all writers recognize ee. The notes are divided into threegroups, calledgraves,acutae, andsuperacutae, beginning at , A (or G), and aa respectively.

6 I use roman letters for the Odonian notation, AG ag aaee, when not combined with solmizationsyllables, and italic for the modern Helmholtzian (in which isGand eee); I also use roman capitals forpitch-classes, e.g. B. See Table 3.

7 Etymologiae3.15.2: nisi enim ab homine memoria teneantur soni, pereunt, quia scribi non possunt.



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Hucbalds attempts at adapting Boethian symbols) on quite differentprinciples. Even if Boethius suggested the use of letters, the letters did notcorrespond to his, and his Greek pitch-names gave place to letters extendedby syllables relating to an organization by hexachords. His interval names

such asdiatessaronanddiapente survived longer against the challenge of thesimpler system, based on ordinal numbers such as quartaandquintawithchordaunderstood,8 that modern languages still use in loan or in translation,since use of the Greek terms displayed the writers education withoutimpairing the readers comprehension; but neither De Institutione Musicanor the other late Latin authorities offered any model for discussing even thesimplestorganum, let alone a four-voice motet, and a text in which neitherlongus nor brevis is ever applied to a sound (or even a syllable) affordedno precedent for treating of modal rhythm, never mind the imperfections,

alterations, and reductions of the fully developed mensural system.9 Theappropriate language had to be devised from scratch, and reinvented asmusic itself evolved.

THE DEVELOPED LATE MEDIEVAL VOCABULARY

By the fourteenth century, something approaching a standard vocabularyexisted in France and Flanders: we may compare an extract from a treatise

reproducing thears novanotational teachings ascribed to Philippe de Vitry,and one from another, by Jacques de Lige, attacking them from thestandpoint of the thirteenth-centuryars antiqua. The former is explainingthe use of dots after notes, either to perfect or to divide them:

Et nota quod duplex est punctus de quo plurimum supradixi: est punctusperfectionis, qui semper perficit longam in utroque modo, et brevem inutroque tempore, et semibrevem in utraque prolatione. Est autem aliquispunctus divisionis, et ille punctus imperficit longam dividendo breves, et

imperficit brevem dividendo


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dividendo> minimas. Unde videndum est quomodo cognoscitur punctusille divisionis a puncto perfectionis, cum unus habeat imperficere figuras,et alius perficere, sicut dixi.10

Jacques de Lige disapproves of imperfection by minim or semibreve:

Ex dictis patet responsio ad rationem primae conclusionis ubi est adver-tendum quod, etsi illa prima conclusio, quantum ad loquendi modumintelligendo illam ut dictum est, concedatur tam a Modernis quam ab ali-quibus Antiquis (dico aliquibus quia illum loquendi modum Aristotelesnon tenuit), alias tamen conclusiones Antiqui non posuerunt, de illismentionem non fecerunt ut quod semibrevis brevem imperficiat etminima semibrevem maiorem, sic de ceteris, quia non est simile de illis ut

de prima, ut ex supradictis patet. Deficiunt enim in illis conditiones quaedictae sunt requiri ad hoc ut, secundum modum loquendi quicquid sit inre, una notula aliam imperficiat.11

The prose is as thoroughly medieval in its style as in its scholastic reasoning:we findquod-clauses instead of accusative and infinitive, gerunds with objectinstead of gerundives; there is also a greater tendency for verbs to appear inmid-clause instead of their traditional default position at the end.12 But evenif we edited the constructions, and tidied the straggling clauses into the

periodic structure of the Latin classics, we should still be faced with thevocabulary. To be sure, every art has always had its peculiar jargon: Vitruviusis aware that architectural vocabulary is not generally understood, and thatmusical terminology is difficult for those who have no Greek;13 FrontinusDe

Aquae Ductu Urbis Romaeshows specialized uses of such words asmodulus(adjutage) and castellum(reservoir); his contemporary, the author ofDe

Munitione Castrorum, abounds in terms incomprehensible to those notversed in the mysteries of castrametation, however well they know thelanguage of Roman warfare.14 We ought, therefore, not to complain if

10 Ars perfecta in musica Magistri Philippoti de Vitriaco, CS III, 32b; my supplement remedies an obvious

saut du mme au mme. The note-values considered here, in descending order, are long, breve, semibreve, andminim; each of the first three is equivalent, when perfect, to three of the next shorter note, when imperfect, totwo; the relation of long to breve is known as mode, that of breve to semibreve as tempus, that of semibreve tominim as prolation. Mode and tempus may be perfect or imperfect, and prolation major or minor, accordingto whether the normative relation is triple or duple; but in the duple mensurations an individual note may be

perfected (later theorists would have said augmented) by a following dot, as still in modern notation; in thetriple mensurations, in which the longer note followed by the shorter is generally imperfected, a dot may bewritten after the longer note to show that it remains perfect. On the other hand, in a triple relation, a dot maybe written between two of the shorter notes following the longer to show that the first of them imperfects the

longer note.11 Jacques of Lige,Speculum Musicae, ed. Roger Bragard (CSM 3/7; AIM 1973),VII, 83. For Aristoteles see

n. 9.12 This vernacularism had recently infected Latin on the pretext of being more natural: see Paul Saenger,

Spaces between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading(Stanford, 1997), 2534.13 De Architectura5 pr. 2; 5.4.1. Architectural language required a knowledge of Greek no less.14 Thus at 40: Et in retentura qui solent et quinquagenis hominibus per strigas strictius seu laxius tendere,

quoniam saepe numeros euenit commutari, tensuram amplius efficiant quam strigae in eandem pedaturam



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substantivizedlongaandbrevis, used classically of syllables, are extended tonotes; we may likewise acceptminimaas a specific use of a basic word. Butnowhere in respectable Latin does one find semibrevis;15 and althoughabstracts such asimperfectio, with privativein and deverbative suffixes, are

found in later Latin,16 the verbimperficere, to render imperfect, apparentlyinvented by Franco of Cologne,17 and said of the note that takes its ownvalue out of another, has no business to exist at all. One would expectimper-

fectum facereor reddere, at the worstimperfectare; butimperficereis used, andeven spread to non-musical contexts.18 This linguistic weed would provepeculiarly resistant to Renaissance hoes.

Italian theory and practice of the early Trecento theArs Italica still showa marked difference from theArs Gallica; the language too is different, but

somewhat less so than the substance. Marchetto of Padua though expound-ing relations between note-lengths quite unlike those used in France stillspeaks of breves and semibreves, perfection and imperfection. On the otherhand, in discussing the vertical stroke added to the first or last note of aligature to change its value, he calls itproprietaswhether it is attached to thefirst note or the last, cases distinguished in France asproprietasandperfectiorespectively:

Hiis habitis formamus talem rationem: latus dextrum est perfectius quam

sinistrum, ut probatum est. Sed proprietas addita notae additur sibi perdextrum et sinistrum, ut patet ad sensum. Ergo proprietas addita notae exparte dextra perficiet ipsam, ex parte vero sinistra imperficiet ipsam.Perficere autem notam est ipsam prolongare, imperficere vero est ipsamabbreviare. Bene ergo dixerunt praedicti doctores, scilicet quod proprietasaddita notae ex latere dextro inferius ipsam perficit (superius vero a lateredextro in modo proferendi); a parte vero sinistra inferius imperficit ipsam,faciendo eam brevem, in superius vero, semibrevem.19

incurrent; note, even in thedicendi genus tenueof the technical handbook, the periodic sentence structure. Fora French translation of this work, with commentary, see Maurice Lenoirs Bud edition, Pseudo-Hygin: Des

fortifications du camp(Paris, 1979).15 If one did, it ought to mean halfway to being short, and therefore not so short asbrevis; or if, oncebrevis

had been substantivized,semibrevismight reasonably mean half a breve, it ought not as it often does todenote some other fraction. See Wolf Frobenius, Handwrterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, ed. HansHeinrich Eggebrecht (Wiesbaden, 1971), s.v. Semibrevis. The comparative breviorand superlativebrevissimawere used for various fractions of the breve: seeLmL, s.vv.

16 See in general Edward Wlfflin, Substantiva mit in privativum. Ein Beitrag zur Kenntniss der Africitas,

Archiv fr lateinische Lexikographie und Grammatik, 4 (1887), 40012. The subtitle refers to the then fashionabletheory of African Latinity.

17 Ars Cantus Mensurabilis, ed. Gilbert Reaney and Andr Gilles (CSM 18; AIM 1974), 32, 36, 49.18 The f irst non-musical example in the British AcademyDictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources

(1997), V, 1248 is from BradwardinesDe Causa Deiof 1344; that in theLexicon Latinitatis Neerlandicae MediiAevi(Leiden, 1990),IV, 2351 from Marsilius van Inghen (d. 1396).

19 Marchetto of Padua,Pomerium1.1.2, ed. Giuseppe Vecchi (CSM 6; AIM 1961), 52. Hiis habitis refers tomedical and philosophical considerations concerning the perfection of the right side and the imperfection ofthe left. In the parenthesis (superius . . . proferendi) the verb imperficit appears to be missing; the upstrokeon the right imperfects the note (pp. 523), causing it to be rendered as a plica (p. 49).



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Here we may note the reflexive sibiand the intensiveipsamused as plainanaphoric pronouns.

Later in the century, as French inf luence increased, Johannes Vetulus deAnagnia states:

. . . et tunc praecedens brevis per virtutem istius signi perfectionis im-perficere non potest sequentem longam, et longa tria tempora continensest perfecta. Et praefata brevis praecedens vel valor refertur ad aliquamaliam notam vel valorem cum qua possit facere perfectionem, quia solanon debet manere, tamen non ad longam punctatam. Et si perfectio noninveniretur nisi per errorem, debet reduci secundum modum imperfec-tum. Nota quod de valore semibrevium ligatarum et non ligatarum idemest iudicium.

Est enim notandum quod de largis, longis, brevibus et semibrevibus estidem iudicium. Et sicut per illum puntectum perfectionis perficitur longa,ita per eum perficitur larga, etiam brevis et semibrevis, quia potestatemhabet addendi et dividendi ut inferius patebit. Et sicut brevis imperficitlongam, ita longa imperficit largam, semibrevis brevem et minimasemibrevem.20

Since Cato the Censor had called skirmishes (pugnae)punctatoriolae, littlestabbing (fights),21 we may wink atpunctatam;22 but there is no excuse for

puntectum, a superficial Latinization of puntetto, instead of Apuleiuspunctulumor Solinuspunctillum.23 The moods and tenses of the conditionalsentence are wrong: the imperfect subjunctiveinvenireturproperly means ifperfection were purely an error, which it is not, which would entail a mainverbdebebat.24

The terminology of fourteenth-century treatises was not entirely uniform(or perspicuous);25 nor was there absent an urge to display more Greek thanone knew, as when Marchetto calls the intervals of sixth and seventh the

hexad and the heptad.26

Neverthless, theorists are wrestling with the Latin oftheir own day, rather than looking back to the Latin of the past. Yet it wasprecisely a looking back to the Latin of the past in revulsion from that of thepresent that characterized the humanist revolution already under way in Italy.

20 Johannes Vetulus de Anagnia,Liber de Musica, ed. Frederick Hammond (CSM 27; AIM 1977), 71.21 M. Porci Catonis Orationum reliquiae, ed. Maria Teresa Sblendorio Cugusi (Turin etc., 1982), fr. 102 (p. 90,

with commentary p. 294).22 Cf. thepunctatorwho noted absences from choir, anglicized at Christ Church, Oxford, as prickbill.23 Apuleius,Metamorphoses5.12.6, 6.21.3; Solinus,Collectanea15.28 (Marchetto haspontellus). The of

puntectumis of course a reverse spelling for /tt/.24 More elegant thandeberet; for the indicative of modal verbs in counterfactual sentences, see Raphael

Khner and Carl Stegmann, Ausfhrliche Grammatik der lateinischen Sprache: Satzlehre, 3rd edn rev. AndreasThierfelder (Leverkusen, 1955), I, 1734, and cf. older Italiandoveva.

25 My account, which of course is over-simplified, completely ignores English theory, since genuinehumanism plays no part in it, though pretentiousness does; see Ronald Woodley,John Tucke: A Case Study in

Early Tudor Music Theory(Oxford, 1993).26 Marchetto,Lucidarium9.1.3, 14, ed. Herlinger, 308, 312.



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EARLY HUMANIST INFLUENCE

Johannes Ciconia, who after receiving his practical grounding in music atLige, had like many other northern musicians made his career in Italy,

proved himself receptive to Italian cultural developments. He was associatedwith a circle of Veneto humanists by no means indifferent to music asactually written and performed, not merely as an intellectual theory or aliberal art.27 In return he, the practical musician, represents himself in his

Nova Musica, completed at Padua in the first decade of the fifteenth century,as the reviver and reformer of ancient theory.28 He makes disobligingreferences to the followers of Guido,29 and finds analogies between musicand those eminently humanistic disciplines, grammar and dialectic.30 Hismost remarkable gesture towards humanism, however, is the importation of

Greek pitch-names (albeit undeclined) from musica speculativa into adiscussion of plainchant, already marked by adoption of Marchettos intervalnames and an incautious venture into music history:

Reliquos vero, id est diapente minorem, tritonum, exaden minorem,exaden maiorem, et eptaden, eodemmodo auctores dederunt in regulis etcantibus quemadmodum et ceteros de quibus supra retulimus. Namdiapente minor in Musica sillabarum datur in regulis.31 Bernardus veroconstituit tritonum et exaden minorem et exaden maiorem.32 Boetius

autem et Remigius invenerunt eptaden.33 Denique ut non repudientur aminus capacibus neque a Guidonistis, qui dicunt coniunctiones vocumsolummodo sex modis fieri, ideo notificemus in quibus cantibusreperiantur. Igitur de pluribus pauca apponam. Diapente minor est inantiphona Isti sunt sancti qui habebant loricas in eo loco et clamabant vocemagna dicentes Sanctus ut hypate meson ad trite synemenon.34

27 Margaret Bent, Music and the early Veneto humanists, Proceedings of the British Academy, 101: 1998Lectures and Memoirs(London, 1999), 10130. The Veneto humanists were not alone: see Giovanni Zanovello,Les Intellectuels florentins et la polyphonie liturgique, in Perrine Galand-Hallyn and Fernand Hallyn (eds),

Potiques de la Renaissance(Geneva, 2001), 62538, 667731, esp. 6316.28 Johannes Ciconia, prologue toNova musica, ed. Oliver B. Ellsworth (Greek and Latin Music Theory, 9;Lincoln, Nebr., 1993), 52.2830.

29 For exampleNova musica1.20 (p. 88.56): Sic itaque omnis Guidonistarum magis ignorantia convinciturBoetii prudentia. Marchetto had allowed himself a scandalous reference to ignorantia Guidonis atLucidarium9.1.12, ed. Jan W. Herlinger (Chicago, 1985), 312 (contrast bene Guido 9.1.62, p. 332), but he was a

progressive, not a revivalist. Ciconia attacks only the followers and cites Guido himself as an authority. The oneexception is at 2.17 (284.21286.5), where he reforms his teaching by adding lowB, but without any personalaspersion.

30 Prologue, p. 52.302.31 Ellsworth refers to Ps.-Odo,De Musica, GS I, 270a, but there is no reference to a diminished fifth there;

nor does the author recognize such an interval, for on the next page he asserts that there is no fifth on low B(a secunda diapente non invenitur).

32 Berno,Prologus, GS II, 64ab (cit. Ellsworth). The accusative ofhexasshould of course be hexadaorhexadem.

33 Ellsworth cites respectively Boethius,Mus.1.20, on the (h)eptachordusfrom hypate to mese, and Remigius,Commentum in Martianum Capellam372.11374.11, ed. Cora E. Lutz (2 vols, Leiden, 19625), II, 1913 onMartianus account of the (h)eptasor number seven, but neither Martianus nor Remigius says a word aboutmusic here.

34 Nova musica1.60 (212.19214.9).



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The bounds of the intervaleb, in contemporary parlanceE la mi gravetobfa acutum, are stated as hypate meson and trite synemmenon, not as a matterof theory but in reference to a specific passage in a specific antiphon. 35

The ancient names suffered from the disadvantage of spanning only two

octaves, excluding the lowest medieval pitch (ourG) and the highest four,bb cc dd ee in superacutis (bcde). Hence although they are perfectlyadequate for discussing interval species, they cannot be used to the exclusionof the letter-names. Nevertheless, when Ciconia discusses the division of themonochord, he uses the letter-names, without the solmization syllables, butqualified asgrave,acutum,superacutum. Now, the Middle Ages had inheritedfrom Antiquity thebthat the Greeks called , but renameditb fa,b rotundum, orb molle, in contradistinction to bmi, bquadrum, or bdurum, meaning orb. Ciconia, however, designates itb synemenon,combining the modern letter with the ancient tetrachord. The samedistinction obtained an octave higher in thesuperacutae, which were normallyrepresented by doubling the letter; Ciconia also doubles the b, but calls itsynemenon superacutum.36 He was not the first to usesynemmenonof a Bother than that in acutis, for Theotger of Metz some 300 years earlierand well in advance of his time had admitted it under the name ofsynemmenon in gravibus.37 Moreover, synemmenon, or in Latin coniuncta,might be used in general for musica ficta.38 However, it fell to the would-bereviver of ancient music to use the term for a note not only not recognized bythe ancients but lying a semitone outside the Immutable Perfect System.39

MANNER ADAPTED TO MATTER: THE CASE OF TINCTORIS

Although Ciconias Latin has some stylistic pretension, it could no morehave passed for humanistic than the motet-texts that speak in his name. 40

Nor was hisNova Musicainf luential; the only author who shows any sign ofhaving read it is Nicolaus de Buccellanito, nicknamedAuritusor Bigears,

who claims to be writing for boys but uses the Greek note-names.41

For along time writers stuck to the treatise style, at best using classical citations toput their teaching in a broader context, though in dedications, prefaces, andepilogues they might demonstrate their literary skills, even as St Luke andbefore him the translator of Ben Sira had written his best Greek in his

35 The antiphon, cited again at 2.28 (296.910) as acantus prosaicus, has not been identified; it does notcorrespond to any of theIsti sunt viritexts in theCorpus Antiphonalium Officii. The allusion is to Rev. 9:9, 17.

36 Ibid.1.19 (84.223).37 Musica, GS II, 184b. Ciconia too adds inter proslambanomenos et hypate hypaton synememon unum

(2.17; see above, n. 29).38 For example Adam of Fulda, Musica2.11: ibi coniunctarum obviatio est, quod Graeci synemmenon,

nostri vero musicam fictam appellare [legeappellari] voluerunt (GSIII, 353a).39 The complete range of ancient pitches, notionally equated with the two octaves fromAtoa.40 Edited by M. J. Connolly inThe Works of Johannes Ciconia, ed. Margaret Bent and Anne Hallmark (Poly-

phonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, 24; Monaco, 1985), 2206: only no. 19, Ut te per omnes celitus /Ingens alumnus Padue, in which Ciconias name does not appear, even attempts quantitative metre (theAmbrosian tetrastich), and that badly.

41 Introductio Artis Musice, in MS Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, lat. Cl. VIII, 85 (3579), fols 61v67v.



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prologue before reverting to biblical jargon in the main text. This is thepractice of another northerner on Italian soil, the great theoretician andreformer Johannes Tinctoris of Braine-lAlleud, who served King Ferranteof Naples (Ferdinand I, 145894) in various capacities for some two decades

untilc. 1492. Tinctoris was not discreet by nature: the self-confidence withwhich in his maturity he would set the leading composers of the age to rightswas manifested in his youth by the peacock Latinity with which he hadregistered himself as proctor of the German nation (i.e. Imperial subjects) atthe university of Orlans, in which city he was master of the cathedralchoir:42

Valvas anno frangentis tipicas M CCCC LXII mensis aprilis die prima,43

me Johannem Tinctoris, pangeristarum ymum ast ecclesie sancte Crucis

Aurelianensis choralium pedagogum, quem terra Branie Alodii, Camera-censis dyocesis ecastor genuit, allubescencia cunctorum elegantis melli-f lueque nacionis Almanie suppositorum ab exordia dividia ne theotocosin ecclesia Boni Nuncii celebrata congregacione cuncti haud ignorentorthodoxorum in procuratorem prelibate fuisse nacionis electum, quoritibus anteritatis mis in manus predecessoris solempnia procuratorumprisca serie nuperorum obtuli juramenta etc.44

The pomposity of Tinctoris youthful folly is medieval in spirit, despite suchfalse classicisms as the female oathecastorand ahaudincorrect in both senseand syntax;45 it provoked marginalia of humanistic allure: Appuleio magisaffectatus et stultior, Apulei asinus sivit docuit rudere, rudit cum Apuleiiasino: ride sesquipedalia verba buttubatte stultiloqui. Parturiunt montesnascetur ridiculus mus.46

42 See Ronald Woodley, Iohannes Tinctoris: a review of the documentary biographical evidence,Journal ofthe American Musicological Society, 34 (1981), 21748 at 243; id., Renaissance music theory as literature: onreading the Proportionale Musices of Iohannes Tinctoris,Renaissance Studies, 1 (1987), 20920 at 212.

43

Datedmore Gallico= 1 April 1463 modern style.44 Cited from Premier Livre des procurateurs de la Nation germanique de lancienne universit dOrlans14441546, ed. Cornelia M. Ridderikhoff with Hilde De Ridder-Symoens (Leiden, 1971), 2930; the grammaris as bad as the taste. The normal style for these records, eschewing all flourish save in praise of the German

nation, may be seen in the preceding proctors entry: Anno Domini M CCCC LXII, quarta die mensisjanuarii [= 4 January 1462/3], ego Guilhelmus Colini de Bergis supra Zooman, Leodiensis dyocesis, artiummagister, electus fui in procuratorem venerabilis ac fructifere nationis Alamanie per dominos venerabilisnationis prenominate nemine contradicente in ecclesia nostre Domine Boni Nuncii juravique juramenta solitain manu predecessoris mei (ibid.29). A genuine humanist wrote no less soberly: Anno Domini M CCCCLXXIX, die XIIIIamensis januarii [14 January 1479/80], ego Johannes Reuchlin Phorcensis ex Alemania alta,Spirensis diocesis, in legibus in hac alma universitate Aurelianensi baccalarius, fui electus per venerabiles viros

nostre nacionis legittime congregatos loco consueto in procuratorem ejusdem nacionis, juravi solitum

juramentum (ibid. 47).45 Onecastor, see Gellius,Noctes Atticae11.6; the clause ne . . . haud ignorent presumably meant to mean

that none should be unaware of Tinctoris election would in fact say lest all be not ignorant ifhaudhad anybusiness in a purpose-clause. More typical of the style represented is mis, an extremely rare pre-classicalequivalent ofmeias genitive ofego, recorded by Priscian and used by medieval writers (as mei was in SilverLatin) instead of the possessivemeus.

46 Between the familiar allusions to Horace, Ars poetica97 and 139, buttubatte [sic] stultiloqui combinesbuttabatta, cited by grammarians from Naevius and Plautus in the meaning worthless, withstultiloquus, found



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Most hurtful, however, may have been the suggestion that such ignorancewas only to be expected of a musician (musicum plane ingenium id estindoctum); at all events in Naples, where learning was taken seriously,Tinctoris showed himself determined to efface such aspersions, taking

inspiration from the preface to CicerosDe Oratorefor that toProportionaleMusices(c. 14734), citing Pliny and alluding to the Sirens song in that toDeArte Contrapuncti(1477).47 Indeed, he required musicians to know Latin as aprecondition for understanding their art; in Proportionale, having beratedvarious composers for what he considers an error in notating proportions, hedeclares, unfortunately unaware thatquoniamtakes the indicative:

non miror quoniam illos minime litteratos audiverim. Et quis sine litterisveritatem huius non solum sed cuiusvis scientiae liberalis attingere valebit?

Sed eis fuisse pares in Missis De plus en plus et Lhomme arme Okeghemet Busnois, quos competenter constat latinitate praeditos, non mediocrempectori nostro admirationem incutit.48

He cannot mean that educated composers ought to have learnt betterpractice from treatises De Musica, for no writer on music theory hadanticipated his doctrine; rather, they ought to have read the treatises De

Arithmeticathat would have enabled them to arrive at the truth from firstprinciples. This he had made clear in the prologue of the same work, where

he praises modern musicians for revolutionizing the art but laments theirincorrect notation:

Quo fit ut hac tempestate facultas nostrae musices tam mirabile susceperitincrementum quod ars nova esse videatur, cuius, ut ita dicam, novae artisfons et origo apud Anglicos quorum caput Dunstaple exstitit, fuisse per-hibetur, et huic contemporanei fuerunt in Gallia Dufay et Binchois, quibusimmediate successerunt moderni Okeghem, Busnoys, Regis et Caron,omnium quos audiverim in compositione praestantissimi. Nec49 eis Anglici

nunc, licet vulgariter iubilare, Gallici vero cantare dicantur,50 veniunt

at Plautus,Persa514. It is not suggested that Tinctoris saw these comments, or even that they were written intime for him to see them; rather that this is unlikely to have been his sole lapse of taste, and students are wontto mock other students to their face.

47 Woodley, Renaissance music theory; Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Tinctoris on the great composers,

Plainsong and Medieval Music, 5 (1996), 1939.48 Johannes Tinctoris,Proportionale Musices, ed. Albert Seay (CSM 22/2a; AIM 1978), 3.3 (p. 49, where

praeditos is misprinted praedictos). In late-imperial and medieval Latin the subjunctive correctly used with

cumis found with other causal conjunctions.49 There is a variant Hec, i.e.haec, in these respects, which is not only excessively poetical, but requires the

current English composers (illi) to be as good as their predecessors (eis) and to be composing in new ways whilethe French (isti, referring to theGalliof the concessive clause) are stuck in a rut; on the contrary, in the 1470sTinctoris would have considered the English to be mere epigones of Dunstaple, and the French to be constantlyinnovating. Hence both eis and illi denote the moderni of the preceding sentence, isti their Englishcontemporaries. As Woodley, Renaissance music theory, 21516 observes, Tinctoris applies here the schemeof Cicero,De Oratore1.1216: Athens brought oratory to perfection, but we Romans now excel all the world.

50 This was to become a commonplace: see Woodley, Renaissance music theory, 21617; Bonnie J.

Blackburn, Music and festivities at the court of Leo X, Early Music History, 11 (1992), 137 at 1417. In the



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conferendi, illi etenim in dies novos cantus novissime inveniunt, ac isti,quod miserrimi signum est ingenii, una semper et eadem compositioneutuntur.

Sed proch dolor! Non solum eos immo complures alios compositores

famosos quo miror dum tam subtiliter ac ingeniose tum in-comprehensibili suavitate componunt, proportiones musicas aut penitusignorare aut paucas quas noverint perperam signare cognovi. Quod-quidem ob defectum arithmeticae, sine qua nullus in ipsa musicapraeclarus evadit, contingere non dubito. Ex eius namque visceribusomnis proportio elicitur.51

Mistakes are not hard to find:quodforutintroducing a consecutive clause,moderniforrecentiores, the intrusive conjunction in the antithesisilli. . .ac

isti,52 andnovissimemisused for in a highly novel fashion.53 Nevertheless, weare clearly meant to be impressed not only withut ita dicamapologizing for ametaphor and the subjunctive construction omnium quos audiverim, whichare found in Cicero, and the tagshac tempestate, fons et origo, proch dolor,which are not,54 but with the overall construction of the sentences.

When writing technically, Tinctoris is utterly unclassical and perfectlyclear:

Deinde notandum est quod circa quamlibet proportionem debemus

considerare in quo modo, in quo tempore et in qua prolatione fiat. Namquaedam proportiones binariae sunt, ut dupla, quadrupla, etc., quaedamternariae, ut tripla, sesquialtera, etc., quaedam utraeque . . . quaedamneutrae . . . Non tamen naturam quantitatum in quibus fiunt immutarepossunt. Immo qualiscumque proportio sit sive binaria, sive ternaria, siveutraque, sive neutra, semper notae iuxta perfectionem aut imperfectio-nem earum per respectum signi modalis, temporalis et prolationalis, subquo consistunt computandae sunt, ut patet in sequenti exemplo . . . 55

Having reached the end, Tinctoris rounds off his treatise with an address toKing Ferrante, informing him with alliteration, and a pun ontinxeritand

context of the sentence as a whole, the point of the concessive clause will have to be something like for all theirshowy performances.

51 Ibid., prol. (p. 10).52 The misuse ofacbefore a vowel was to last for centuries in authors of far greater scholarship; or was it

meant forat? ForistiCicero would have saidhi, butiste, originally that . . . of yours/near you (ese,codesto), hadacquired the sense this by the first centuryAD.

53 The word means last or lately; it is not used by Cicero or Caesar, but is found in their contemporaries.54 WithTusculanae Disputationes5.15, cf. Jules Lebreton,tudes sur la langue et la grammaire de Cicron(Paris,

1901; repr. Hildesheim, 1965), 3245. Tempestasmeaning time was a poeticism perpetuated by historians(hence with reference to that time rather than this); Cicero, though in principle not opposed to its occasionaluse (De Oratore3.153), in practice admits it only in a report of Spartan prodigies atDe Divinatione1.75, wherethe historical style was in order.Fons et origo, though approached by Florus and Gellius, as a set phrase is f irstfound in Tertullian and after him in other Christian authors, but also at Macrobius, Commentarii in SomniumScipionis1.6.7.Pro[the best spelling]dolorfirst appears at Statius,Thebaid1.77, then in late prose both paganand Christian.

55 Proportionale musices3.5 (p. 53).



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Tinctoris that his servant has discussed the musical proportions by speciesand genus albeit he has not painted them with the highest colours ofrhetoric apart from the matters included in the proem:

Haec equidem, clementissime rex, de proportionibus musicis specialiter etgeneraliter, licet eas non summis rhethoricae coloribus tinxerit praetercausas in prohemio positas, tuus Tinctoris tractavit, ut et Dei gratiam pre-cibus eorum, si qui per ea proficiant, et tuum favorem assequi mereatur.Quo et in praesenti et in futuro saeculo bene beateque vivere possit.56

One may suspect the vernacular (le cose, les choses) behindcausas for res,though the word is correct for subject in a rhetorical context; in any case, itis redeemed byeorum, si quiof any who.

No later than 1483, Tinctoris wrote a learned tractateDe Inventione et UsuMusicaein his best Latin, stuffed with quotations from the classics includingthe poet Manilius, discovered early in the century, and read, it seems, in amanuscript even though he was in print but also (in contrast to stricterItalian practice) from the Bible and Church authors; however, he uses suchcurrent terms astenorista,viola,ghiterra,leutum, albeit associating the instru-ments with the ancient lyre.57 A brief specimen will suffice:

Tibia instrumentum est duo principalia tenens foramina: unum valdeangustum: per quod (canna de se sonora quam vulgus anciam58 vocatinfixa) sonus flatu hominis creatus immittitur: at alterum amplum perquod emittitur. Hanc Pallas (secundum aliquos) pre ceteris invenit:inventamque: propter deformitatem faciei quam inflans contrahebat(quod et Alcibiadem Atheniensem puerum apud avunculum Periclemfecisse: Aulus Gelius post Pamphilam refert) protinus abjecit. CanenteOvidio:

I procul hinc dixit non es mihi tibia tanti:Quom vidit vultus Pallas in amne suos.59

56 Ibid.3.8 (p. 60).57 Karl Weinmann,Johannes Tinctoris (14451511) und sein unbekannter Traktat De inventione et usu musicae,

rev. Wilhelm Fischer (Tutzing, 1961), 33, 40, 42, 45. The persistent Renaissance equation of the lyre with

modern stringed instruments, whether plucked or bowed, affected not only the names given to theseinstruments but conceptions of antiquity itself. Besides the familiar Orpheus with his lute we may cite atrandom Pier Francesco Molas painting in the Galleria Corsini of blind Homer, his lira da gambabetween hislegs and his bow in hand, reciting his epic while an assistant takes it down; this instrument is also calledlirone,a term still applied in the regional Italian of Emilia to the violoncello and double bass. For other applicationsofliraandlirone, see Blackburn, Music and festivities, 910. For Manilius, see Holford-Strevens, Tinctoris on

the great composers, 195, n. 13, and in general Ronald Woodley, The printing and scope of Tinctoris frag-mentary treatiseDe inuentione et usu musice,Early Music History, 5 (1985), 23968.

58 Frenchanche, Italianancia.59 Weinmann,Tinctoris35. For the quoted passages, see Gellius, Noctes Atticae15.17; Ovid,Ars Amatoria

3.5056. The Bible and the Fathers are also prominent in Tinctoris Complexus Effectuum Musices(c.14778),edited together with Egidius CarleriusTractatus de Duplici Ritu Cantus Ecclesiastici in Divinis Officiisand Carlo

ValguliosContra Vituperatorem Musicaeby J. Donald Cullington,That Liberal and Virtous Art: Three HumanistTreatises on Music(Newtonabbey, 2001), 7586.



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HIGHER PRETENSIONS

This same blend of current technicalities and classicizing style marks theLiber Musices addressed to Cardinal Ascanio Sforza by Tinctoris con-

temporary Florentius de Faxolis, canon of Firenzuola dArda, known from apresentation copy written in humanistic script and illuminated in theFlorentine manner. It abounds in classical quotations: the initial laudesmusicaeeven include the tale of Arions rescue by the dolphin, as retold byAulus Gellius after Herodotus.60 Even in the technical portions, Florentiusattempts a literary elegance by means ofvariatio; in the following extract heexplains how to improvise counterpoint against a rising fifth:

De notulis per dyapenten scandentibus regula quarta hoc nobis instituet.

Si in unisono quispiam se deprehensum uiderit uocem solam descendatuel ibidem moretur uel quartam uel sextam infra uocem deponat. Inquinta uero solam uel quartam descendat. Sin autem in tertia unicam uelsursum uel deorsum quartam uel sextam attingat. Sin uero in sexta ineodem loco uel moretur uel inde per tertiam descendat.61

This device too recalls Gellius, who not being a professionalgrammaticusis not content to impart his learned information without a seasoning of style.Florentius, musicus et sacerdos, wishes to demonstrate that, unlike other

musicians and other priests, he is also a man of culture. Unfortunately, hisgrasp is not always equal to his reach:

Posteriori loco notatione digno animaduertendum uidetur ut his summacura notatis quibusque proprietatibus notis optime repertis et uocepropria per ascensum et descensum in his notulis experimento habitopronuntiata lineas et spatia altero ab altero distincto nec cognoscimusquidem.62

From the sequel, which concerns the use of F and C clefs, he appears to be

saying that the lines and spaces of the staff do not, of themselves, indicatepitch-levels; but even with that information the sentence remains uncon-struable.

Florentius is no thoroughgoing humanist. He quotes, without apology andas the work of St Gregory, a barbarous mnemonic for the church modes;63

60 Florentius de Faxolis,Liber Musices, in Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana, MS 2146, fols. 11r12v = 16.19 (fromHerodotus 1.234); Florentius also cites Gellius at 1v2r = 1.11.13; 10v11r = 4.13; 23v24r = 5.15.1, 68; 51r =1.7.19 as then edited.

61 Ibid.2.14 (fol. 63); the chapter-heading De experiundo contrapuncto per regulas notissimas exhibits the

older form of the third-conjugation gerundive still found in Cicero.62 Ibid.1.6 (fol. 30rv).63 Namely hexameters beginning Primus cum sexto fa la solla [sic] semper habetur,ibid. 1.14 (fol. 40v); his

annotation, Quos versus Arnaldus dalps et quamplurimi beatum Gregorium fecisse autumant, hints at themanner of ancient learning (not least in Gellius), but it needed little critical acumen to doubt the attribution toGregory the Great of verses incorporating the Guidonian solmization syllables. For the verses, see e.g.Lambertus,De Musica, CSI, 262a and numerous other treatises down to the end of the fifteenth century; theyare called rude documentum tonorum in a text cited by Adrien de La Fage,Essais de diphthrographie musicale



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unlike Ciconia, he is willing to talk aboutGsolreutand bquadrumandbmolle.He admits not only the Latin names for intervals, but the verbimperficere, andadoptscadentiafrom the vernacular.64 This word is unknown to classical Latinin any sense at all, but has several meanings in the Middle Ages.65 In music it

had been used by Jacques de Lige over a century and a half earlier forthe progression from dissonance or imperfect consonance to perfect con-sonance, whether or not at a cadence in our sense; it recurs in Florentiuscontemporaries Guillaume Guerson and Jean Le Munerat.66 The alternativeclausulafavoured by Tinctoris and others albeit a good classical word hadthe disadvantage of also being used in the sense of interval and musicalphrase.67

On 5 November 1490 Adam of Fulda,ducalis musicusof Frederick the Wise

of Saxony, completed his four books ofMusica. The f lowery dedication is tobe expected:

Clarissimo iurisconsulto Ioachim Luntaler advocato consistoriali, amico,fautorique singularissimo Adam de Fulda ducalis musicus felicitatem dicit.

Cum saepius mecum egisses, vir ornatissime, ut musicale istud opuscu-lum, per me iam dudum inchoatum, aliquando perficerem, perfectumquetibi transmitterem, motus, ut arbitror, prima amicitiae lege, quam Ciceroesse affirmat, ut ab amicis honesta rogemus, et amicorum causa honesta

faciamus.68

Moverunt me ibi Hieronymi verba dicentis: ne ad scribendumcito prosilias, ne levi ducaris insania, multo tempore disce quoddoceas.69 . . . Non potui ergo hucusque, fateor, licet totiens promiserim;sed causam accipe: cum nudius Pataviae,70 ut ipse scis, abirem, ad Formi-bacense me contuli monasterium [Frnbach in Bavaria] rei perficiendae

(Paris, 1864; facs. Amsterdam, 1964), 362. Livy, describing a propitiatory ritual for Juno in 207 BC, declines toreproduce the processional hymn, illa tempestate forsitan laudabile rudibus ingeniis, nunc abhorrens etinconditum si referatur (27.37.13).

64 For example (intervals),Liber Musices2.612 (fols 55r59v); 3.9 Quot modis figurae perficiuntur aut

imperficiuntur (fol. 77r

); 2.17 De neuma et cadentia: note especially Eandem vernacula lingua cadentiamuocitarunt (fol. 67r).

65 It is the origin of our word chance.66 Guerson,Utillissime [sic] musicales Regule (Paris, c.1492), 2.2 in fine cadentiarum (sig. [c8]r); Le

Munerat,De Moderatione et Concordia Grammatice et Musice623, ed. Harrn,In Defense of Music, 98. The wordhas a different sense, coincidence, at Guerson, op. cit. 2 pr., bona cadentia dictaminum cum figuris as arequisite of gooddiscantus(sig. [b6]v), from Anonymous II,Tractatus de Discantu, ed. Albert Seay (ColoradoSprings, 1978), 32: bona cadentia dictaminum cum discantu ita quod longae figurae longis syllabis, brevesbrevibus nobiliter adaptentur; to be added to Don Harrn, WordTone Relations in Musical Thought: From

Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century(Musicological Studies and Documents, 40; AIM 1986), 37684.67 BesidesLmLs.vv., see Siegfried Schmalzriedt inHandwrterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie s.vv.

clausula, Kadenz.

68 Cf. Cicero,De Amicitia44 Haec igitur prima lex amicitiae sanciatur, ut ab amicis honesta petamus,amicorum causa honesta faciamus, ne exspectemus quidem dum rogemur.

69 Epistulae125.18.1, ed. Isidor Hilberg, 2nd edn (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticarum Latinarum [=CSEL], 56; Vienna, 1996), 137.78.

70 The text seems corrupt here:nudiusneeds an ordinal to make sense (e.g.nudiustertius, two days ago, lit.it is now the third day), the locativePataviaeat Passau is incompatible with the verb of motion (cum)abirem,(when) I was departing, which requires eitherPataviamfor Passau orPataviafrom Passau. Unfortunatelythe manuscript was lost in the Strasburg fire of 1870.



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non sine ratione In medium afferuntur: quia que paucis sumus absoluturinullus vnquam nisi qui studio arte exercitio assiduitate: adeptus fuerit.non poterit ea consequi que huius preclare primi inuentores artisconsecuti sunt.87

For some of the incoherence the printer, Michel Tholouze of Paris, may beto blame;88 but it was no doubt Guerson himself who inserted the ver-nacularizing negative before poterit, as ifnullus non poteritmeantnul ne

pourraand nottout le monde pourra. As to its style, if the periphrastic futuresumus absoluturiis meant to suggest Cicero, it has already been underminedbyexercitioforexercitatione.89 South of the Alps, such things attracted censure.

A CICERONIAN MAN OF LETTERS: PAULUS CORTESIUS

Italian humanists had been wrestling far more intently than others with theproblem of what constituted a good classical style, free from later cor-ruptions even if of Christian origin.90 Some writers constructed eclecticstyles based on the best authors; but this required taste as well as learning.Criticism has divided the eclecticists into a moderate camp calledQuintilianists after the author so much admired by Lorenzo Valla91 andextremists who picked up unusual words from the second centuriesBCand

AD, called Apuleianists after their ancient predecessor. A stricter schoolconfined legitimate usages (their own extremists said, even forms ofindividual words) to those attested in Cicero. This principle has an evilname amongst moderns as being unreasonably restrictive; yet many human-ists did not find it so; Erasmus famous pamphlet as its very title ofCiceronianusindicates is less an enlightened counterblast against pedantrythan a tendentious imputation of neopaganism that did more harm to itsauthor than to the Ciceronian cause.92 Ciceronianism had the merit offurnishing the writer with a reasonably coherent stylistic model, provided

ready-made by an author highly regarded as patriot and philosopher in

87 Guerson,Utillissime musicales Regule, sig. a2r.88 Punctuating as we surely must after negatum est, we have two causal clauses, quoniam. . .constatand

quia scimus, each with its own dependent clause; but there is no corresponding main clause, forhec enimmustbegin a new sentence.

89 The formexercitiumdid not exist in Ciceros day.90 See e.g. Remigio Sabbadini,Storia del ciceronianismo e di altre questioni letterarie nellet della Rinascenza

(Turin, 1885).91 See e.g. his letter to Giovanni Tortelli, 5 August 1441: Idem ego sum qui preposui inCommentariisquod

[sic] in Ciceronem et Quintilianum composui Quintilianum Ciceroni, Demostheni atque ipsi Homero. Ideoque

qui non studiosissimi fuerint Quintiliani eos nequaquam eloquentes existimo: Laurentii Valle epistole, ed.Ottavio Besomi and Mariangela Regoliosi (Padua, 1984), no. 17, pp. 21516.

92 Ed. Pierre Mesnard, inOpera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Rotterodami, I/2 (Amsterdam, 1971), 581710; thetitle comes from Jeromes dream: Ciceronianus es, non Christianus (Epist.22.30.4). When Erasmus, once thevaliant adversary of the pious obscurantists, presents a summary of Christian doctrine, first in Church Latin,then satirically refashioned in Ciceronian (pp. 6412), those not brought up on Church Latin have every rightto prefer the recasting, but will complain thatiuxtain accordance with is post-Ciceronian and thatcontiodoesnot mean community.



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whom, with a little ingenuity, one could find the vocabulary for almost everysubject on which one might wish to write.93 Almost, but not quite.

The choice of style was the subject of a quarrel between the eclecticPolitian and the Ciceronian Paolo Cortesi, or Paulus Cortesius,94 the author

of a dialogue De Hominibus Doctis dedicated to Lorenzo il Magnifico,surveying the history of neo-Latin literature as CicerosBrutushad surveyedthat of Roman oratory; although Cortesius is the youngest speaker in thedialogue, the choice of model automatically implied the claim that progressin the art had culminated in himself, without any need for open boasting.95 Atsome time in the 1490s he sent Politian his collected letters, which the latterreturned with the comment that he was ashamed of the time he had wastedreading them (pudet bonas horas male collocasse). He disparaged

Cortesius aping of Cicero, both on principle and for the jejunity of theresults, and recommended the prolonged and profound study of not onlyCicero but other good authors. Cortesius replied with spirit, conceding thathis performance might have fallen short of his intentions, but defending hisdecision to imitate a single author, and that the best, rather than, on thepretext of self-reliance, to combine several different styles into the jumble ofthe pawnshop.96 His letter is an excellent statement of the Ciceronian case;and his account of eclecticism was amply borne out by the Apuleian writerswho gathered together the oddest words from ancient authors to mix and

match.97

Cortesius subsequently wrote a commentary on the Sentences of PeterLombard, published at Rome in 1504 and more than once reprinted; thoughnothing could be more medieval in its content, it is in the high humanistic

93 See e.g. Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 13001600(Baltimore,1989), 21534.

94 Successivelyscriptor, secretary, and protonotary apostolic; seeDizionario biografico degli italiani, XXIX(Rome, 1983), 76680 (R. Ricciardi); Sabbadini,Storia del ciceronianismo, 3241; Ingrid D. Rowland,The Cultureof the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome(Cambridge, 1998), 2005.

95

The dialogue was not printed until 1734, by Bernardo Paperino with a dedication to Gabriele Riccardi;the most recent edition is by Giacomo Ferra (Palermo, 1979). LikeBrutus, it is set on an island and featuresthree speakers: they are Cortesius himself, Alexander Farnese, and an older man called Antonius, probablyAntonio Augusto Baldo or Valdo, successor to Pomponio Leto at theStudium Romanum. Cicero, comparingprogress in other arts, had asserted that the older painters, with their restricted palette, pleased by theirdraughtmanship (70), and likened the early Roman poet Naevius to the early Greek sculptor Myron (75);Antonius likens Dante to an old picture whose paint has worn off but whose outlines still please (in Dante,

sicut in veteri pictura, detractis coloribus, delineamenta delectant), adapting an image used more aptly byCicero for Hortensius period of decline in the 60sBC(Brutus320). See in general Ferra, ed. cit. 1016 and hisregister of sources underneath the text. The point was taken by Cortesius friend Phosphorus (Lucio Fazini,bishop of Segni), who concluded his complimentary letter: Ausim affirmare, si quid ego sum, omnes istosquos commemoravisti, faci le a te uno in dicendo superatos (Ferra, ed. cit. 99).

96 The letters are edited by Eugenio Garin, Prosatori latini del Quattrocento (Milan, 1952), 90210, anddiscussed in depth by Vincenzo Fera, Il problema dellimitatiotra Poliziano e Cortesi, in Vincenzo Fera andAugusto Guida,Vetustatis indagator: Scritti offerti a Filippo Di Benedetto(Messina, 1999), 15581, who shows thatit took place after, not before, the circulation ofDe Hominibus Doctis, when relations between the two werealready strained, and that for Politian the issue was not merely taste or evenamour-propre, but the right ofphilology to recover ancient words.

97 For specimens, see e.g. Sabbadini,Storia del ciceronianismo, 435; Carlo Dionisotti,Gli umanisti e il volgarefra Quattro e Cinquecento(Florence, 1968), 84.



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style, a choice defended in the prefatory address to Julius II. This begins: DiuPont. Max. summa est hominum contentione certatum, Philosophorumneesset studiis latini sermonis adhibendus nitor; that one sentence is enough toindicate the answer, but it manifestly recalls Ciceros assertion that the

advocate, when arguing points of logic, needs a polished style: haec tenendasunt oratori (saepe enim occurrunt), sed quia sua sponte squalidiora sunt,adhibendus erit in iis explicandis quidam orationis nitor.98 Naturally thequestion is said to concern philosophers, not theologians, for thetheologiofCicerosDe Natura Deorum (5.534) who attempted to rationalize myth bypositing three Jupiters and f ive Sols are not to be compared with the supremeintellectuals of antiquity. But to claim the status of philosopher is once againto assert parity with Cicero, who demonstrated that philosophy, even whentechnical, could be written in elegant Latin.

Cortesius last work was a treatise on the conduct befitting cardinals,amongst whose number he hoped one day to be counted. Although the textspeaks resolutely of senators, it was impossible absolutely to eschew post-classical language; the provisional title De Principe Ecclesiastico, with anadjective attested in late antiquity, gave way in the posthumous publication of1510 toDe Cardinalatu Libri Tres, in which the substantive, despite its classicalsuffix, is of medieval coinage. For all his avoidance of unnecessary Chris-tianisms, the author is no longer bound by the idiolect of Cicero, but drawson other authors, and even invents words of his own; obscure terms areexplained either in the margin or in the annotations appended by his brotherLattanzio, or Lactantius, but originally conceived by the author himself.99 Inbook 2, among the amenities of daily life, Cortesius turns to music, whichcontrary to certain persons opinion is morally beneficial. He goes into somedetail:

at uero dorica ratio multo est aequali mediocritate temperatior: qualeillud genus uideri uolunt / quod est / a / Diuo Gregorio in aberrun-catorio [legeauerruncatorio] sacro stataria canendi mensione institutum :quocirca nostri omnem canendi rationem in litatoria / praecentoria : etcarmina comparando seiungunt . . .100

This may be translated, without loss of style or gain of clarity, as:

By contrast, the Dorian principle is more temperate by reason of an evenmoderation, such as they predicate of that kind which was instituted by StGregory in the apotropaic rite with standing measure of singing: where-fore our generation classify the entire method of singing into the music ofpropitiatory sacrifice, choirmaster music, and songs . . .

98 Orator115.99 See Fera, Il problema dellimitatio, 17781.100 Paulus Cortesius,De Cardinalatu Libri Tres(Castel Cortesiano, 15 November 1510), sig. K1v, reproduced

in facsimile by Pirrotta, Music and cultural tendencies, 150, whose article has given this work a certainnotoriety amongst musicologists.



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because even those who, as he put it, spoke Barbarian rather than Latin knewthatanalogicuswas the model forproportionalis.109

It is not, of course, a professional musician who is speaking here: thoughCortesius is happy enough, unlike many elegant laymen, to use technical

language provided it is ancient, he appears to use it rather loosely.110 Someof our sixteenth-century theorists, however, attempt a humanistic style forthemselves.

ONE MANS JOURNEY TO HUMANISM: THE CASE OF GAFFURIUS

Among the writings of Franchino Gaffori or Gaffurius,maestro di cappellaofthe Duomo at Milan from 1484 to 1522, is aPractica Musicein four books

of which the second exists in four versions: (i) a manuscript of the early1480s preserved in the Houghton Library at Harvard; (ii) an Italiantranslation by Gaffurius pupil Francesco Caza published in 1492; (iii) adefinitive Latin text published in 1496; and (iv) the Tractatus Tertius of theauthors own heavily revised adaptation published in 1508 under the title

Angelicum ac Divinum Opus Musice, but cast mainly in Italian for those suchas nuns (a la deuotione de molte donne religiose) who could not under-stand Latin or rather, given the vocabulary used, could understand Latinwords but not Latin grammar. All four have dedications to illustrious

persons, the least illustrious being Filippino Fieschi, captain of the guard, towhom Gaffurius not Caza dedicated the first translation, the mostillustrious Duke Ludovico Maria Sforza himself, who received the Latin textof 1496. I give below the beginnings of each dedication, and in Appendix Ithe opening sentences of the chapter concerning imperfection, taken ineach case to the same point of subject-matter:

(i) Franchinus Gaforus laudensis musices professor Guidoni Antonioarcimboldo Equiti aurato praestantissimo uiro ac ducis insubrium

Senatori dignissimo. Salutem plurimam dicit.Si de tua praestantissime aurate Eques summa humanitate singularique

beneficentia et charitate cum in omnes tum maxime erga eos qui specialiquadam morum honestate doctrina ac aliquo uirtutis splendore pre-eminent non optime exploratum haberem eam sane scribendi prouinciammihi in presentiarum haud quaquam usurpassem. Verum cum me minime

109 See sig. [XI]ra: hac maxime tempestate / qua Barbare potius quam Latine loqui homines consuescunt /et magis in senticetis inambulare uolunt quam pomariis.

110 Observe his comment on the German lute duo who devised a style quo simplex antiquorum per

hyperboleon iteratio ab hypate singulorum coagmentatione iungeretur (sig. K1r); see Pirrotta, Music andcultural tendencies, 1578. Lattanzio glosses hypate correctly (corda instrumento musico grauior etmaior caeteris, sig. X4r), but the next entry runs: Hyperboleon est corda quae superat acumine netas: uideBoetium, a garbling ofMus. 1.20 (211.35). To be sure this is less flagrant than Juvenals misuse ofcacoethes,malignant but curable growth or ulcer, to mean addiction (7.52). In fact Roman authors were not implacablyopposed to the use of technical language in literary contexts, provided it could be understood, though theyoften avoided it: see Brenda Bell, Roman literary attitudes to technical terms,Acta Classica, 34 (1991), 8392.But ease of comprehension was no longer Cortesius main concern.



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lateat prestantissimam humanitatem tuam tanta beniuolentia tantaqueeximiae uirtutis obseruantia ac potius ardore pietatis affectam ut omnia[illeg.] nobis summa anim[i] praestantia ac bonitate liceat polliceri, quodprofecto et tua ut de multis ita et de genitore meo quamplurima optime

m[erita] declarant, huic scribendi officio deesse nequaquam potui.111

(ii) Splendido equiti aurato Philipino flisco ducalis custodie capitaneoFranchinus Gaffurus salutem

Meorum assecla studiorum Franciscus cacia qui te et suspicit etueneratur eques splendide vernacula lingua quamuenuste et elegantermensurabilium figurarum compendium a me exactis annis latine editumcontexuit quod prestantie tue gratum existimans: ad te summa cum animisui commendatione mittit: vt exercitationis sue apud te notior ratio

habeatur Id enim cato censorinus fieri censuit: quod quidem nonpossum non vehementer approbare: cum et musices suauitate atque utplatonica lex admonet gymnastica pre ceteris rebus merito te delectarivideam . . .112

(iii) Illustrissimo et Excellentissimo Principi domino .D. Lodouico MariaeSfortiae Angl[eri]o Duci Mediolanensium inuictissimo FranchinusGaforus Musicae professor Salutem.

Quantae musicae artis professio Illustrisime Princeps apud Priscos non

authoritatis modo sed etiam venerationis extiterit facile edocemur etsummorum Philosophorum exemplo qui se admodum senes ad hancdisciplinam velut in ea summam studiorum suorum manum imposituricontulerunt: et seuerissimarum rerum publicarum instituto: quae cumsumma diligentia quicquid moribus publice officeret: circuncidi curassent:hanc tamen artem non modo non eiecerint: sed etiam velut morumparentem Altricemque summo studio excoluerunt: et vt claudam semelomnium gentium omniumque nationum consentienti stabilique confir-matur iudicio apud quas nihil umquam fuit cura maiore celebratum. Quae

enim alia disciplina tanto mortalium assensu: tantaque omnis vel aetatisvel sexus conspiratione recepta est: vt nullius conditionis vllus sit adhucrepertus qui molestias suas vel rudi saltem modulatione consolari nonstudeat?113

(iv) Magnifico ac Clarissimo Musarum Cultori domino Simoni CrottoPatricio Mediolanensi: Franchinus Gafurius Regius musicus Salutem.

Dii quam bene agitur quoties in magna Vrbe quis claris natalibus pollensaddit ad parentum gloriam cum diuitiarum amplitudine moderationem: et

111 Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Mus 142 (early 1480s), fol. 1r; transcribed by Bonnie J.

Blackburn. Here and in all subsequent transcriptions I renderand asae,&aset(in both Latin and Italian),andasoe. Letters lost in trimming have been restored in square brackets.

112 Francesco Caza,Tractato vulgare de canto figurato (Milan, 1492; facs. Berlin, 1922), sig. [a1]v. Catocensorinus (i.e. Censorius) may be the Cato of Cicero,De senectute38; but see below, n. 118.

113 Gaffurius,Practica Musice (Milan, 1496; facs. Farnborough, 1967), sig. [3]v. The allusions are toSocrates and Sparta.



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uirtutis: litterarumque studia: ut bonis artibus tam proprio laboreemineat: quam bonae Fortunae Indulgentia est: reliqua ad uitae ornatumconsecutus: Hunc qualescunque sunt principes suspiciunt: res publicaeexcipiunt: proxime ad immortales omne hominum genus non immerito

admiratur. Tales non paucos Roma rerum domina: et graecia foeliciorquondam tulit: Non multos posterior aetas uel effoeta natura: uel uirtuteper contemptum fatiscente . . .114

Naturally a dedication will be in a more literary style than the technical part:there is no linear increase in classicity, for it is the first dedication that callsthe duke of Milan the leader of the Insubres; that affectation was omitted inthe others, perhaps because, read with a classical eye, it denoted the chief ofa barbarian tribe against which Rome fought fierce battles. By contrast,

Fieschi is called capitaneus, a hopelessly non-classical word for whichpraefectuswould have been substituted in any work intended to impress thelearned. But the third and fourth dedications are in the most flowery style,the fourth staking its high humanistic claims by speaking of and eveninvoking the gods in the plural.

So far as the business part is concerned, however, there is no attempt atavoiding unclassical technicalities; nevertheless, the scholastic language ofaccidents and essence used in the first draft disappears in 1496, and thesentence structure of the Latin texts becomes more complex:

[MS Houghton 142] quod si figurae fuerint in quantitatiuis acci[den]tibusimperfectis: per punctum tunc possunt augmentari et sic aequipolentperfectioni.[But if the note-shapes are in imperfect quantitative accidents, then theymay be augmented by a point and are thus tantamount to perfection.]

[1496 edn.] Verum dispositis in cantilena figuris secundum propriambinariae ac imperfectae quantitatis rationem: eas plerumque certo

augmentationis puncto perornant: quo dimidia vniuscuiusque figuraequantitas superexcrescit: hinc ternariam sectionem acquirunt: ipsi aequi-polentes perfectioni.[But, the note-shapes in the song having been disposed according to theprinciple proper to the binary and imperfect quantity, they most oftenequip them with a certain point of augmentation: whereby the half valueof every single note-shape grows from it in addition; hence they acquire aternary division, being themselves tantamount to perfection.]

All the same, Gaffurius has no qualms about the verbimperficere; contrari-wise, although in the Italian versions we find the infinitiveimperficere, and inCaza also the participial adjectiveimperficiente, in all f inite forms the notionis expressed by such periphrases as fa esser imperfetta or se fa imperfetta.Musical Italian is thus purer than musical Latin.

114 Angelicum ac Diuinum Opus Musice(Milan, 1508; facs. Bologna, 1971), sig. [A4]v.



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Gaffurius also wrote aTheoricum Opus Musicae Disciplinae, which exists in:(i) an autograph manuscript of 1479, dedicated to Antonio de Guevara,count of Potenza;115 (ii) a printed book of 1480 almost unchanged save forrededication to Cardinal Giovanni Arcimboldo; and (iii) a revised edition of

1492, dedicated to Lodovico Maria Sforza, duke of Bari but as yet onlygovernor of Milan on behalf of the nominal duke, his nephew Gian Galeazzo.The prose dedications are in high style, with allusions to Cato, Sallust, andCicero; in the revised edition Gaffurius describes his position as in delubrimaioris choro phonascus, voice-trainer in the choir of the larger temple.116 Thetechnical part is in a higher style than that of the practical work, and uses theGreek note-names; nevertheless, one would not call it humanistic, and thereremain even in the final version such medievalisms assibinot referring to thesubject. The citations given below, from the dedication, and in Appendix II

from the chapter on intervals in the Greater Perfect System,117 will indicatethe development.

(i) franchini gafori laudensis musices professoris pars prima musicaespeculationis ad Illustrem et excelsum Don Antonium de Gevara Comitempotentiae musicum clarissimum

Utra mihi sententia plus placeat Illustrissime Comes Marci ne Catonisqui non minus ocii quam negocii reddendam rationem et amissumnegligentia diem magna poenitentia prosequendum multaque diligentia

resarciendum iudicauit118 / an Crispi Salustij aliorumque doctrina etsapientia clarissimorum qui desidiam propriam belluarum existimant119/nondum satis constitui. Ille quid magnis Viris maxime agendum: hi quidpraecipue uideatur unicuique homini fugiendum proponunt. quorumcum alterum caueri pluribus modis alterum effici possit / non inpostremis collocanda uidetur scribendi exercitatio et Stilus Marci Tullisententia non dicendi modo uerum etiam intelligendi magister optimus120

mihi ad effugiendam socordiam rationemque ocii mei constituendam nonminus auide quam consulto arreptus.121

(ii) Clarissimi ac prestantissimi musici Franchini Gafori Laudensis

115 On this dedication, see Clement A. Miller, Francesco Zambeccari and a musical friend, RenaissanceQuarterly, 25 (1972), 4258.

116 For a similar phrase in Malegolos life of Gaffurius, and for its everyday counterpartmagister biscantandi,see Alessandro Caretta, Luigi Cremascoli, and Luigi Salamini,Franchino Gaffurio(Lodi, 1951), 25, 73.

117 This differs from the Immutable Perfect System by excluding the synemmenon tetrachord (a bcd);aisrecognized only as mese,cdonly as trite and paranete diezeugmenon.

118 Cf. Cato,Origines, fr. 2 clarorum uirorum atque magnorum non minus oti quam negoti rationem

exstare oportet, in Hermann Peter,Historicorum Romanorum Reliquiae, 2nd edn (Leipzig, 1914, repr. Stuttgart,1967),I, 55 with note ad loc.; et introduces Gaffurius own gloss.

119 A distillation of Sallust,De Coniuratione Catilinae1.2 animi imperio, corporis seruitio magis utimur;alterum nobis cum dis, alterum cum beluis commune est, 4.1 non fuit consilium socordia atque desidiabonum otium conterere, Bellum Jugurthinum1.4 sin captus prauis cupidinibus ad inertiam et uoluptatescorporis pessum datus est . . . ubi per socordiam uires tempus ingenium diff luxere.

120 Cf. Cicero,De Oratore1.150 stilus optimus et praestantissimus dicendi effector et magister.121 British Library, MS HirschIV1441, fol. 2v, transcribed by L. A. Holford-Strevens.



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Theoricum opus musice discipline Ad Reuerendissimum in christo patremdominum dominum Iohannem Arcimboldum miseratione diuinasacrosancte Romane ecclesie presbiterum Cardinalem Nouariensemprohemium

Utra mihi sententia plus placeat Reuerendissime pater. . . .122

(iii) Ad magnanimum et pientissimum dominum Lodouicum MariamSphortiam Vicecomitem: Bari ducem: principis excellentissimi: et reiMediolansensis gubernatorem: Franchini Gafuri Laudensis in delubrimaioris choro phonasci Theoricum opus musice discipline

Quorum magis sententiae accedere debeam maxime aeui tui RectorLodouice Sphortia: an eorum qui tam ocii quam negotii rationem exiguntet neglectum (emoriente opera) diem duplici foenore calumniatricis

diligentiae resarciendum putant: an eorum qui turpem desidiae notam etignauae socordiae ignominiam brutis animalibus onerosam et peculiaremsarcinam attribuunt nundum [legenondum] satis compertum habeo. Iiquid hominem liberum agere conueniat: Ii quid unumquenque fugeremaxime oporteat: ante oculos quasi in tabula proponunt.123

Yet despite the pretensions thus revealed, Gaffurius monthly salary adlecturam musices at the dukesGymnasium Mediolanensein 1498 was a mere6lire9soldi8denari, the lowest of any professors, compared with DemetriosChalkondyles 96l.17s.6d.for teaching Greek and the 25l.16s.8d.drawnby Luca Pacioli, who taught geometry and arithmetic.124 Evidently he wasregarded as a mere technician, unversed in the higher learning. Despite hisignorance of Greek, the owner and annotator of Plutarchs Lives(albeit inLapo Fiorentinos Latin) and at least that volume of Ficinos Plato whichcontainedTimaeus,125 had aspirations to being a philosopher and man ofletters: having read the Greek theorists in specially commissioned trans-lation,126 Gaffurius set out his stall of learning in De Harmonia Musicorum

Instrumentorum Opus, begun about the turn of the century but not publisheduntil 1518.127

Now that Milan was subject to France, a Gaulish name could be used againwithout embarrassment in the dedication to Jean Grolier:

122 Franchinus Gaffurius,Theoricum Opus Musice Discipline (Naples, 1480; facs. Lucca, 1996), withoutsignatures or foliation. From here on, in the quoted passage, only accidentals differ.

123 Theorica Musice(Milan, 1492; facs. Rome, 1934), fol. [3]v.124 See Caretta, Cremascoli, and Salamini,Franchino Gaffurio, 91.125 See respectively Kate Trauman Steinitz, Two books from the environment of Leonardo da Vinci in the

Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana: Gafurio and Plutarch,Libri, 1 (19501), 114, and Otto Kinkeldey, FranchinoGafori and Marsilio Ficino,Harvard Library Bulletin, 1 (1949), 37982 (the book is now in the BibliothecaHermetica Philosophica, Amsterdam). See too Palisca,Humanism, 16678, 181225.

126 Not by Chalkondyles, but by Gianfranesco Burana and Niccol Leoniceno: see Alberto Gallo, Le

traduzioni dal greco per Franchino Gaffurio,Acta Musicologica, 35 (1963), 1724.127 The work was dedicated first to Bonifazio Simonetta (d. 1502), abbot of S. Stefano del Corno, then to

another prospective patron no longer identifiable: for its evolution see Clement A. Millers introduction to hisEnglish translation (Musicological Studies and Documents, 33; AIM 1977), 1118.



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Franchinus Gafurius Ioanni Grolierio Lugdunensi Christianissimi Fran-corum Regis a Secretis ac Insubriae Quaestori Primario. S.P.D.

Mos fuit apud Antiquos uir Amplissime: quem posteriores per manustraditum ad haec usque tempora seruauerunt: ut lucubrationes suas

doctissimi quique Illustri cuipiam uiro nuncuparent: ut tantorum uirorumauthoritas eas ab inuidiae morsibus mastigiisque uendicaret. Proptereadioscorides Anazarbeus (ut sudas tradit) Marco Antonio: PlutarchusTraiano: Pollux Naucratita Commodo: Aristoteles Alexandro Macedoni,Oppianus Antonino Caesari: Philostratus Seuero: ingenii sui commentanominatim dedicauere.128

When he returns to the intervals of the fifteen strings, his lengthyexposition (see Appendix II), beginning with Mercury, Orpheus, and

Pythagoras, is largely taken from the Byzantine theorist Manuel Bryennios(c. 1300). In literary elaboration De Harmonia thus goes well beyond theTheorica, as befits a work addressed to a humanist by one who aspires to thesame status and who, in his next publication, falls with learned vehemenceon the non-Latinist Giovanni Spataro, maestro de canto at S. Petronio inBologna, for venturing to disagree with him. The emphasis on the need forLatinity and mathematics recalls Tinctoris, whom Gaffurius follows in thisas in his musical doctrines; but the style has become far more ornate andhumanistic:

Nunc tua deliramenta iamdiu latentia non qua debeo acerbitate: sed quasolitus sum modestia taxare fas sit. Non enim abs te quicquam dis-simulatum iri arbitror, quod ad depraehendendam ignorantiam tuampertineat. Plaerumque fit ut qui interpellandi lacerandiue studio tenenturdum alienam eruditionem insectantur propriam petulantiam prodant.Quo nam pacto conuitiator leuissime ad Parnasi aditum musarumquelares absque latinitate peruenire potuisti? qui a uulgari uestigio minimesemotus non modo musicam sed et philosophiam, ac mathematicas

caeterasque bonas artes profitearis? cum identidem nos admonueris hocest si quando ad te scribere destinassem id omne materna lingua expli-caretur quasi a uulgo non differas.129

128 De Harmonia(Milan, 1518), sig. A1r. Pollux indeed dedicatedOnomasticonto Commodus and OppianCynegetica to Antoninus Caracalla; Philostratus moved in the circle of Severus consort Julia Domna, whocommissioned him to write on Apollonius of Tyana. The Byzantine lexicon known as theSudaor Fortress butlong ascribed to one Suidas conflates Dioscorides of Anazarbus (first century AD), author of the Materia

Medica, with Dioscorides of Alexandria, a physician at the court of Cleopatra and Antony; it does not say thathe dedicated his books to the latter, though a poor Hellenist might have mistranslated (dative of agentwith the perfect passive: by him, sc. Dioscorides) as to him (Antony). The famous Instructio Traianiwas

written in Plutarchs name by John of Salisbury; Aristotle was wrongly supposed to be the author of theRhetorica ad Alexandrum(written by Anaximenes of Lampsacus) andDe mundo, also dedicated to Alexander; hewas further credited with having written him a letter on kingship.

129 Apologia Franchini Gafurii Musici aduersus Ioannem Spatarium et complices musicos Bononienses(Turin,1520; repr. New York, 1979), sig. A1r. The work is a reply to criticism by Spataro (who, though able to write onlyin Italian, could give as good as he got) ofDe harmonia musicorum instrumentorum, conveyed per 18 mieepistole: see Bonnie J. Blackburn, Edward E. Lowinsky, and Clement A. Miller,A Correspondence of Renaissance

Musicians(Oxford, 1991), 374.



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instar mundanae fabricae ex lite amicitiaque constantis, factum, et aurispercipit, et ratio adprobat.132

We may observe how Frosch has attempted to designate intervals by classicalor classicizing names, either for the intervals themselves or their generatingratios; he has strayed by calling minor thirds semiditoni, a medieval namewith the characteristic misuse ofsemi-, rather thantrihemitonia, but only forsixths has he used the common working name, knowing unlike Marchetto,Ciconia, and indeed Florentius de Faxolis thathexasnever bore that sensein any Greek or Roman text.133 When three paragraphs later he recommendsthe reader to collect commissuras quam optimas from as many composersas possible for use in his own works,134 his examples range from briefcadential formulae to longer segments, mostly from the ends of phrases,

often adjacent and hence capable of being put together by the pupil.Unfortunately two other writers of the period also pressed the same wordinto service, but in different senses. Biagio Rossetti, the organist at Verona,who sometimes rises above treatise Latin, uses the word once by way ofelegant variation instead ofligatura:

Est igitur proprietas, conueniens principiis ligaturarum descriptio, musicis authoribus instituta, ultimis autem commissura [legecommissurae]notulis quod omnium rerum perfectio, teste Philosopho fini attribuitur,

perfectionem ascripserunt . . .135

and Glareanus, not a humanistic musician but a musical humanist, applies itto movement between the fifth and the upper or lower fourth within amode:136

Hic commissuras duarum diatessaron cum diapente prosequamur. Egosane eam harmoniam primam simplicem, ac, ut alia primitiuae Ecclesiae,sine fucis ac lenociniis compositam fuisse puto. Cuius rei argumentum

132 Johannes Frosch,Rerum Musicarum Opusculum(Strasburg, 1535), sig. [D6]v. The Greek terms denoterespectvely the intervals of fifth, octave, twelfth, and f ifteenth.

133 Limmataare (minor) semitones,ditonimajor thirds; sesquioctavi, sesquialteri, andsesquitertiiare tones,fifths, and fourths, generated respectively by the ratios 9:8, 3:2, 4:3. However, even in just intonation neither

the major sixth (5:3) nor the minor sixth (8:5) can be so described without revealing the ratios to besuperpartient, which in ancient theory indicated dissonance.

134 Frosch,Rerum Musicarum Opusculum, sigs [D6]vE1r. On this passage, see Jessie Ann Owens,Composersat Work: The Craft of Musical Composition 14501600(New York, 1997), 1913; the commissuraepresent theconn