Karen Desmond

The 14th-century music theorist Jacobus devoted a complete chapter of his Speculum musicae (SM vii.37) to a critique of what he termed ‘solitary’ semibreves (semibreves solitarias). He listed several arguments against the moderns’ use of solitary semibreves. The present essay considers what this motet repertory that used solitary semibreves might be. The emergence of the Ars Nova is often identified with the newer motets copied in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France fr. 146 manuscript of the Roman de Fauvel, but solitary semibreves are not found in the motets of Fauvel. In this article, I examine some ambiguities of the semibreve notation in BnF fr. 146. I then consider the evidence of another group of motets classified as Ars Nova motets by music historians since they are explicitly notated in Ars Nova notation in manuscript sources copied later than BnF fr. 146. These motets contain clues indicating that they were originally copied in a notation similar to that used in the Roman de Fauvel. That is, these motets too (originally) had no solitary semibreves. To find the solitary semibreves of Jacobus’s complaint then, and per consequens, the music of Jacobus’s ‘ars nova’, we must identify compositions that appear to have been originally conceived in Ars Nova notation. This article closes with a brief consideration of some of these motets.

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

A set of thirteenth-century parchment fragments, including the remnants of two rolls and one manuscript codex, preserves a largely unstudied repertoire unique to medieval England. In addition to a single motet and a setting of a responsory verse, the Rawlinson Fragments preserve twelve three-voice Alleluya settings. While polyphonic Alleluyas are well known from the continental Magnus liber repertoire, these insular Alleluya settings are quite different. Most significantly, while composed on the text and pitches of plainchant, they include newly composed texts in at least one voice—that is, they are polytextual chant settings. Aspects of their musical style certainly draw on other polyphonic genres—organum, conductus, and motet. This article presents the paleographical and codicological evidence that corroborates an early date for these fragments (in the 1240s), confirms their connection to Reading Abbey, and situates their repertoire within a broader context. My analysis points to intriguing points of overlap with both the plainchant prosula tradition and the Magnus liber organa and motets. It reopens broader questions about the copying and performance practices of liturgical polyphony, including previous suggestions that motet texts may have been sung within the performance of the Magnus liber organa, regardless of the scribal copying conventions that separated organum and motet in the surviving Magnus liber manuscripts. The article also considers the role of the Rawlinson Fragments’ main scribe, Benedictine monk W. de Wicumbe, who was active within the monastic communities of Leominster and Reading as a composer of plainchant and polyphony, and as precentor, most likely in charge of his community's musical life.

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

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ABSTRACT: In balades 27 and 38, Machaut likens the wounds suffered by the lover to those that result from the poisons of deadly beasts. He invokes animal imagery to depict the beloved and her behaviour: she encloses within her being monstrous beasts that repel and repulse the lover, causing him grievous bodily harm. In the course of both balades the deadly beasts transform into various allegorical characters that are personifications of secular vices. One of these characters, Refusal (‘Refus’), emerges as central. Machaut personifies the lady's rejection of the lover's advances (which he makes through words/music) as the courtly vice Refusal. In Balade 27, it is her sense organs that enact this refusal: her ears cannot hear him, her mouth rejects him, and her Look kills him. I explore the resonances of Machaut's sadistic and animalistic lady in two spheres: the courtly, where the obvious antecedents for Machaut's imagery are the courtly bestiaries; and the sacred, where parallels between Refusal and the deadly sins of pride and envy can be detected, as suggested by my interpretation of these two balades and some of Machaut's motets, and the links I set forth between these sins, vices, and the senses that partake in them.

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ABSTRACT: Early Ars nova theory sources present a complex web of interdependencies. Apart from the more substantial texts of Jehan des Murs and Marchetto da Padova, there are a number of sources containing short texts that appear to emanate from the orbit of Philippe de Vitry. Vitry’s role as the author of a definitive written text, however, is now regarded as doubtful, with the hypothesis favored that the extant sources are but remnants of an oral teaching tradition possibly originating with Vitry. We can study these ‘Vitrian’ texts today through editions published in various edited volumes, in journal articles dating from 1908, 1929 and 1958, and in the nineteenth-century Scriptores edition of Edmond de Coussemaker. The differing presentation formats, and specific editorial policies and accessibility issues, however, have served to obfuscate attempts at the analysis and interpretation of these texts.

While HTML versions of many medieval theory texts are available online (TML, Lexicon musicum Latinum), technologies available today could better present the relationships between these texts. In this paper, I demonstrate how these technologies might realize the potential of truly ‘hyper-textual’ editions that would reflect the fluidity and variance that characterize medieval texts. As a proof of concept, I have prepared a digital edition, following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), of one important early Ars nova text (incipit ‘Omni desideranti notitiam’). This is the first modern edition of this text, which is extant in three Italian sources dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. My analysis of Omni desideranti notitiam demonstrates that Jacobus de Montibus used it, in his Speculum musicae, as a primary authority for the Vitrian tradition (in a written version), as did other fourteenth-century theorists. I reconsider the importance of this text within the early Ars nova, and I extrapolate on the advantages of presenting all the Ars nova texts online. Modern readers of a digital editions, using hypertext, could mimic the intertextual and indeed hypertextual experience existent within the medieval work (whether text or music), whose web of reference and allusion becomes apparent those in on the ‘game.’

Since the realization, at the beginning of this century, that the treatise Speculum musicae had been incorrectly attributed to Jehan des Murs by its first editor, Edmond de Coussemaker, the actual author of this voluminous work of music theory from the early fourteenth century has remained a shadowy figure. The most certain detail of the author's identity is his name, contained within an acrostic spelled out over the initials that begin each of the seven books of the treatise, rendering the given name IACOBUS. The provenances of the three surviving manuscript sources, all dating from approximately a century after the proposed date of Speculum musicae, suggest an Italian bias to the transmission of the work, but, as physical documents, the manuscripts have yet to yield any clues to the author's origins. The treatise itself is a bit more helpful. Besides offering the author's name, clues within the text have allowed for the formulation of the following hypothesis concerning the career of Jacobus: that he was probably born in the diocese of Liège, that he was a student in Paris in the late thirteenth century, and that he returned to Liège to complete the final books of his treatise, Books 6 and 7 of Speculum musicae. In what follows, I will first briefly evaluate the evidence previously marshalled to support this hypothesis, and I will then discuss new information pertinent to the biography of the author.

The fifteenth chapter of Guido of Arezzo's Micrologus has occasioned comment and controversy in both medieval
and modern times. The opening chapters of this early eleventh-century treatise deal with traditional subjects of medieval theory-the monochord, the consonances, the modes - and the final chapters herald the subject that will dominate music treatises of the later medieval period, namely organum. In the midst of this, chapter 15, a discussion of melodic aesthetic principles, with no real precedents or consequents in medieval theory, appears highly original. The sometimes ambiguous
language that Guido employs in this chapter has prompted varying interpretations, many of which have been made without consideration of the context of Guido's remarks.

In this article I am primarily concerned with the sources of Guido's vocabulary, but also with the analogies that Guido draws, whether implicitly or explicitly, between music and the arts of the trivium, specifically grammar and rhetoric. These connections will throw light on problematic passages in this chapter, particularly the opening three paragraphs, and will clarify the position of Guido's outlined precepts in the composition-analysis-performance spectrum that, to modern readers, is seemingly implied. To aid my interpretation, I have drawn on the medieval commentaries that discuss this chapter, and specifically on those written in the second half of the eleventh century. I have accepted as a basic premise that these authors, writing probably not more than a generation after Guido, had a better understanding of his terminology than we do today and can only enlighten us in the interpretation of this chapter.

This study addresses the general question of how medieval music theory participated in the discourse of the related disciplines of philosophy, natural science and theology. I focus on a specific instance of scientific inquiry: the fourteenth-century music treatise Speculum musicae , written by an author known to us as Jacobus. A detailed analysis of Speculum musicae reveals an aesthetic system whose elements are assigned meaning and value through the anagogical relationships that the author posits (either explicitly or implicitly) with systems articulated in philosophical and theological treatises at the turn of the fourteenth century. My central concerns are uncovering the impetus behind the production of this treatise, determining where Jacobus's philosophies fit within particular schools of medieval thought, as revealed through his vocabulary choices, supporting sources, and methods of reasoning, and then extrapolating from these philosophies which rationale (ratio ) most informs his positions on particular issues, such as his classification of music, or his defense of the ancient art of singing against the modern art. I hope to present a fresh perspective on one of the most important yet one of the most mysterious ages in the history of music. The turn of the fourteenth century was a fascinating time for music: we find musical systems in a pronounced state of flux with various theoretical solutions proposed in response to the problems of notating this increasingly complex music. Analyzing the background of these theoretical formulations, and assessing the various judgments of "good" practice, and the kinds of arguments used to bolster these judgments, will uncover reasons for the overturning of musical systems and go some way toward explaining the nature of musical change.

Music theorists labelled the musical art of the 1330s and 1340s as 'new' and 'modern'. A close reading of writings on music theory and the polyphonic repertory from the first half of the fourteenth century reveals a modern musical art that arose due to specific innovations in music notation. The French ars nova employed as its theoretical fundament a new system for arranging musical time proposed by the astronomer and mathematician Jean des Murs. Challenging prevailing accounts of the ars nova, this book presents the 'new art' within the intellectual context of its time, revises the datings of Jean des Murs's writings on music theory, and presents the intersection of theory and practice for a crucial era in the history of music. Through contemporaneous accounts, Desmond explores how individuals were involved in 'changing' music in early fourteenth-century France, and the technical developments they pursued that precipitated this stylistic change.

Anyone who listened to BBC radio broadcasts from the 1950s to the 1980s should remember the popular game show My Word. The last segment of the show featured the two team captains, Denis Norden and Frank Muir, competing to tell the best story that would explain, and end with, a famous phrase or quotation supplied by the game show host. Listeners delighted in the anticipation of the catchphrase, for as the clock ran down, it seemed that the phrase became more and more incompatible with the story unfolding. Norden and Muir endeavoured to outdo each other’s displays of erudition, constrained by the generic requirements of the show’s format, the imposed time limit on their story’s length, and the need for the story to end with the supplied quotation. Such competitive composition, or ‘poetic jousting’ as Yolanda Plumley terms it, between medieval poets and composers, is at the centre of her new book on fourteenth-century song, The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut. In it, through a virtuosic display that traverses almost a century of song, and considers almost 350 works (as listed in the ‘Index of Cited Compositions’ at the end of the book), Plumley examines the circumstances in which, and the processes by which, fourteenth-century faiseurs plucked material from other contexts and ‘grafted’ it—to use Plumley’s horticultural metaphor, derived from the medieval verb enter (p. 10)—into new works.

In A paradise of priests, Catherine Saucier weaves a compelling narrative centered on the lives of Liège’s founder-bishops as celebrated in the hagiography, art, rituals, and music made, enacted, and reenacted by the medieval clerical population of the Liège. Through an expert examination of an impressively vast array of sources—including archival, liturgical, artistic, and hagiographic—Saucier analyses the changing image of the city and its founder-bishops through nine centuries of documentary record. The story centers on the celebration of the lives and deaths of three bishops—Theodard (d. ca. 668), Lambert (d. ca. 700), and Hubert (d. 727)—who were credited with the foundation, promotion, and protection of Liège. Liège, a large and wealthy city, and capital of the prince-bishopric from 985, had large numbers of secular clergy, encompassing a cathedral and seven collegiate church chapters totaling (in the fourteenth century) between 700 to 800 canons (p. 32). It was, as Petrarch observed, a ‘place noted for its clergy’ (p. 4).

Jennifer Saltzstein’s revisionist study of refrains in the music and poetry of medieval France examines why specific refrains were invoked in specific compositional contexts and within specific communities. The results of this study bring into question the long-held assumption that surviving refrains are the remnants of a lost repertoire of orally-transmitted popular song. Through her examination of refrain transmission and distribution, Saltzstein instead relocates refrain quotation within the literate traditions of their clerical poet-composers in order to reveal “an intellectual framework for the practice of refrain usage that has largely been overlooked, namely, the conception of auctoritas in medieval writing”(p. 29).

The urban landscape of France at the turn of fourteenth century vibrated--just as it does today--with sound. This medieval soundscape is the subject of Emma Dillon's new book, which invites the reader on a whistle-stop tour of the variety of contexts and activities in which sound assumed a central role. What is left to us today of this world is exclusively visual: we may still gaze on the art and architecture of that time--but we must recreate and reimagine its sound world from the scant evidence that is preserved in visual media. We "hear" their poets by reading words transcribed on manuscript pages, and we "hear" their music through our recreation of their music notation systems, which necessarily involves interpretation even with respect to the most fundamental elements as pitch and rhythm. Other details of how their music sounded and resounded (timbres, dynamics, vocal and instrumental forces employed, and so on) are even more difficult to ascertain. But Dillon goes beyond summoning music manuscripts in her examination of sound and meaning in medieval life, tapping into a rich variety of source materials that includes literary accounts, manuscript illuminations, and prayer books.

This elegant volume—issued as part of the I Tatti Renaissance Library series—offers the Latin text and an English translation of a 15th-century treatise on music written by the musician and priest Florentius de Faxolis (1461–96). The editors, Bonnie J. Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, also provide detailed notes to both the text and translation, an opening chapter that serves to introduce Florentius the man and his cultural context, a chapter on Florentius’s Latin, and a textual commentary that elaborates on some of the more significant or interesting points of theory contained in his Liber musices.

This collection of essays was prompted by the bicentennial birth anniversary of Charles-Edmond-Henri de Coussemaker (1805–76). The volume celebrates the music of northern France (“ars musica septentrionalis”) from ninth-century chant to the polyphony of the fifteenth century, and had its first incarnation as a conference held in Cambrai and Douai in 2005, directed by Barbara Haggh and Frédéric Billiet. The conference was held concurrently with an exhibition of manuscripts held in Douai, Cambrai, and Bailleul (the birthplace of Coussemaker). The exhibition inspired the publication of a separate book that included a catalog and discussion of Coussemaker’s library (Bruno Bouckaert, Mémoires du chant. Le livre de musique d’Isidore de Séville à Edmond de Coussemaker [Neerpelt: Alamire; Lille: Ad fugam, 2007]); the byproduct of the scholarly conference is the book of essays under review here. An overarching theme of these essays is a concentration, for the most part, on primary source research, including both manuscript studies and archival research. Questions of repertory transmission and interpretation, liturgical issues, and historiography are broached via the examination of certain northern French manuscripts, some of the most beautiful examples of which were owned by Coussemaker, as noted by Billiet in his introduction to the volume (p. 8).

St. Hugh’s College, The University of Oxford, March 20-21, 2014. Organisers: Catherine Bradley, Karen Desmond, with the assistance of Elizabeth Eva Leach.

Conference Report by Amy Williamson, ‘Montpellier in Oxford’, Early Music 42 (2014), pp. 502-503 (link to report given below).

Within the mid-fourteenth century Parisian manuscript F-Pn lat. 7378A, three as yet unedited music treatises are found, copied in a tiny, highly abbreviated script in a section of the manuscript devoted mostly to the music treatises of Jehan des Murs. The incipits of the three treatises are as follows: ‘Omnes homines scire desiderant’; ‘Partes prolationis quot sunt’ and ‘Celebranda divina sunt officia in ecclesia’. Lawrence Gushee suggested that Jehan des Murs may be their author, since des Murs listed a book loan of a work authored by him with incipit ‘Omnes homines’ in the Escorial manuscript (O.II.10) that contains his autograph annotations. This paper considers the content of the second treatise, which appears to be closely related to Jehan des Murs’s own Compendium artis musicae. The Compendium begins: ‘Partes prolationis quot sunt? Quinque’ whereas the answer to the same opening question posed in the F-Pn lat. 7378A treatise is ‘Quattuor’. The text of this treatise is considered as a witness to early Ars nova theory as it relates to des Murs’s early works and to the transmission of these texts within the layer of F-Pn lat. 7378A that is devoted to works by des Murs (on both music and astronomy) and his contemporaries in these fields.

In the conclusion of her 'A Phantom Treatise' article, Fuller points to the possible relationships between the Ars nova, Omni desideranti notitiam and Libellus: 'The movement from the pluralistic, unsettled confused state of affairs eloquently evoked by Jacques of Liège to the settled codified in the Libellus cantus mensurabilis has not been adequately explained. Did Philippe de Vitry contribute to this state of normalization? . . . Given the relationship between the Omni desideranti notitiam compendium and the Libellus cantus mensurabilis, and the loose association of the one with Philippe de Vitry, the other with Johannes de Muris, does some collaborative effort between the two men enter into the realm of plausibility?'  We are not yet at the point when we can answer this question – and perhaps may never be – but in this paper I outline that indicates the centrality of Omni desideranti notitiam in addressing it. Jacobus, the author of Speculum musicae, appears to have used two primary authorities for the modern notational theories outlined in Speculum musicae Book 7. Given the direct quotations from Notitia and the Compendium, one of these authorities is most certainly Jehan des Murs. It also seems likely that a treatise, very close in content and structure to the Omni desideranti notitiam (and Pn7378A), was Jacobus’s other source (these two texts are much more likely candidates than the texts preserved in Rvat307 or Pn14741). The Omni desideranti notitiam also appears to to have been the source for CS3anon3 and CS3anon4, but also has close textual relationships with the Libellus. Finally, Omni desideranti notitiam is attributed to Philippe de Vitry in two of its three manuscript transmissions, and there is no good reason to doubt the veracity of these attributions.  Closer examination of the relationships between all of these texts, and in particular between the Omni desideranti notitiam, Jacobus’s Speculum musicae, and the Libellus, will yield fresh insights into the contributions of both Jehan des Murs and Philippe de Vitry, and indeed music theory itself, in the emergence of the ‘new art’ of the fourteenth century.

(podcast track 5) The act of glossing at text was one of the primary ways texts were analysed, interpreted and understood in the Middle Ages. Glossing, is so called, according to the twelfth-century scholar, Hugh of St. Victor, since it is derived from the Greek word for ‘tongue’ or ‘gloss’ and a ‘gloss’ speaks the meaning of the word underneath. Glossing in the Middle Ages could be very explicit such as with interlinear glosses that often functioned merely as translations or definitions in between the words of the authoritative text, and the more extensive marginal glosses that could longer commentaries or interpretations, or even disagreement with the arguments being made in the text by the primary author. As opposed to this very explicit glossing, glossing could be implicit in the texts and not distinguished in this physical in the manuscript sources. Music theory treatises often contain glosses of this type: implicit glosses that elaborate, comment on, add interpretation upon other treatises. These implicit glosses are not differentiated physically in the manuscript sources that transmit these theory treatises, and so it is more difficult to trace the relationships between them. But certainly a philosophy of glossing, and of a specific type of learning that takes place through this activity of glossing pervades the content of these texts. This presentation is concerned with how we might trace the relationships between a group of music theory texts dating from the fourteenth century, and discusses some ways in which we could more successfully present and analyse these texts.

"Within the last twenty-five years a handful of scholars have emphasized the necessity of reading the texts of late medieval music theory within the context of learning at the medieval university. In this paper, I examine how two central metaphysical debates of the late thirteenth century impacted both the new systematization of mensural notation proposed by the musician and mathematician Johannes de Muris in his Notitia, and the subsequent attacks on this new system by Jacobus, author of Speculum musicae. While certain ars nova treatises circulated as guides to specific technical problems of notation, Muris’s Notitia represents a whole-scale overhaul of mensural notation, systematizing it within a particular ontological framework. It is imperative that we have a full understanding of the frameworks within which Muris and Jacobus were operating, for only then can we hope to appreciate the proposed innovations, and the reasons for the irreconcilable issues between the two men.

The first metaphysical debate concerned the unity of form within being. The question was whether there existed a single form within man (Aquinas, Godfrey of Fontaines), or whether a plurality of forms existed simultaneously within one being (John Duns Scotus). A related debate looked at how qualities were understood to change: the plurality-of-forms proponents outlined a theory of change known as the additive theory while the unity-of-form adherents rejected this additive theory of change, believing that it assumed characteristics of qualities that were really only predicable of quantities, and proposed an alternative theory known as the succession-of-forms theory. While the references within the more well-known Book 7 of Speculum musicae to these debates are somewhat oblique, Jacobus makes specific and detailed references to them within chapters of Book 1 and Book 4. I analyze these passages within the context of the Quodlibets by Godfrey, Walter Burley’s De intensione et remissione formarum and the Ordinatio of Duns Scotus. This analysis will show Jacobus clearly advocating the unity-of-form position, and a close reading of the Notitia in this context will show how Muris developed his new systemization for mensural notation based on the Scotist position (which was further developed by John Dumbleton) that a plurality of forms may exist within one being, and that qualities change through addition or subtraction of degrees. For Muris, there is but one species of tempus, and within this one species there is a plurality of accidental forms, which are measured along one dimension. There are not different species of times, just greater and lesser times. The individual notes are individuated by the quantity of their matter, and whether parts are added or taken away from this individuating quantity of matter. Jacobus, on the other hand, holds onto the traditional explanation of the mensural system, conceptualized as a Porphyrian tree (like the arbor of Johannes de Burgundia) of the different species and sub-species of note values, each being distinct in their name, definition and essence, and each having an indivisible unity of form."

A key music theory text within the fourteenth-century Ars nova tradition that has received little attention is the so-called Omni desideranti treatise. The treatise is found in three manuscript sources of Italian provenance dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth-centuries: in a manuscript copied by G. Frater de Anglia in Pavia in 1391, and now preserved in the Newberry Library in Chicago (Ms. 54.1, ff. 52v-56v); in a manuscript of Italian and Catalan origin dating from the early fifteenth century, Seville, Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina, Ms. 5-2-25, ff. 63r-64v; and a late fifteenth-century paper manuscript of Italian origin, Siena, Biblioteca comunale, Ms. L.V.30, ff. 129r-129v. This online edition of the Omni desideranti treatise is intended as a proof-of-concept model for a digital editing approach to medieval music theory. It follows TEI encoding standards. Using the XML files based on the TEI schema, a traditional critical edition is offered, where variant readings are displayed in the footnotes. Diplomatic transcriptions of the text as found in the three different sources are presented in parallel with high-quality images of the manuscript sources. The free software tool ZoomifyTM allows the user to zoom in on these images, while also protecting the image files from illegal downloads. Using the same data files, PDF and ePub versions of the texts can be generated: these are provided as downloads on the website. An English translation is provided, and a collation of the the three witnesses generated by the JuxtaTM web service. The advantages of this edition include the higher level of transparency into any editorial interventions as the evidence of the transcriptions and the original source documents are displayed side-by-side. In addition, it allows for a greater degree of interactivity on the part of the user as one can examine paragraphs or sections of text more closely.

Since the realization, at the beginning of this century, that the treatise Speculum musicae had been incorrectly attributed to Jehan des Murs by its first editor, Edmond de Coussemaker, the actual author of this voluminous work of music theory from the early fourteenth century has remained a shadowy figure. The most certain detail of the author's identity is his name, contained within an acrostic spelled out over the initials that begin each of the seven books of the treatise, rendering the given name IACOBUS. The provenances of the three surviving manuscript sources, all dating from approximately a century after the proposed date of Speculum musicae, suggest an Italian bias to the transmission of the work, but, as physical documents, the manuscripts have yet to yield any clues to the author's origins. The treatise itself is a bit more helpful. Besides offering the author's name, clues within the text have allowed for the formulation of the following hypothesis concerning the career of Jacobus: that he was probably born in the diocese of Liège, that he was a student in Paris in the late thirteenth century, and that he returned to Liège to complete the final books of his treatise, Books 6 and 7 of Speculum musicae. In what follows, I will first briefly evaluate the evidence previously marshalled to support this hypothesis, and I will then discuss new information pertinent to the biography of the author.

This article analyzes the distribution of three- and four-voice vertical sonorities in a repertoire of French ars antiqua and ars nova motets. Rather than selecting the subjectively important sonorities within a piece—an effort that would rely on the analyst’s judgment of the overarching contrapuntal goals—this study uses computational musicological methods to analyze and categorize the distribution of sonorities across individual motets and groups of motets that occur at regular time intervals across the course of the compositions. This study offers some preliminary observations and conclusions about sonority usage in the late medieval French motet repertoire.