Florentine Trecento Musical Iconography and Contemporary Musical Performance Practice
Over the last sixty years there has been disagreement about the meaning of angels holding musical instruments in Trecento painting. Some regard them as simply symbols of heavenly music" others argue that payments are documented to instrumentalists 'when they made like (fecerunt) angels'. To resolve this issue I have used the quasi-complete catalogue of all Trecento paintings compiled by the late Howard Mayer Brown as a basic data set of images, and two inventories derived from Trecento literature, one of the names of musical instruments, the other of musical 'activities' and generic names of musical performance. From these three sources, I hoped to document musical instruments in pictures, payment records, contemporary chronicles, imaginative literature and music theory treatises.
Chapter 1 reviews current literature on the topic" Chapter 2 reviews the production and function of objects on which the images were painted" Chapter 3 analyses the iconography of Brown's Catalogus and two iconic images, the Coronation of the Virgin and the Virgin and Child (sometimes called Maesta, a Tuscan version of the Herogetria). The fourth chapter examines evidence of music activity in Florence: Musici, the performer-composers" itinerant musicians or giullari" the professional musicians salaried by the government" amateur musicians like the ones described by Boccaccio in his Decamerone" clerics, all of whom had some musical training for the performance of the liturgy, some who cultivated the skill of improvised counterpoint and some who composed the music found in secular manuscripts" and finally, Laudesi, the confraternities who gathered regularly before an image of the Virgin Mary to sing her praises (laude). Chapter 5 examines in detail the contribution written music may make to the use of musical instruments in performance. A conclusion follows summarising the findings of this thesis and their significance for further research.
After the examination of 368 paintings and 41,493 texts from a database of 48,985 records (3,266 from chronicles" 25,634 from payment records" 4,151 from literary works and 342 from musical treatises), no unequivocal evidence has been found for the use of musical instruments on the untexted voices in the surviving manuscripts. Yet, there is much circumstantial evidence: professional instrumentalists were paid to accompany the laude" three-voice works are written into vacant folios of manuscripts written at the same time as local and visiting pifferi were being paid by the Signoria. Untexted contratenors in works by Francesco degli organi (also known as Francesco Cieco or Francesco Landini) and Don Paolo Tenorista may have been intended for an instrument, and this may have been the third kind of music referred to by Filippo Villani (vocal music, instrumental music and a mixture of the two). Some of the composers are documented as instrumentalists: might not Jacopo da Bologna, Giovanni Mazzuoli and Francesco degli organi have played their own music? We have no evidence, one way or the other. Nor is there any evidence that untexted voices were vocalised. All circumstantial. On the other hand, there is no positive evidence to exclude instrumental performance of written music. The evidence for angelic musicians is more secure. Goro Dati remarks on processions of 'confraternities of laymen who come together . . .with the clothing of angels' (con abito d'angioli)" lauda singers were sometimes paid 'when they dressed like angels' (quando si fecerunt angioli)" and the confraternity of S. Zenobi at the Cathedral possessed 'six garments of angels . . . and six pairs of angel's wings' (6 chamici da angioli . . . 6 ispalliere da angioli).
After a thorough examination of all of the paintings, all of the surviving published payment records and a generous selection of contemporary literature, no unequivocal evidence for instrumental participation in secular polyphony has been found but the circumstantial evidence supports it. There is strong evidence that the angel musicians performing before the iconic image of the Virgin and Child were images based on the lauda service: real people making real music.
Angels in Florentine Iconography and Trecento Musical Performance
Over the last sixty years there has been debate about the meaning of angels holding musical instruments in Trecento painting. Some regard them as simply symbols of heavenly music" others argue that payments are documented to instrumentalists 'when they made like (fecerunt) angels'. To resolve this issue I have used the quasi-complete catalogue of all Trecento paintings compiled by the late Howard Mayer Brown as a basic data set of images, and two inventories derived from Trecento literature, one of the names of musical instruments, the other of musical 'activities' and generic names of musical performance. From these three sources, I hoped to document musical instruments in pictures, payment records, contemporary chronicles, imaginative literature and music theory treatises.
Roger north's writings on music to C.1703: A set of analytical indexes (Review)
The writings of Roger North on music have attracted attention since the publication of Memoires of Music by Edward Rimbault in 1846, The Musicall Grarnarian by Hilda Andrews in 1925, and Roger North on Music by John Wilson in 1959.
Roger North's The musicall grammarian and theory of sounds: Digests of the manuscripts
The musical essays of Roger North are amongst the most important writings of the eighteenth century on music. To date they have been ill-served by editors, who have been misleadingly selective in presenting his ideas to the modern reader. Edward Rimbault, who first published Memoires of Musik(London: Bell, 1846) from the manuscript in Hereford Cathedral Library, omitted completely the Musicall Grammarian, which occupies folios 1-102 of the same manuscript" Hilda Andrews, in her edition of The Musicali Gramarian [sic] (London: Oxford University Press, 1925) also omitted the text of The Musicall Grammarian, and published only the Notes of Comparison between the Elder and Later Musick, and somewhat Historicall of Both, which had been incorporated into the text of the first draft of The Musicall Grammarian in 1726, and separated in the final version of 1728 as a separate essay. The best known edition of North's works, Roger North on Music, edited by John Wilson, (London, Novello, 1959) reproduces more of North's works than either Rimbault or Andrews had done, but is still highly selective. The editions of North's essays by Mary Chan and Jamie Kassler are certainly welcome corrections to the previous misleading publications.
An English choirbook fragment in the National Library of Australia
Amongst the papers left by Manfred Bukofzer was a draft of an address to be given at the International Musicological Society's Con ference at Oxford in 19551 in which he identified two fragments, one from Cambridge2 and the other from Oxford3 , as being the work of one scribe. To these Margaret Bent added another nine fragments, and in a paper presented at the 1972 IMS Conference at Copenhagen she argued that these eleven fragments were originally from the one manuscript, an English choirbook of the early fifteenth century, second in importance only to the Old Hall manuscript.4