A gap of several decades existed between the first sung performances of trouvère melodies and the earliest surviving songbooks to collect them in notation. A thriving culture of written and notated song grew up in parallel to the unquestionably oral culture driving the trouvère tradition. This article traces the vestiges of that written culture through surviving sources. Empty staves and absent music demonstrate the existence of lost notated sources and reveal their relationship to surviving songbooks. The case studies, taken from thirteenth-century trouvère sources, take part in a recent scholarly trend towards revisiting written transmission. The article drives this trend forward by distinguishing notated transmission from written transmission in text-only sources. The continuing existence of vernacular songs in notation, including many unique melodies, was only possible thanks to lost manuscripts. The article points the way towards further research into notated song culture and new bodies of evidence.

This article examines the revision of liturgical chant manuscripts at a single Premonstratensian house in the Low Countries, with focus on a period of religious upheaval in the seventeenth century. Sint-Catharinadal, founded in Vroenhout in 1271 for a community of sisters, had a difficult history. Between its founding and the seventeenth century, the house relocated more than once: first to Breda, and then to its present location in Oosterhout. During this period, its chant books also underwent substantial revision. Its surviving manuscript sources that contain music for the Divine Office show textual and notational changes that coincide with later publications of the Premonstratensian antiphoner; however, unlike manuscripts from other houses, these revisions are partial and at times inconsistent. Taking stock of the surviving collection of sources preserved at Sint-Catharinadal, this article charts the process of revising older chant sources. This process was gradual, complicated and at times non-linear. Scribes often adopted individual approaches when revising their chants, including the use of notational systems commonly used for other repertoires, such as secular or keyboard music. What emerges is a location-specific and context-dependent picture of chant sources, where scribes exercised individual autonomy in the revision of repertoires, despite the calls for conformity and consistency that defined the early modern period.

The most sensational event of the year 609 in Rome was the conversion of a unique pagan temple, the Pantheon, into a church dedicated to ‘blessed Mary ever virgin and all the martyrs’. The conversion required the permission of the emperor, a lustration, deposition of contact relics and the celebration of Mass. The chant formulary for a dedication Mass, beginning with the introit Terribilis est, is first associated with the anniversary (13 May) of this event. I believe that it was composed by the papal schola cantorum specifically for the rededication of the Pantheon. This dating has implications for the history of Western liturgical chant. The noted chant scholar James McKinnon claimed that such a ‘properised’ chant formulary was characteristic of a project undertaken by the schola in the late seventh century to reorganise the entire chant repertoire. If the Terribilis est formulary can be credibly dated more than a half century earlier, this scenario would appear questionable.

Music historiography has traditionally understood and described collective singing in the early modern era as an almost exclusive prerogative of Protestant communities. Recent and less recent studies, however, have recorded numerous occurrences of Catholic communal singing, for instance during processions, pilgrimages or popular missions. In spite of this, and even though several traditions (such as the Italian lauda) have been investigated in some depth, a comprehensive assessment of such singing practices and of their role in the surrounding soundscape is still wanting. Starting from a discussion of the causes of this ‘selective deafness’ in historiography, and moving on to a case study of late-fourteenth- to early-seventeenth-century Milan, the present article aims to start filling the lacuna and to demonstrate that communal singing was an important (if not always uncontroversial) element of Catholic sonic cultures in the early modern era.

One of the five Elizabethan anthologies of ‘Englished’ Italian songs, Thomas Watson’s 1590 Italian Madrigalls Englished (IME) presents itself as a selection of madrigals – almost all by Marenzio – with texts that do not strictly translate the original lyrics yet remain equally suitable to the music they underlay. Contrary to earlier studies of the IME, this article argues that Watson’s contrafacta, while indeed far from faithful translations, in fact remain deeply invested in the appropriation and subversion of the madrigals’ original verse. Most crucially, the IME carefully naturalises Marenzio’s pastoral landscapes – originally meant to evoke the Roman milieu of the composer’s patron – by repopulating this Arcadia with prominent Elizabethans and recognisable characters drawn from Watson’s own poetry. His contrafacta equally engage with the madrigals’ representation of characteristic formal elements of Italian verse, to prove not only the English language’s capacity to assimilate foreign prosody but also the Italian madrigal’s capacity to accommodate native English rhythms. Ultimately, the IME seeks to prove that English verse is equally suitable to being sung to the period’s most prestigious secular compositions, that the madrigal is equally capable of evoking a musical Arcadia in Elizabethan England.

In sixteenth-century France, the viol emerged as a symbol of cultural refinement enjoyed by men of virtue and as a tool to shape bourgeois leisure to reflect noble ideals of a moral and virtuous life. Viols appeared at the French court alongside the transalpine migration of artists, artisans and musicians, the acquisition of prized Italian string instruments and the recruitment of the luthier Gaspar Duiffoprugcar, master of the latest innovations in Italian instrument building. Learning to play viol and lute became essential for the education of nobles because of the belief that they could elevate the soul through the emulation of the ratios present in musica mundana. Philibert Jambe de Fer, in one of the first French music treatises, affirms that by the middle of the century viols were played by both the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie when he claims it is ‘an instrument with which gentlemen, merchants and other men of virtue pass their time’. For the bourgeoisie – the targeted readership of the earliest published tutors – luthiers, musicians and religious reformers founded music schools to teach lute and viol under a moral philosophy aimed at limiting the idle time of urban youths through humanistic and religious curricula.