When discussing varietas Tinctoris cites six works that exemplify the concept, of which four survive. Chapter 6 considers up to what point these pieces, which span the major genres of the day, illustrate Tinctoris’s ideas. The chapter analyzes this music at different levels of zoom, and in light of the relevant compositional parameters.

Chapter 4 argues that varietas in Tinctoris’s usage gestures toward an esthetics of opposition. The chapter situates Tinctoris’s discussion in the context of The Art of Counterpoint as a whole, while showing how the individual components of varietas – melody, rhythm, texture, and so on – give teeth to the concept.

In a passage in his famous Art of Counterpoint (1477) devoted to the widely diffused concept of varietas, Johannes Tinctoris offers a prototheory of musical pacing and flow. Chapter 3 surveys the terms that for Tinctoris underpin this concept before describing how a modern tendency to make too much of the false friends varietas/variety has impeded our understanding.

Tinctoris was among the first music theorists to back up his points with citations of many polyphonic works. Chapter 5 takes another look at these well-studied examples, not for the sake of the theoretical ideas Tinctoris uses them to support, but to ask how deeply he knew the music in question. The central claim is that Tinctoris, himself an accomplished composer, had intimate knowledge of contemporary repertoire.

Beginning with the problem of historical distance, the introduction charts a path from notes on the page to potent sound experiences, taking as a representative example the modern performance of a mass by Johannes Okeghem. In addition to defining counterpoint and explaining the term’s relevance to this study, the introduction sets up some of the book’s main questions while laying out a ground plan for what follows.