ABSTRACT
In the early fourteenth century, musicians in France and later Italy established new traditions of secular and sacred polyphony. This ars nova, or "new art," popularized by theorists such as Philippe de Vitry and Johannes de Muris was the among the first of many later movements to establish the music of the present as a clean break from the past. The rich music of this period, by composers such as Guillaume de Machaut and Francesco Landini, is not only beautiful, but also rewards deep study and analysis. Yet contradictions and gaps abound in the ars nova of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries-how do we read this music? how do we perform this music? what was the cultural context of these performances? These problems are well met by the ingenuity of approaches and solutions found by scholars in this volume. The twenty-seven articles brought together reflect the broad methodological and chronological range of scholarly inquiry on the ars nova.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|78 pages
Periodization and Boundaries
chapter 1|18 pages
Novelty and Renewal in Italy, 1300-1600
chapter 2|16 pages
Ars Nova and Stil Novo
chapter 3|29 pages
Magister Egardus and Other Italo-Fiemish Contacts
chapter 4|14 pages
Problems of Dating in Ars Nova and Ars Subtilior
part II|30 pages
Sources
chapter 5|28 pages
The Ars Nova Fragments of Gent
part III|30 pages
Music Theory
chapter 6|28 pages
A Phantom Treatise of the Fourteenth Century? The Ars nova
part IV|78 pages
Composers
chapter 7|18 pages
Francesco Landini and the Florentine Cultural Élite
chapter 9|18 pages
Further Notes on Magister Antonius Dictus Zacharias de Teramo
chapter 10|24 pages
Musicology, Archives and Historiography
part V|73 pages
Literary Studies
chapter 11|14 pages
"Un leggiadretto velo" ed altre cose petrarchesche
chapter 13|10 pages
On Text Forms from Ciconia to Dufay
chapter 14|14 pages
Leonardo Giustinian and Quattrocento Polyphonic Song
part VI|112 pages
Secular Song
chapter 15|24 pages
New Glimpses of an Unwritten Tradition
chapter 16|12 pages
Improvisation in the Madrigals of the Rossi Codex
chapter 18|34 pages
Machaut's Balades with Four Voices
chapter 19|18 pages
Playing the Citation Game in the Late 14th-Century Chanson
part VII|40 pages
Sacred Music
chapter 20|16 pages
The Sacred Polyphony of the Italian Trecento
part VIII|98 pages
Motets
chapter 22|34 pages
The Emergence of ars nova
chapter 23|26 pages
Myth and Mythography in the Motets of Philippe de Vitry
chapter 24|22 pages
Imitation in the Ars Nova and Ars Subtilior
chapter 25|14 pages
Deception, Exegesis and Sounding Number in Machaut's Motet 15
part IX|22 pages
Performance Practice