Music and Music Theory in the Universities of Central Europe during the Fifteenth Century

One common view of the place of music in the universities during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries holds that, despite the musical skills shown by a significant number of students and graduates, the extent of institutionally required musical study was lectures on the De institutione musica of Boethius or on one of the commentaries on it, generally the Musica speculativa of Johannes de Muris. The principal implication of this view is that music as a university subject had little or no relationship to the practice of music, but was largely arithmetical speculation. Specific aspects of the place of music in one of the universities of central Europe can be discovered through an investigation of the materials left behind by an important member of the university communities in Leipzig and Greifswald during the second half of the fifteenth century, Johannes Klein of Lobau. The chapter provides the biography of Klein.