Jason Stoessel
University of New England - Australia, Music, Faculty Member
- Music Paleography, Music Palaeography, Latin Paleography, Early Music, Music, Codicology of medieval manuscripts, and 65 moreCultural History of Music, Johannes Ciconia, Medieval Music Theory, Philosophy of Music, Ars subtilior, Music editing, Ars nova, Medieval Music, French and Italian Poetry, Writer identification (forensic and paleographic), Nicholas of Cusa, Late Middle Ages, Iconography, Musicology, Renaissance Florence, Italian Humanism, Paduan History, Pre-humanism, Padua medieval history, Renaissance Padua, Padua, Marsilius of Padua, Intertextuality, Notation (Music), Guillaume de Machaut, Late medieval and Renaissance music, Symbolism (Art History), Modena A, Jacob de Senleches, Codex Chantilly, Philosophy, Japanese music history, Animal Sounds Medieval, Mensuration Signs, Arnulf of St Ghislain, History, Art History, Cultural History, Medieval History, Digital Humanities, Medieval Studies, Music History, History of the Mongol Empire, Intellectual History, Music Theory, Medieval Literature, Manuscript Studies, Medieval Church History, Liturgy, Manuscripts (Medieval Studies), Paleography, Codicology, Performance Practice, Renaissance music, Gregorian Chant, History Of Emotions, Monasticism, Medieval musicology, Philippe De Vitry, Musical Iconography, Cistercians, Cistercian nuns, middle ages, Benedictine Monasticism, Papacy (Medieval Church History), MIlan under Visconti and Sforza, and Cistercian Studiesedit
- Associate Professor Stoessel is one of Australia's leading historians of music before 1700. His doctoral dissertation... moreAssociate Professor Stoessel is one of Australia's leading historians of music before 1700. His doctoral dissertation was on the music notation and musical culture of fourteenth-century France and Italy, and he has published extensively on various topics within the historical timeframe of 1250–1500. In addition to ongoing research on the emotional community of musicians and humanists in late medieval Padua, he is writing a new history of relations between music and science in early 17th-century Rome, in collaboration with Dr Denis Collins. He is also a computer programmer and digital musicologist who is interested in devising new tools to assist musical analysis and information management in music research.edit
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Myths and stories offer a window onto medieval and early modern musical culture. Far from merely offering material for musical settings, authoritative tales from classical mythology, ancient history and the Bible were treated as... more
Myths and stories offer a window onto medieval and early modern musical culture. Far from merely offering material for musical settings, authoritative tales from classical mythology, ancient history and the Bible were treated as foundations for musical knowledge. Such myths were cited in support of arguments about the uses, effects, morality, and preferred styles of music in sources as diverse as theoretical treatises, defences or critiques of music, art, sermons, educational literature, and books of moral conduct. Newly written literary stories too were believed capable of moral instruction and influence, and were a medium through which ideas about music could be both explored and transmitted. How authors interpreted and weaved together these traditional stories, or created their own, reveals much about changing attitudes across the period.
Looking beyond the well-known figure of Orpheus, this collection explores the myriad stories that shaped not only musical thought, but also its styles, techniques, and practices. Moreover, music itself performed and created knowledge in ways parallels to myth, and worked in tandem with old and new tales to construct social, political, and philosophical views. This relationship was not static, however; as the Enlightenment dawned, the once authoritative gods became comic characters and myth became a medium for ridicule. This collection provides a foundation for exploring myth and story throughout medieval and early modern culture, and facilitating further study into the Enlightenment and beyond.
Looking beyond the well-known figure of Orpheus, this collection explores the myriad stories that shaped not only musical thought, but also its styles, techniques, and practices. Moreover, music itself performed and created knowledge in ways parallels to myth, and worked in tandem with old and new tales to construct social, political, and philosophical views. This relationship was not static, however; as the Enlightenment dawned, the once authoritative gods became comic characters and myth became a medium for ridicule. This collection provides a foundation for exploring myth and story throughout medieval and early modern culture, and facilitating further study into the Enlightenment and beyond.
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Research Interests: Renaissance Studies, Italian Humanism, Josquin des Prez, Baroque Music, Medieval Music, and 11 moreGregorian Chant, Medieval Music Theory, Historiography of Music, Johannes Ciconia, Saxon Court at Dresden, Alessandro Scarlatti, Ludwig Senfl, Adémar De Chabannes, Gui De Saint-Denis, Spanish Liturgical Chant, and Gordon Athol Anderson
Historical listening has long been a topic of interest for musicologists. Yet, little attention has been given to the systematic study of historical listening practices before the common practice era (c. 1700–present). In the first study... more
Historical listening has long been a topic of interest for musicologists. Yet, little attention has been given to the systematic study of historical listening practices before the common practice era (c. 1700–present). In the first study of its kind, this research compared a model of medieval perceptions of “sweetness” based on writings of medieval music theorists with modern day listeners’ aesthetic responses. Responses were collected through two experiments. In an implicit associations experiment, participants were primed with a more or less consonant musical excerpt, then presented with a sweet or bitter target word, or a non-word, on which to make lexical decisions. In the explicit associations experiment, participants were asked to rate on a three-point Likert scale perceived sweetness of short musical excerpts that varied in consonance and sound quality (male, female, organ). The results from these experiments were compared to predictions from a medieval perception model to in...
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There have been several attempts to improve the retrieval of symbolic music information by Optical Music Recognition (OMR) to increase the “searchability” of digital music libraries of early music prints and to facilitate the collection... more
There have been several attempts to improve the retrieval of symbolic music information by Optical Music Recognition (OMR) to increase the “searchability” of digital music libraries of early music prints and to facilitate the collection of data for musicological research. Their success has varied. This report describes a new online OMR system based upon industry-standard platforms to automate the encoding of early 17th-century music prints. Due to our research on composers of canons in early 17th-century Rome, we have used as a test case the early music prints of Paolo Agostini. Agostini was maestro di cappella at St Peter’s Basilica and the most active exponent of advanced contrapuntal techniques, especially canon, in Rome in the 1620s. We developed a digital tool to process images of Agostini’s printed music and to classify 7,092 automatically selected objects according to 38 music symbols using supervised learning with convolutional neural networks (CNN). The resulting system, In...
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Just what does ‘English’ or ‘British’ mean for the music of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Can there be definitions of these term centred on the small but important island off the Atlantic coast of the European mainland, whose... more
Just what does ‘English’ or ‘British’ mean for the music of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Can there be definitions of these term centred on the small but important island off the Atlantic coast of the European mainland, whose identity has been most recently transformed from a rusty former superpower to a cultural and business capital of the world, so-called ‘Cool Britannia’? Even attempts to escape the slippage between the geopolitical entities of England and Britain are prone to disagreements and equivocations. Turning to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the situation was no clearer. The strong admixing of royal French and English bloodlines during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the fact that the English line was descended from a conquering French line and the death of last of the Capetan line of French kings, Charles IV, in 1328 resulted in the longest war (or series of wars) in European history between rival English and French claimants for the French throne, the so-called Hundred Years War. For a time, swathes of continental northwest Europe, even Paris, were English possessions. The consequence was cultural exchange. French kings and princes were hostage-guests, sometimes for many years, of their English victors. Princes brought their musicians from England and even hired continental composers. Add to this the two enormous church councils of the early fifteenth century—the schism-busting Council of Constance (1414–1418) and the conciliar-movement-busting Council of Basel (1431) at which representatives of all ‘nations’ of Europe and beyond were present with their entourages, including musicians—and some of the problems of trying to distinguish English
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In the years before his death, Johannes Ciconia (1370?–1412) set to music several poems penned by the young Venetian humanist Leonardo Giustinian. One of the earliest of these settings is Con lagreme bagnandome el viso. This article... more
In the years before his death, Johannes Ciconia (1370?–1412) set to music several poems penned by the young Venetian humanist Leonardo Giustinian. One of the earliest of these settings is Con lagreme bagnandome el viso. This article proposes that both the poem and its setting by Ciconia operate within the emotional community of early humanists active at Padua in the decades around the year 1400. The public funeral oratory of one of the high-profile humanists active in this community in Padua, Pier Paolo Vergerio, reveals a renewed interest in ancient rhetoric that was instrumental in the development of new modes of self-expression within this emotional community. Different types of musical repetition in Ciconia's setting of Con lagreme serve as musical analogues to rhetorical figures of pathos witnessed in the orations of Vergerio.
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The inner gatherings of the music manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, MS. α.M.5.24 (Mod A II-IV ) contain a tangle of politically-charged songs, mostly in French, referring to the tumultuous Great Schism of the Western Church... more
The inner gatherings of the music manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, MS. α.M.5.24 (Mod A II-IV ) contain a tangle of politically-charged songs, mostly in French, referring to the tumultuous Great Schism of the Western Church (1378–1417) and the prowess of several princes of ascendant Italian states during the same period. Some scholars have connected the repertoire of Mod A II-IV with Petros Filargos, sometime Archbishop of Milan and then the short-lived conciliar pope Alexander V. Yet art-historical evidence now strongly suggests that Mod A II-IV was completed during the pontificate of Alexander’s successor, John XXIII, between September 1410 and March 1411 in Bologna. During the first two years of John’s pontificate the influential and wealthy prince of France, Louis II of Anjou, prosecuted his claim for title of the Kingdom of Naples in Italy, simultaneously supporting John XXIII’s military campaign to reclaim Rome. This article explores a new hypothesis that part of the repe...
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The inner gatherings of the music manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, MS. α.M.5.24 (Mod AII-IV) contain a tangle of politically-charged songs, mostly in French, referring to the tumultuous Great Schism of the Western Church (1378–1417)... more
The inner gatherings of the music manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, MS. α.M.5.24 (Mod AII-IV) contain a tangle of politically-charged songs, mostly in French, referring to the tumultuous Great Schism of the Western Church (1378–1417) and the prowess of several princes of ascendant Italian states during the same period. Some scholars have connected the repertoire of Mod AII-IV with Pétros Fílargos, sometime Archbishop of Milan and then the short-lived conciliar pope Alexander V. Yet art-historical evidence now strongly suggests that Mod AII-IV was completed during the pontificate of Alexander’s successor, John XXIII, between September 1410 and March 1411 in Bologna. During the first two years of John’s pontificate the influential and wealthy prince of France, Louis II of Anjou, prosecuted his claim for title of the Kingdom of Naples in Italy, simultaneously supporting John XXIII’s military campaign to reclaim Rome. This article explores a new hypothesis that part of the repertoire of Mod AII-IV—and possibly the manuscript’s very structure—reflects the presence of the Angevin prince at the court of John XXIII in Bologna in the second half of 1410. It considers how other political threads running through this manuscript render it an unlikely candidate for a source connected with the pro-Visconti Alexander V.
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Petrarch’s description of his ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336 provides a point of departure for exploring the dynamic between the old and new, logic and rhetoric, absolute and relative knowledge, and scholasticism and humanism in writings... more
Petrarch’s description of his ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336 provides a point of departure for exploring the dynamic between the old and new, logic and rhetoric, absolute and relative knowledge, and scholasticism and humanism in writings on music from early fifteenth-century Padua. Early fifteenth-century Padua was a city of contrasts in which two intellectual traditions – one condemned by Petrarch and the other his legacy – ran alongside, and often entangled with, each other: scholasticism and early humanism. The writings on music of Paduan citizens Johannes Ciconia and Prosdocimo de’ Beldomandi afford insights into the reception of these intellectual traditions. Ciconia’s Nova musica embraces the spirit of early humanism by proposing a revolutionary understanding of music as grammar and rhetoric, largely from the perspective of some of the oldest authors of Latin music theory. Prosdocimo’s scholastic approach to musical knowledge nonetheless demonstrates an interest in the aesthetics of listening that emphasises the role of emotion, especially pleasure, in musical experience. Yet, Ciconia alone provides the most forceful exposition of an emotional theory of musical expression that ultimately manifests itself in the music that he composed during the last decade or so of his life in Padua.
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In 1984, John Stinson and Brian Parish developed Scribe, a computer program to encode every meaningful mark on each page of a medieval music manuscript and produce an on-screen representation of these data in both medieval and modern... more
In 1984, John Stinson and Brian Parish developed Scribe, a computer program to encode every meaningful mark on each page of a medieval music manuscript and produce an on-screen representation of these data in both medieval and modern notation. Scribe data have proved essential for creating statistical and comparative analyses, compositional analyses and producing online thematic indices for the Medieval Music Database over a large body of music. Even though the Scribe still functions in cross-platform DOS-emulated computer environments, the growth of Digital Humanities, linked open data and enormous potential for online research collaboration offers a series of opportunities for encoded medieval music notation data. This report details the authors’ efforts since 2013 in converting Scribe’s data into open access data based upon the standard being developed by the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI). When coupled with recent developments in the Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL) project, our new Scribe-based module, known as NeoScribe, offers significant enhancements to the MEI standard that stand to benefit current and future developments in digital musicology.
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Scholars have proposed Milan, Pisa and/or Bologna as possible locations for the copying of the inner gatherings (II–IV) of the manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, [alpha].M.5.24 (Mod A) and have argued that some of the... more
Scholars have proposed Milan, Pisa and/or Bologna as possible locations for the copying of the inner gatherings (II–IV) of the manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, [alpha].M.5.24 (Mod A) and have argued that some of the compositions might have originated in the circle of Archbishop of Milan Pietro Filargo. Yet evidence based on Mod A’s repertory and the scant biographies of its composers is insufficient for determining the manuscript’s origin. To solve this problem, I look at Mod A as a cultural artifact, attributing its illumination to the Master of 1411, an illuminator active in Bologna from 1404 to 1411, or to his assistant, both associated with the manuscript workshop of the Oli- vetan abbey of San Michele in Bosco, on the outskirts of medieval Bologna. The Master of 1411 might have been Giacomo da Padova, an illuminator documented there between 1407 and 1409. Iconographical analysis shows that the illuminator of Mod A possessed considerable knowledge of Paduan culture before the fall of the ruling Carrara family in 1405. This knowledge is apparent in his use of an astrological allusion to Carrara heraldry in his decoration of the song Inperial sedendo. His illumination of a Gloria by Egardus with the figure of Saint Anthony of Padua implies a familiarity with Padua’s musical institutions. Mod A may have been illuminated when the papal entourage of John XXIII visited San Michele in Bosco in the fall of 1410, although further compositions were added after the illuminator had finished his work. This conclusion invites scholars to consider afresh the social context that might have fostered the compilation of the repertory in the inner gatherings of Mod A.
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The aim of the present article is to re-examine the Barberini music theory miscellany now divided between the libraries of the Vatican and the southern Austrian abbey of Sankt Paul im Lavanttal. We take this opportunity to provide a fresh... more
The aim of the present article is to re-examine the Barberini music theory miscellany now divided between the libraries of the Vatican and the southern Austrian abbey of Sankt Paul im Lavanttal. We take this opportunity to provide a fresh appraisal of this unusual manuscript’s codicological, paleographical, musico-theoretic and art-historic features with a view to shedding new light on its origin, date and earliest function. A consideration of the manuscript as a physical object and its study from a multidisciplinary viewpoint has led to a better understanding of all these features. The revised dating we suggest, moreover, allows new insights in the spread of Anglo-French music culture in fourteenth-century Italy.
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A number of fifteenth-century Italian collections of polyphonic song feature at or near their beginning historiated initials showing a bearded figure beating an anvil with two hammers. Sometimes identified as Jubal, Tubalcain or even... more
A number of fifteenth-century Italian collections of polyphonic song feature at or near their beginning historiated initials showing a bearded figure beating an anvil with two hammers. Sometimes identified as Jubal, Tubalcain or even Pythagoras, the literary image of the blacksmith (and, implicitly, his forge) also runs—as Richard Schrader, Elizabeth E. Leach and Michael Long have most recently shown—through music pedagogic and poetic discourse in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In his early seminal article on the iconography of Jubal and his brother Tubalcain, Paul Beichner argues that late medieval literary and artistic sources often confuse the two for the biblical inventor of music. Part of the blame seems to lie centuries earlier with Peter Comestor who conflated the biblical tradition with the Hellenistic story of Pythagoras’ discovery of music’s proportions after hearing a blacksmith at work. No matter who the blacksmith was for different medieval authors or artists, the underlying iconography is pervasive, symbolizing the musical arts in the vernacular vein. Authors have been quick to accept that the association of this harmonious blacksmith with Lady Music by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century illuminators and painters requires no further explanation. This chapter proposes that the association of Lady Music and the musical blacksmith draws upon the medieval iconography of Minerva, especially in the tradition and manuscripts of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris. A fresh understanding of the place of notated songbooks in late medieval musical culture thereby emerges which situates them as objects of musical skill, artistic commerce and learning. The chapter concludes by providing a new reading of Dosso Dossi's Allegory of Music in light of the ongoing cross-fertilisation of iconographical models in the early 16th century.
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Jason Stoessel explores ‘pan-Eurasian cultural and musical relations witnessed during the Mongol age’ (12th–14th centuries): Latin missionaries, particularly mendicant friars, transported Catholic plainsong to the empire of the Khan,... more
Jason Stoessel explores ‘pan-Eurasian cultural and musical relations witnessed during the Mongol age’ (12th–14th centuries): Latin missionaries, particularly mendicant friars, transported Catholic plainsong to the empire of the Khan, discovering alterities in the concepts of voice and song, as documented in their travel accounts and the famous 14th-century Codex Cumanicus, which are analysed to reveal a unique fusion of Central Asian language and Western European song.
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In a seminal publication on computational and comparative musicology, Nicholas Cook argued more than a decade ago that recent developments in computational musicology presented a significant opportunity for disciplinary renewal.... more
In a seminal publication on computational and comparative musicology, Nicholas Cook argued more than a decade ago that recent developments in computational musicology presented a significant opportunity for disciplinary renewal. Musicology, he said, was on the brink of new phase wherein “objective representations of music” could be rapidly and accurately compared and analysed using computers. Cook’s largely retrospective conspectus of what I and others now call digital musicology— following the vogue of digital humanities—might seem prophetical, yet in other ways it cannot be faulted for missing its mark when it came to developments in the following decade. While Cook laid the blame for its delayed advent on the cultural turn in musicology, digital musicology today—which is more a way of enhancing musicological research than a particular approach in its own right—is on the brink of another revolution of sorts that promises to bring diverse disciplinary branches closer together. In a...
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There have been several attempts to improve the retrieval of sym- bolic music information by Optical Music Recognition (OMR) to increase the “searchability” of digital music libraries of early mu- sic prints and to facilitate the... more
There have been several attempts to improve the retrieval of sym- bolic music information by Optical Music Recognition (OMR) to increase the “searchability” of digital music libraries of early mu- sic prints and to facilitate the collection of data for musicological research. Their success has varied. This report describes a new online OMR system based upon industry-standard platforms to automate the encoding of early 17th-century music prints. Due to our research on composers of canons in early 17th-century Rome, we have used as a test case the early music prints of Paolo Agos- tini. Agostini was maestro di cappella at St Peter’s Basilica and the most active exponent of advanced contrapuntal techniques, espe- cially canon, in Rome in the 1620s. We developed a digital tool to process images of Agostini’s printed music and to classify 7,092 automatically selected objects according to 38 music symbols using supervised learning with convolutional neural networks (CNN). The resulting system, IntelliOMR, exhibits up to an average of 99% accuracy for classifying unseen items after 50 training epochs. It has proven effective for rapidly encoding all of Agostini’s works in the Music Encoding Initiative’s XML format for a critical edition and computer-assisted musical analysis. The approach and design of this digital tool offer significant opportunities for enhancing dig- ital library systems and for future research projects investigating digital corpora of early printed music
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The following information is also contained in the attached "ReadMe" text document. This document contains all the necessary information to reproduce the dataset, as well as the dataset itself. Included are: CONFIDENTIAL -... more
The following information is also contained in the attached "ReadMe" text document. This document contains all the necessary information to reproduce the dataset, as well as the dataset itself. Included are: CONFIDENTIAL - Ethics application in original proprietary formant (Word Doc "EthicsFinalApplicationWithConditionsMet.dox") - Ethics application in open format ("CONFIDENTIALEthicsFinalApplicationWithConditionsMet.odt", "CONFIDENTIALEthicsFinalApplicationWithConditionsMet.pdf") - Ethics conditions in original proprietary format (Word doc "CONFIDENTIALEthicsConditions.dox") - Ethics conditions in open format ("CONFIDENTIALEthicsConditions.odt", "EthicsConditions.pdf") - Ethics approval ("EthicsApproval HE18-255.pdf") - Ethics closure form in original proprietary formant (Word Doc "CONFIDENTIALEthicsFinalReportWithConditionsMet_20HE18-233.dox") - Ethics closure in open format ("CONFIDENTI...
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This living web site, devoted to the works of the 15th-century composer Caron, has been made entirely possible by a Grant made available by the Dean of The Faculty of Arts — The University of New England (UNE), Armidale, New South Wales —... more
This living web site, devoted to the works of the 15th-century composer Caron, has been made entirely possible by a Grant made available by the Dean of The Faculty of Arts — The University of New England (UNE), Armidale, New South Wales — Professor Michael Macklin. His faith in and support of this project is fully acknowledged.
In equal measure I acknowledge members of the Armidale Community-based a cappella ensemble — Fiori Musicali — who have so willingly and patiently "lent" their voices for the recording of the acoustic sound samples from which this project's sound files have been produced.
I am fully indebted to Dr Jason Stoessel who through exceptional diligence and attention to detail has worked assiduously to create the sound files for this project. As important is his principal contribution to the setting up this web site.
I am grateful to Mr Lindsay Rowlands for his assistance and valued suggestions as to the processes and workability of this project's site.
I also wish to thank UNE's Academic Unit — UNE Music — for making available its computer hardware and software resources freely available to generate the sound files.
Warmest thanks to the following scholars for their suggestions and contributions: Margaret Bent, Ted Dumitrescu, Sean Gallagher, Barbara Haggh and Peter Wright.
In equal measure I acknowledge members of the Armidale Community-based a cappella ensemble — Fiori Musicali — who have so willingly and patiently "lent" their voices for the recording of the acoustic sound samples from which this project's sound files have been produced.
I am fully indebted to Dr Jason Stoessel who through exceptional diligence and attention to detail has worked assiduously to create the sound files for this project. As important is his principal contribution to the setting up this web site.
I am grateful to Mr Lindsay Rowlands for his assistance and valued suggestions as to the processes and workability of this project's site.
I also wish to thank UNE's Academic Unit — UNE Music — for making available its computer hardware and software resources freely available to generate the sound files.
Warmest thanks to the following scholars for their suggestions and contributions: Margaret Bent, Ted Dumitrescu, Sean Gallagher, Barbara Haggh and Peter Wright.
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The Canons Database was developed by Dr Denis Collins, University of Queensland, and Dr Jason Stoessel, University of New England, as part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP150102135) “Canonic techniques and musical... more
The Canons Database was developed by Dr Denis Collins, University of Queensland, and Dr Jason Stoessel, University of New England, as part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP150102135) “Canonic techniques and musical change, c.1330–c.1530" from 2015 to 2018. Our goal has been to collect and classify every canon that survived in musical sources as late as 1530. Canon is defined here in the broadest sense as a polyphonic structure that results from one or more voices or parts being combined using strict repetition or systematic transformation. The next phase of research consists of expanding the database to include later repertoires. As part of a second ARC Discovery Project from 2018 to 2021 (DP180100680) "The Art and Science of Canon in the Music of Early 17th-Century Rome", the database will classify all canons associated with composers active in Rome during the period c.1580 to c.1650. Feedback and suggestions for areas of future expansion are welcomed. We hope that this website will provide musicians and musicologists with insights into the vibrant and creative processes that informed the composition of canons in early European music.
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Essays in honour of Margaret Bent. The chapters of this book probe the varied functions of citation and allusion in medieval and renaissance musical culture. At its most fundamental level musical culture relied on shared models for... more
Essays in honour of Margaret Bent. The chapters of this book probe the varied functions of citation and allusion in medieval and renaissance musical culture. At its most fundamental level musical culture relied on shared models for musical practice, used by singers and composers as they learned their craft. Several contributors to this volume investigate general models, which often drew on earlier musical works, internalized in the process of composers' own training as singers. In written theoretical musical pedagogy, conversely, citation of ...
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Byzantine neumes led the author to the conclusion that the classification worked out for Latin neumes corresponds exten-sively with the typology of Paleobyzantine signs. As a whole, Rome, according to Floros, took over, with certain... more
Byzantine neumes led the author to the conclusion that the classification worked out for Latin neumes corresponds exten-sively with the typology of Paleobyzantine signs. As a whole, Rome, according to Floros, took over, with certain changes, chant notation from ...
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Publikationsansicht. 52204917. Leach, ed., Machaut's Music (Jason Stoessel) (2005). JasonStoessel. Abstract. Jason Stoessel , University of New England, jason.stoessel@une.edu.au. Details der Publikation. Download,... more
Publikationsansicht. 52204917. Leach, ed., Machaut's Music (Jason Stoessel) (2005). JasonStoessel. Abstract. Jason Stoessel , University of New England, jason.stoessel@une.edu.au. Details der Publikation. Download, http://hdl.handle.net/2022/5996. ...
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Memory's role in processes of cultural production, including intertextuality and citation, has emerged in the last few decades as an prominent area of enquiry in medieval and Renaissance studies, not only in literary studies but also in... more
Memory's role in processes of cultural production, including intertextuality and citation, has emerged in the last few decades as an prominent area of enquiry in medieval and Renaissance studies, not only in literary studies but also in histories of art, music, religion and law.
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Historians have sometimes labelled the music of Antonio Zacara da Teramo 'strange', 'bizarre' and even 'mannerist.' Yet, many of the characteristics of Zacara's music exemplify the composer's extraordinary attention to text setting and a... more
Historians have sometimes labelled the music of Antonio Zacara da Teramo 'strange', 'bizarre' and even 'mannerist.' Yet, many of the characteristics of Zacara's music exemplify the composer's extraordinary attention to text setting and a progressive awareness of his own musical identity. Textual and musical repetition emphasize significant words, establishing a precedent soon embraced by younger contemporary composers like Johannes Ciconia (c.1370-1412). A fondness for compound duple meter, descending chains of melodic thirds, prolonged syncopation, decorative small-note melodic figures and contrasting proportional rhythms are just some of the features that, when brought together, point to Zacara's distinctive musical style.
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Publikationsansicht. 36050774. The captive scribe : the context and culture of scribal and notational process in the music of the ars subtilior (2002). Stoessel, Jason. Abstract. Photocopy. Bibliography : leaves 341-372 (volume 1). 1.... more
Publikationsansicht. 36050774. The captive scribe : the context and culture of scribal and notational process in the music of the ars subtilior (2002). Stoessel, Jason. Abstract. Photocopy. Bibliography : leaves 341-372 (volume 1). 1. Thesis -- 2. Appendices. Details der Publikation ...
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Paper presented at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, Maynooth, Ireland, 5-8 July 2018. Earlier version read at “A Celebration of Music Manuscripts”, University of Sydney, 14–15 June 2018.
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In the early fifteenth century, the author of the Règles de la seconde rhétorique stated that Philippe de Vitry had invented "la manière des motès, et des ballades, et des lais et des simples rondeaux", and "les iiij prolacions, les notes... more
In the early fifteenth century, the author of the Règles de la seconde rhétorique stated that Philippe de Vitry had invented "la manière des motès, et des ballades, et des lais et des simples rondeaux", and "les iiij prolacions, les notes rouges et la nouveleté des proportions". That Vitry created four of the most important musico-poetic genres of the fourteenth century might initially arouse suspicions about this author's veracity, especially given that the named genres have strong poetic and musical precedents in the thirteenth century or earlier. Similarly, one might also ask of the same author: was Vitry responsible for some of the most important and influential innovations of the French ars nova, including the invention of the four prolations, coloration, and (as I will contend) mensuration signs? Other contemporaries believed that Vitry had invented the minim, semiminim and dragma, although two authors were at pains to correct these errors within, or shortly afterward, Vitry's lifetime. Did Vitry's reputation exceed his actual deeds? A source situation in which Vitry's authorship is obscured by the fraught transmissions of his purported teachings, the impossibility of identifying his complete (and probably lacunate) oeuvre of works, and his overblown, post-mortem literary reputation within Petrarchan humanist circles in Italy and Germanic lands, make the task of answering these questions all the more difficult. In this paper, I reexamine the transmission of ars nova music theory and compositions in selected sources from the fourteenth century with a view to providing some observations on how they either obscure or elucidate Vitry's role in ars nova innovation. In doing so, I hope to shine some light upon present-day assumptions regarding musical authorship by shifting agency from the "individual" towards the ongoing and collective participation of musicians and scribes in the musical traditions of the fourteenth century.
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When the composer Johannes Ciconia (c.1370–1412) arrived in Padua in 1401, he found a vibrant community of humanists not only keeping alive the memory of Francesco Petrarch — who had died in 1374 in nearby Arquà — but also actively... more
When the composer Johannes Ciconia (c.1370–1412) arrived in Padua in 1401, he found a vibrant community of humanists not only keeping alive the memory of Francesco Petrarch — who had died in 1374 in nearby Arquà — but also actively reinventing modes of thought and communication based upon ancient models. One of the youngest of them, Pier Paolo Vergerio (the Elder), had almost single handedly resurrected public oratory in the classical style. While less of a classicist, the older Francesco Zabarella was famed for his public speaking and powers of persuasion. Vergerio’s and Zabarella’s speeches often praised Padua, describing her places and scenes using vivid ekphrasis like that which Michael Baxandall identified in the next generation of Florentine humanists. The same imagery occurs in the texts set to music by Johannes Ciconia, texts which — for want of any evidence to the contrary —the composer probably penned himself. It is well known that several of Zabarella's speeches and Ciconia's motets played a role in various ceremonies in Padua, c.1400. In this paper I discuss a further instance of collaboration between Zabarella and Ciconia. What particularly interests me about this partnership between a humanist and musician is the way that the two performative acts of oratory and musical performance not only enunciated place through spoken and sung descriptions, thereby emplacing orators, musicians and listeners, but they also created a privileged space resounding with localised speech and song. Enveloping listeners, oratory and song served to evoke in listeners a sense of communitas or a feeling of societas though shared experience. Oratory and music did this in different ways: here I shall focus on music’s capacities to shape memory, associations and feelings in partnership with poetry. A crucial question remains about where did these performative acts, that evoke feelings of community or sincere friendship, occur, and by what methods might this sound world be reconstructed, even if only to provide greater understanding of the powerful emotional use of music at this early stage in European musical history.
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Through the coincidence of politics, geography, and the pressing need to end the Great Schism and address the Hussite heresy, Europe's princes, prelates and their retinues gathered in 1414 in a small provincial city on the shores of the... more
Through the coincidence of politics, geography, and the pressing need to end the Great Schism and address the Hussite heresy, Europe's princes, prelates and their retinues gathered in 1414 in a small provincial city on the shores of the Bodensee. Music historians have looked upon the Council of Constance as an opportunity for the transfer and transformation of musical culture in Western Europe. Upper estimates put the number of professional musicians present at the council at 1700, although just what music they performed remains contentious. Ulrich von Richenthal describes the popes' singers, the trumpeters of the Earl of Warwick, King Sigismund and the Merchants of Florence, and the English choristers of the Bishops of Lichfield and Norwich. Oswald von Wolkenstein, Pier Paolo Vergerio, Francesco Zabarella and other connoisseurs of music were also present. Yet, apart from some fragments of plainchant, no sources are known to have survived from Constance that might provide direct clues for what was heard during the council. Thus another approach is required. In this paper I examine source evidence from the decades before and after the Council of Constance with a view to identifying continuities, discontinuities and novelty in musical repertoires. Although it is tempting to see Constance as a catalyst for musical change, Upper Rhenish and Austrian sources from the decade or so before Constance already reveal distinct continuities of decades old traditions, sometimes appropriated as contrafacta, to the exclusion of more recent flamboyant musical styles. At the same time, new music in later sources, or sources that were compiled over several decades before and after the council, attests to the presence of northern composers who found employment in the courts of Italian princes and the papal curia in the years immediately after the council. To some extent, the marginalisation of the earlier flamboyant style of music rests upon the political demise of those who patronised it. Yet the re-texting of older songs with both Latin and vernacular texts begs questions about the influence of Hussite Wycliffism, the proselyting of mendicant orders, and ecclesiastical reform (especially in the Benedictine congregations) upon the development of music in the early fifteenth century. I conclude by outlining some of the answers to these questions.
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From the moment of his arrival in early fifteenth-century Padua, the composer and music theorist Johannes Ciconia (c.1385?–1412) was closely connected with a community of humanists and musicians in that city. Eminent double jurist and... more
From the moment of his arrival in early fifteenth-century Padua, the composer and music theorist Johannes Ciconia (c.1385?–1412) was closely connected with a community of humanists and musicians in that city. Eminent double jurist and humanist Francesco Zabarella had sponsored Ciconia's first benefice, and one of the leading humanists of the day, Pier Paolo Vergerio, had been one of his witnesses. Many of Ciconia's compositions from his early years in Padua adopted the tenor of civic humanism, celebrating Padua's leading family and their city in the revived and refashioned classical tradition of viri illustri and urbs egregia. In this respect, the influence upon Ciconia of Vergerio's ideas, most clearly expressed in his De ingenuis moribus et liberalibus adulescentiae studiis (Padua, 1402), is evident. But two events were to change Ciconia's music fundamentally. While the Carraresi still ruled Padua, Ciconia met the young Venetian Leonardo Giustinian, perhaps as a student of Giovanni Conversini, and fell in love with his poetry. The poetry of Giustinian's youth struck a note in Ciconia, and the composer soon set several of the humanist's short poems to music. The crucial transformation of Ciconia's musical style seems to have occurred around the time of the murder of the last lord of Padua, Francesco Il Novello da Carrara, at the hands of Padua's new overlords, the Venetians, in early 1406. Ciconia's approach to Giustinian's lament for Francesco, Con lagreme bagnandome, is unprecedented, marking a marriage of the emotional capabilities of revived ancient rhetoric, of which Vergerio was a major proponent, with music. Emotive words and phrases are emphasized through musical repetition. Plaintive, drooping melodic phrases return again and again, reminding the listener of the sentiments with which they were at first associated. In this paper, I outline the various strategies that Ciconia seems to have assimilated from contemporary humanists for expressing emotion musically in his late songs and motets, especially his musical analogues to rhetorical figures of pathos. I also consider how similar concerns for emotional expressiveness are manifest in the compositions of other singers like Melchior de Brissia also active in Ciconia's Padua.
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Certain polyphonic compositions from the fourteenth century onwards require performers to derive one or more additional contrapuntal lines from an existing notated part. Yet, several of the earliest transmissions of these compositions... more
Certain polyphonic compositions from the fourteenth century onwards require performers to derive one or more additional contrapuntal lines from an existing notated part. Yet, several of the earliest transmissions of these compositions from north of the Alps c.1350–c.1380 often lack explicit textual or notational prompts denoting the very existence and musical relationship of these canonic parts. This paper demonstrates how knowledge of canonic techniques might assist musicians to recognise the canonic potential of a part. Using computer-assisted analysis, I reveal how principles of canonic composition—such as voice exchange and contrapuntal ostinatos—serve as implicit cues to the canonic nature of some melodic lines. At the same time, these findings shed light on the role of canonic techniques in quotidian musical practice and creativity in the late middle ages.
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Physical and scribal evidence shows that Louise Hanson-Dyer Music Library manuscript 244 (LHD 244) continued to be used, augmented, and modified by its various owners from the late fifteenth century until around the year 1600. In this... more
Physical and scribal evidence shows that Louise Hanson-Dyer Music Library manuscript 244 (LHD 244) continued to be used, augmented, and modified by its various owners from the late fifteenth century until around the year 1600. In this paper, I outline scribal and physical evidence that points to the Italian origin of this manuscript of music theory, shows that it was used by Franciscans in the later sixteenth century, and reveals that it was transferred from Franciscans to Southern Italian Austin Friars around the year 1600. Seven or more scribes were responsible for LHD 244’s contents. A scribe using a conservative but somewhat degenerate round gothic script, possibly a member of a religious order, was responsible for its earliest layer. This layer is a collection of music treatises, including two which are ascribed to authors active around 1400 and 1415, with a strong leaning toward the rudiments of plainchant. That the paper used in this layer bears traces of watermarks similar to Italian papers datable to between 1465 and 1481 suggests a retrospective focus, although this is not unusual for this period. The subsequent addition by two different scribes of excerpts from Nicolaus Burtius’s Musices opusculum (first published in Bologna in 1487) and a unique counterpoint treatise describing a pan-consonance contrapuntal style, situates the next two near contemporaneous scribal layers towards the end of the fifteenth century. Further gatherings were added using paper datable to the last decade of the fifteenth century, although several were left blank only to be filled by further scribes whose handwriting and topics date them to the last 20 years of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. Sometime after it was foliated by the penultimate contributor (who was interested in figured bass treatises), LHD 244 lost at least three gatherings or 32 leaves, and was rebound, possibly shortly before Louise Hanson-Dyer purchased it in Rome in 1929.
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At the dawn of the early modern era, humanist, polyglot, singer and music theorist Matthæus Herbenus of Maastricht (1451–1538) composed his unique discourse "On the nature of song and the miraculous voice" (De natura cantus ac miraculis... more
At the dawn of the early modern era, humanist, polyglot, singer and music theorist Matthæus Herbenus of Maastricht (1451–1538) composed his unique discourse "On the nature of song and the miraculous voice" (De natura cantus ac miraculis vocis, 1496). Matthæus discusses at length the angelic, human, animal and even his own voice, all within a discursive framework of rationality inherited from antiquity, revived in the middle ages and tinged with his own brand of cosmopolitan humanism. For Matthæus, the singing human voice can affect fellow rational humans psychosomatically and even sway the souls of savage beasts. Yet Matthæus admits that the vocalisations of animals are not without their own useful effect on humans: the Capitoline geese warned the ancient Romans that the Gauls had breached the citadel, and dogs raise the alert when they perceive an intruder in their master's realm. Matthæus' contemporary, Clément Janequin composed several chansons that feature syllables representing animal vocalisations, including his Le chant des oiseaux and La chasse. The intrusion of nonsense syllables into these songs signals the presence of an established musical genre that obliged singers to sing literally like animals. These grammatically meaningless syllables entreat listeners to construe meaning out of a set of widely known cultural metaphors featuring anthropomorphised animals. Given that church authorities censured singers for an alleged lack of composure in their singing, the challenge for performers of even this secular repertoire must have been (and still is to a certain extent) to maintain a delicate balance between the perceived rational order of human music and beastly noise. How did early modern audiences receive these songs? I propose that Matthæus, when read against recent contributions from historical animal studies, provides a means for understanding how these commixtures of the human and the beastly vocalisations functioned as elaborate cultural conceits arising from a late medieval and early modern Christian worldview.
During the Great Schism of the Western Church (1378–1417) polemical French song texts asserted the claims of rival popes or praised princes who had thrown their support behind a particular pope. French and Italian composers regularly set... more
During the Great Schism of the Western Church (1378–1417) polemical French song texts asserted the claims of rival popes or praised princes who had thrown their support behind a particular pope. French and Italian composers regularly set these texts to the most astounding musical style of the day, the so-called ars subtilior. Understandably, sources that scholars associate with the Council of Constance contain few examples of these divisive political songs. They also lack examples of the ars subtilior style, at least in the register cultivated for these songs. On the face of it, this situation suggests that the Council of Constance fell at a significant juncture in European polyphonic song development that saw the demise of the ars subtilior style and French song as a vehicle for political statement. In this paper I outline some of my most recent thoughts on the role that French-texted songs played in Italian power politics after 1409, particularly in the Angevin struggle over Naples and Baldassare Cossa's play for capturing Rome for the conciliar branch of the Schism. I argue that musical traces of this struggle, as well as a more widely transmitted "international" repertoire of French songs using stylised courtly texts, accompanied singers, like those in the large retinue of Cossa, to the Council of Constance, and can be indeed seen, upon closer inspection, in sources like the Strasbourg manuscript. The ornate political song did not immediately disappear after the Council of Constance, but the patterns of transmission of French-texted repertoire indicate that this genre did not travel well for reasons that will be outlined. I also ask whether prevailing historical narratives have caused scholarship to overlook other surviving early fifteenth-century sources of French-texted songs that might instead be connected with the Council of Constance.
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Abstract: The repetition of text and music in the songs of Johannes Ciconia (c.1370–1412) from the last decade or so of his life has not gone unnoticed in the musicological literature. Nino Pirrotta argued that such repetition marked the... more
Abstract: The repetition of text and music in the songs of Johannes Ciconia (c.1370–1412) from the last decade or so of his life has not gone unnoticed in the musicological literature. Nino Pirrotta argued that such repetition marked the influence of Italian popular song. Conversely, Susanne Clercx stated that it lent an "accent lyrique … pathetique" to Ciconia's songs. David Fallows describes it as Ciconia's "sighing technique". In this paper, I argue that during his last years, Ciconia's compositional technique came under the influence of the cutting-edge humanist culture at Padua. Ciconia must have been part of a thriving community of humanists that included at various times Conversini da Ravenna, Francesco Zabarella, the young Leonardo Giustinian, and Pier Paolo Vergerio. Ciconia's use of repetition in his mature musical works directly parallels ideas that these men appropriated from the ancients in their unprecedented efforts to revive public oratory. These early humanists understood from manuals like the Rhetorica ad Herennium that repetition was just one effective figure of speech that they might use to sway—indeed move—their listeners emotionally, especially when the words themselves had the strong potential for creating an emotional response. Indeed, the use of emotionally suggestive words, gestures, and types of voice, or what William Reddy terms "emotives", is strongly analogous with musical techniques like repetition. Using this approach, I demonstrate clear parallels between the funeral orations of Pier Paolo Vergerio and the music of Ciconia that reveal much about emotive strategies in their respective creations. Such relationships signal Ciconia's place as a musician in the humanist emotional community of early fifteenth-century Padua. I conclude by briefly speculating on how this understanding of Ciconia's music might inform the performance of his music.
Students of late medieval music are familiar with many of the ways in which composers and scribes employed musical notation to symbolise extramusical concepts and ideas. Coloration could signal musical quotations or a play on a sung text.... more
Students of late medieval music are familiar with many of the ways in which composers and scribes employed musical notation to symbolise extramusical concepts and ideas. Coloration could signal musical quotations or a play on a sung text. Unusual note shapes could serve as icons for a particular aesthetic like that of the so-called ars subtilior or, as I have recently proposed, as musical “signatures” by which performers might have identified a composer of an otherwise anonymous work. With geometrically laid out parts (previously dismissed pejoratively as Augenmusik) scribes responded to the texts of some works and composers sought to show how to perform their songs. Yet mensural notation, or more accurately mensural notation’s conceptual framework, also played an important role in shaping late medieval musical structures. Anna Maria Busse Berger argues that Ars nova notes, the mensural system (mensuration, alteration, imperfection and coloration), and proportions provided composers and performers with flexible visual and conceptual tools for creating motets based upon isorhythmic or homographic tenors in mente. In this paper, I look beyond the motet repertoire to examples from the late fourteenth and fifteenth century in which written instructions (canons) or sung texts produced long-term transformations of a real or putative notational archetype. Just as certain music theorists proposed an ontological chain between written notes and their sounding form in the fourteenth century, I argue that the intersection of mensural notation and various transformative processes produced large-scale structural referents to socio-cultural and religious ideas. In particular, I postulate that the Missa L’Ardant desir, which provides one of the earliest and most comprehensive examples of the long-term transformation of a homographic tenor in the polyphonic mass, served as a musical analogue to Nicholas de Cusa’s redemptive theology centred on the incommensurability of humankind’s imperfect comprehension of the infinite and the infinite nature of God’s perfect divinity. Yet further notational symbolism in the Missa L’Ardant desir accentuated not the necessity of Christ’s incarnation for reconciling humankind with an infinite and unknowable God, but the redemptive power of the gift of baptism. In this sense, the Missa L’Ardant desir does not represent a conceptual leap towards modernity but an affirmation of late medieval Christian beliefs through Cusanus’s brilliant theological program.
In 1983 Margaret Manion and John Stinson embarked upon an investigation of early fourteenth-century Dominican liturgical chant manuscripts in Perugia. One of the challenges for Stinson was to assemble a body of data that facilitated the... more
In 1983 Margaret Manion and John Stinson embarked upon an investigation of early fourteenth-century Dominican liturgical chant manuscripts in Perugia. One of the challenges for Stinson was to assemble a body of data that facilitated the computer-assisted study of this music and its notation. At that time, no software was capable of encoding late medieval music notation. The software needed to be memory efficient and able to be used in archives on a "portable" computer. The resulting DOS program Scribe, developed in collaboration with Brian Parish, debuted in 1984 and was marketed from 1988 to musicologists and music departments. Scribe permitted researchers to encode every meaningful mark on each page of a music manuscript and produce an on-screen representation of the music notation in both medieval and modern notation. Stinson designed Scribe to include context sensitive information for the analysis of musical, palaeographical and scribal features in the original notation. By 1990 Stinson and his assistants had encoded a complete annual cycle of liturgical chant and a generous selection of complex 14th-century Italian secular music. Even though Scribe continues to run on computers in an emulated DOS environment, the growth of Digital Humanities, linked open data and online collaboration offers a series of new opportunities for the sharing and re-use of encoded medieval music notation data. For securing Scribe's future in eResearch, we have adopted a new XML-based format: NeoScribeXML. All existing Scribe data has been migrated to NeoScribeXML and an ODD Schema of the format drafted. As part of a global community-driven initiative towards creating libraries of linked open music notation data, we have implemented NeoScribeXML as a module within standard of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), http://music-encoding.org. MEI. MEI's principles closely follow those of the Text Encoding Initiative and provide an open access, well documented and extensible framework suitable for music research. In this paper we argue that NeoScribeXML provides an important extension of the MEI standard for encoding early music notation and for music research. We compare our module, which draws upon more than 30 years of experience in encoding medieval music notation in Scribe and our combined expertise in music palaeography, with the two existing MEI modules which offer incomplete solutions for encoding early music notation. We conclude by outlining NeoScribeXML's role in open access and massively collaborative early music eResearch over the next decade.
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Did late medieval composers use music notation as a form of self-representation? In light of recent literature on late medieval authorial self-representation, I propose that around the year 1400 distinctive note shapes, notation puzzles... more
Did late medieval composers use music notation as a form of self-representation? In light of recent literature on late medieval authorial self-representation, I propose that around the year 1400 distinctive note shapes, notation puzzles or other elements of musical handwriting increasingly served to identify the composer of a musical work, similar to an author, painter or sculptor signing their own work. From this theoretical premiss, music paleographers might begin to explore the notational identity of composers or their scribes. I discuss examples of idiosyncratic notation that, despite their mediation through the pens of anonymous scribes, point towards composers such as Jacob de Senleches, Philipoctus de Caserta and Matheus de Perusio using musical writing as a medium of self-representation, or at the very least, for stamping their identity upon their notated compositions. As an extension of this approach, I select examples of notation wherein the scribe of a particular manuscript has left traces of his own identity upon a musical work's notation. In doing so, I intend to highlight a latent epistemological tension between the composer as scribe and the active copyist.
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Recent discussions of music have argued that medieval discourse often employs representations of animals within an ontological framework that situates rational and articulate humanity in opposition with the irrational and inarticulate... more
Recent discussions of music have argued that medieval discourse often employs representations of animals within an ontological framework that situates rational and articulate humanity in opposition with the irrational and inarticulate world. In this sense, authorities, authors and notable pedagogues like the eleventh-century monk Guido of Arezzo often charged ill-disciplined singers with animalistic attributes largely in a effort to regulate the delivery of the divine liturgy. This paper proposes that at the heart of this discourse lies a process of “othering” musicians and musical acts both within various European contexts but also in relation to external cultures. Moving beyond discussions that have hitherto focused on representations of birds, dogs and she-mules in late medieval music, I examine how representations of domesticated ruminant species such as sheep, goats and oxen occupy a particular niche within the medieval discourse of alterity. In particular, I highlight the relationship of Giovanni da Firenze’s Agnel son bianco with early humanist social programs as articulated by Mattero Palmieri, and conclude by discussing a little known chapter from Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum majus that sheds light on thirteenth-century European attitudes to foreign peoples and cultures.
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Musical laments are found in various guises (planctus, planh, déploration, complainte) throughout the medieval period, although their cultivation in the vernacular from the second half of the fourteenth century marks a new phase in their... more
Musical laments are found in various guises (planctus, planh, déploration, complainte) throughout the medieval period, although their cultivation in the vernacular from the second half of the fourteenth century marks a new phase in their emotive content and the cultivation of voices of mourning that was to remain a feature of European music for the coming centuries. Better known examples like Ockeghem’s Mort tu as navré de ton dart (c.1460) and Josquin’s Nymphes des bois (c.1497/1502) cultivate the public spectacle of mourning through their no less emotive uses of a liturgical cantus firmi from the Mass for the Dead. On the other hand, earlier polyphonic laments like Eustaches Deschamps’s Deploration on the death of Machaut (set to music c.1377 by F. Andrieu) and Christine de Pizan’s Dueil angoisseus, a lament for her dead husband (set to music c.1435 by Binchois), evidence the individual voice of the mourner, even if this relies on conventions observed in a boarder cultural context. In this paper, by way of putting recent theories concerning the writing of the history of emotions into practice, I examine the emotive and musical language of Johannes Ciconia’s setting of Leonardo Giustinian’s Con lagreme bagnandome el viso (c.1406?) within the context of late medieval Padua. In examining this lament on the death of one of the last lords of Padua, I draw upon various contemporary documents including chronicles and funeral orations. In concluding, the writings of Barbara Rosenwein prompt me to ask whether there is a place for a history of musical mourning in the late middle ages.