On 20 February 1469, the cathedral canons of Lucca appeared before the general council of their city to plead on behalf of their choirmaster of less than two years, John Hothby. Warning that this Englishman and Carmelite friar might accept a more lucrative post elsewhere, they asked the council to supplement his salary provided by themselves and the local nobleman, Nicolao da Noceto. Such support, they assured, would guarantee Hothby’s continued residence in Lucca and thus his cultivation of ‘so many talented students in music and in the practice of it that he will not only be useful to the clergy but also the highest consolation and praise to the entire people’. Their predictions had the desired effect, as the council granted the choirmaster a monthly stipend of 2 ducats.

Johannes de Grocheio is best known today primarily for the fact that he wrote about secular monophony, a subject practically ignored by previous music writers. In Grocheio’s only surviving treatise, which modern scholarship has christened De musica (it is actually untitled in the manuscripts), he provides an unparalleled witness to Parisian musical life around 1300 through a wide-ranging classification of musical performances. The treatise’s tantalisingly realistic observations have been by far the most discussed aspect of De musica in over a century of modern scholarship ranging from an early landmark critical edition to recent postmodern readings. However, for those intent on discovering thirteenth-century performance practice, Grocheio has been as much a musicological frustration as a delight. The most egregious problem is that he appears not to describe some of his musical examples accurately. What has been lost in a great deal of this discussion is the extent to which Grocheio’s unique perspective shapes his discussion of music.

The twelve extant treatises of Johannes Tinctoris offer a wealth of insight into almost every aspect of fifteenth-century music theory. A graduate of the University of Orléans and a doctor of canon and civil law, Tinctoris was an expert in both the language arts of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and the mathematical arts of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). Such was his erudition that he was extolled by Johannes Trithemius, one of the leading German humanists of the fifteenth century, as ‘a man very learned in all respects, an outstanding mathematician, a musician of the highest rank, of a keen mind, skilled in eloquence’. Given Tinctoris’s towering intellect, it is no surprise that frequent citations from many of the major thinkers of antiquity – Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, Virgil, Cicero and Quintilian – appear in his theoretical discussions on mode, mensural notation and counterpoint.

On 15 June 1442, Frederick, the Habsburg Duke of Austria soon to be crowned King of the Romans, entered the city of Aachen amidst a notably diverse and sonorous cortège:

Through Patrick Macey’s extensive research on Josquin des Prez’s Miserere mei Deus, the historical context of this monumental motet, especially its connection with the Savonarolan reform movement and its repercussions at the Este court of Ferrara, has received major attention. Above all, Macey has shown how this piece generated a whole cluster of compositions throughout the sixteenth century that bear musical, structural and/or textual references to Josquin’s work. One of the main elements of this intertextual web includes the use of Josquin’s soggetto ostinato – either literally or with slight variations – by composers such as Adrian Willaert, Cipriano de Rore and Nicola Vicentino, who were all connected with the Este court at a certain point in their careers. Macey’s discoveries have brought to light a highly intriguing reception history, to which other scholars have also contributed. In the present essay, I wish to add yet another piece of evidence to the afterlife of this Miserere tradition. I will focus on two lesser-known motets by Gioseffo Zarlino, Miserere mei Deus and Misereris omnium, both of which were published in his collection Modulationes sex vocum (Venice, 1566) (see Figure 1). Not only did they inscribe themselves in the intertextual network that was initiated by Josquin, but also they can be linked to the Ferrarese court in general and to Duke Alfonso II in particular.

Mention sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch vocal music and the knowledgeable music lover usually thinks immediately of the brilliant polyphonic creations of famous Flemish masters like Josquin des Prez, Adrian Willaert and Orlande de Lassus. And they did indeed write compositions that still appeal to the imagination. Take Josquin’s polyphonic, chirping El Grillo, a relatively simple but effective piece that can entice even the most a-musical twenty-first-century student into the world of the Renaissance. Those familiar with the Baroque will recall Jan Pietersz Sweelinck, the organist of the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam and a composer of bewitching instrumental and vocal music, including his four books of polyphonic Pseaumes de David (1604–21) to the texts of Clément Marot and Theodore Bèze, which are still being performed regularly. Perhaps, too, the French, Latin and Italian arias by Constantijn Huygens from his Pathodia sacra et profana (1647). But it is then that the singing seems to stop in the Low Countries. The names of the composers, at least, are barely known beyond our borders.