One of the most extensive repertories of Renaissance sacred music to have come down to us was written for the Cathedral of Treviso. An Allied raid over the city on 7 April 1944 resulted in the destruction of 25 manuscripts of polyphonic music written prior to 1630. In this book, Bonnie Blackburn reconstructs the inventories of two of these lost manuscripts: MS29 and MS30, and explains their puzzling repertory.

The first articles here focus on Johannes Tinctoris, the prominent late 15th-century music theorist. They deal with the discovery of his lost pedagogical motet, and his treatise on counterpoint; this forms the basis of a wide-ranging investigation of contemporary practices of improvisation and composition (singing super librum and writing res facta), in which the question of a successivea and a simultaneousa composition is reconsidered. Tinctoris's sometimes sharp rebukes to famous composers are also investigated in the context of works by Ockeghem. Ottaviano Petrucci's first publication of...

Eroticism in Early Modern Music contributes to a small but significant literature on music, sexuality, and sex in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Its chapters have grown from a long dialogue between a group of scholars, who employ a variety of different approaches to the repertoire: musical and visual analysis; archival and cultural history; gender studies; philology; and performance. By confronting musical, literary, and visual sources with historically situated analyses, the book shows how erotic life and sensibilities were encoded in musical works. Eroticism in Early Modern...