Looking Back over the 'Missa L'Ardant desir': Double Signatures and Unusual Signs in Sources of Fifteenth-Century Music

Abstract

A number of unusual signs appear in the notation of west European polyphonic music in manuscripts from the first seventy-five years of the fifteenth century. Though they resemble mensuration signs, these signs behave as signatures, and are used to indicate proportions and other tempo relationships in music. Beginning with an examination of ‘double signatures’ in the Missa L’Ardant desir from Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cappella Sistina 51, this study identifies earlier examples of rare and unusual signs in fifteenth-century sources. While the superficial resemblance of these signs across sources outwardly suggests a coherent and continuous history of notational meaning, close empirical observation of notational practice instead presents a picture of semantic discontinuity. Many unusual signs are associated with proportional effects in music. It is clear that similar notational devices and proportional effects symbolize radically different ideas in the texts of vocal compositions. This suggests that over time and place these unusual signs differ in their symbolic and therefore cultural associations. This state of epistemic discontinuity requires scholars to reassess any argument proposing the continuation of flamboyant musical styles first observed in the turn of fifteenth-century ars subtilior into the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

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