Music Theory in Late Medieval Avignon

Magister Johannes Pipardi

Karen M. Cook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000398809
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The manuscript Seville, Biblioteca Colombina y Capitular 5-2-25, a composite of dozens of theoretical treatises, is one of the primary witnesses to late medieval music theory. Its numerous copies of significant texts have been the focus of substantial scholarly attention to date, but the shorter, unattributed, or fragmentary works have not yet received the same scrutiny. In this monograph, Cook demonstrates that a small group of such works, linked to the otherwise unknown Magister Johannes Pipudi, is in fact much more noteworthy than previous scholarship has observed. The not one but two copies of De arte cantus are in fact one of the earliest known sources for the Libellus cantus mensurabilis, purportedly by Jean des Murs and the most widely copied music theory treatise of its day, while Regulae contrapunctus, Nota quod novem sunt species contrapunctus, and a concluding set of notes in Catalan are early witnesses to the popular Ars contrapuncti treatises also attributed to des Murs. Disclosing newly discovered biographical information, it is revealed that Pipudi is most likely one Johannes Pipardi, familiar to Cardinal Jean de Blauzac, Vicar-General of Avignon. Cook provides the first biographical assessment for him and shows that late fourteenth-century Avignon was a plausible chronological and geographical milieu for the Seville treatises, hinting provocatively at a possible route of transmission for the Libellus from Paris to Italy. The monograph concludes with new transcriptions and the first English translations of the treatises.

1 The Seville Manuscript

In 1927, Higini Anglès published an overview of extant medieval music manuscripts in his native Spain.¹ Included in his list was a composite manuscript that he described as containing around thirty fourteenth- and fifteenth-century theoretical treatises in various stages of completion, most if not all of which were Italian in origin. These treatises were collected during the sixteenth-century travels of Hernando Colón (1488–1539), son of Cristóbal Colón. A well-known scholar, Colón accumulated a massive library housed in Seville, which would eventually include his famous father’s collections after his death in 1506.

Colón’s desire was to have his library maintained and expanded in perpetuity, but its ownership was contested after his own death in 1539. After years of dispute, the library, along with Colón’s detailed catalog of its contents, was finally donated in 1552 to the Cathedral of Seville. Despite the library’s vast reduction in size—the donated materials were well under half of Colón’s original collection—these theoretical treatises were among those preserved in the new Biblioteca Colombina. While Colón’s catalog contained intricate details about the contents, provenance, and purchasing price of each of his library’s items, the treatises comprising this manuscript unfortunately do not appear to have been documented.² They were only bound together in their present form by librarian Juan de Loiasa in the later seventeenth century. Today the composite manuscript, consisting of 138 parchment and paper folios and still bound in de Loiasa’s original parchment covers, bears the shelf mark 5-2-25.³

1 Higini Anglès, “Die Mehrstimmige Musik in Spanien vor dem 15. Jahrhundert,” in Beethoven-Zentenarfeier vom 26. bis 31. März 1927, ed. Michael Hainisch (Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1927), 158–163. Seville 5-2-25 had been described previously in 1877 by Juan Facundo Riaño under its old cataloguing number: Z, 135, 32, wherein he listed only nine of the theoretical works and none of the musical compositions in the manuscript; see Riaño, Critical & Bibliographical Notes on Early Spanish Music (London: B. Quaritch, 1887), 67.

2 Anglès stated that these treatises were of an accord with Colón’s item 1139 in his Regestrum. However, F. Alberto Gallo cites Dragan Plamenac as observing that that number refers to a printed book, not a collection of handwritten documents. F. Alberto Gallo, “Alcune Fonti Poco Note di Musica Teorica e Pratica,” in L’Ars Nova Italiana del Trecento: Convegni di Studio 1961–67 (Certaldo: Centro di studi sull’Ars nova italiana del Trecento, 1961–1968), 49–76; Dragan Plamenac, “‘Excerpta Colombiniana’: Items of Musical Interest in Fernando Colón’s ‘Regestrum’,” in Miscelánea en Homenaje a Monseñor Higinio Anglés, Vol. II (Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1958–1961), 663–688. Archer M. Huntington’s facsimile reprint of the Regestrum (1905) is digitally available at https://archive.org/details/CatalogueOfTheLibraryOfFerdinandCo. For more on Hernando Colón’s library, see Edward Wilson-Lee, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library (New York: Scribner, 2019). Recently, Colón’s lost library catalog, the Libro de los Epítomes, was rediscovered in Copenhagen; hopefully, the forthcoming transcription and translation of the catalog by Wilson-Lee and José María Pérez Fernández (Yale University Press, expected 2021) will reveal new details about the works comprising the Seville manuscript discussed here.

3 The folios have been numbered 1–138 in a later hand, possibly that of de Loaisa; however, other foliation, perhaps original, does remain visible in some places. Also see the information on the manuscript on the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM): https://www.diamm.ac.uk/sources/70/#/

Since Anglès’s initial publication, the significance of the manuscript as a primary witness to late medieval music and theory has been widely recognized. In a later publication highlighting the musical sources preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina, Anglès referred to it again as a “precious collection of musical theory of the Middle Ages.”⁴ He also clarified his original assessment of the manuscript’s contents: it now comprised approximately thirty-one treatises, many fragmentary, some of which originated as early as the thirteenth century. Anglès isolated three brief contiguous works on folios 99–108v as being of particular interest: a treatise he calls De arte cantus, a treatise containing some rules of counterpoint, and a shorter, less formal work written in a mix of Latin and Catalan in the same hand as the previous two works.⁵ The first two treatises, he noted, were authored by the otherwise unknown theorist “Johannes Pipudi, canonicus Sancti Desiderii Avionensis [sic].”

Several decades later, F. Alberto Gallo revisited Anglès’s work on Sev, narrowing the dates of the manuscript’s contents once more to the mid-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and expanding the list of treatises from thirty-one to forty-seven.⁶ In an accompanying index, he also identified nine musical works, some of which are fragmentary as well. Gallo divided the treatises into three broad categories. The first and largest of these deals primarily with musica plana, and several treatises in this category draw on the Lucidarium by Marchetto of Padua or the Introductio musice by Johannes de Garlandia.⁷ The second group, again largely anonymous, treats the basics of organum, discantus, and contrapunctus. The last group considers mensural music and includes the treatise Omni desideranti notitiam, three different versions of the Tractatus figurarum, and no fewer than six different witnesses to the treatise commonly known as the Libellus cantus mensurabilis, often attributed to Jean des Murs.⁸ Among them, Gallo included Pipudi’s De arte cantus, which he labeled in his inventory by its incipit as item XXXV: “[P]ro introducione cognicionis habende de valloribus notularum.”

4 Anglès, “La música conservada en la Biblioteca Colombina y en la Catedral de Sevilla,” Anuario musical 2 (1947): 3–39 at p. 8.

5 Ibid.

6 Gallo, “Alcune Fonti …”

7 Jan W. Herlinger, The Lucidarium of Marchetto of Padua (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Nigel Gwee, “De plana musica and Introductio musice: A Critical Edition and Translation, with Commentary, of Two Treatises Attributed to Johannes de Garlandia” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 1996).

8 The Libellus cantus mensurabilis is also known as the Ars practica mensurabilis cantus secundum Johannem de Muris. For more information on the choice of title for this treatise, see Daniel S. Katz, “The Earliest Sources for the Libellus cantus mensurabilis secundum Johannem de Muris” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1989). See also F. Alberto Gallo, La Teoria della notazione in Italia dalla fine del XIII all’inizio del XV secolo (Bologna: Tamari, 1966), 79 fn. 151.

Gallo’s revised approach to Sev laid the groundwork for many later studies focused on the larger or attributed works. Giuliano Di Bacco’s investigation of the Tractatus figurarum, for example, led him to provisionally revise the manuscript’s inventory, and he identifies thirteen distinct units based on codicological and paleographical evidence (see Table 1).⁹ Michael Scott Cuthbert clarified this inventory even further in a study of the musical compositions interspersed throughout the manuscript.¹⁰ The smaller, fragmentary, anonymous theoretical works that comprise the bulk of Sev, however, have received much less attention.¹¹

9 Giuliano Di Bacco, “Original and Borrowed …,” 354–355.

10 Michael Scott Cuthbert, “Palimpsests, Sketches, and Extracts: The Organization and Compositions of Seville 5-2-25,” in L’Ars Nova Italiana del Trecento VII. Dolce e Nuove Note: Atti del quinto convegno internazionale in ricordo di Federico Ghisi (1901–1975), Certaldo, 17–18 Dicembre 2005, ed. Agostino Ziino (Lucca: Libreria musicale italiana, 2009), 57–78.

11 One exception to this generality was made by Di Bacco, who pointed out that both the Regule contrapuncti attributed to Philippotus de Caserta and an anonymous treatise on counterpoint found on folios 110r–v are derived from Cum notum sit, the second part of the Ars contrapuncti conglomerate often attributed to Jean des Murs. See Di Bacco, De Muris e Gli Altri: Sulla Tradizione di un Trattato Trecentesco di Contrappunto (Lucca: Libreria musicale italiana, 2001); also Nigel Wilkins, “Some Notes on Philipoctus de Caserta (c.1360?–c.1435),” Nottingham Mediaeval Studies 8 (1964): 82–99 and Ryan Taycher, “De Fundamento Discanti: Structure and Elaboration in Fourteenth-Century Diminished Counterpoint” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2019). For more on these works, see Chapter 3.

Anglès and Gallo both singled out the fascicle comprising folios 99–108v as significant.¹² Because ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Manuscript Sigla and Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1 The Seville Manuscript
• 2 The Practical Art of Measured Song
• 3 The Rules of Counterpoint
• 4 Introducing Johannes Pipardi
• Epilogue
• Appendices
• Works cited
• Index