Composition, Printing and Performance

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 ’successive’ and ’simultaneous’ composition is reconsidered. Tinctoris's sometimes sharp rebukes to famous composers are a