EGIDIUS DE MURINO; JACOB DE SENLECHES; MATHEUS DE SANCTO
JOHANNE; PHILIPPUS DE CASERTA; TAPISSIER, JOHANNES]
Apel, Willi, ed. French Secular Compositions of the Fourteenth Century. 3 vols. N.p.: American
Institute of Musicology, 1970–72.
Basso, Alberto, ed. Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti. 13 vols.
Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1983–90.
Greene, Gordon, ed. French Secular Music. 5 vols. Monaco: Oiseau-Lyre, 1981–89.
Hirshberg, Jehoash. The Music of the Late Fourteenth Century: A Study in Musical Style. Diss.
University of Pennsylvania, 1971; Ann Arbor: UMI, 1971.
Sadie, Stanley, ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 20 vols. London:
Macmillan, 1980.
Tomasello, Andrew. Music and Ritual at Papal Avignon, 1309–1403. Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1983.
COMPOSERS, MINOR (15TH
CENTURY)
. Around 200 15th-century composers are known from musical manuscripts across
Europe. Over two-thirds of them are French or Franco-Flemish, reflecting the fact that
this was an age in which the Franco-Flemish school dominated music in all European
countries except England. But it is also a century in which musical manuscripts from
France and modem Belgium are in disastrously short supply, as can be seen from the
survey of source origins in Vol. 5 of the Illinois Census-Catalogue; a vast majority of the
surviving sources are from Italy or from eastern countries.
It is also a century in which the composer’s name was only intermittently valued.
Many musical sources never name a composer: there is no name among the forty-three
works of the Chansonnier Cordiforme (Savoy, 1470s), the fifty-six in the Wolfenbüttel
chansonnier (Loire Valley, 1460s), or the thirty-three of the Copenhagen chansonnier
(Loire Valley, 1470s), to take only three of the most famous manuscripts. Turning to
some of the largest manuscripts, we find only three names among the 240 pieces in Trent
91 (northern Italy, 1470s), and the few names among the 106 pieces in the Laborde
chansonnier (Loire Valley, mainly 1470s) are nearly all added later.
The names of several important composers survive in only a single manuscript.
Without the manuscript Q15 (1420s–30s) in the Bologna conservatory, we would know
nothing of Johannes de Lymburgia, whose three dozen works evidently had a wide
influence, and we would know little of the early sacred work of the leading composer of
the time, Guillaume Dufay. Without MS. Canon. Misc. 213 of the Bodleian Library, we
would lose the names of over twenty early 15th-century composers and have little idea of
the achievement of such major figures as Pierre Fontaine, Nicolas Grenon, Jacobus Vide,
Richard Loqueville, and Gilet Velut, not to mention Carmen, Tapissier, and Cesaris, later
praised by Martin le Franc as the leading composers in Paris ca. 1400. Without that
manuscript, we also would have lost most of the early secular work of both Dufay and
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