of them in musically linked pairs that (unlike such pairs in Western European sources) are entered
consecutively, as actual pairs, in the manuscript.
One pair is unified by more than the usual common mode, meter, tessitura and texture. In addition to
these, there is also a recurrent pan-isorhythmic passage that crops up twice in the Gloria and three times
in the Credo. All the parts go into a threefold talea, jam-packed with syncopations, hemiolas, and hockets
between the triplum and the tenor, that lasts an asymmetrical five tempora, followed by a cauda whose
rhythms also recur on each appearance of the passage. The tenor, which moves more slowly than the other
voices and has a very well-shaped melodic line, is not known to be a cantus firmus, but it may well be a
paraphrase of an indigenous French-Cypriot plainchant. Example 9-24 contains the first occurrence of the
common pan-isorhythmic passage in the Gloria.
Three Gloria-Credo pairs from a manuscript roughly contemporaneous with the Cypriot codex, by a
composer who signed his name “Nicolaus de Radom,” bear witness to the spread of Ars Nova styles and
genres to the northeast as well as the southeast. Radom is a town midway between Kraków and Warsaw
in central Poland, and the manuscripts that contain the works of this Nicolaus (or Mikolaj, as he would
have been christened) were associated with the royal chapel at Kraków, the seat of the joint Polish-
Lithuanian Jagiellonian dynasty, one of the great ruling houses of Europe.
EX. 9-24 Pan-isorhythm in a French-Cypriot Gloria-Credo pair (MS. Torino, f. 32–33, 34–35)