FIG. 10-3 Giovanni da Cascia, from the Squarcialupi Codex.
Jacopo of Bologna, universally recognized as the leading composer of his generation, came from the
most venerable of all the Italian university towns. (The University of Bologna, founded in 1088, grew out
of a school of Roman law that went all the way back to the fifth century CE.) The fact that Jacopo, in
addition to his poems and songs, wrote a treatise on discant suggests that he may have actually been a
university teacher. Bologna’s only rival for academic eminence was Padua, site of Italy’s second oldest
university, founded in 1222 by refugees who had fled Bologna in the course of the long struggle between
papal and imperial power known as the War of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. And thus it is probably no
coincidence that the basic treatise on the theory and notation of trecento music was the work of a Paduan
musician.
Marchetto of Padua (d. 1326) acknowledged the assistance of a Dominican monk, Syphans de Ferrara,
in organizing his treatise, called Pomerium—“The Fruit Tree,” containing the flores et fructus, the
“flowers and fruits” of the art of mensural music—along scholastic lines. It is not clear whether
Marchetto actually invented the notational system he expounded in this text completed in 1319 or just
systematized it. Although he himself was a cathedral musician (his three surviving compositions are all
motets, two of them Marian), his notational system was appropriated almost exclusively by the
madrigalists and their thoroughly secular successors, which again implies dissemination through “liberal
arts” rather than ecclesiastical channels.
The differences between the Italian and the French systems of notation, and they were considerable,
may be explained by viewing the ArsNovaasa direct outgrowth of the “Franconian” notation of the
thirteenth century, while the trecento system continued and refined the somewhat offbeat “Petronian”
tradition—the tradition of Pierre de la Croix, the composer of those late thirteenth-century motets (like
Ex. 7-10) that divided the breve into freely varying groups (or gruppetti, as we now call such things) of
semibreves.