CHAPTER 12

Emblems and Dynasties

THE CYCLIC MASS ORDINARY SETTING

THE INTERNATIONALISM OF THE UPPER CRUST

Johannes Tinctoris (ca. 1435–1511), a minor composer but a theorist of encyclopedic ambition, can be

our very capable guide to the music of his time, the mid- to late fifteenth century. His twelve treatises,
covering the properties and powers of music, the qualities of the modes, notation, counterpoint, form,
mensural practice, terminology, and even (in his last work, called De inventione et usu musicae) what
might be called musical sociology, attempt collectively to encompass all of contemporary music, its
practices and its products alike. They are liberally illustrated with extracts not only from the works of
ancient authorities but from the works of the leading composers of Tinctoris’s own generation—the
musical literati who staffed the principal courts and churches of Latin Christendom at the time of his
writing.

Tinctoris, the theorist’s Latin professional name, means “dyer.” He was born near Nivelles (Nijvel in
Flemish), a town in present-day Belgium, and attended the University of Orléans as a member of the
“German nation” or non-French constituency there. No one knows today what his native language was or
what his original surname may have been: in French it would have been Teinturier, in Dutch or Flemish de
Vaerwere, in German Färbers. Around 1472, after a stint teaching the choirboys at Chartres Cathedral
near Paris, and singing under Du Fay at the Cathedral of Cambrai, he entered the service of Ferdinand
(Ferrante) I, the Aragonese (that is, Spanish) ruler of the kingdom of Naples in southern Italy, and seems
to have remained in Naples until his retirement, if not his death.

Tinctoris’s international, polyglot career, and in particular its southward trajectory from the Low
Countries to Italy, were characteristic, even paradigmatic, for his time. The old Frankish territories were
still the chief seats of musical learning, but the nouveau riche Italian courts, avidly competing with one
another for the most brilliant artistic personnel, were becoming the great magnets for musical talent. Even
after impregnation by the English, the basic technique of music remained French; but once the northerners
began invading the south, it became impossible to tell by style where a piece of written continental music
had been composed. Europe, musically, seemed one.

But this apparent musical unity should not be read as an indicator of cultural or social unity. Literate
musicians, it is time once again to recall, served a tiny clientele of aristocrats and ecclesiastics. These
elite classes did indeed identify with their counterparts throughout the length and breadth of Europe, but at
less exalted social levels, Europe, musically and in every other way, was far from one. The minority
culture of the literate cannot yet be taken as representative of society as a whole. It was just the surface
cream—if a less complimentary analogy is desired, call it an oil slick—that only seems homogenized
from our bleary historical distance. Owing to the nature of our sources of evidence, the surface slick tends
to hide the rest from view; and unless we are careful to remind ourselves, we can easily forget that the
vast majority of Europeans in the fifteenth century lived out their lives in complete ignorance of the music
we are about to investigate.