northern Italy. It is a compendium of music treatises, including one, called Regule de proportionibus
(“Rules of proportions”), that contains dozens of little problem pieces, mainly in two parts, of which so
many are known to be by Tinctoris himself that the assumption is inescapable that so are the rest. Each
one introduces some new difficulty of notation, preparing the way for a three-part monster called
Difficiles alios (translatable in this context as “The hardest ones of all”) that Bonnie J. Blackburn, its
discoverer, wittily describes as “the musical equivalent of a bar examination,” having passed which one
could claim the title of musicus—a fully trained musician.^6
Three of the study-pieces on the way to the exam are textless duos in which one part consists of the
superius of J’ay pris amours—a well-known tune whose familiarity makes it an effective “control”—and
the other consists of a virtuosic counterpoint to it, after the fashion of those blind fiddlers’ teams
described above. The difference, of course, is that Tinctoris’s duo is a proving ground for literate, rather
than “oral” virtuosity—virtuosity not just in singing and playing per se but also in reading and using
complicated notation. The easiest and most straightforward of the three duos is given in Ex. 13-15.
From duos that test and display virtuoso reading skills it is but a step to untexted chanson
arrangements that test and display virtuoso compositional skills—and a familiar step indeed, given the
tradition of competitive compositional tours de force with which we have been acquainted since the
thirteenth century. The one by Henricus Isaac whose beginning is given in Ex. 13-16 a is found in a late
fifteenth-century Florentine manuscript, and must therefore date from the composer’s period of service to
the great Florentine Duke Lorenzo de’ Medici (“il Magnifico”). The original treble is preserved against a
new and very florid tenor that may represent the type of brisk and airy counterpoint with which the
itinerant Flemish fiddlers used to wow their audiences. The compositional tour de force, however, is in
the contratenor, which Isaac has fashioned entirely out of repetitions and transpositions of the opening
devise, the memorable five-note motto that distinguished the original tune.
EX. 13-15 Instrumental duo on J’ay pris amours