Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

The interesting historical question is where this sudden new style could have come from. It did not
rise up like the frottola from subterranean improvisatory depths; it wasn’t there all along in oral tradition,
so far as we can tell. It really was a new invention. Hypotheses about its origins include the impact of
Italian musicians who were welcomed at the French court following King Francis’s conquest of Milan in
1515 (this would reinstate the frottola as a stimulus on the chanson). Another guess is that court
musicians, possibly spurred by the King’s taste, began to copy the style of urban popular music (this