© 2018 by the Regents of the University of California/Sponsoring Society or Association.
Published as Emily Zazulia, "Composing in Theory: Busnoys, Tinctoris, and the L'homme armé Tradition," Journal of the American Musicological Society 71 (2018): 1–73. In doing so, mere “composers” could sometimes achieve significance as “theorists.” Taken together, the L'homme armé masses of Busnoys and Tinctoris raise a range of historiographical issues that invite us to reassess the figure of the “theorist-composer.” This article thus not only contributes to the discourse on musical borrowing but also opens out to a broader framework, asking what it means for a late medieval musician to theorize-in music as well as in prose. Tinctoris's and Busnoys's settings need to be understood in the context of fifteenth-century masses, one in which composers were not necessarily content to work within the system but invented new ways of writing in order to create new sounds. He echoes Busnoys's mass notationally, in that he treats it as an example of what not to do his response is also deeply musical, in that he tackles similar technical problems as a means of achieving analogous contrapuntal effects. Tinctoris the composer responds far more comprehensively, and at times with far greater sympathy for Busnoys's practice, in his own Missa L'homme armé.
In this article I argue that Tinctoris's response to Busnoys is not limited to the criticisms in his theoretical treatises. And yet Busnoys's notational choices, while certainly idiosyncratic, are also arguably justifiable: the composer was merely finding ways of recording novel musical ideas that had no agreed-upon notational solutions. As several scathing passages in his Proportionale musices attest, Tinctoris abhors Busnoys's mensural innovations. On this premise it is possible to use mensuration signs to show tempo relations between sections: after will indicate that three semibreves are performed in the place of two semibreves.Īntoine Busnoys's Missa L'homme armé commits one notational error after another-at least according to Johannes Tinctoris. For Giovanni Spataro and other theorists (and for the great majority of composers in the second half of the fifteenth century), it is the breve that is equal in perfect and imperfect mensuration, and the minim in perfect tempus is shorter than the minim in imperfect tempus. The consequence of this doctrine is that proportions can only be shown by fractions, comparing the number of minims or semibreves (or breves) in the new mensuration with the number in the old, and the note value compared is dependent on the mensuration. For Tinctoris and Gaffurius the breve in perfect mensuration is longer than one in imperfect mensuration because the former comprises six minims but the latter only four. This has implications for tempo relations when the mensuration changes within a piece. For these theorists, the minim retains the same temporal value whether the mensuration is perfect or imperfect. Moreover, the sesquialtera relationship depends on the mensuration under which it falls. In rejecting '3' as a sign for sesquialtera, Petrus Castellanus was adhering to the views of Johannes Tinctoris and Franchinus Gaffurius, who held that a single figure cannot logically be used to describe a proportion, nor does it specify which note value is involved. Alternatively, coloration can be used to indicate sesquialtera Josquin, for example, is fond of coloration in one voice part, the sign '3' in another: this is purely an aesthetic choice, as there is no difference in performance.
The sign most composers favour is a single '3', although 3 can also be found. 1 In every manuscript source I examined that dates from before 1501 all compositions that have a concordance in Petrucci publications use a different sign for sesquialtera, with the notable exception of the works of two composers, Busnoys and Obrecht. After surveying how sesquialtera was indicated in prints and manuscripts of about 1480 to 1520, I came to the conclusion that the sign had been imposed by Petrucci's editor, Petrus Castellanus. At the Petrucci conference in Venice in 2001 I reported on an unusual sign for sesquialtera,, that I had seen far more often in Petrucci's prints than in contemporary manuscripts. What's in a sign? Sometimes more than its primary meaning.
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