Revisiting 'Aÿ, mare, amice mi care': insights into late medieval music notation

Abstract

It goes without saying that scholarship on late medieval music notation continues unabated. Whether on the interpretation of so-called cut signs in 15th-century manuscripts, the meaning of unusual signs in late 14th-century notation, the use of texts prescribing how the notes are realized, or relationships between a work's musical notation and text, recent studies share an approach that critiques a conventional understanding of notation theory transmitted in medieval music manuals. Musicologists find these manuals - that are no doubt vital to our general understanding - inadequate for shedding light on the more obscure features of notation witnessed in manuscripts from c.1370 to c.1430. This inadequacy is neither a fault of medieval authors nor their society that required simple primers for instructing young (but accomplished) singers in the rudiments of the rhythmic and proportional notation used in polyphony. The source of our disquiet lies instead in the assumption that what interests us also held the attention of a medieval writer on music. Furthermore, no single medieval author could have witnessed the myriad of notational devices developed in the musical style that today's music histories refer to as the Ars Subtilior. This style's notation includes new note shapes, unusual signs for indicating various musical proportions and even different coloured inks, each system of notation often unique to the works of a particular composer. Given the notational licences practised by Ars Subtilior composers and their early 15th-century successors, the rediscovery of a new source containing this repertory further contributes to our appreciation of the individual habitus of composers and their scribes.