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[1] Musicologists like me, who study Renaissance music, have usually studied surviving musical scores and documents. We knew that there were unwritten musical traditions, but since we thought we had no access to them, we made little attempt to recover them. Several developments in musicology and music theory have changed all that.[2] First, Rob Wegman published an article (1996) stating that the role of the composer first emerged at the end of the fifteenth century; before that all musicians were "makers" or improvisers. But he did not explain how or what they improvised.[3] Then Jessie Ann Owens (1997) showed that composers did not use scores when they composed Renaissance music. Her evidence-treatises and some of the few surviving autograph manuscripts from the Renaissance-was compelling. But it was hard for most of us to imagine how they actually did it.[4] Peter Schubert pointed out that the term "counterpoint" in Renaissance treatises did not mean written composition: instead it meant improvised polyphony for singers (2002, 503). He started to figure out what musicians could improvise, and how they did it: he taught himself to do it, and taught others, including me.[5] The idea of counterpoint as improvised polyphony is in stark contrast to the standard view of counterpoint, as in Gradus ad Parnassum (Ascent to Parnassus) by Johann Joseph Fux (1966), where counterpoint is presented as the least instinctive, most controlled form of written composition. Centuries of counterpoint students have agonized over every first-species exercise; canons are considered the most difficult, arcane form of composition, which only the most accomplished composers could write.

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