Beyond the standard and familiar theoretical instruction materials on notation and mensuration, on mode and hexachord, and on the rules of two-part counterpoint, information and insight about the techniques of musical composition in the later Middle Ages are hard to come by. From a modern vantage point, medieval music theory leaves many of the questions most interesting to us unanswered. And for our part, too, analysts of chansons and motets have yet to agree on many basic notions about how this music works, and therefore what is most necessary to talk about. It is symptomatic of this state of affairs that articles discussing analytical approaches to early music, even those addressed to specialists, do not start out in medias res but rather must begin with first principles, and that current textbooks ignore or skimp on all but the most superficial aspects of musical style. We need to establish for all genres the paradigms or fundamental givens, the constraints understood at the outset, the range of choices available to the composer.

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In a rich and learned article, Lawrence Gushee explored the tabula monochordi of Magister Nicolaus de Luduno. The tabula, which was copied into a music theory manuscript of c. 1400 of southern Italian provenance (Rome/St. Paul), consists of three associated parts. The first and third I shall call, following Gushee, the tabula figurarum (an elaborate musical example) and the tabula numerorum (an extremely elaborate table of corresponding information). Between them lies the enigmatic text of a six-stanza musical puzzle poem, ‘Ut pateat evidenter’, with which Gushee wrestled inconclusively. A concordance to the poem unknown to Gushee in an English music theory manuscript of about the same age (Bodley 842) associates these cryptic verses with a polyphonic chanson, a two-voice ballade that has never been published. The ballade is a sophisticated demonstration piece for tonal and mensural behaviours, and I believe that this song is the original complement and key to the poem’s meaning. It also offers a significant new point of entry into the complicated world of Anglo-French tonal theory as it developed in treatises and compositions of the fourteenth century.

The exciting discovery of new music from the Middle Ages sheds new light on knowledge of the medieval motet.