This new and illuminating study of medieval polyphony examines the links between music and contemporary political, civil and religious events. The period from the second half of the twelfth century to the second half of the fifteenth is of great historical interest since it marks the development of polyphonic forms and the birth of mensural music. There is also the earliest evidence of individual composers, from Leonin and Perotin to Machaut, Landini and Dufay. Alberto Gallo pays particular attention to the elaboration of refined techniques of composing, often drawing a parallel with the techniques of rhetoric and poetry. The writing down of music and also theory are shown to be essential stages of composition. Professor Gallo also describes the birth of the professional composer and the flowering of those permanent institutions within which musicians worked and which for centuries characterized European music. Professor Gallo has taken the opportunity of this first English edition to update the text, and to add notes.

Written by one of Italy's most eminent scholars of music, this book explores music's place in the cultural, artistic, and literary life of medieval Italian courts, paying particular attention to the influence of French culture on Italian artistic and musical traditions.
In the first of three elegant essays, Gallo examines the troubadours who traveled to northern Italian courts from Provence during the thirteenth century. He discusses their performance practices, the verbal and musical sophistication of their songs, and their role in the daily life of courtiers at Genoa, Ferrara, and Monferrato. The second essay concerns the now dispersed collection of the Visconti library at Pavia. Here, Gallo examines how this collection expressed the tastes of the fourteenth-century court of Giangaleazzo Visconti, how French arts were imported and imitated at Pavia, and the effects this had on music heard at the court. In the final essay, Gallo looks at the fifteenth-century tradition of improvised music, and especially the virtuoso lute player Pietrobono. Mythologized in literary circles of his day, Pietrobono becomes a point of departure for a discussion of the entire vision of music of Italian humanists, from Guarino Veronese to Aurelio Brandolini.