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• Introduction
• Music Editions
• Doctoral Dissertations
  • Clark, A.
  • Cuthbert, M.
  • Lefferts, P.M.
  • Peck Leverett, A.
  • Rico, G.
  • Sandon, N.
  • Widaman, J.
  • Williamson, M.
• Appendices and Errata lists

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Full dissertation (5.6 MB)

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Abstract

In the thirteenth-century, the city of Paris witnessed the birth of the University, the gradual penetration of the new philosophical paradigm of Aristotelianism and the emergence of a new theoretical discourse dealing with the measurement and notation of musical time. Scholars have attempted to find correlations between these three distinct phenomena. Focusing on music theory sources and on other indirect testimonies, they have never satisfactorily approached the central question of the teaching of music in the Arts faculty of Paris. The objective of the present study is precisely to explore this terra incognita. This exploration will take as a point of departure a multiplicity of hitherto unpublished sources, produced by the Parisian masters of Arts, likely to yield insightful information about the form and the content of the teaching of music in the Arts faculty of Paris in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It will be asserted that the teaching of music in the institution was confined to musica as an intellectual discipline. It involved commenting a textbook and discussing scholastic questiones about musical issues and was profoundly influenced by the gradual change of epistemé brought about by the study of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Reconstructing the nature and function of music teaching in the Arts faculty will lead to the reassessment of the role played by the institution in the developments of musica mensurabilis. It will be demonstrated that, contrary to what has been asserted, the University authorities do not seem to have fostered the cultivation of measured polyphony. Correlatively it will also be shown that influence of the Arts faculty and of its intellectual orientations on the elaboration and shaping of the theoretical discourse on rhythmic notation has been largely overestimated.