Un témoin de la réception méridionale des traditions d'enseignement du Nord aux XIVe et XVe siècles : Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, M. 883

Abstract

The collection of music treatises deposited at the Catalonia Library in Barcelona under the shelve-mark M. 883 gathers the main matters of the mediaeval musical education -liturgical chant, « música plana », and polyphony (organum and discantus)- with the exception of the mathematical theories of the « música speculativa ». The manuscript under study transmits educational traditions spread over a geographic area located between the Seine and the Rhine : not only does the Parisian milieu is clearly discernible in it, but monastic cultures, those of the Cîteaux Order and of the Preaching Friars in particular, can also be disclosed. The contents of this collection, which may have been realised in the surroundings of the Avignon Papacy (perhaps under the Cistercian Pope Benedict XII), met with a large success in Italy during the 15th century, and show in this respect a peculiar aspect of the cultural lag there in the fields of musical practice and theory from the late 14th to the beginning of the 15th century. By 1474 in Mantua, Franchinus Gafurius drew the essential of his Tractus brevis cantus plani from this collection of treatises.