Tinctoris's reading practice: De inventione et usu musice and his Greek authorities
- Submitting institution
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Birmingham City University
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 33Z_OP_C2091
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Johannes Tinctoris and Music Theory in the Late Fifteenth Century
- Publisher
- earlymusictheory.org
- ISBN
- 0000000000
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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https://earlymusictheory.github.io/REF2021/Tinctoris/Articles/Johannes-Tinctoris-And-Music-Theory/Dean/
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Jeffrey Dean’s ‘Tinctoris’s Reading Practice: _De inventione et usu musice_ and his Greek Authorities’ forms chapter 1 of _Johannes Tinctoris and Music Theory in the Late Fifteenth Century_, ed. Goursaud and Woodley, published on the open-access scholarly resource <earlymusictheory.org> (submission links to a ‘frozen’ December 2020 version of this ongoing site).
Tinctoris’s _The Invention and Use of Music_ draws on a variety of literary sources to offer a sort of historical sociology of music. The last of his writings, it survives in fragments: six chapters were printed in 1482/3; five more were excerpted in a slightly later manuscript, but this is at most a sixth of the whole. In contrast to his earlier writings it cites a wide range of Greek sources, a tendency begun in the last portions of his _On the Art of Counterpoint_ (completed 1477). A close reading of his quotations leads to several conclusions.
Tinctoris treated literary sources as authorities, relying on them for information rather than engaging with them critically. Tinctoris was scrupulous about his treatment of sources. In virtually every Greek citation, the particular Latin translation he relied on can be identified; all of these were in print prior to _De inventione et usu musice_.
This demonstrates that, contrary to a recent hypothesis, the manuscript excerpts cannot represent an earlier phase of Tinctoris’s work: two authors quoted in them appeared in print for the first time in the 1470s. The manuscript chapters must belong, like the printed chapters, to the completed book. Finally, Tinctoris’s historical approach was not articulated into the periods of humanistic history, antiquity–Middle Ages–Renaissance, but rather into forms of life: Hebrews, pagans, Christians, and contemporaries. Altogether, his use of Greek literature demonstrates he was a non-humanist eager to make use of humanistic material.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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