page_title: Late Middle Ages
section_title: Music
hierarchical_section_title: Late Middle Ages / Arts and sciences / Music
caption_attribution_description: Someone playing the vielle. Cantigas de Santa Maria, about 1300. German specialists answer about the origin: "Was das Bild angeht: es stammt aus einer der Handschriften der Cantigas de Santa Maria. Ich müßte genau nachschlagen aus welcher und wie die genau datiert wird... (entweder spätes 13. Jh. oder frühes 14. Jh. - mit Gerard David (15. Jh.) hat das so überhaupt gar nix zutun). OK, ich habe zwar die Faksimiles von 2 der Hauptcodices, aber nicht vom 3., der am reichsten illuminiert ist (das Faksimile kosten diverse Tausend Euro) - ohne jetzt in die Musikwissenschaft Basel zu gehen und dort den Mikrofilm durchzusehen oder zu schauen ob die das Fakimile haben, könnte ich jetzt nur indirekt erschließen: aufgrund stilistischer Vergleiche, würde ich mit 95%iger Sicherheit sagen: es handelt sich um eine Abbildung aus dem Codex E2, auch Codex T genannt - der hat über 1200 Miniaturen und ist der am reichsten geschmückte der Cantiga Codices. Datiert wird er auf das Ende des 13. Jh.: San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Biblioteca del Real Monasterio, T.I.1 (also known as T.j.1) [e; E²; T]. 256 parchment leaves, 49 × 33 cm. Modern arabic foliation in pencil; songs numbered with illuminated Roman numerals on both leaves, top centre. Layout: normally 2 columns, 44 lines or 11 staves a page; red and blue illuminated capitals; each song headed in red. Illuminations: 1264 magnificent miniatures, normally grouped by 6 (1 full page corresponding to a song) or 12 (2 full pages, singling out the fifth song in each group of 10). Scribes: no detailed study; seemingly uniform French gothic hand. Notation: proto-mensural, based on, but not identical to French pre-Franconian practice (Ferreira, 1987, 1993). Date:&#160;?1280–84 (Ferreira, 1994) Contents: on f.4, after the surviving folios of the index, a fragmentary cantiga without music forms an ‘appendix’; on f.4v the main collection begins, with 194 cantigas (including 3 fragmentary, of which 2 without music, and 1 more with empty staves). This is the first volume of a set of 2; the second, incomplete volume, containing 104 songs with empty staves, is now in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, B.R.20 [F]. Facs.: El ‘Códice Rico’ de las Cantigas de Alfonso el Sabio: Ms. T.I.1 de la Biblioteca de El Escorial (Madrid, 1979) Also: ich konnte das Bild direkt nicht finden - dazu müßte man das Faksimile durchsehen und nach diesem Ausschnitt suchen - aber stilistisch ist ziemlich eindeutig, daß es eine Cantiga-Abbildung sein muß (und selbst wenn nicht, dann ist es ziemlich eindeutig 13. Jh., bzw. um 1300, keinesfalls 15. Jh.) - ich habe die Art der Abbildung mit anderen aus dem T-Codex verglichen und sie scheint aus diesem oben genannten Codex zu kommen (u.a. habe ich dort in anderen Abbildungen, die ich habe, die Säulenkapitelle wiedergefunden)."
context_page_description: The Late Middle Ages or Late Medieval Period was the period of European history lasting from 1250 to 1500 AD. The Late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the early modern period.
  Around 1300, centuries of prosperity and growth in Europe came to a halt. A series of famines and plagues, including the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the Black Death, reduced the population to around half of what it had been before the calamities. Along with depopulation came social unrest and endemic warfare. France and England experienced serious peasant uprisings, such as the Jacquerie and the Peasants' Revolt, as well as over a century of intermittent conflict, the Hundred Years' War. To add to the many problems of the period, the unity of the Catholic Church was temporarily shattered by the Western Schism. Collectively, those events are sometimes called the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages.
  Despite the crises, the 14th century was also a time of great progress in the arts and sciences. Following a renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman texts that took root in the High Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance began.
context_section_description: Music was an important part of both secular and spiritual culture, and in the universities it made up part of the quadrivium of the liberal arts. From the early 13th century, the dominant sacred musical form had been the motet; a composition with text in several parts. From the 1330s and onwards, emerged the polyphonic style, which was a more complex fusion of independent voices. Polyphony had been common in the secular music of the Provençal troubadours. Many of these had fallen victim to the 13th-century Albigensian Crusade, but their influence reached the papal court at Avignon.
  The main representatives of the new style, often referred to as ars nova as opposed to the ars antiqua, were the composers Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut. In Italy, where the Provençal troubadours had also found refuge, the corresponding period goes under the name of trecento, and the leading composers were Giovanni da Cascia, Jacopo da Bologna and Francesco Landini. Prominent reformer of Orthodox Church music from the first half of 14th century was John Kukuzelis; he also introduced a system of notation widely used in the Balkans in the following centuries.
caption: A musician plays the vielle in a fourteenth-century Medieval manuscript.
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