Humanism and the language of music treatises

The style and technical vocabulary of late‐medieval music theory were reasonably settled; they owed little to ancient models, which did not furnish an adequate terminology, and the wider frame of intellectual reference was scholastic. This theoretical language came under challenge from humanistic pressure to write according to classical canons of diction. The first glimmerings of humanism appear in an early fifteenth‐century treatise that uses Greek pitch‐names, not without strain, in discussing plainchant; another response is that of Johannes Tinctoris, who reserved his classicism for non‐technical writings and passages, but even there used technical language when he needed it; others attempt a classical style, but without eschewing unclassical technicalities such as the incorrectly formed verb imperficere . The aspirations and limitations of classicism are demonstrated through the pseudo‐antique vocabulary created by Paulus Cortesius; its increasing power is traced over four decades through the writings of Franchinus Gaffurius. Nevertheless sixteenth‐century theorists, even the humanist Glareanus, combine a classical style and frame of reference with traditional terminology, but introduce individual classicism such as commissura , which means three different things in three different authors. Progress from this dead end could be made only in the vernacular.