The past in the present. Thinking about history in music theory in the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the Modern Age

Elżbieta Witkowska-Zaremba

Abstract

The present article is an outline of a larger project concerning music historiography and its pre-modern stage of development. As such, the article does not exhaust the subject, but only communicates ‘work in progress’.

Using as the starting point the classification of music proposed by Otton Gibel (1660), who distinguished ‘historical music’ (musica historica vel didactica) as a field of music theory studying ‘the origin and development of music-related issues’, the author follows selected themes connected with thinking about history in the treatises of Johannes Cotto/Affligemensis, Johannes de Muris, Johannes Boen, texts representing the tradition of Johannes Hollandrin, and finally texts by Johannes Tinctoris and Adam of Fulda. The author concludes that the contribution of medieval theorists of music to the foundations of modern music historiography consisted mainly in providing major landmarks around which the thinking about history later developed. Those landmarks are the following: the belief in the temporal continuity of ‘ars musica’; establishing the point of reference and defining the time axis; defining one’s own cultural identity; the perception and conceptualization of changes taking place over time; constructing a picture of the past.