Blick in ein Studierzimmer

The manuscript Urb. Lat. 1419 is not one of the magnificent handwritings of the Italian Trecento such as the Codices Squarcialupi or Panciatichi, it is probably not even a “commodity” such as the Codex Rossi. Rather the diversity of its contents (sacred and secular two- and three-voice compositions of different provenance), its modest appearance as well as the sometimes rather clumsy handwriting allow us to assume that we are dealing with the “notes” of a music-interested studioso. This hypothesis would explain why the fascicle containing music was tied up with fascicles containing excerpts of writings about logic and jurisprudence on the one hand, and the widely fragmentary character of the musical notation on the other: there are a few sketches, whose meaning cannot be reconstructed at all, the sung text is incomplete, one composition suddenly breaks off and sometimes only one voice of an evidently polyphonic piece was written down. But the diversity of the manuscript clearly betrays a theoretical approach to the different compositional processes in the late 14th century.