TINCTORIS ON VARIETAS

Abstract

The twelve extant treatises of Johannes Tinctoris offer a wealth of insight into almost every aspect of fifteenth-century music theory. A graduate of the University of Orléans and a doctor of canon and civil law, Tinctoris was an expert in both the language arts of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and the mathematical arts of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). Such was his erudition that he was extolled by Johannes Trithemius, one of the leading German humanists of the fifteenth century, as ‘a man very learned in all respects, an outstanding mathematician, a musician of the highest rank, of a keen mind, skilled in eloquence’. Given Tinctoris’s towering intellect, it is no surprise that frequent citations from many of the major thinkers of antiquity – Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, Virgil, Cicero and Quintilian – appear in his theoretical discussions on mode, mensural notation and counterpoint.