| Musical manuscripts of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries are supplied with a generous amount of text compared to fifteenth-century manuscripts, where the text often is misplaced, inadequate, or missing altogether. This study sought to determine the efficacy of the rules of text underlay from the perspective of the Renaissance singer, despite the necessity of applying many of them retrospectively.;Assuming the demonstrable practices of singers and composers were part of an evolving continuum, the author demonstrated the plausibility of such a continuum through establishing its presence in various other fields: grammar and rhetoric, education, philosophy, humanism, art and architecture, and the relationship between music and text.;The next chapter surveyed several external factors affecting text underlay: the doctrine of ethos, musica reservata, melismatic chant, Latin, and tropes and sequences. Another chapter surveyed various habits and variances of copyists and printers regarding text underlay practices when text was insufficient or misplaced.;A number of the most pertinent rules relating to text underlay were assembled, from Antiquity through the Renaissance, with brief exegesis regarding their application. These were, in tandem with typical scribal habits, the substance of the texting process. The author selected as a demonstration vehicle the Kyrie of Dufay's Missa Caput. It provided an appropriate worst-case scenario, since the Trent 88 and 89 manuscripts present the movement nearly devoid of text.;The author began by identifying all eligible and ineligible notes. In attempting to create some initial expectations, the writer then calculated the average projected densities of "eligible notes per syllable," "total notes per syllable," and "beats per syllable." Texting subsequently was undertaken one part at a time, without regard for the texting of any other part. After texting each voice part "blindly," only one invocation required major adjustment to coordinate it with the other parts. After texting, the actual syllable densities were re-calculated and compared to the original pre-texted figures. The correlations were exceedingly close.;The writer thus concluded that extant text underlay prescripts may be applied with facility and success to music of the fifteenth century. |
