(fl late 14th century). Theorist. He is named only in the manuscript US-Cn 54.1, copied at Pavia in 1391. This manuscript attributes to him two widely distributed theoretical works: De contrapuncto quedam regule utiles (ed. in CoussemakerS, iii, 116–18), a set of contrapuntal instructions written in 26 pseudo-hexameters and found in seven further sources (see Sachs, 215 and 87), of which only two include the musical examples printed in CoussemakerS; and the Tractatus figurarum (ed. Schreur), known from 12 further copies. Both treatises appear elsewhere with ascriptions or implied ascriptions to Philippus de Caserta. While the Tractatus figurarum is also ascribed to Egidius de Murino, the stemmatic arguments of Arlt effectively rule out his authorship. Despite the arguments of Arlt and Schreur, it seems hard to resist the suggestion of Strohm (following Pirrotta) that both treatises are in fact by Philippus de Caserta. Coussemaker's suggestion (CoussemakerS, iii, XXII) that he could be identified with the composer Andreas de Florentia has found no further support.
W. Arlt: ‘Der Tractatus figurarum: ein Beitrag zur Musiklehre des “ars subtilior”’, Schweizer Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft, i (1972), 35–53
K.-J. Sachs: Der Contrapunctus im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert: Untersuchungen zum Terminus, zur Lehre und zu den Quellen (Wiesbaden, 1974)
P.E. Schreur, ed.: Tractatus figurarum (Lincoln, NE, 1989)
R. Strohm: ‘Philippotto da Caserta, ovvero i francesci in Lombardia’, In cantu et in sermone: for Nino Pirrotta on his 80th Birthday, ed. F. Della Seta and F. Piperno (Florence, 1989), 65–74
DAVID FALLOWS