(Lat.: ‘new art’).
In the most general terms Ars Nova is used as a synonym for ‘14th-century polyphony’ just as Ars Antiqua stands for ‘13th-century polyphony’. The concept of Ars Nova is based on the enormous new range of musical expression made possible by the notational techniques explained in Philippe de Vitry's treatise Ars nova (c1322). The term was first used as a historical slogan by Johannes Wolf in his Geschichte der Mensural-Notation (1904) in which the treatise was seen as one of the major turning-points in the history of notation; and it was perhaps the chapter titles rather than the specific content of Wolf's work that brought about the use of ‘Ars Nova’ to include all 14th-century French music in the work of subsequent scholars.
Several early 14th-century theorists referred to the idea of an Ars Antiqua, represented primarily by Franco, and an Ars Nova instituted by Philippe de Vitry (see, for instance, CoussemakerS, iii, 371, 408); but in historical terms the usefulness of the idea is supported more by the treatise Ars novae musicae (c1320) of Johannes de Muris, the 1324–5 bull of Pope John XXII decrying the musicians who were ‘novellae scholae discipuli’ and the reference in Jacobus of Liège's Speculum musice to ‘moderni cantores' and to ‘aliqui nunc novi’. That there was some awareness of a change in musical techniques and outlook in the years around 1320 is suggested also by the earliest music to exemplify the notation described in Philippe de Vitry's treatise, the motets for the Roman de Fauvel copied into manuscript F-Pn fr.146 in 1316, some of them extensive works several times longer than the motets of the previous generation and displaying a range of notational values far greater than it was possible to notate with the previous Franconian and post-Franconian techniques.
Relatively few French musical sources survive from the years immediately following the Roman de Fauvel manuscript, and those few are fragments whose dating and provenance are subject to substantial disagreement, so there remain very few sources in the purest Ars Nova notation as described by Philippe de Vitry. The term was therefore almost inevitably applied (by Wolf and many later scholars) to the work of Machaut and, since several Machaut manuscripts are from the early 15th century, to all French 14th-century music in spite of Schrade's insistence that after 1330 the style was no longer new. Indeed, so convenient was the label that it came to stand for all music between the Roman de Fauvel and the Renaissance: thus volume iii of the New Oxford History of Music is entitled Ars Nova and the Renaissance, 1300–1540 (London, 1960) and the major historical surveys in MGG follow the sequence ‘Ars Antiqua’, ‘Ars Nova’, ‘Renaissance’. In such surveys Ars Nova can include music from all parts of Europe and stretch to about 1420 (see Medieval).
Italian music of the 14th century is now more often separated off with the name ‘trecento’; but there is a reasonable (and strong) school of opinion that since the surviving repertory stretches from about 1325 to 1425 it is historically misleading to call it by a name that implies a division at the year 1400, and geographically separatist to use such an exclusively Italian name. Major considerations in support of excluding Italy from the idea of Ars Nova are: that Italian music until about 1370 was stylistically and notationally entirely different from French music; and that Italian notation evolved more gradually and a precise demarcation point between an Ars Antiqua and an Ars Nova in Italy cannot be established in any historically useful sense (see Clercx).
On the other hand it is hard to resist the claims of Nino Pirrotta (1966) that the fundamental change in both France and Italy in the years around 1320 was the same: that for the first time ‘it required that the length of every sound be precisely determined so that the different voices could proceed on schedule and fall precisely into the combinations of sound and rhythm determined by the composer’. While that was just the culmination of processes that had been in hand for the preceding half-century, it remains one of the most startling and important moments in the history of music. No historian has ever denied that French and Italian music in the first half of the 14th century are, in general, stylistically quite different; but it is too easy to overlook the range of styles within each tradition, to impose facile boundaries. Moreover, Pirrotta's analysis allows room for seeing the undeniable links between musical evolution in all parts of Europe, including England and the eastern parts of the empire.
A further narrowing down of the terminology has been effected by Günther who formulated the term Ars Subtilior to designate music of the post-Machaut generation of composers, those musicians of an International Gothic who fused the styles of France and Italy, paving the way for the simpler styles of the 15th century. In a sense this terminology is again an attempt to transfer a description of a notational style (called by Apel ‘manneristic notation’) to denote a musical style. The difficulty in this analysis is that many simpler styles in French music co-existed with the intricate music of the Ars Subtilior; that is, the Ars Subtilior did not replace existing styles, and its techniques were not fundamentally different from what had existed before, merely more elaborate. But since this distinction has been generally accepted and has led to the French Ars Nova being considered to end about 1370, at a time when French and Italian styles were still clearly separated, there has been subsequently less force of opinion to support any references to an Italian Ars Nova.
It is therefore customary to use ‘Ars Nova’ to refer to French music from the Roman de Fauvel to the death of Machaut, for though this is not historically the most precise way of using the term, it is historiographically the most useful. At the same time it is worth observing that ‘Ars Nova’, like ‘Renaissance’, is a term found at many times in the course of history (see Schrade). Perhaps the most famous use outside the 14th century is that of Tinctoris (CoussemakerS, iv, 154), who described Dunstaple (d 1453) as ‘ut ita dicam, novae artis fons et origo’.
DEUMM (N. Pirrotta)
LaMusicaE (N. Pirrotta)
MGG1 (H. Besseler)
MGG2 (K. Kügle)
J. Wolf: Geschichte der Mensural-Notation von 1250–1460 (Leipzig, 1904/R)
H. Riemann: Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, i/2 (Leipzig, 1905/R)
S. Clercx: ‘Propos sur l'Ars Nova’, RBM, x (1956), 154–62
C. van den Borren: ‘L'Ars Nova’, L'Ars Nova: Wégimont II 1955, 17–26
E. Perroy: ‘Le point de vue de l'historien’, ibid., 261–9
N. Pirrotta: ‘Cronologia e denominazione dell'Ars Nova italiana’, ibid., 93–109
L. Schrade: ‘The Chronology of the Ars Nova in France’, ibid., 37–62
U. Günther: ‘Das Ende der Ars Nova’, Mf, xvi (1963), 105–20
F.J. Smith: ‘Ars Nova: a Re-Definition?’, MD, xviii (1964), 19–35; xix (1965), 83–97
N. Pirrotta: ‘Ars Nova e stil novo’, RIM, i (1966), 3–19
S. Fuller: ‘A Phantom Treatise of the Fourteenth Century? Ars Nova’, JM, iv (1985–6), 23–50
D. Leech-Wilkinson: ‘Ars Antiqua – Ars Nova – Ars Subtilior’, Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. J. McKinnon (London, 1990), 218–40
DAVID FALLOWS