Tinctoris, Johannes [Le Taintenier, Jehan]

(b Braine-l’Alleud, nr Nivelles, c1435; d before 12 Oct 1511). Franco-Flemish theorist and composer. He was one of the most profound and influential writers on music of his day, as well as a capable composer and performer.

1. Life.

2. Writings.

3. Music.

WORKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

RONALD WOODLEY

Tinctoris, Johannes

1. Life.

Tinctoris’s earliest musical education was probably at one of the maîtrises close to his home town, such as Cambrai, Soignies or Nivelles. His father Martin was probably the Martin le Taintenier who was municipal magistrate of Braine-l’Alleud in 1456. Tinctoris was employed at Cambrai Cathedral for four months in about 1460 as petit vicaire, in which position he would have had personal contact with (and perhaps tuition from) Du Fay. Around 1460–62 he became succentor at Orléans Cathedral, and by September 1462 he had matriculated as student in the German nation at the University of Orléans. He was already entitled ‘magister’, though nothing is known of any previous university studies. He became procurator of the German nation at Orléans in 1463. At Orléans he acquired the higher qualification of licentiate in canon and civil law. At some point, probably in the later 1460s, according to his De inventione, he was in charge of the choirboys at Chartres Cathedral.

In the early 1470s Tinctoris travelled to Naples to enter the service of King Ferrante I as singer-chaplain, legal adviser and court tutor in the theory and practice of music. (Besides singing, he played bowed string instruments enthusiastically.) Almost all his writings and compositions date from his two decades in Naples. Throughout this time he was involved with the highest intellectual levels of Italian humanism; in 1478–80 he was particularly close to and influential upon Franchinus Gaffurius. He briefly visited Ferrara from 7 to 11 May 1479 at the expense of the Este court. His status at the Neapolitan court was high, and in October 1487 he was sent to northern Europe to recruit new singers for the chapel, bearing letters of introduction to Charles VIII of France and the Emperor Maximilian; he probably visited Bruges and Liège on this expedition. On 24 October 1490 he supplicated for the title and privileges of doctor of canon and civil law, apparently with success.

Tinctoris was possibly appointed archicapellanus to Ferrante in the early 1490s, but he probably quitted his formal position in Naples shortly thereafter. He may have been in Rome in 1492 for the enthronement of Pope Alexander VI, shortly after which he wrote both the words and music of a celebratory motet, Gaude Roma vetus, whose text only has survived. He possibly visited the court of his erstwhile pupil Beatrice of Aragon, the widowed queen of Hungary, in Buda about 1493. It seems from his letter to Joanmarco Cinico that Tinctoris revisited the Naples area in about 1495–6. Very little else is known of the last 20 years of Tinctoris’s life. He had been a non-resident canon of Ste Gertrude, Nivelles, since about 1488, and he held another benefice, worth about 100 ducats, at the parish church of S Giorgio Maggiore ‘ad mercatum veterem’ in Naples, which he resigned in Rome on 11 June 1502. He may have returned to his homeland in his last years; his Nivelles benefice passed to Peter de Coninck on his death in 1511. The best depiction of him is the illuminated frontispiece to the Valencia copy of his treatises, which shows him reading at a desk (see illustration).

Tinctoris, Johannes

2. Writings.

12 Latin treatises by Tinctoris survive in whole or part. They demonstrate not only his intellectual and pedagogical mastery of notational and music-theoretical principles, but also his close attention to the work of a wide range of contemporary composers, most prominently Busnoys and Ockeghem. Although in the Proportionale he acknowledged a debt to the example of earlier English musicians, especially Dunstaple, he was primarily motivated by a zealous enthusiasm for the French and Franco-Flemish music of his own generation. He was the first significant theorist to offer a precise and comprehensive critique of his contemporaries’ music and of their notational and contrapuntal idiosyncrasies.

Tinctoris’s earliest treatise, perhaps compiled before his move to Naples, was a now lost Speculum musices, whose contents were probably revised and redistributed among his surviving writings. Most of the extant treatises are undated, but were written in the first few years of his employment at Ferrante’s court. Their order of completion is evident from references in later treatises to ones that had already been written. They were not composed according to a strict didactic progression, but the three principal manuscripts present them in a more rational order. These are a probable authorial holograph in Brussels, which contains all the surviving treatises except for De inventione, and two sumptuous copies made for the Neapolitan court – the one in Valencia about 1485–8, when Tinctoris was in Naples; the one in Bologna in the 1490s, after his departure – which further lack the Complexus effectuum and the Diffinitorium.

Tinctoris’s smaller treatises, mostly written by 1475, offer a meticulous introduction to the elements of musical pitch (Expositio manus, c1472–3) and rhythmic notation. Even on these elementary topics, Tinctoris operated at a level of detail and nuance seldom found in music theory of any period. His Proportionale musices was probably the second in the pre-1475 series; it is one of the most comprehensive treatments of mensuration and proportion from the period, showing a broad and penetrating critique of contemporary usage, though frustrating in omitting some basic information. Many of its specially composed musical examples seem to give an indication of how rhythmically elaborate extemporization (vocal as well as instrumental) may have been practised.

Two substantial pedagogical treatises were written a little after the first wave of writings. The Liber de natura et proprietate tonorum, completed 6 November 1476, is a clear and thorough exposition of the modal system, showing a reliance on the theory of Marchetto da Padova. Tinctoris stated that he had undertaken the treatise for the sake of polyphonic music, but his single brief chapter devoted to the understanding of polyphony in modal terms is not wholly satisfactory. The dedication jointly to Ockeghem and Busnoys was in response to the disquiet caused by Tinctoris’s criticism of them in his Proportionale, but he was careful not to cede any intellectual ground. The most extensive of the surviving treatises is the Liber de arte contrapuncti, dated 11 October 1477. This work provides Tinctoris’s main exposition of intervals, consonance and dissonance, and their usage in both simple and figured counterpoint. He made some provocative distinctions between composed polyphony (res facta) and extemporized counterpoint super librum. The treatise ends with a discussion of the importance of varietas in good composition. The three larger treatises are particularly valuable for their copious examples drawn from works by Tinctoris’s contemporaries, which have sometimes led to the identification of music that survives without ascription in the sources.

Only two treatises were printed during Tinctoris’s lifetime. The Terminorum musicae diffinitorium, a glossary of musical terms, was originally compiled before 1475. As an early example of the genre it holds considerable interest; by and large it summarizes material covered in more detail in the other writings, though some of the wording suggests ways in which the author’s thought evolved. The glossary was printed, with a few revisions, in Treviso about 1495. It is not known whether Tinctoris had anything to do with the publication.

In the early 1480s Tinctoris embarked on his most ambitious piece of writing, De inventione et usu musice, a large-scale treatment of the origins and evolution of music, its theological and metaphysical roots and ramifications, and a broad survey of vocal and instrumental practice. Embedded within this was an augmented revision of another early treatise, the Complexus effectuum musices, a courtly sourcebook of literary and historical quotations on the effects – physical, emotional and spiritual – of music on human beings and their relationship with God and the universe. The complete version of De inventione, in five books of perhaps some 100 chapters, has not survived, but its size was comparable with the rest of Tinctoris’s theoretical work put together, and there is evidence that the Valencia manuscript may have been one of a pair, a lost volume containing this treatise alone. What has survived is a single printed copy of extracts from the work, probably dating from about 1481–3. A different selection of otherwise unknown chapters survives in a Cambrai manuscript. This epitome includes an abridgement of the enlarged Complexus, and its accurate retention of book and chapter identification enables the scope of the original treatise to be estimated.

According to Trithemius, Tinctoris was also notable for his epistolary writings, but only two of these survive: a brief note to the composer Johannes de Stokem in Buda, and what is effectively a short humanistic tract on the follies of worldly success, expressing a disaffection with courtly life that was probably more than simply rhetorical. (It was addressed to the Neapolitan court scribe Joanmarco Cinico, who probably copied Tinctoris’s Italian translation of the constitutions of the Order of the Golden Fleece, made on Ferrante’s election to the order in May 1473.)

Tinctoris’s reputation was high throughout Europe during his lifetime. The impact of his thinking on contemporaries and succeeding generations, however, was mostly indirect, through his influence on Gaffurius; it would undoubtedly have been greater if more of his writings had, like Gaffurius’s, been committed to print. Later writers’ citations of Tinctoris mostly refer to his printed Diffinitorium. But the correspondence (c1520–40) of the circle around Giovanni Spataro in northern Italy shows that the manuscript tradition of music theory was still very lively, and that Tinctoris’s work remained highly regarded after his death and was eagerly discussed. German theorists maintained an interest in his writings into the mid-16th century.

Tinctoris, Johannes

3. Music.

Tinctoris was also an accomplished composer, demonstrating a stylistic kinship with Busnoys and Ockeghem that corroborates the rhetoric of his treatises. His surviving output is small; the pattern of sources suggests that he wrote nothing of consequence before his move to Naples, with the possible exception of his rondeau Vostre regart.

His most impressive work is the four-voice ‘L’homme armé’ mass, possibly composed in the early 1480s. Its use of trope texts in the Kyrie, Sanctus and Osanna suggests a possible influence from the anonymous Naples cycle of six ‘L’homme armé’ masses (probably composed in Burgundy about 1476). Tinctoris’s other four-voice mass lacks the Kyrie and Agnus, and has a foreshortened Credo text; it survives uniquely in a Milanese choirbook compiled by Gaffurius, so it may date from the period of their acquaintance in the late 1470s. The two three-voice masses seem in some ways to be conceived as a complementary pairing, the first in a very unusual configuration of low clefs, the second in high clefs. No pre-existing material is apparent in either mass. The unique source of the low-pitch mass bears a Latin inscription to Ferrante, so it surely dates from the period of Tinctoris’s Neapolitan service. All four masses show a strong and confident compositional hand, with clearly articulated but nuanced motivic relationships, often characterized by closely imitative head-motifs initiating movements and secondary head-motifs relating their subdivisions. Tinctoris’s melodic fluency and contrapuntal technique are of a high order, only slightly less individual than those of his most distinguished contemporaries.

Other surviving sacred works include a fine, probably quite late setting of the Lamentations; some details of dissonance treatment reveal contrapuntal criteria that go beyond those of the Liber de arte contrapuncti. The two brief Marian motets appear in the Mellon Chansonnier, which was almost certainly compiled in the mid-1470s by Tinctoris himself as a wedding gift to Princess Beatrice; Virgo Dei throno digna subsequently became quite widely disseminated. Tinctoris’s other extant works include a widely copied though generally textless song Helas (ascribed in one source to Compère), a brief three-voice O invida Fortuna, and a four-voice setting based on Morton’s Le souvenir de vous. There are also a number of short but mensurally and rhythmically interesting pieces, mainly in two voices, usually untexted and in some cases duplicating examples given in the treatises. These seem to function only partly as abstract contrapuntal exercises, and may more fruitfully be seen as notated approximations of extemporized vocal and instrumental practice. Of more clearly didactic intent is Difficiles alios delectat pangere cantus, a work from the 1470s, which contains numerous complex mensural, proportional and other notational features that were commented upon at length by the marginal annotator of its source and further discussed in the correspondence of the Spataro circle some 50 years later.

Tinctoris, Johannes

WORKS

Edition: Johanni Tinctoris opera omnia, ed. W. Melin, CMM, xviii (1976) [M]

sacred

secular

theoretical writings

Editions:Joannis Tinctoris Tractatus de musica, ed. E. de Coussemaker (Lille, 1875; repr. in CoussemakerS, iv, 1–200) [C]Johannis Tinctoris Opera theoretica, ed. A. Seay, CSM, xxii (1975–8) [S]

Tinctoris, Johannes

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BNB (C. van den Borren)

BurneyH

FétisB

FlorimoN

LockwoodMRF

SpataroC

StrohmM

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R.G. Kiesewetter: Die Verdienste der Niederländer um die Tonkunst (Amsterdam, 1828)

K. Weinmann: Johannes Tinctoris und sein unbekannter Traktat ‘De inventione et usu musicae’ (Regensburg, 1917; rev. 2/1961 by W. Fischer)

R. Schäfke: Geschichte der Musikästhetik in Umrissen (Berlin, 1934, 3/1982)

A. Baines: ‘Fifteenth-Century Instruments in Johannes Tinctoris’s De inventione et usu musicae’, GSJ, iii (1950), 19–26

E.H. Sparks: Cantus Firmus in Mass and Motet 1420–1520 (Berkeley, 1963/R), esp. 98, 241

P. Champion, ed.: Charles d’Orléans: Poésies (Paris, 1966)

C.A. Miller: ‘Early Gaffuriana: New Answers to Old Questions’, MQ, lvi (1970), 367–88

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W.E. Melin: The Music of Johannes Tinctoris (c. 1435–1511): a Comparative Study of Theory and Practice (diss., Ohio State U., 1973)

G. Gerritzen: Untersuchungen zur Kontrapunktlehre des Johannes Tinctoris (Cologne, 1974)

K.-J. Sachs: Der Contrapunctus im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert: Untersuchungen zum Terminus, zur Lehre und zu den Quellen (Wiesbaden, 1974)

M. Staehelin: ‘Euphonia bei Tinctoris’, IMSCR XII: Berkeley 1977, 621–5

L.L. Perkins and H. Garey, eds.: The Mellon Chansonnier (New Haven, CT, 1979)

R. Strohm: ‘Die Missa super “Nos amis” von Johannes Tinctoris’, Mf, xxxii (1979), 34–51

L. Zanoncelli: Sulla estetica di Johannes Tinctoris (Bologna, 1979)

B.J. Blackburn: ‘A Lost Guide to Tinctoris’s Teachings Recovered’, EMH, i (1981), 29–116

R. Woodley: ‘Iohannes Tinctoris: a Review of the Documentary Biographical Evidence’, JAMS, xxxiv (1981), 217–48

J. van Benthem: ‘Concerning Johannes Tinctoris and the Preparation of the Princess’s Chansonnier’, TVNM, xxxii (1982), 24–9

R. Woodley: The ‘Proportionale musices’ of Iohannes Tinctoris (diss., U. of Oxford, 1982)

M. Bent: ‘Resfacta and Cantare super librum’, JAMS, xxxvi (1983), 371–91

H.M. Brown: Introduction to A Florentine Chansonnier from the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent: Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale MS Banco Rari 229, MRM, vii (Chicago, 1983)

P. Gülke: Afterword to Johannes Tinctoris: Terminorum musicae diffinitorium, DM, 1st ser., Druckschriften-Faksimiles, xxxvii (Kassel, 1983)

R. Sherr: ‘Notes on Some Papal Documents in Paris’, Studi musicali, xii (1983), 5–16

A. Atlas: Music at the Aragonese Court of Naples (Cambridge, 1985)

C.V. Palisca: Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven, CT, 1985)

R. Woodley: ‘The Printing and Scope of Tinctoris’s Fragmentary Treatise De inventione et usu musice’, EMH, v (1985), 239–68

T.A. Schmid: ‘Der Complexus effectuum musices des Johannes Tinctoris’, Basler Jb für historische Musikpraxis, x (1986), 121–60

B.J. Blackburn: ‘On Compositional Process in the Fifteenth Century’, JAMS, xl (1987), 210–84

R. Woodley: ‘Renaissance Music Theory as Literature’, Renaissance Studies, i (1987), 209–20

R. Woodley: ‘Tinctoris’s Italian Translation of the Golden Fleece Statutes’, EMH, viii (1988), 173–205

K. Polk: German Instrumental Music of the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992)

A.M. Busse Berger: Mensuration and Proportion Signs (Oxford, 1993)

R. Sherr: ‘A Biographical Miscellany: Josquin, Tinctoris, Obrecht, Brumel’, Musicologia humana: Studies in Honor of Warren and Ursula Kirkendale, ed. S. Gmeinwieser, D. Hiley and J. Riedlbauer (Florence, 1994), 65–73

R.C. Wegman: ‘Sense and Sensibility in Late-Medieval Music: Thoughts on Aesthetics and “Authenticity”’, EMc, xxiii (1995), 298–312

J. Dean: ‘Okeghem’s Attitude towards Modality: Three-Mode and Eight-Mode Typologies’, Modality in the Music of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. U. Günther, L. Finscher and J. Dean, MSD, xlix (Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1996), 203–46

L.A. Holford-Strevens: ‘Tinctoris on the Great Composers’, PMM, v (1996), 193–9

C. Page: ‘Reading and Reminiscence: Tinctoris on the Beauty of Music’, JAMS, xlix (1996), 1–31

R. Strohm and J.D. Cullington, eds.: Egidius Carlerius, Johannes Tinctoris: On the Dignity and the Effects of Music (London, 1996)

R.C. Wegman: ‘From Maker to Composer: Improvisation and Musical Authorship in the Low Countries, 1450–1500’, JAMS, xlix (1996), 409–79