Tempus, tactus, proportions and barlines: the perception of time in the Bourdeney manuscript of the National Library (Rés. Uma ms. 851)

Abstract

One of the first manuscripts in score at the very end of the 16th century, the
Bourdeney manuscript (Rés. Uma ms 851) of the French National Library proposes
a varied repertoire, compiled mainly from printed sources (from Josquin des Prés to
Claudio Merulo) that transmit it in separate parts. Copying these pieces in score
raises questions of page layout and of musical visualization that go far beyond what
can be done in separate parts: the visual and the conceptual aspects of the copy are
inextricably linked. When the copyist deals with Josquin des Prés, more particularly
through the copy of his mass L’homme armé super voces musicales, one of Josquin’s
summits in mensural speculation and, for the copyist, a testimony of an already
foreign system of rhythmic notation, the solutions imagined in order to arrange
without ambiguity a notation that rests in part on equivoque, reach a degree of
rational sophistication very symptomatic of the evolution of the metric thought at the
turn of the 17th century.