In this context Guido d´Arezzo provided a fresh spirit of renewal, and it was this restless personality that fuelled his desire for new ways to pass on musical knowledge. In the main essay in this edition, Angelo Rusconi does a fine job of placing the musical advances of Guido in historical context. He says d´Arezzo “wanted to free up singers completely, and conceived of a method of sight-reading by using books with staffs.

Singers no longer had to memorise a melody, rather just the elements that made up any melody, the sounds and the intervals. In this way the singers on their own could intone an unfamiliar melody written in notation on a staff.” Also focusing on the medieval period is Susana Zapke in her essay “Examining the Liturgical-Musical Codex of Spanish-Visigoth Culture”, an analysis of the intangible values surrounding the medieval codex through a sample of liturgical-musical texts from the 10th and 11th centuries.

They are unique both for their exquisite composition and particular content as transmitters of the Spanish-Visigoth rite, abolished in the 11th century by a complex web of interests that were not so much religious as political and socio-economic. Meanwhile, Gianluca Capuano delves into the biography of one of the most exciting figures of the 17th century, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Among many contributions in diverse fields of science, he carried out fundamental research into music theory.

William Yeoman takes us back to the 18th century with his essay on the baroque guitar, offering a panoramic view of the five-course baroque guitar and drawing attention to music for the instrument by some of the most important composers of France, Spain and Germany during the 17th and 18th centuries. Finally, Brian Robins holds one of his traditional lively chats, this time with Jean Tubéry, the French cornet player and director of La Fenice.