Instrumental Music, c .1300– c .1520

Sources of information concerning medieval instrumentalists and their music are profoundly inconsistent. Most musicians did not belong to the elite layers of society and therefore did not attract much description or comment in the writings of the time. We must glean our information on their social contexts from scattered and disparate sources. Written collections of music can rarely tell us anything about the players or instruments; sources made for specific purposes such as keyboard performance are concentrated in a relatively narrow region and time-span (see also below). As regards archival records, very few documents give any details concerning freelance musicians, except perhaps when mentioning the instruments which were played. Members of court retinues or civic ensembles, on the other hand, are far better documented, as thousands of payroll records have survived (civic records, however, are more consistently preserved than those of the courts). Church records, preserved in great numbers, also occasionally mention the participation of instrumentalists.

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• The Cambridge history of musical performance

  Colin Lawson, Robin Stowell•The Cambridge history of musical…•2012

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