NB: Parts of this paper were expanded and published in two books of collected essays, La cathedrale Saint-Bavon de Gand (ed

NB: Parts of this paper were expanded and published in two books of collected essays, La cathedrale Saint-Bavon de Gand (ed. B. Bouckaert) and Un millennio di polifonia liturgica tra oralita e scrittura (ed. G. Cattin and F.A. Gallo). See “Publications” for full citations.

Élite and Popular Music in Fifteenth-Century Ghent

Barbara Haggh

In a recent book, the social historian David Nicholas characterized late medieval Ghent as 'notoriously dangerous', 'the most particularistic of the Flemish cities', 'new money and old hatreds' and 'raw sex not courtly love'. Such blunt phrases imply vigorous and multifaceted music-making, but Ghent was peculiar in this respect. It was the most populous European city north of Paris, with 60,000 inhabitants in the fourteenth century and slightly less in the fifteenth, yet apart from Obrecht and Agricola, who were born in Ghent but never employed in the city, only a few minor musicians grace the pages of local documents before 1500, all of the surviving polyphony of the period is from monasteries and convents, and the largest body of locally composed music is the substantial repertory of plainchant for local saints (some Magnificat antiphons and responsories from the ninth to twelfth-century offices for local saints are on the last pages of your handout). How and why the history of music in Ghent differs so greatly from that of other cities in the Low Countries is a question too complex to be answered in an hour-long presentation - though I will point out some of the ways in which it does here - but any answer presupposes a review of the types of music for which we have evidence from Ghent - of the 'soundscape' of Ghent, to borrow Reinhard Strohm’s term - and of the place in town society of those individuals introducing, performing and listening to music.

We can identify élite and popular communities in fifteenth-century Ghent, because in this time town society, there as elsewhere in Europe, was highly stratified and regulated, not only on the highest and broadest level of the three estates - the clergy, nobility and bourgeoisie - but also at the local level of smaller corporations such as craft, military or rhetoric guilds, parishes, confraternities, colleges of canons, groups of vicars-choral, masters and choirboys, cotidianen (daily singers), or even poorters or citizens. Each of these groups promoted their own agenda and prescribed rules for including and excluding members, and historians now concur that it was to such smaller communities rather than to the city or duchy as a whole that individuals bore their primary allegiance. I define the élite of late medieval Ghent as the wealthy and powerful, and élite music as the music they introduced or that only they knew. For popular music, I borrow the definition from Webster's dictionary: 'Music suitable or intended for the general public'. In fifteenth-century Ghent, such music that we know in this category was mainly that performed outdoors.

Three élite representatives of the estates from Ghent provide examples of three musical milieux. They are, first, Joos Vijd, the Burgundian official and Ghent alderman who, with his wife Elisabeth Borluut, commissioned the famous Adoration of the Mystic Lamb altarpiece painted by Hubert and Jan Van Eyck; second, Raphaël de Marcatellis, abbot of St Bavo's and book collector, and, last, Simon de Mirabello, a wealthy banker and member of the landed gentry, whose foundations at the collegiate church of St Pharaïlde and of the convent of Victorines at Groenenbriel changed the devotional landscape of Ghent.

The details of Joos Vijd's foundation in the chapel of Adam and Eve in the parish church of St John's are in the registers of the aldermen of Ghent and can also be reconstructed from the painting itself. In 1420, Vijd, who was immensely wealthy and influential enough to place the Van Eyck brothers in Burgundian service, commissioned the renowned Mystic Lamb altarpiece. Hubert Van Eyck and his brother Jan finished it in May 1432, the year the chapel was dedicated and the public first admitted. In May 1435, four years before his death, Vijd and his wife, Elisabeth Borluut, also from a prominent local family, founded a daily mass to be celebrated before the altarpiece in perpetuity, with rents destined for the cotidiane foundation (that is, the foundation for some twenty 'daily' singers and their leader), as well as for the mass, which would be performed by two good and honorable priests from the cotidiane, with no other benefices in the church. A small vicar would assist them by opening and closing the chapel every day and caring for ornaments and wine.

No document states whether the mass was to be chanted or read, yet there are reasons for assuming a chanted mass. In 1484/5, one of two chaplain-priests assigned to the mass was a member of the cotidiane and tenor singer, Gillis Hazaert, who had copied out two masses in discant elsewhere and must therefore have had a good voice (as did his colleagues in the cotidiane). No provision is made for discant in the foundation, making that unlikely.

A daily chanted mass finds further support in the painting itself. The Mystic Lamb altarpiece depicts the City of God described by St Augustine, also the Heavenly Jerusalem of Revelations, the apocalypse of St John, and its central panel represents the heavenly Eucharist, with the Lamb of God at its center, a perpetual mass. Art historians have shown that the painting's perspectives and arrangement were intended to reflect two sets of viewers: those inside the painting looking out and those outside looking in. This multidimensionality was manifested again as the real-time daily mass interacted with the heavenly mass. That such interaction extended to the chant is suggested not so much by the two panels with singing and playing angels, which have elicited much discussion, but by the inscription beneath the panel with the singing angels. There we read 'melos deo laus perhennis orare aevo', (song to God, perpetual praise to pray forever). The phrase 'laus perhennis' dates from Merovingian times, when a number of monasteries established a 'laus perhennis'. More than the opus dei defined in monastic rules, this was psalmody in shifts (per turmas) resulting in unbroken song. It was described as representing the singing of the angels in heaven specifically.^[A] The correspondence between musica angelica and musica humana implied by the 'laus perhennis' is discussed most extensively by Reinhold Hammerstein and can be traced throughout the Middle Ages, although the monastic 'laus perhennis' fell out of use around the tenth century, when the Benedictine rule was adopted in most places. In the fifteenth century, human angel music was recognized not only in monastic singing but especially in Assumption plays, which made provisions for man-made recreations of angel music accompanying Mary's rise to heaven. Music was unquestionably understood there as the accompaniment to jubilating hosts of angels - we find this in Gilles Carlier's mid-fifteenth century treatise on the effects of music, which was copied in Ghent, as well as in paintings. Tinctoris is more relevant for the Mystic Lamb altarpiece, however. In his slightly later treatise, he writes that Virgil imagined music to be among the joys of the Elysian fields, and he also cites a phrase from St Augustine's City of God, 'For the logical and controlled harmony of different sounds conveys the unity of God's well-ordered city, blended in consonant diversity'.ⁱⁱ Yet St Augustine also advocates restrained music in his De Musica. Given this fifteenth-century recognition of a parallel between man-made and angelic music evident in Carlier, Tinctoris, the plays and suggested by the 'laus perhennis' inscription on the Mystic Lamb altarpiece, it seems likely that a chanted and not a polyphonic or read mass was intended to intersect with the depiction of singing angels. It is also possible that an organ was brought in - we know that St John's had three by 1480, one portative, but accounts for performances of the mass before the seventeenth century are missing. That instrumental music was to be imagined, not heard, in the chapel of Adam and Eve is suggested by the array of other foundations made by the Vijd and Borluut families in Ghent, most which introduced a daily mass, but did not prescribe music other than chant.

The Mystic Lamb altarpiece soon became the artistic centerpiece of Ghent. Fascinating are therefore the many counterparts to its depictions of the post-apocalyptic Jerusalem in the churches of Ghent. For example, angel musicians playing trumpets were painted on the ceiling of the chapel of the town trumpeters in the crypt of St John's (see Rob Wegman's book). In the fifteenth century, their long trumpets must have reminded of the Apocalypse, even though Ghent had six not seven trumpeters. What is interesting here is that such trumpet ensembles were not found elsewhere in the Low Countries except at the court of Burgundy and abbey of St Bavo, where the St Livinus confraternity employed a different set of trumpeters by 1381. Moreover, the Ghent city trumpeters had an international reputation unmatched by that of any Low Countries alta capella, more evidence for their unusual status. Last, no city of the Low Countries included trumpeters more frequently in ceremonies inside and outside the sanctuary than Ghent. There, they performed for the processions honoring Sts Livinus, Macarius and Landoald, not only during the processions and meals, but even inside St Bavo's abbey, at the beginning and end of the procession. Also noteworthy is the reappearance of the fountain depicted in the Mystic Lamb altarpiece as the name of the first - and leading - rhetoric guild of Ghent, De Fonteine. In 1473, Charles the Bold selected this guild to lead all such guilds in the Low Countries. Last, three chapels in Ghent, in St Bavo's, at its subordinate parish church of St Saviour, and in the crypt of St John's, came to be known as Jerusalem (no relation to the Order of Templars).

Elisabeth Dhanens has emphasized that Vijd was an alderman of Ghent and churchmaster of his parish, and that the symbolism of the Mystic Lamb altarpiece should be read consequently as local and not necessarily Burgundian. Yet there is evidence for both in the entertainments devised for the Entry of Philip the Good into Ghent in 1458, five years after the Burgundians massacred 16,000 Ghent citizens in Gavre. An enormous tableau vivant of the Mystic Lamb altarpiece, with more than ninety actors and live angelic music was the central point in the Entry procession. Before the procession arrived, as Philip the Good reached an outer and inner city gate, trumpets played, then, at the inner gate, a banderole described Christ's descent into limbo - the Harrowing of Hell. Another banderole read: 'You have come to the story of the longed-for resurrection which we await in the shadows'. Now Philip approached the monumental dramatization of the Mystic Lamb altarpiece, set on a three-tiered stage measuring 100 by 28 feet. This was not simply the image of the City of God, but, above all, the model for the terrestial paradise that Ghent could become under Philip the Good if reconciliation were achieved. In this tableau vivant, Vijd's personal foundation had become a public statement.

Before reaching conclusions about the Mystic Lamb music, however, it is useful to compare the other foundations made by Vijd and Borluut family members in Ghent, of which a striking number were for daily masses. Jan Borluut, whose family established none other than an Augustinian convent in Ghent, founded a daily mass in its chapel of St John the Baptist in 1358 (the Lamb of the later Mystic Lamb altarpiece is an attribute of St John the Baptist), showing a continuing interest in this saint by the Borluuts. In 1440, Gerelm Borluut and his wife founded another daily mass at the same convent. At the church of St Nicholas, like St John's a town church in that the town waits played from its spire, the heirs of Simon Borluut founded a daily read mass in the early fifteenth century.

The Borluut masses may not have inspired Vijd, however. Given his Burgundian connections, he may have been aware of the 1432 and 1436 foundations for daily polyphonic votive masses at the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon made by Philip the Good and Réné of Anjou, the latter calling himself 'King of Jerusalem'. Moreover, in Ghent, a daily mass and office in the main choir by cotidiane singers had been established in most parishes by the end of the fourteenth century, usually by prominent townspeople, although polyphony was not specifically prescribed before 1423, nor was it requested for any other early daily mass foundations in Ghent. Indeed, only one of an increasing number of daily mass foundations of fifteenth-century Ghent might refer to polyphony although it is not certain. In 1460, an important civic official and his wife founded a daily mass to be performed by the seven priests of the cotidiane of St John's at the main altar, but we do not know if they wished merely for good voices or polyphony. The other known fifteenth-century daily mass foundations share founders from the élite families of Ghent, the frequent donation of missals, and a lack of specified elaborate music.

The last important Vijd foundation could have included polyphony. In 1462, Vijd founded the Mandatum at St John's, a ceremony practiced especially among Benedictines and at courts. Remarkable is the requirement that the 'vulle choore' or entire choir be present during the footwashing. No documents survive to tell us what they did, but at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris prayers cum nota are mentioned in a 1471 ordinal, and at the Este court in Ferrara, according to Bonnie Blackburn, elaborate but not precisely specified music was sung. The Mandatum was held after Compline in Ghent, however, so the performance of polyphonic Caput masses seems out of the question.

These findings point to an interesting and relatively unexplored fifteenth-century perception of human music as the earthly representation of heavenly angelic music, resulting in Ghent in a preference for daily unadorned chanting in the church, which also conforms to St Augustine's advocacy of restraint. This was the type of music introduced by those noble and patrician townspeople in high civic positions, like Vijd, who founded daily masses in chapels or contributed to the establishment of cotidianen in the parish churches.

Was a restricted, élite audience also intended for such music? Even in the fifteenth-century, outsiders had to pay a fee to enter the chapel of Adam and Eve. And when the Mystic Lamb was dramatized in 1458, its presence was surely destined for the eyes of Duke Philip in first place and only then for the popular following. The elevated status of the Mystic Lamb is again evident in a collection of poetry by the mid sixteenth-century Ghent painter Lucas d'Heere, Den of en boomgaerd der poesie, a collection thought to mark the beginning of Dutch Renaissance poetry. There we find, not popular refrains, but an ode to the Mystic Lamb.

* * *

Élite members of the clergy in Ghent furthered simplicity in musical expression in the sanctuary even while their private associations brought them within earshot of more complex discant. The abbots of the two seventh-century Ghent monasteries of St Bavo's and St Peter's ranked highest among the local and even regional clergy, as is evident from their initiation fees - in the diocese of Tournai, only the abbot of St Martin in Tournai paid more. The abbots' inclinations towards music must be separated from those of the monks in their care, however, because they moved in different circles, and this was true for Raphael de Marcatellis, a bastard son of Philip the Good and abbot of St Bavo's from 1478 to 1507, who lived in Bruges while his monks remained in the abbey in Ghent. His musical interests can be inferred from his web of connections with musicians in Bruges, the presence of a compendium of 27 full or partial music theory treatises in his library, and evidence revealing that discant was introduced among the monks at St Bavo's while he was abbot.

Marcatellis's musician contacts included a singer, a schoolmaster, perhaps also a Carmelite and another teacher. An enthusiastic bibliophile, he was in direct contact with one musician who served as an intermediary for his book-buying, Aliamus de Groote (d. 1501), composer and choirmaster of St Donatian's in Bruges from 1475 to 1485 and again in 1492 and 1501 (to replace Jacob Obrecht), also in Ferrara between 1495 and 1498 as master of the chapel at the court of Duke Hercules I, where he made the contacts for Marcatellis. De Groote's humanistically inclined correspondence dates back to the 1460s and such was his milieu at St Donatian's. Strohm credits De Groote with developing a tradition of schoolboys performing secular plays every year, but other individuals were involved as well: from 1480 onwards, there were gatherings in the refectory to recite poetry, and from 1484 on there were annual recitations in Latin on St Luke's day and during Lent. That year, the ludimagister had the boys read parts of the Aeneid; later years witnessed readings of Lucian, Plautus and Terence. De Groote himself composed music as well as plays. In 1476, a polyphonic mass by De Groote was copied at St Donatian's, and in 1485, he wrote a morality play.

A correspondent with De Groote, who probably met Marcatellis, was the spiritually troubled and peripatetic Jean van den Veren, cantor and scholaster in Oudenburg near Oostende in the mid 1460s, and before this a teacher in Middelburg in Holland. Van den Veren sought to reinvent his school in Oudenburg as a Humanist college, but his jealous neighbors in Bruges thought he was a pedant, and in 1463, he became so discouraged that he thought of entering an abbey and left for many years of wandering. In that same year, Marcatellis became abbot of St Peter's in Oudenburg precisely, where he remained until going to St Bavo's in 1478, and it was to this abbey that Van den Veren returned after his wanderings, though when Marcatellis was already in Ghent. Van den Veren passed through many musically interesting locales before returning to Oudenburg. In 1464, for example, he was scholaster of the chapter school in Bergen op Zoom, where he taught only plainchant. This is worth mentioning, because Van den Veren's correspondence survives - 39 letters - demonstrating his fluency with the pen, and several anonymous plainchant treatises are found in Marcatellis's manuscript, Ghent, University Library 70. In mid 1465, Van den Veren returned to Bruges, later took a rather lowly teaching post in Antwerp, then went to tutor the boys of a wealthy family in Bergen-op-Zoom and then moved on to Leuven to teach at the College of the Lily before returning to Oudenburg. He would have had many opportunities to meet musicians in these cities.

Two others knowledgeable in music corresponded with Van den Veren. Nicasius Weyts, chaplain at the collegiate church of Our Lady's in Bruges and ostensibly a good Latinist and excellent versifier but poor in prose, is thought by Strohm to be the Carmelite master Nicasius Weyts, author of a counterpoint treatise added to the Faenza codex, perhaps in Bruges in 1467. Jean Ondanc, a small-town teacher in 1463 with a degree from the University of Paris, was said to be, like Van den Veren, 'litteratus, musicus vocalis et instrumentorum'. This last point is pertinent, because the manuscript Ghent 70 includes several detailed drawings of instruments: not just a monochord, but also a clavicimbalum, lute and harp.

All of these humanistically-inclined correspondents were both Flemings and bourgeois schoolmasters, not the French-speaking élite associated with the northern courts. There is some evidence that the two circles overlapped, however, since the duke of Burgundy had collation rights to several scholasterships in Dutch towns, notably Middelburg, where two wealthy Burgundian singers, de Bracle and Cocquel, both also active in Ghent, were appointed at different times.

In Marcatellis's vast library was Ghent 70, the compilation of theory treatises, with the last and longest section completed in 1503-4 in Ghent as we learn from its ex libris. Ghent 70 contains works fitting the schoolmasterly milieu just described and known at the Burgundian court. The first three treatises were copied in the fifteenth century by two anonymous individuals and several notators of examples (black square, white mensural, Gothic) - they are the Flores musice by Hugo von Reutlingen, a German chronicler and pedagogue; the Ars discantus by Johannes de Muris, which could have been acquired by a student from St Bavo's abbey in Paris, or even in Holland, since another De Muris treatise survives in fragments from the Court of Holland; and then the ubiquitous Micrologus by Guido, the foundation for all teaching of solmization (in nearly every late medieval theory manuscript in Brussels). The remaining treatises must have been known in Ghent and Bruges. They were copied by Antonius from St Maartensdijk near Bergen-op-Zoom, a region with contacts to Ghent and the Burgundian court (direct route by water and much commerce on it). Busnoys, for example, had a benefice in Tholen, near Bergen-op-Zoom; the abbey of St Bavo owned property in St Maartensdijk; and in September 1462, a sexton of St Maartensdijk had come to Ghent and other places to recruit choirboys. The treatises include two on the effects of music by Gilles Carlier and Tinctoris as well as Tinctoris's writings on notation, the Carthusian encyclopedist de Ryckel's De arte musicali, the anonymous plainchant treatises and others. Now Marcatellis had received a bachelor in theology in Paris in 1460 after Gilles Carlier had taught at the College de Navarre, and in any case, Carlier's Recollectio texts were introduced in Ghent at the convent of St Agnes, suggesting that Carlier's name was known in Ghent. Tinctoris's treatises were surely known to the court composers he names, and De Ryckel's writings may have come via the Charterhouse convent in Ghent established in 1328 and important for Humanist instruction from the early sixteenth-century onwards. Most revealing are the three composer names added only in Ghent 70 to the list at the end of Tinctoris's Complexus. They are Robert Morton, who was at the Burgundian court, Jacob Obrecht, whom we now know as a native of Ghent, and Jacobus Carlier, recently identified by Daniel Lievois as a native of Ghent but singer at the church of Our Lady's in Bruges until his death in 1457/8. Even if more evidence is lacking, it is entirely plausible that Ghent 70 was assembled with works circulating in Ghent and Bruges and probably among personalities known to Marcatellis.

During Marcatellis's tenure as abbot, polyphony was introduced as a regular part of worship at St Bavo's. Even though his initiative was probably put into effect by others, it adds to the evidence for his interest in music. Marcatellis's predecessor, James of Brussels, abbot from 1457 to 1470, had already begun to make changes at St Bavo's, for he commissioned his subprior to copy a large two-volume gradual and a two-volume antiphoner of similar size (all survive). Under Marcatellis, statutes of the cantor were drawn up in 1486, which show that he was responsible for boys and even travelled with them, evidence for an ensemble that might have sung polyphony. Finally, a kyriale in the two-volume gradual of St Bavo includes two chants expanded with polyphony, one expansion made during Marcatellis's tenure. (Mary Jennifer Bloxam discovered the polyphony and has kindly permitted me to discuss it.) The two are a four-voice Credo in falsobordone with the rubric in vigilia nativitatis domini, pasche et penthecostis, which dates from around 1485-1500 and perhaps earlier, and a Gloria de sanctis huius loci with a lower voice added in the first half of the sixteenth century. The size of the gradual to which this polyphony was added, pointing to its use in the choir, its clear destination for the abbey, signs of wear, accurate notation, copious marginalia giving evidence of continued use throughout the sixteenth century, and rubrics assigning the polyphony only to the highest feasts argue that it does indeed reflect the relationship of polyphony to chant in the divine service held daily in the choir of St Bavo's abbey and that the additions were not mere accidents.

The Credo setting belongs to a style of polyphony known almost exclusively from southern European sources - it is an example of falsobordone. The cantus firmus is unusual, since it is neither chant from the office nor placed in the discantus (here in the tenor) as in other early falsobordone. All chords are in root position, the polyphony is note against note and for four mixed voices, the only rhythmic values are breves and semibreves, and some cadences depart from patterns. The relationships between vocal parts are also typical of falsobordone - B and T move in fifths where possible, the B skips frequently, and the top three voices move in parallel motion where possible. Another brief and more or less contemporaneous example of falsobordone written out in four parts was found in Cambrai, Bib. Mun., 29 by Craig Wright, but there are no other known examples from the Low Countries.

How the technique reached Ghent is not known - it is not related to fauxbourdon, but simple polyphony in similar notation is found in other Benedictine manuscripts from Corbie and Munsterbilzen, so perhaps a Benedictine network of some kind was responsible. Early falsobordone is found in a manuscript in Montecassino, and in the fifteenth century, St Bavo's, like other regional abbeys, donated funds for repairs to that abbey. St Bavo's also belonged to a prayer society including the other major regional Benedictine abbeys.

Paleographical features of the voices added to the Credo place them during Marcatellis's tenure as abbot. The scribe, who may well have been the composer, added two words in a cursive script - erased but visible and clearly from the fifteenth century - to remind him where to place the rubrics for alternatim performance (one feature common to this Credo and to falsobordone psalms). The added polyphony is copied with ink that is quite similar to if nevertheless different from that used for the original chant, arguing for the fifteenth rather than the sixteenth century.

That the decision to copy the Credo was deliberate and represented a change of practice is clear from the complexity of the falsobordone setting and its status within the ritual of St Bavo. It could not have been improvised and even caused the scribe to erase and correct in several places.

The rubrics indicate that the polyphonic Credo was to be performed by a chorus alternating with organum, probably solo singers but possibly an organist - St Bavo had an organ by 1488. The alternatim technique itself was customary in both Benedictine abbeys in Ghent and in abbeys elsewhere: a paper bifolium from St Peter's from the 18th century contains a manuscript kyriale with alternation between 'cantus' and 'chorus' throughout, and there are references to alternatim singing of Credos in the published ordinals of the abbeys of St James in Liege and of Egmond in Holland.

Marcatellis's musical interests are also demonstrated by his main foundation for the cemetary chapel at St Bavo's, dated 1490, which prescribed a daily Salve regina and yearly mass on 18 February at the main altar, a solemn mass of the Holy Ghost to be held with solemn singing and organ playing as well as bellringing, until his death, when it would be replaced by an obit. Every Thursday a Holy Sacrament mass with singing, organ playing and bellringing would be followed by a procession to his grave. The evening Salve was to be sung by a chaplain and boys, very suggestive of polyphony. Whether the solemn singing of the mass was discant is unclear, but Marcatellis had founded a discant mass at the collegiate church of St Donatian's in the 1480s.

Such references to Benedictines with an interest in music are rare in the fifteenth century, but Strohm points to a monk of the abbey of St Andrew just outside the walls of Bruges, Christian Sage (1410-1490), who is reported to have been 'in vocali ac instrumentali musica expertissimus' and was the author of a treatise on mensural notation. At St Bavo's, a mid-fifteenth century bibliophile, the prior Olivier de Langhe, had a copy of the musica boecij. There is also a fascinating account of the abbot of St Peter's from 1487, showing that minstrels from Aalst came to play for him after dinner and that he was entertained on other occasions by different musicians and rhetoricians. What emerges from these details is again a preference for sober music during divine worship, but a great interest of abbots outside of the confines of the abbey for the theory and practice of mensural polyphony.

* * *

The wealthiest founder in fourteenth-century Ghent was the banker, Simon de Mirabello, son of a Lombard merchant, who made important foundations at the collegiate church of St Pharaïlde and established the Victorine convent of Groenenbriel. At question is whether Mirabello himself had any training or interest in music, even though his foundations acted as catalysts for it.

The collegiate church St Pharailde had always served as castle chapel of the Counts of Flanders, and Mirabello had married a sister of the Count, placing him within court circles, even while, as banker, he often represented the financial interests of Ghent. This dual allegiance led to his death, for during the Hundred Years' War, Mirabello sided with the English to protect his financial holdings, whereupon he was murdered in 1346 by followers of the count. We know nothing about the music at the court of Flanders that Mirabello might have known, though the city accounts of Ghent are replete with 14th-century references to minstrels, even to a 'vedelscole', giving the impression that court music would have been minstrel music. Certainly we know of a thriving literary scene at court in this period.

In 1341, Simon and his wife made their great foundation at St Pharaïlde, which continued to be recorded in the documents into the eighteenth century. They assigned a rent of three hundred pounds to be given yearly to the provost: one hundred pounds for distributions to the canons chaplains vicars and sexton for presence at the daily office and the mass; another hundred pounds to establish and support the Bonifanten or choirboys, a foundation-type known in thirteenth-century Paris and throughout Western Europe in the fourteenth; and a last hundred pounds to support four chaplaincies founded by Simon's father Jan, an obit for the two men, and a mass at Prime to be sung by four and later five chaplains. Mirabello also donated one of his houses to be used by the choirboys as lodging and prescribed that the leftover moneys should be set aside as scholarship funds for students headed for Paris. That Mirabello's foundation provided 300 pounds a year is extraordinary, when one realizes that the total incomes of St Pharailde in 1338 were only 109 pounds and expenses 112 pounds. It is no wonder that, at St Pharailde in the fourteenth century, the provost in charge of the chapter, the canons and the chaplains had to swear fidelity to Mirabello's foundation - to uphold and protect it. Similarly, the 1423 statutes of the choirboys required them to pray for Mirabello's salvation.

None of the documents contemporary to Mirabello suggest that he established polyphonic singing, yet the only complex mensural polyphony to survive from Ghent is that copied on the binding of a document from the Victorine convent of Groenenbriel first described by Strohm. [discuss: possible copying in Low Countries, rehearsal letters under final melisma: A M E N] This convent was also established by Mirabello in his will of 1341, with 800 pounds, and its chapel was dedicated in 1346. Strohm's fragments postdate the Mirabello foundation by many decades, but the presence of a French repertory at Groenenbriel, admittedly Victorine, is less surprising if we know of Mirabello's associations with St Pharailde and the court of Flanders, his personal support for students at the University of Paris, and that associations among these communities continued long after his death.

Mirabello's foundation establishing the Bonifanten at St Pharailde - unquestionably led to greater musical activity at the church. In 1423, the statutes of the cantor of the church show that the scholaster was to appoint a singer able to teach the boys 'discante, simple musiiken ende anderssins'. The same statutes explain that the leading singer for the Marian confraternity would have to sing the Marian mass met discante every Thursday and on all Marian feast days. The cantor of St Pharailde was also responsible for directing musical affairs in two subordinate parishes: his submonitor kept the choir at St Michael's on Saturdays, Sundays, mass evenings and holy days, and a different submonitor kept the choir at St James and also sang masses with the choirboys outside of the choir.

Precedents for the fifteenth-century activity are harder to interpret. The fourteenth-century documents from St Pharailde never use the word discant but instead 'cum nota', a term which became common coin throughout Europe, but seems not to suggest polyphony or even notated music unambiguously. The term appears in the 1360 charter of foundation of the Marian confraternity of St Pharailde with reference to their Tuesday mass cum nota. In 1376, a chaplaincy was founded at the main altar of St Pharailde's subordinate parish church, St Michael, for three weekly Marian votive masses 'cum nota', to be sung on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, within the hour of the bellringing of Prime. This was the time slot that had been assigned to the famous Mass of Tournai, a Marian mass foundation surely known in Ghent, because the city accorded a yearly subsidy to the foundation throughout the fifteenth century. Returning to St Pharailde, an ordinal from c. 1400 singles out several hymns for performance cum nota, often where hymns for the hours should be performed in this way as well as those for Vespers and Lauds. Even in 1463, the statutes of the provost, dean and chapter state that vicars and others should hold the daily office in the nave and at the altar of the blessed virgin, which should be done 'perfecte honorifice distincte et de note' following the dictum of St Jerome. Thereafter the term disappears from the documents. Its use here points to exceptional music, but whether it was chant or polyphony remains debatable. In the sixteenth century, a Vesperale from the leper hospital of Ghent, to which we will return, does use the rubrics 'de hoghe noet' and 'de laghe noet' for two-part polyphony.

Joos Vijd, Marcatellis and Mirabello thus came from entirely different musical circles. What emerges from my comparison is a sense of the place of discant - for Joos Vijd, discant was incompatible with his apocalyptic vision, for Marcatellis, discant for his monastic community was to be introduced with caution and modesty, but privately, it was an appropriate subject of study and object of listening enjoyment. Mirabello, too, may have known discant, but when it first appears at St Pharailde after his death, it is performed for the élite restricted circle of the Marian confraternity.

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Confraternities were the corporate élite of Ghent, and they did commission and listen to discant. The word confraternity has become synonymous with bourgeois laity, so it must be emphasized that in Ghent, the three wealthiest and most influential confraternities also had the highest percentage of priests and noblemen among their membership and the lowest percentage of members belonging to the craft guilds. The three most prominent confraternities were, first, that of St Anne in the church of St Nicholas, whose guild book is now in Windsor Castle and which had members belonging to the nobility from Ghent and surrounding cities, including Mary of Burgundy and Margaret of York, also the chapel singers Philippe Siron and Matthias Cocquel. The others were the Marian confraternities of St John's and St Nicholas. By 1450, all of these confraternities had evening Salves and masses with discant. We can be certain that the membership actually listened to as well as paid for the music, because the discant masses were always held on important days along with ceremonial meals and business meetings, and statutes required presence. The evening Salves were open to the general populace as well as to confraternity members, however.

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Music for a restricted audience mixing élite and popular was that performed in the chapel of the largest leper hospital in Ghent, known as the Rich Guesthouse because of its generous endowment. Descriptions of singing in late-medieval hospitals or their chapels are very hard to come by, so the anonymous simple polyphony discovered by Jennifer Bloxam in a Vesperale from the leper hospital is important. The mid-sixteenth century paper book mixes chant for high feast days with processional material, and was undoubtedly intended for singers from the parish church of St Martin, men assigned to the divine service at the leper hospital. They sang what was in the book either at the leper hospital or at St Martin's, since some rubrics single out the leper hospital.

The only polyphony in this manuscript is for Christmas Eve. A procession ending Matins on Christmas Eve began with the plainchant responsory Sanctificamini filii Israel and antiphon Bethleem non es minima. Then, the plainchant responsory Hodie et illuxit nobis was followed by three short verses in two-part polyphony (notated consecutively). After the Lauds antiphons, with the rubric De Domina antiphona, there followed a monophonic hymn with the rubric Rhythmus, Magnum nomen domini Emanuel (in triple meter and white mensural notation) and a two-part hymn Dies est letitie, very well-known in the Low Countries. The procession ended with the verse Tamquam sponsus, beginning in chant with a final Alleluia in two-part polyphony.

Singing the polyphony were a chaplain assigned to the Rijke Gasthuis and choirboys from an undetermined place, though probably from the Hieronymite schools. The Hieronymites, established in Ghent in 1439, were a leading force in public education in Ghent as well as elsewhere. Their school was established by 1463, a house for poor boys followed in 1480, and by the sixteenth century many singers and composers at the Netherlands' courts were trained by them. The Hieronymites also produced a remarkable number of antiphoners and graduals for churches in the Ghent region, including St Martin's near the leper hospital.

That there were contacts between the Hieronymites and St Martin's suggests that the choirboys to which the rubrics in the Vesperale came from the Hieronymite schools, since no foundations for choirboys at the leper hospital or at St Martin's are known and St Martin's hired discant singers from outside for its only documented discant mass - that for the dedication of the church. The Christmas polyphony itself reinforces the hypothesis, since the choice of texts set and simple style characterize a repertory sung primarily in communities associated with the Modern Devotion like the Hieronymites. Yet despite the many similar compositions surviving in a range of manuscripts from the Low Countries, I have found no exact concordances, raising questions about the uniformity or lack of it in the rites of houses associated with this new religious movement.

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The most remarkable popular events with music in Ghent were two religious processions, the first from Ghent to Tournai on the octave of the Assumption, a procession largely subsidized by the city, and the annual procession to Sint-Lievens-Houtem, which lasted several days and was mainly the concern of St Bavo's Abbey. The former included chanting and minstrels but no polyphony. The latter was filled with trumpet playing to mark time and signal important moments, both outdoors and indoors. Others joined the trumpeters - a small group of rhetoricians and a bagpipe player. We know that a play for St Livinus was performed, and in 1469, the procession included a wagon with the relic of the saint and 'twee clercxkins die songhen het liedekin van St Lievin', a two-part song? Processionals of St Bavo's abbey all assign responsories and antiphons to the procession from the plainchant offices for local saints, such as those on your handout. In this way, the monastic musical repertory became 'popular'.

Other music for the general populace was performed by the Ghent town wind bands on occasions as diverse as high feasts of the church, weddings, processions, Entries, jousts or rhetoric festivals. There is little reference to what they played, but perhaps some of the textless instrumental collections such as the Casanatense chansonnier or the early sixteenth-century Petrucci repertories, may contain examples. Richard Sherr has referred me to a strange alternatim setting of Inviolata, integra et casta es Maria apparently for instruments. Cantus firmi in such sources do appear in other guises, suggesting wider transmission.

In Ghent, popular music was also rung on bells. A fascinating document tells of bellringing that could produce counterpoint as early as 1401. On 29 July of that year, Daniel de Leencnecht bellfounder, promised to make a bell for the churchmasters of the church of St Nicholas. It would be higher in pitch and tuned to the two bells already hanging in the bellfry, the heaviest named Marie and the other Gloriosa. The carillonneurs' guild of Ghent was established in 1473, a guild type not found elsewhere at this time, further evidence of the city's precocity in this respect.

To sum up, the most curious aspect of music in Ghent is that chant still comprised the greatest percentage of music sung in the abbeys and churches, even in the fifteenth century. Normally sung in a closed community, selected chants became popular from use in processions or during ceremonies attended by the populace, such as evening Salves. (It is these chants that were set to or embedded in polyphony!) The known simple polyphony was sung at St Bavo's and its associated hospital - the Rich Guesthouse, again for a restricted audience of monks and the ill.

Discant remained a private music, principally but not exclusively for élite audiences through most of the fifteenth century. It was requested by a confraternity membership with a substantial percentage of priests and nobility and introduced first for the daily office and mass at St Pharailde, the church of the noble counts of Flanders, around 1423 - otherwise there is, to date, very little evidence for foundations for polyphony by individual founders, in direct contrast to what was occurring in the nearby cities of Brussels, Bruges and Antwerp. It is also striking that whereas fourteenth and fifteenth-century book lists from the two Benedictine abbeys and the church of St John's do list service books, there is no trace of any manuscript of polyphony (exceptional is the liber motetorum of St James from 1376); the contrast is particularly evident when these lists are compared with inventories from Cambrai and Antwerp Cathedrals, where books with polyphony abound.

Other music has left no traces - keyboard music, music for stringed instruments, or popular song in our modern sense. Some rhetoricians had musical training, but even though they performed at public festivities, their membership and sponsorship were élite. The references to their music exist, but suggest that it served poetry or theatre and was not a means of showing off musical skill.

In Ghent, new initiatives to teach music to the broader public begin in the fifteenth century and become especially apparent in the sixteenth, not only in the conservative schools of St Pharailde and St Bavo but also in the more humanistically oriented schools of the Hieronymites. These efforts resulted in a newly-emerging category of music-makers between the elite and popular musicians - the amateurs.