16 Winter 2017 American Recorder

rom 1387 to 1396, King Juan I (b. 1350) ruled the Crown of

Aragón—a confederation formed from the Kingdom of Aragón, the County |of Barcelona (Catalonia), and the Kingdom of Valencia, in northeast Spain. On July 23, 1378, when he was still the Crown Prince, Juan wrote the following letter from his political capi-tal of Zaragoza to his chamberlain, Petro d’Artes: I certify to you that Matheu, our

tragitador, is going under our license to the city of Valencia, and as he is very good at making harps, we want him to ask Ponç, who makes lutes, that with the counsel and assistance of the said Matheu he will make us a double harp, and provided that he works every day until the said harp is finished, and I anticipate that it will be necessary for him to do that, and the said Matheu bring it to us, and send us the lutes and the flahutes as quickly as possible.

(Tragitor usually meant “conjurer,” but perhaps here it means an entertainer in general, or even simply an ambassador.)

Valencia was about 200 miles further south within the Crown of Aragón. Doubtless Ponç had made the lutes —which, like the flahutes, seem to have been ordered earlier. But it is not spelled out in this letter or the ensuing letter of receipt whether the flahutes had also been made by him or someone else in his workshop—or perhaps had even been obtained elsewhere. In any case, when the instruments arrived, Juan wrote to d’Artes again and declared that he had received them “to my complete satisfaction.”

Let us explore the implications of this letter for the history of the recorder, including the truth of theories about the origin and purpose of the instrument.

The Flute Family in AragónTerms for members of the flute family go back to the early 14th century in Aragonese sources. The registers of the Crown Prince Jaime (son of King Jaime II) record payments to “Berthomeu de les Praguergnes and Ramon de Fraga, jutglar de flauta” in 1312 and “Jacme, juglar de flauta and Pero ... juglar de rebeba” the following year. Juglar was cognate with what the French called jongleur; rebeca was evi-dently the Catalan word for rebec, an early bowed stringed instrument. “Jacme Costa, juglar de flauta,” perhaps the same man, turned up as a visitor at the Court in 1345.

At the coronation of Alfonso IV “el Benigno” ( Jaime II’s successor) in 1328, the chronicler and trumpeter Ramon Muntaner noted: axi altre no gosaua caualcar ab ells,

ans cascu sen anaua axi ab trompes e ab tabals e ab flautes e ab sembes, e ab molts daltres instruments; quen veritat vos dich, que mes de CCC pareylls de trompes hi hauia

No others dared to ride with them, but everyone was going like this, with trumpets and with drums and with flautes and with cymbals and with many other instruments: I truly tell you that more than three hundred pairs of trumpets were there.During Alfonso’s brief reign

(1327–36), the Court employed “Pedro Abril, el juglar de flauta, que fascina y ennoblece las almas”

JUAN I AND HIS FLAHUTES:WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

IN MEDIEVAL ARAGÓN?

By David Lasocki

The author writes about woodwind instruments, their history, repertory, and performance practices. His book

with Richard Griscom, The Recorder: A Research and Information Guide,

published by Routledge, received the 2014 Vincent H. Duckles Award from the

Music Library Association for best book-length bibliography or reference work

in music. Now in its third edition, this collaborative work incorporates

Lasocki’s annual reviews in AR (1985– 2012) of research on the recorder.

In 2011 he received the ARS Distin guished Achievement Award, and in 2012 the Frances Dens more Prize

from the American Musical Instrument Society for the most distinguished article-length work in English for his two-part

article, “New Light on the Early History of the Keyed Bugle.”

Since he retired from his position as Head of Reference Services in the Cook Music

Library at Indiana University in January 2011, he has been devoting himself to

many unfinished writings and editions (some now available in print through

Edition Walhall); to his own publishing company Instant Harmony; and to the

practice of energy medicine. See his web site, www.instantharmony.net.

A version of this article first appeared in German translation in Windkanal,

2017-3, and is also accessible in its original English version with footnotes in the online bonus material for inter-

national readers at www.windkanal.de.

www.AmericanRecorder.org Winter 2017 17

(the jongleur of the flauta, which fascinates and ennobles the soul).

In 1349, during the long reign (1336–87) of Pedro IV “el Ceremonioso,” a man named Bernat was paid for “fittings and ferrules of silver that he makes for two flahutes de bahanya,” to be given to two juglars de cornamusa (bagpipe) of the Court, Guillelmi Veguer and Ugoni de la Pelliça. Bahanya means “animal horn,” and the term occurs once more in Court records: in 1394 Juan I wrote to one Bernardo de Penavera, commanding that he give the king the ciulet de banya de unicorn (whistle of unicorn horn) in his possession, and thus “do service to us which we will take as agreeable.” Of course, a real unicorn horn would be infinitely rare; this one was presumably ivory.

The flauta is mentioned in a Spanish literary source from the middle of the 14th century. The Libro de buen amor (rev. 1343; earliest surviving manuscript dated 1368) by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita, links the instrument with the tabor played by joglares:

Con muchos estrumentes salen los atabores.... La flauta diz con ellos, más alta que un risco,Con ella el taborete: sin él non vale un prisco.With many instruments depart the drums....The flauta among them, higher [sharper] than a bluff, And the small drum with it, without which it is not worth a farthing.

(This apparently refers to the pipe and tabor, an early form of “one-man band.” The tabor was a small drum slung over the player’s shoulder and beaten with the right hand, while the player’s left hand played a “pipe”—a very narrow duct flute with usually three fingerholes, mostly sounding higher harmonics.)

Furthermore, the poem distinguishes the flauta from the axabeba, a term derived from the Arabic shabba ba, which scholars have generally taken to be the transverse flute, intro-duced to Spain by the Moors in the eighth century, although

the word is used today for an obliquely held rim-blown flute made out of cane.

Thus in Aragón juglars tended to play the flauta, which in a manuscript from nearby Guadalajara is identified with tabor pipe. But flahute or flaute was also employed—so, as in all linguistic matters, the terminology was not clear-cut.

Because the Aragón Court was highly influenced by everything French, it may be significant that the French lan-guage used flaüte/flahüte to mean tabor pipe. Then, probably by the late 14th century, and certainly by the early 15th, flaüte in French began to shift its spelling to fleute and its meaning to recorder. Therefore, it may again be significant that Juan chose the term flahutes rather than flautas for the instruments he had ordered, and French influence may also be suggested. More significance may be attached to Juan ordering more than one flahute and at the same time as lutes.

Finally, clear depictions of the recorder begin to show up in art from Aragón around 1380. Two similar works of art attributed to the Aragonese painter Pere Serra (fl.1357–1405) depict clear and remarkable recorders (detail below, and see the cover of this issue). Not clear, however, is their exact dating. Only two works are securely documented as by him with dates (1394 and 1395), neither work containing duct flutes; all other attri butions and dates by art historians are based on stylistic considerations. Que Sera, Serra!

The central panel of the altarpiece La Virgen con el Niño (next page), painted for the monastery of Sant Cugat del

Pedro IV, King of Aragón, father of Juan I (painting by Gonçal Peris Sarrià and Jaume Mateu, 1427; preserved in the Museu d'Art de Catalunya and by the Google Art Project)

The flauta is mentioned in a Spanish literary source from the middle of the 14th century.

Pere Serra, central panel of altarpiece La Virgen con el Niño, c.1385, from Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, Inv. 3950 (photo by Lucien Lasocki, www.lucienphotography.com)

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Vallès, now a suburb of Barcelona, has been dated at around 1385. The Virgin Mary, with baby Jesus on her knee, is surrounded by six angels playing harp, lute, gittern, organetto, psaltery and recorder. The cylindrical recorder has eight fingerholes in line higher up on the instrument than the whole of the player’s lower (left) hand, below which one of the paired fingerholes for the little finger is visible. A similarly posed group, playing the same six instruments, is depicted in an altarpiece painted for the cathedral of Santa Clara, Tortosa (actually in nearby El Baix Ebre), between Barcelona and Valencia, around 1385, although recent scholarship suggests it could have been as late as 1400.

In research on the Middle Ages, nothing is certain— but all things considered, Juan had almost certainly bought a set of recorders.

Juan and his MinstrelsAs a child of a mere 16 months, Juan had already been assigned two juglars for his own service; they played the cornamusa, the favorite instrument of his father, King Pedro IV. Juan loved the cornamusa so much that an elaborately decorated one was ordered for him when he was three years old from a Barcelona maker, presumably as a plaything.

In 1367, he was given his own pair of musicians, who played cornamusa and trumpet. After he got married for the first time (to the French infanta Juana de Valois, at the age of 21 in 1371), Juan hired for his personal service four musicians—now for the first time at Court called “minstrels”: Thomasi (Tomasinus de Xaumont, probably Chaumont in France), Tibaut (Tibaldus de Barrenes), Jacomi ( Jacobinus de Bar, in France), and Lupi (Luppus tibalerius, piper?), “from France and other countries.”

Their contract introduced the term coblas de ministriles (associations of minstrels) to the Court. This particular cobla was based on the duo of Thomasi, shawm, and Jacomi, cornamusa. The other two minstrels presumably added an accompaniment of other instruments, not necessarily all winds, although their eventual replacements, Johani de Sent Luch (Saint-Luc in France) and Jacomi Capeta, both played the shawm.

Recall that Juan remained the Crown Prince until 1387, so he had not yet taken the throne during most of the activity discussed in this section.

Thomas III, marquis of Saluzzo (Savoy, in the moun-tains between France and Italy), wrote in his Le chevalier errant (1394): “The King of Aragón and the Aragonese appeared to me very arrogant. They belittled all the great princes in the surrounding area, judging themselves very superior to everyone; their king was among them, distracting himself by watching and listening to the jongleurs and minstrels.”

Pere Tomich in his history of Aragón (1438) wrote more neutrally about Juan: “and he had at his Court many coblas of all kinds of minstrels dancing and singing to amuse himself.”

Reporting more than a century after the fact (1495–1513), another chronicler of Aragón, Pere Miquel Carbonell, noted of Juan: “His biggest concern was to order the search around the world for the best minstrels to be found, strings as well as winds and singers, so that they would play and sing in his presence three times a day—that is, one in the morn-ing, another at noon, and another in the afternoon; and he wanted this rule to be observed every day of the week. And before going to bed, he would command the young men and maidens to dance and amuse themselves in his presence, except on Fridays.”

Enrique de Estencop, central panel of altarpiece La Virgen con el Niño (1391-92), from Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, Inv. 64023 (photo by Lucien Lasocki, www.lucienphotography.com)

www.AmericanRecorder.org Winter 2017 19

We might imagine Juan to be lis-tening to his musicians in a dark, dank castle constructed from huge blocks of gray stone. Nothing could be further from the truth. The photos on p. 22 (background) and p. 23 show that he inherited from the previous rulers of the area, the Moors, a sumptuous pal-ace called the Aljafería, containing examples of the most striking architec-tural forms in the Western world. Because the Koran forbade represen-tation of human and animal forms, Moorish architects and artists concen-trated on developing intricate orna-mentation instead.

Did Juan play instruments himself, like some monarchs of England? The

only surviving evidence of his own musical ability is that, “helped by my singers,” who had been newly recruited from the Papal Court in Avignon, he composed a three-voice rondeau in 1380. Note that it was singers, not minstrels, who taught him to compose.

The equivalence of singers and composers is also implied in another letter Juan wrote to Avignon in 1379: “Similarly, we want you to help make a book for us in which are notated fifteen to twenty motets as well as the flower of ballades, rondeaux, and virelais, and ask the singers of the Pope to make it, since they know quality the best, and send it as soon as it is ready by a trusted messenger.”

Minstrel SchoolsBetween about 1313 and 1447, a highly effective mechanism of commu-nication existed among minstrels inter-nationally: the so-called minstrel “schools.” Rob Wegman observes: “These were not schools in the modern sense but international assemblies, the counterpart of conferences or trade fairs in our time.” They were held roughly annually during Lent—a sea-son when secular music stopped being performed everywhere—in cities in France, the Low Countries, and occa-sionally England and Germany, pre-sumably organized by urban minstrel guilds and confraternities.

Those attending came from cities and courts in the same countries, and from as far away as Greece and Spain, returning home by Easter. Maricarmen Gómez Muntané has suggested that permanent music schools may have been located in Flanders, too—and perhaps woodwind makers were also located permanently in Flanders at this time.

The purposes for such schools are documented as learning the craft, pur-chasing instruments, recruiting new minstrels, and above all learning “new songs,” presumably including the sense of “pieces.” The Limburg Chronicle, written from 1378 to 1398 by the notary and town clerk Tilemann Elhen von Wolfhagen, records many instances of new songs “played on shawms and trumpets as well as sung by the people.”

Wegman writes: “If minstrels were prepared to travel hundreds of miles each year to learn new songs, then musical novelty must have been at a very high premium in their profession, much more so, one assumes, than among singers and composers. Since the minstrel school was attended by musicians from nearly all countries, it allowed new songs to become instant hits, and new styles of playing and singing to break through almost

The purposes for [the minstrel] schools are documented as

learning the craft, purchasing instruments, recruiting

new minstrels, and above all learning “new songs.”

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overnight.” The same would have been true of new instruments.

Minstrels from Aragón attended schools in Germany (1352), unknown (1371), Flanders (1372), Bruges (1373), Flanders (1374), Bourg-en-Bresse, a free city in what is now eastern France (1377), Bruges (1378), Flanders (1379), unknown (1381, 1382, 1383), France/Germany (1386), unknown (1388), France (1389), and unknown (1390, 1415).

One of the things that Juan’s minstrels did at the schools was learn new pieces. When they returned, they taught the pieces to other local min-strels, as documented in his letters. For example, he wrote on August 1, 1377, to his cousin Alfonso I, duke of Gandia, about “Johani, our minstrel ... since he is just back from the schools, we want him to teach your minstrels all the new songs (cançons) he learned.” In addition, Juan wrote to the duke on March 1, 1378, just before his minstrels went to the schools again, “Our min-strels have taught yours six new songs, and when our said minstrels have returned from the schools, send yours again and ours will show them our instruments. This way, we will deliver to them two shawms, two cornamusas, one large and one small museta, a small shawm, and a bombard.” Here we see

that not only was Juan obtaining instruments from the schools—he was passing them on to a neighboring monarch’s minstrels.

In May 1377, Juan heard and hired a 20-year-old shawm player, Jacomi Capeta, and was so excited that he prepared for the advent of this virtuoso by asking all the wind instru-ments to be checked out and repaired. He then ordered new harps, rebecs, lutes, and a kettledrum (timbal). Juan’s taste was fickle, so by the end of the year Capeta had been sent to the ser-vice of Juan’s brother Martin—and Juan acquired another shawm player, Johani Estrumant, previously in the service of the Count of Flanders.

Thus it was that in spring 1378, the year that Juan bought flahutes, he sent six men to the minstrel schools in Bruges: the cobla consisting of Estrumant, shawm; Johani Coecre, cornamusa; Johani de Sent Luch, shawm; and Jaquet de Noyo, psaltery and fiddle; plus Matheu (the harp maker, who was also a performer).

These minstrels returned tardily in August, to the music-loving Juan’s despair. As early as May 22, he had to write to his brother Martin: “Because the instruments of the Duchess's min-strels that are now here torment us when they are played, I beg you that

One of the things that

Juan's minstrels did at

the schools was learn new

pieces. When they returned,

they taught the pieces to

other local minstrels.

www.AmericanRecorder.org Winter 2017 21

your man bring us the musetes of yours that Tibaut, your minstrel, brought to you from Flanders this year.” Note that these instruments were brought from Flanders, apparently independent of the minstrel schools. In this connection, it was also to Flanders that Juan dis-patched his best-ever shawm player, Everli, to buy instruments “of [a] new type” in 1388.

On July 30, 1378, a week after Juan referred to an order for flahutes, and shortly before his own minstrels came back from the minstrel schools, he wrote a letter to Martin: “... we know that your minstrels, who have just returned from the schools, have brought with them many instruments, big and small [perhaps in the sense of bas and haut], and we would be very grateful if, in case you think that listen-ing to the big instruments would not be agreeable or fruitful, then, dear brother, we would kindly ask you to send us your minstrels, especially with the small instruments, although we would prefer that they bring all of them.” This document once more shows that Juan was vitally interested in new instruments, which minstrels brought back from the schools.

Perhaps flahutes were among the new “small” instruments that Martin’s minstrels had brought back, but the

timing shows that Juan could not yet have seen or heard them. If flahutes of a new type had previously been made—even developed—in Valencia, within his own territory, surely Juan would have already known about them and been able to order them earlier. His hurry to obtain the ones from Valencia may well have been because his min-strels were finally due home and now he could hear the instruments played.

In any case, by the time Juan’s minstrels returned to Aragón in August 1378, the flahutes had arrived at the Court.

SingersWho else but these minstrels could have played the flahutes? Juan tells us himself that some singers also played instruments. His father kept a steady number of six chantres. The French name for the singers suggests they sang French Ars Nova Masses, and in any case they came from Avignon.

But Juan did not start organizing his own chapel until his second mar-riage, to the French noblewoman Yolanda de Bar, in August 1379. At that time he hired eight singers, mostly French and mostly from Avignon, writ-ing to his ambassador there: “and we want them to bring all the Mass chants notated in a book containing also

In any case, by the time

Juan's minstrels returned

to Aragón in August

1378, the flahutes had

arrived at the Court.

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motets, rondeaux, ballads, and vire-lais.... And let us know if they can play instruments too, and which ones, since we have all kinds of them....” Juan’s new sister-in-law pronounced him “completely French.”

We know the names of no fewer than 26 of Juan’s singers over the period 1379–96, but there is no surviving record of any instru-ments they might have played or any compositions they wrote. And unfor-tunately, none of the 14th-century secular vocal repertoire has survived in Aragón. Some Ars Subtilior music—the modern name for Ars Nova music of particular rhythmic and notational complexity—in the Chantilly Codex (compiled around 1375–95) was associated with Juan and his brother and successor, Martin, who may therefore have commissioned it for performance at Court.

An ExplanationThe best explanation I can think of for all this evidence is that Juan had already obtained a flahute: from a previous trip that his minstrels made to the schools, or else brought in by one of the many minstrels visiting the Court or by a newly-hired minstrel. Estrumant, who had been working in Flanders, is an obvious possibility, given that woodwind instruments generally came from there.

Then Juan sent the instrument to the lute-maker Ponç and asked him to make several copies. If such an instrument had been new to Ponç, then it would certainly have taken him a while to figure out how to make one well, especially if it had to be made in more than one size. Recorder-making is significantly different from making stringed instruments in requiring skill with a lathe and reamers.

If Juan’s hurry suggests that he “seemed to like” the recorder, asAnthony Rowland-Jones put it, we

have no further evidence of his relationship to this instrument; it was the shawm that he found “the most agreeable sound” of all instruments, especially when it was accompanied by the cornamusa. He went to enormous lengths to obtain the best lead shawm player he could, before and throughout his reign.

If these shawm players also played the recorder, as shawm players generally did in the following century, that would have been a bonus. And it would help to explain why string players were sometimes members of coblas. The stringed instruments were suited to the volume of the recorders, not to the loud shawms.

The suggestion by Anthony Rowland-Jones that the recorder was developed in Avignon, from whence it would have made its way to Aragón, has not borne fruit. He observed that “Jaime and Pere Serra were influenced by Sienese painters, including Simone Martini and others who worked at Avignon, and perhaps the recorder was invented in the sophisticated musical ambience of the papal court there.” Rowland-Jones went on to look for depictions of recorders in the Avignon art of the 14th century—without success.

One piece of evidence in favor of Avignon would have been Maria del Carmen Gómez Muntané’s report that a man named Pere Palau made both stringed instruments and recorders in that city in the late 14th century. However, Gómez Muntané informs me she was just speculating that Palau made recorders, based on the presumed model of Ponç in Valencia.

How many flahutes would Juan have purchased in 1378 and what sizes were they? The only pertinent evidence we have is from 1410, on the death of Juan’s younger brother

www.AmericanRecorder.org Winter 2017 23

Martin (b. 1356), who had ruled the Crown of Aragón since 1396. His possessions were given to his widow, including “tres flautes, dues grosses e una negra petita.... dues flautes, una negra petita e 1 altra travessada” (three flautes: two large and one small black one... two flautes: one small black one and another transverse one). Were the “black” instruments made of a dark hardwood, a sign of their great value, or perhaps covered in black leather?

The instruments listed first apparently constitute a set of three in two different sizes—the first clear reference in history to more than one size of recorder. Martin strongly sup-ported the royal chapel, but seems to have been less interested in minstrel music than Juan (despite having had his own minstrels as early as 1378), so the flautes could well have been those passed down from Juan.

Let us pause for a moment and consider a notable difference. When minstrels wanted to learn new reper-toire, they traveled to the minstrel schools, where they picked up the repertoire orally and later passed it on orally to other minstrels. When singers wanted to learn new reper-toire, they read the music, or composed some themselves.

So when the flahutes arrived in Zaragoza in August 1378, they were

presumably handed to Juan’s minstrels, who were used to oral transmission of pieces and perhaps did not even read music. Then the minstrels would have simply played their usual memorized repertoire on these new instruments.

Juan’s minstrels increased by seven in 1379, then were reduced to five, crept up to 10 by 1382, and declined again to three by the com-mencement of his reign in 1387; then he immediately recruited more to make 10, after which documents about them are lacking. No security

of employment to be found there! But whenever instruments are mentioned, they are the same ones as before: shawm, cornamusa, bombard and harp.

Theories and their PlausibilityThe researchers Jordi Ballester and Anthony Rowland-Jones have conjec-tured that Juan’s recorders, perhaps in conjunction with his lutes, were used to play the latest French chansons; that the recorder was developed for that very purpose; and that the prac-

Details of Juan’s Residence: Aljafería, Zaragoza, Spain,

in Moorish style: looking out, background

on facing page; palace interiors at right (photos by Lucien Lasocki, www.

lucienphotography.com)

... the first clear reference in history to more than one size of recorder.

24 Winter 2017 American Recorder

tice of playing chansons on recorders might have spread from Aragón around Europe. How plausible are these conjectures?

Certainly, instruments of the type of recorder with a full tone as the lowest interval, readily chromatic, would have been helpful for playing such music— if such instruments already existed. The surviving instruments from the 14th and 15th centuries uniformly have a semitone as the lowest interval.

Even a set of three recorders in two sizes would have been capable of performing vocal polyphony. As Herbert W. Myers has observed, “Two sizes of recorder built a fifth apart would suffice for most written [three-part] polyphony of the [late fourteenth and] early fifteenth century; three sizes become necessary with the general adoption of the contratenor bassus, whose range is typically a fifth below that of the tenor.”

Singers from Avignon, who could read the notation of Ars Nova and Ars Subtilior music, might have learned an instrument like the recorder, which needs no special embouchure, and used it to play chansons, with or alternating

with voices, in Aragón. And it has been proposed that, doubling at least the tenor (the foundation vocal line), the recorder would have been able to help singers with their chal-lenge noted by one writer in 1434: “it becomes most diffi-cult to keep the notes at the right pitch for a long time, even for one song.”

The singers might have even taught the minstrels to play chansons by rote—which would not have been a stretch for minstrels used to oral transmission—or from the notation—which would have

Sepulchres of the Kings of AragónThe Royal Monastery of Santa Maria de Poblet is a Cistercian Monastery, west of Barcelona, Spain, and still functioning. Built between the 12th and 18th centuries, the monastery shows an evolution from Roman esque style to Gothic. In the monastery church, alabaster statues of important sovereigns appear on two arches over the royal tombs; they were restored by the Catalan sculptor Frederic Marés in 1948. Kings have lion sculptures at their feet, and queens have dogs. Pedro IV (1319–87) made it a condition under solemn oath that kings of Aragón be buried at Poblet Monas-tery. Only Ferdinand II broke the oath, after his kingdom merged with the Kingdom of Castile upon his marriage to Isabella I (with whom he sent Christopher Columbus to the New World); his tomb is at Granada. (Juan I and Yolanda, center below; photo, right, by PMRMaeyaert - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17488206)

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been something new for them. We even have a beautiful quotation from the Court of Savoy—but 100 years later!—showing that such things happened: in 1479 a singer was paid “for having shown chansons to the minstrels of the said Lord.”

It is worth noting that, as well as chansons, Juan of Aragón obtained motets for his singers. Although no researcher has suggested the possibility that his singers played motets on recorders, that would have been as plausible as singers playing chansons.

No less a figure than Guillaume de Machaut provides some relevant evidence about the instrumental performance of chansons. In a poetic letter written in about 1363–65, he observes about his ballade Nes qu’on porroit, “... I beg you to be willing to hear and learn the piece exactly as it has been written without adding to or taking away any part ... and whoever could arrange [it] for the organ, bagpipes, or other instruments, that is its very nature.” The Machaut expert Lawrence Earp comments: “In our current view, this does not mean an ensemble of instruments literally playing the written music, but some kind of creative rearrangement, and thus not ‘exactly as it has been written,’ because that segment of the musical practice [i.e., instrumental perfor-mance] was carried on in a largely unwritten tradition.”

One suggestive piece of evidence in favor of recorders playing at least some vocal music is that, as early as 1385, in a nuptial Mass in Cambrai for the future John II of Burgundy, singers and flusteurs musicals performed—whether at the same time or alternately, we do not know. Otherwise, we have no further evidence of vocal music being played on recorders until the Court of Burgundy in 1468. Neither do we have evidence either for or against instruments—even stringed instruments such as the fiddle, lute, and harp— taking part in French secular chansons at the same time as the voices.

As for the idea that playing chansons on recorders might have spread from Aragón: if such a practice existed in 1378–79, or developed soon afterwards, more likely it originated in Burgundy or Avignon, especially given that Juan of Aragón was pronounced “completely French.”

Unless more evidence is discovered, although recorders may have been used to play arrangements of chansons (and motets), the rest of the chanson theory and its relationship to the development of the recorder remain a series of “mights.”

This article is based on a draft section of the chapter “Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries” in The Recorder by David Lasocki with Nikolaj Tarasov and Robert Ehrlich (London & New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming).

Dr. Lasocki appreciates the inestimable help he received in researching the article from Maricarmen Gómez Muntané, Nicholas Lander, Ana López Suero, Herbert Myers, Vicente Parrilla and Keith Polk.

Reading ListAlcoy i Pedrós, Rosa, ed. L’Art gòtic a Catalunya. Pintura I:

De l’inici a l’italianisme. Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 2005.

Ballester, Jordi. “La flauta dulce en la antigua corona de Aragón a finales del siglo XIV: nuevas aportaciones.” Revista de flauta de pico, no. 15 (2000): 9–12.

Chronik des edlen En Ramon Muntaner. Karl Lanz, ed. Stuttgart, 1844.

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