Mateo de Aranda

Tractado de canto mensurable: y contrapuncto (Lisbon, 1535)

1. Project context

This site is part of the FWO-funded doctoral project Renaissance Improvised Counterpoint: Rethinking Concept, Cognition, and Aural Foundations (working title, FWO Project no. 11A9922N), conducted by Vicente Parrilla at KU Leuven / LUCA School of Arts / docARTES.

The project investigates how Renaissance improvised counterpoint—once a core performance skill—can be re-engaged today through combined aural, practical, and scholarly approaches.

This website functions as a companion platform to improvisedcounterpoint.com, which centralises access to the project’s recordings, open research datasets, and documentation.

To transform historical sources into practical tools for modern study and performance, part of this doctoral project has been devoted to the creation of treatise-specific companion websites. These sites present individual Renaissance sources in detail, while remaining fully integrated within the project’s central platform.

In its current form, the Corpus of Recorded Counterpoint Examples comprises six volumes and 276 recorded tracks, turning sixteenth-century counterpoint treatises into living aural resources. Each companion site presents one treatise in full, together with modern transcriptions, interval annotations, and embedded recordings that restore its intended sonic dimension:

aranda.improvisedcounterpoint.com — Mateo de Aranda, Tractado de canto llano y contrapunto (1535)
lusitano.improvisedcounterpoint.com (forthcoming) — Vicente Lusitano, Trattado grande de musica pratica (F-Pn Esp. 219, ca. 1550)

3. On Aranda’s treatise

This site presents Mateo de Aranda’s Tractado de canto llano y contrapunto (Lisbon, 1535), one of the earliest Iberian treatises to document improvised counterpoint. It reproduces the complete text in its original Spanish and provides modern transcriptions of all thirty-eight musical examples, each annotated with labelled vertical intervals.

The modern transcriptions and recordings presented here form part of an open research dataset archived on Zenodo, with accompanying source files and documentation maintained in a public GitHub repository, ensuring citability, transparency, and long-term accessibility.

Preserved copies of Aranda’s 1535 treatise:

BM (London, British Library), K.I., f. 2 — in RISM
BNL (Lisboa, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal) — in RISM (a)
Évora, Biblioteca Pública, Res. n° 402 — in RISM
Lisboa, Biblioteca da Academia das Ciências (inc.) (b)
Roriz, Biblioteca do Mosteiro Beneditino de Singeverga (without signature, inc.) (b)
Vila Viçosa, Biblioteca do Palácio Ducal, BDM 2°-80 — in RISM
Facsimile edition (1962)

(a) This copy could not be traced by Mazuela-Anguita (see appx. 1, 6n5). (b) In Alegria, “Notícia bibliográfica”, p. 51.

From Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita, “Artes de canto (1492–1626) y mujeres en la cultura musical del mundo ibérico renacentista” (PhD diss., Universidad de Barcelona, 2012), appx. 1, p. 6.

4. Site structure

The structure of this website follows the original sequence of sections in Aranda’s treatise, facilitating direct engagement with the source while providing navigational and analytical support:

Prologo (prologue)
Canto mensurable (mensural notation)
Contrapuncto (counterpoint section)
Declaracion (comments on the mensural notation section)
De contrapuncto (comments on the counterpoint section)

5. Purpose

Each musical example can also be heard in newly recorded instrumental performances forming part of the six-volume Corpus of Recorded Counterpoint Examples produced within this doctoral project.

The aim is to restore the aural dimension of Aranda’s sixteenth-century examples, allowing them to be heard, analysed, and practised as living demonstrations of contrapuntal thought. By embedding recordings directly alongside the musical examples, this site bridges written theory and sound, offering a practical platform for ear-led study and for a historically grounded understanding of Renaissance improvised counterpoint.

6. Linking and citation of examples

All individual counterpoint examples on this website can be linked to and cited directly using stable, human-readable URLs. Each example is assigned a unique editorial number (1–38), reflecting its order of appearance in the counterpoint chapter of the treatise (see /contrapuncto).

Direct links to individual examples are created by appending the example identifier (e.g. ex14) to the chapter URL. For example, Example 14 can be accessed at:

https://aranda.improvisedcounterpoint.com/contrapuncto#ex14

These links point to the corresponding newly recorded instrumental realisations, which form part of the Corpus of Recorded Counterpoint Examples. This corpus includes complete recordings of the counterpoint examples from four Iberian counterpoint treatises.

Recommended citation format

Example 14,
https://aranda.improvisedcounterpoint.com/contrapuncto#ex14

7. Open access

All materials—texts, modern and analytical transcriptions, and recordings—are freely available for study, teaching, and performance. The corresponding open research dataset is archived on Zenodo with a persistent DOI, while the underlying editorial materials, including MusicXML files, PDF editions, and related documentation, are maintained in a public GitHub repository, enabling reuse, verification, and scholarly citation.

8. Acknowledgements

This research was generously funded by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) (Project no. 11A9922N). Thanks to Kirby for supporting this project with a free license and to Daniel Guillan for his invaluable guidance on all things web-related, generously shared over many years.