Mateo de Aranda

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

1. Project context

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

The project investigates Renaissance improvised counterpoint as a historically central musical practice whose procedural and aural foundations are only partially reflected in surviving theoretical sources. Integrating practice-based experimentation, analytical reconstruction, and digital editorial methods, it re-examines the techniques, pedagogies, and cognitive dimensions through which contrapuntal knowledge was historically transmitted.

This website forms part of a wider digital research environment centred on improvisedcounterpoint.com, which provides unified access to the project’s recordings, datasets, and methodological documentation.

2. Project sites and research corpus

A central outcome of this research is the Corpus of Recorded Counterpoint Examples (CRCE), a multi-volume research audio corpus comprising 420 recordings of 276 counterpoint exempla transmitted in Renaissance music theory treatises. These recordings are published as open research data via the corresponding Zenodo datasets and are also presented in contextualised editorial form across treatise-specific companion sites:

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

Developed as integrated research environments, these sites enable musical examples to be read, analysed, and heard in parallel through combined editorial, analytical, and recorded components. Each presents a complete source together with newly prepared modern transcriptions, interval annotations, and embedded CRCE recordings.

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 sources to document improvised contrapuntal practice. 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.

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

This site has been conceived as an integrated research environment in which musical examples can be read, analysed, and heard in parallel. By bringing together modern transcriptions, intervallic annotation, and recorded realisations, it supports historically informed approaches to improvisation while facilitating close engagement with the contrapuntal techniques transmitted in Aranda’s treatise.

Together, the transcriptions and recordings presented here constitute documented aural and analytical evidence of improvisatory practice, enabling the systematic investigation of the pedagogical and procedural logic underlying early modern counterpoint training.

The recorded realisations embedded on this site form part of the six-volume Corpus of Recorded Counterpoint Examples (CRCE), which explores the aural conditions under which Renaissance contrapuntal examples functioned as pedagogical models. While accessible here in contextualised editorial form, these materials are likewise available for independent analytical and practice-based study, including download, via the corresponding Zenodo datasets.

6. Linking and citation of examples

All individual counterpoint examples on this website can be cited using stable, human-readable URLs. Each example is assigned a unique editorial number (1–38), reflecting its order within the counterpoint chapter of the treatise. Direct links are created by appending the example identifier (e.g. ex14) to the chapter URL. For instance: https://aranda.improvisedcounterpoint.com/contrapuncto#ex14.

These links provide direct access to the corresponding recorded realisations within the Corpus of Recorded Counterpoint Examples.

Recommended citation format

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

7. Open access and research infrastructure

The materials presented on this site form part of open research datasets archived on Zenodo and integrated within the Improvised Counterpoint Sources and Corpora research infrastructure. Editorial source files, documentation, and version histories are maintained in a public GitHub repository, ensuring transparency, citability, and long-term accessibility. All texts, transcriptions, and recordings are freely available for research, teaching, and performance.

8. Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) (Project no. 11A9922N). Thanks are due to Kirby for providing a licence that supported the development of this digital corpus, and to Daniel Guillan for sustained guidance on all things web-related, generously shared over many years.

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