Chapter 1 introduces three esthetic paradigms – kaleidoscopic, alternatim, and oppositional – that can help ground discussions of musical flow. Using examples spanning Gregorian chant through mid sixteenth-century polyphony, the chapter makes a case for a shift to and from an esthetics of opposition in the years surrounding the period at the heart of the book.

In a passage in his famous Art of Counterpoint (1477) devoted to the widely diffused concept of varietas, Johannes Tinctoris offers a prototheory of musical pacing and flow. Chapter 3 surveys the terms that for Tinctoris underpin this concept before describing how a modern tendency to make too much of the false friends varietas/variety has impeded our understanding.

Tinctoris was among the first music theorists to back up his points with citations of many polyphonic works. Chapter 5 takes another look at these well-studied examples, not for the sake of the theoretical ideas Tinctoris uses them to support, but to ask how deeply he knew the music in question. The central claim is that Tinctoris, himself an accomplished composer, had intimate knowledge of contemporary repertoire.

Chapter 2 confronts head-on a dearth of documentary evidence about the poetics of compositional practice and practical music-making, mining extant writings for insights into contemporary thinking about music while seeking out analogies with fifteenth-century discourses about other time-bound experiences.

The bulk of Part IV digs into the repertoire to explore the myriad ways composers activated an esthetics of opposition across a nearly 100-year span. Chapter 11 considers how Guillaume Du Fay’s early songs pit introductory melismas against densely texted phrases to create productive oppositions. The chapter also shows how Du Fay’s stunning Malheureulx cueur gives voice to the virelai form.

This section of the book takes a holistic approach by exploring elements of the compositional lingua franca that catalyzed a new musical poetics. Chapter 7 identifies approximately eight parameters (e.g., text-setting, cadences, and harmony) that in tandem can be used to create dramatic arcs.

Powerful conclusions are central to the esthetic world this book describes. Many pieces trade on the so-called drive to the cadence; others feature deliberate ratchetings down. This chapter discusses seven heterogeneous examples, each extraordinary in its own right: songs by Johannes Okeghem and the little-known Malcort, a motet by Johannes Regis, and mass music by Jacob Obrecht, Josquin des Prez, Alexander Agricola, and an anonymous composer.

Textural contrast might well drive an esthetics of opposition more than any other compositional technique. Chapter 8 asks what is new in the fifteenth century about vocal ranges and scoring, and how composers manipulate changes in texture to pull back the throttle or produce calculated bursts of intensity.

Beginning with the problem of historical distance, the introduction charts a path from notes on the page to potent sound experiences, taking as a representative example the modern performance of a mass by Johannes Okeghem. In addition to defining counterpoint and explaining the term’s relevance to this study, the introduction sets up some of the book’s main questions while laying out a ground plan for what follows.