One of the most challenging problems in the performance of sixteenth-century music is the interpretation of tempo relationships between passages of duple and triple time. After c. 1520 binary signatures became standard for most pieces, and ternary passages within them were notated as sesquialtera or triple proportions. The signs of these proportions ostensibly specify precise tempo relationships between the binary and ternary passages, but in practice they could be interpreted in a variety of ways depending on time, place and musical context, as well as on the notation itself.

We know only two things with certainty about the life of Roger de Chabannes. He was a monk at the abbey of St Martial in Limoges by the year 1010, at which time he served as the teacher of his nephew, Adémar de Chabannes. And when he died, on 26 April 1025, he held the position of the abbey's cantor. Both pieces of information come to us from Adémar, monk at St Cybard in Angoulême, historian, homilist and tempestuous polemicist in the campaign to win recognition for St Martial as an apostle. Other evidence, which also may well originate from Adémar, attests to Roger's death date and office.

It has often been noted that Pietro Aron's Trattato della natura et cognitione di tutti gli tuoni (1525) links traditional eight-mode theory with polyphony by naming actual compositions and asserting the modal categories to which they belonged. The significance of Aron's connection of mode and polyphony has been the subject of a wide variety of historical and theoretical interpretation: in particular, Leeman Perkins based a study of modality in the masses of Josquin on the Trattato, while Peter Bergquist argued that Aron's classifications were essentially irrelevant for polyphony. The most recent interpretation of Aron's text appeared in an article by Harold Powers provocatively entitled ‘Is Mode Real?’ There, Powers proposed understanding Aron literally and deduced Aron's methods of modal categorisation from a close reading relying solely on the internal evidence of the treatise.

The great ceremonies of the Middle Ages and Renaissance have an uncomfortable position in music history. Contemporary descriptions of such events have survived from all over Europe through the centuries, and they are often full of vivid and quotable detail. For all its rich abundance, however, the documentation surrounding these large ceremonies has proved in a number of ways difficult to interpret. First, it is usually impossible to connect the official ceremonial accounts securely to specific, known pieces of music. Second, it is the nature of secular documents to omit as beneath their purview many of the musical details that we today regard as indispensable – the chroniclers were always maddeningly more interested in the musicians' clothing than in, say, their instrumentation. Third, and perhaps most important as we strive towards a balanced, street-level view of music in medieval and Renaissance life, the ceremonies that got the biggest descriptions tended to be the most extraordinary events of their day, unique by definition and held for the most rarefied and least representative audiences. The people who attended the Feast of the Pheasant or the meetings of the Order of the Golden Fleece were no cross-section of their society, and it is hard to know exactly how much of what we learn about their music can be applied to anything we might call real life.

The seven Trent Codices preserve much of the sacred vocal polyphony that has survived from the middle decades of the fifteenth century. With some 1500 individual pieces, the collection is a rich compendium of liturgical and paraliturgical genres, large and small. The codices are perhaps most valuable, however, as sources for the cyclic mass Ordinary, the most ambitious of fifteenth-century polyphonic forms.

Professional musicians first appeared in medieval Europe during the tenth century. These jongleurs, or minstrels, earned a precarious living by travelling alone or in small groups from village to village and castle to castle, singing, playing, dancing, performing magic tricks and exhibiting trained animals. These itinerant performers were often viewed as social outcasts, and were frequently denied legal protection as well as the sacraments of the church. With the revival of the European economy and the growth of towns during the twelfth century the opportunity for more stable living conditions emerged, and the minstrels began to organise themselves into brotherhoods or confraternities, eventually developing guilds of musicians. By forming corporations and thus voluntarily placing themselves under the power of rulers or civic authorities, the musicians could achieve a modicum of social acceptance and legal protection.