Dante Alighieri in Italy and, one century later, Eustache Deschamps in France conceived and defined poetry as music in itself, as a text with its own proportional harmony. Both authors specify that each poem is structured so that it can be set to music. At the end of the thirteenth century Romance lyric poetry met polyphony and in the early decades of the fourteenth century a new notational system, called Ars Nova, was introduced in response to the need to write a kind of music that was melodically and rhythmically more complex.
The complexity of Ars Nova polyphony, with its melodic ornamentation and its elaborate rhythmic patterns, can be an obstacle to the proper comprehension of the lyrics. This new form of coexistence between poetry and music, in which the latter seems to predominate over the former, has led scholars to believe that the lyrics should be regarded as subordinate to the music, and that, consequently, the poems set to music by Ars Nova polyphonists constitute a secondary and negligible repertoire. As a matter of fact, however, many of these poetic texts manifest a refined symbolism and an elegant pursuit of technical virtuosity, which contradict the current historico-critical evaluation. In the light of these considerations, the project's first line of research re-evaluated and interpreted the poetic repertoire of the Ars Nova (around 1100 texts, in Latin, Italian and French), contributing significantly to a better understanding of what becomes of poetry when it is involved in the complex architecture of polyphonic music.
Many Ars Nova polyphonists were churchmen or monks working in the principal cultural centres of Europe, at the service of high prelates, lords and rulers who used music also as a means of personal and institutional propaganda. Nonetheless, most of the poetic texts set to music follow the great tradition of Romance love poetry and have nothing to do, at least apparently, with morals or politics. But what kind of love do they express, exactly? The second research line of the project verified how the ideology of courtly love, which permeates this poetry, could be compatible with the status of the polyphonists who set it to music and whether it is possible to attribute to these love texts a moral and political meaning and a militant function.
The most important sources of the Ars Nova repertoire are multilingual anthologies produced in ecclesiastical environments between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, when the highest secular and religious authorities attempted to put an end to the Western Schism. So far analysed for their musical content, the Ars Nova anthologies are the result of elaborate editorial projects developed and enriched over time, and their ideological orientation cannot be fully understood without considering the poetic texts. For these reasons, the project's third line of research addressed the study of the manuscript tradition ‘from the side of poetry’, reconstructing the ideological orientation of the musical anthologies by reading them as collections of poetry.
