The Makings of Philippe De Vitry

The Makings of Philippe De Vitry Synopsis

Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361), celebrated by his contemporaries as "the flower of the musical world," is known today as the premiere French composer and music theorist of his century. This pioneering book, the first devoted to Vitry, offers a new account of his music, poetry, biography, and scholarly reception, illuminating both the man and the cultural processes by which he came to join the ranks of the Great Composers.

Rejecting narratives that credit Vitry with ushering in a revolutionary New Art while still in his twenties, author A. Zayaruznaya depicts him as a life-long creator living in a time of technological change who experimented with new notational technologies and documented them over decades of his own creative practice. Moving beyond music and music theory, The Makings of Philippe de Vitry breaks new ground to explore Vitry's poetic works and literary exchanges, introducing readers to his propagandistic crusade tract Chapel de trois fleurs de lis, the salacious debate poem Ulixea fulgens facundia, and the nuances of his at-times fraught correspondence with the poet Petrarch.

A book concerned at once with Vitry's legacy and with the historical forces that have shaped that legacy, The Makings of Philippe de Vitry illuminates its subject without aggrandizing him, replacing a decontextualized heroic genius with a specific historical agent whose extraordinary legacy was shaped by a dense web of social, political, intellectual, and technological entanglements.