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Our knowledge of musical sources in that crucial and mysterious decade that Alfred Einstein termed an "artistic pause," the 1520os, has greatly expanded in the last thirty years. Three major landmarks have been Catherine Weeks Chapman's 1964 dissertation on Andrea Antico (followed by her 1968 article "Printed Collections of Polyphonic Music Owned by Ferdinand Columbus"), Knud Jeppesen's La Frottola (1968-70), and lain Fenlon and James Haar's The Italian Madrigal in the Early Sixteenth Century: Sources and Interpretation (1988), a masterly work that brings together decades of research on the topic and revises our notions of the early history of the madrigal. I should like to contribute a small footnote to that enterprise as a birthday offering to James Haar. The pursuit of books led Ferdinand Columbus, on forays at home and four trips abroad, to acquire some 172 printed books of music published between 1503 and 1534. Many of these have disappeared from the Biblioteca Colombina over the centuries, and today we are almost totally dependent on the catalogues of his collection for knowledge of what he owned. These are remarkably informative since they typically list not only the title, place of publication, and date, but also the format, number of pieces, and title of the first piece (sometimes also the last); occasionally he noted where he purchased the book and for how much.' Thanks to his detailed listings, Catherine Weeks

The change from "successive composition" to "simultaneous conception" is one of the great turning points in the history of music. The latter term, derived from Pietro Aaron's allusion to the method of composition used by modern composers, does not correctly convey Aaron's meaning. He said that modern composers "take all the parts into consideration at once," disposing them in different ranges and thus allowing the avoidance of awkward clashes between the inner voices. This more harmonic orientation finds confirmation in the writings of Giovanni Spataro, whose theory of harmony, later developed by Zarlino, contradicts a current view of fifteenth-century music as purely intervallic counterpoint founded on a superius-tenor framework in which the bass is nonstructural and nonessential. The theory is grounded in the functional role of dissonance, adumbrated a century earlier in the treatise by Goscalcus. Discussion of the new compositional process can already be found fifty years earlier in the writings of Johannes Tinctoris. That this has not been recognized is due to persistent confusion over the term res facta. The key to comprehending this term lies in a correct understanding of what Tinctoris meant by counterpoint: it is not what we today call counterpoint but successive composition. Res facta differs from counterpoint in that each voice must be related to every other voice so that no improper dissonances appear between them. This method, "harmonic composition," could be quasi-simultaneous or successive; the criterion is the ultimate result-the finished work of art. Res facta is both a method of composition and a term that denotes a work composed in this manner, analogous to Listenius's opus perfectum et absolutum. The musica poetica of the sixteenth century is the legacy of res facta, and the two terms are indirectly connected. The new process of composition is the foundation for Tinctoris's delineation of an ars nova beginning about 1437, a date that may have been chosen in recognition of its first great representation in Dufay's Nuper rosarum flores.