Preface

Abstract The preface describes the history of the book’s writing, with a thirty-year gap between the first drafting and the completion of the book almost forty years later, and outlines the benefits of the collaboration between the author in his fifties and the same author in his late seventies, with a much slower and less retentive mind but with enormously more experience of music and how people react to it. It explains the relationship between the book and the Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415–1480 (Oxford University Press, 1999, now online) which was originally intended as an integral part of the book and continues to occupy that role. It describes also the function of the Appendix (also now online), which summarizes information newly acquired in the interim and is also an integral part of this book.