Pedro Martínez de Osma’s Treatise on Music: A Recovered Testimony from the Fifteenth Century

Abstract

This article presents a new fifteenth-century Spanish music treatise written by Pedro Martínez de Osma, Professor of Theology at the University of Salamanca. This text was known through contemporary references by his colleague Ramos de Pareja, but had not been identified until now. Written in 1465 and preserved at the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III in Naples, the text provides new information from a very little explored period in Spain in terms of music philosophy, precisely because of the lack of documentary sources. By analysing its content, the author explains the reformist and pre-humanist climate that characterized those years in Salamanca, and outlines the school of thought that would allow distinguished theorists of the sixteenth century century to flourish in the wake of Ramos and other composer-theorists around 1500, especially Francisco Salinas.