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<p>A semiminim is typically defined as a note value worth half a minim, usually drawn
as a flagged or colored minim. That definition is one according to which generations
of scholars have constructed chronologies and provenances for fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
music and the people who created it. `Semiminims' that do not match this definition
are often portrayed in modern scholarship as anomalous, or early prototypes, or evidence
of poor education, or as peculiarities of individual preference. My intensive survey
of the extant theoretical literature from the earliest days of the Ars Nova through
c. 1440 reveals how the conceptualization and codification of notation occurred in
different places according to different fundamental principles, resulting not in one
semiminim but a plethora of related small note values. These phenomena were dynamic
and unstable, and a close study of them helps to clarify a range of historical issues.
Localized traditions have often been strictly bounded in scholarly literature; references
to French, Italian, and English notation are commonplace. I explain notational preferences
in Italy, England, central Europe, and the rest of western Europe with regard to these
small note values but demonstrate that theorists educated in each of these places
routinely incorporated portions of other traditions. This process began long before
the `ars subtilior,' dating at least to the time of Franco of Cologne. Rarely were
regional traditions truly isolated; the various aspects of semiminim-family note values
were debated and adapted for decades across these cultural and geographical boundaries.
The central theme of my research is to show how and why the theoretical conceptualization
of these myriad small note values is key to understanding the continual merging of
these local preferences into a more amalgamated style of notation by the mid-fifteenth
century.</p>
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