Montanos Digital Corpus – The 111 Counterpoint Examples from Francisco de Montanos (1592)

Description

This dataset presents a complete and structured digital edition of the contrapuntal examples transmitted in Book III (Contrapunto) of Francisco de Montanos’s Arte de música theorica y practica (Valladolid, 1592). The corpus contains 111 contrapuntal realisations (editorial numbering 1–111), organised into eighteen pedagogical families corresponding to Montanos’s categories (especies, clausulas, passos cortados, imitacion, contrapunto concertado, and contrapunto sobre canto de organo).

The transcriptions and editorial documentation were prepared by Vicente Parrilla (2025) as part of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO)-funded doctoral project Renaissance Improvised Counterpoint: Rethinking Concept, Cognition, and Aural Foundations (project no. 11A9922N), conducted at KU Leuven, LUCA School of Arts, and docARTES.

This dataset includes:

• Editorial notes (PDF), including contextual introduction, bibliographical information, a synoptic table of all families and examples, and a diplomatic transcription of Montanos’s Contrapunto (ff. 1r–27v)

• MusicXML, PDF, and MIDI transcriptions of all examples

• Audio files (MP3) representing both complete families and selected individual examples

• Comprehensive metadata (Montanos_Tracklist.csv), linking each audio track to its family number, variants, editorial example numbering, contrapuntal technique, and folio location in the 1592 print

• CITATION.cff, release notes, and ancillary metadata files

A companion GitHub repository documents the editorial workflow, source files, and version history associated with the preparation of the corpus:
https://github.com/vparrilla/montanos-digital-corpus

The corpus is designed to support historical musicology, contrapuntal pedagogy, performance-based research, and computational analysis of Renaissance counterpoint. All files follow a unified internal indexing system to enable consistent citation and reproducibility.

Relationship to other datasets

This dataset forms part of the Improvised Counterpoint Sources and Corpora community on Zenodo, which brings together digital corpora of primary sources and the multi-volume Corpus of Recorded Counterpoint Examples (CRCE).

The CRCE currently comprises 420 historically informed instrumental recordings of counterpoint examples transmitted in Renaissance music theory treatises, including the present source. While the digital corpora provide edited transcriptions, navigational tools, and analytical metadata, the CRCE volumes document performative realisations of the same repertory.

Further contextual materials are available through the project website:
https://improvisedcounterpoint.com

Funding

Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), doctoral fellowship no. 11A9922N.