No sooner did the Gutenberg revolution reach musical academia than some distinguished theorists became embroiled in a rather nasty disagreement about tuning. Two years after the appearance in 1480 of Franchino Gaffurio's Theoricum opus musicae disciplinae, which was the first European printed book on music, Bartholome Ramos de Pareja published in his Musica practica a new and mathematically simple scheme which he said young singers could use for a monochord to provide a model scale for plainchant. Ramos's book appears to have enjoyed more than one reprinting (Ghisi 1935) but was vigorously attacked by John Hothby and, in 1487, Nicola Burzio. Around 1489 Ramos's leading disciple, Giovanni Spataro, gave a copy to Gaffurio, who returned it with critical comments in the margin (see Gaffurio ed. Miller 1977, 20), some of them about the monochord. Ramos left Italy in 1491, but the exchange between Gaffurio and Spataro went on for some thirty years.

If music is to meet the requirements of modern medical practice, it ought ideally to behave like a medicine (Kneutgen 1970): in other words, it ought to be possible to calculate its effects on a patient in advance, in the same way that this is possible with tablets. Yet the history of music therapy, from its beginnings in shamanistic healing songs and ancient Greek ethos doctrine to the present (Möller 1971), shows that music can scarcely be said to generate effects that are calculable in advance in a medical sense; and, consequently, the hackneyed idea of music as a drug has no meaning. The effects of music are complex and diverse, and are not comparable with those of drugs, which have largely been established as specific to individual drugs. Drug dependence is described in terms of concepts like addiction; dependence on music, if indeed it exists at all, ought rather to be described in terms of concepts like predilection or preference.

At the end of his life, Socrates reported a command which he had received in a dream. This is, of course, the Platonic Socrates; the Socrates of Xenophon would never have had anything to do with so trifling a pursuit as musical composition. According to Plato, he was told, ‘Compose musical settings of poetry; make this your regular practice’ (Phaedo 60e6–7: , mousikēn poiei kai ergadzou).

Guillaume De Machaut's Hoquetus David has long been regarded as an exceptional work (for sources, see the bibliography appended to this article). Sections of hocket had been included in motets since the twelfth century (see Sanders 1974), and the technique still played an important part in the isorhythmic structure of Machaut's own motets. Surviving examples of hockets as independent compositions, however, are few. From the thirteenth century there are the seven consecutive pieces in Bamberg 115 (ed. Aubry 1908, nos. 102–8), five of them based on the same chant, together with isolated pieces in Montpellier 196 (ed. Rokseth 1935–9, no. 5) and Paris 11411 (no. 3). On the other hand, the numerous references in theoretical treatises to hocket as an independent form on a par with motets and organa suggest that hockets as separate pieces were not uncommon during the thirteenth century. For the fourteenth century, however, the picture is far less clear. Jacob of Liège, writing around 1330–40, states that modern composers use hocket only in motets, having abandoned the old duplex, contra-duplex, triplex, and quadruplex forms (ed. Bragard 1973, 89); and the fact that the Hoquetus David appears to be the only surviving example supports this.

Of the twenty or so music manuscripts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries preserved in Hereford Cathedral Library, no fewer than six contain sections devoted to keyboard music — a remarkably high proportion. Although all six contain other music too, this article will concentrate on the keyboard music; and, since the sources are very little known and virtually unrecorded in print, a description and inventory of all the keyboard music will be given here. (A complete inventory of all the manuscripts will eventually be published under the auspices of the Répertoire international des sources musicales (RISM).) The six manuscripts can be divided chronologically into three groups: two from around 1700, two from around 1720 and two from around the 1760s.