Jacques de Liège (Iacobus Leodiensis)

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Jacques de Liège (Iacobus Leodiensis)

Jacques de Liège (Iacobus Leodiensis), Belgian music theorist; b. Liège, c. 1260; d. there, after 1330. He studied in Paris, then was a cleric in Liège. About 1325, already at an advanced age, he wrote the important compendium Speculum musicae, in seven parts and 293 folios (586 pages; approximating some 2, 000 pages in modern typography). It was long attributed to Johannes de Muris, but the authorship of Jacques de Liège is proved by the specific indication in the MS in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris that the initial letters of the seven chapters form the name of the author (I-A-C-O-B-U-S). W. Grossmann overlooked this indication in his Die einleitenden Kapitel des Speculum Musicae von Johannes de Muris (Leipzig, 1924). The treatise has been ed. by R. Bragard in Corpus Scriptorum de Musica, III (parts 1-5, 1955-68), and by C. de Coussemaker in Scriptorum de musica medii aevi nova series, II (parts 6-7, 1864-76; incorrectly attributed to Johannes de Muris); selections in Eng. tr. are given in O. Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History (N.Y., 1950).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire

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