Muris, Johannes de

A disciple of Franco; a mathematician and musical theorist of the early part of the Fourteenth Century of whom very little is certainly known. Neither the date nor the place of his birth has been found, some authorities claiming him as English. Although the matter of his birthplace will probably never be settled, we are tolerably certain that de Muris spent much of his life in Paris, for he mentions having heard there a triplum composed by Franco, and some of his writings are dated from the Sorbonne, among them Musica Speculativa and Canones de eclipsi lunse. He is mentioned as a mathematician and musician in manuscripts of that time. In the British Museum is a copy of Musica Speculativa, an abridgment of Boetius attributed to him, which was printed in Frankfort in 1508. The only writing which   may certainly be assigned to him is the Speculum Musice, which is to be found in two manuscripts in the Bibliptheque Nationale at Paris. It consists of seven books, as follows:   Miscellaneous; On Intervals; On Musical Oratorios; On Consonance; Theory of Ancient Music after Boetius; Church Modes and Solmisation; Measured Music and Discant. The influence de Muris had upon music was a restraining one; he believed in formality and dignity of composition and decried the tendencies of various innovations in his time which he thought threatened the theory and structure of music.