Self-reference occurs in a number of pieces written by well-known composers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We normally associate this with textual references in works that mention musicians by name, such as laments, or musical prayers. Jane Hatter’s Composing Community in Late Medieval Music explores many of these pieces, as well as a number of others that highlight the act of composing itself. Through analyzing self-referential works in conjunction with their social functions, Hatter uncovers how pieces alluding to composers and their trade were used to construct a sense of community and to promote the idea of the professional composer among several generations of musicians working around 1500. She neatly sums up the importance of these works to those who wrote and performed them by saying, “Self-referential compositions themselves provide evidence for how musicians were involved in the development and transmission of the early modern concept of the composer”...

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