| Summary: | <p>Johannes, the eleventh-century glossator of Guido of Arezzo, is the earliest of several theorists who indirectly associate the semitone with cross-dressing, using a Vergilian citation about Phrygian men. Taking this as a starting point, this paper explores the gendered nature of sub-tonal intervals. The femininity of the semitone is initially a theoretical commonplace drawn from Greek antiquity, but in the context of medieval antifeminism on the one hand and the new placement and tuning of semitones afforded by the directed progression on the other, the ethical precariousness of <em>ars nova</em> music leads a number of music theorists to highly gendered and revealing discussions of their own contemporary musical practices. This paper discusses the theoretical positions of Marchetto of Padua and Johannes Boen in the context of the gendered discourse that surrounded intervals smaller than a tone. It can be argued that fourteenth-century counterpoint represents a point of origin for music-theoretical associations between chromaticism, exoticism, femininity and sexually alluring East.</p>
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