Editing Early Music is designed as a guide to editorial procedures suitable for music written from the Middle Ages to about 1830. Some of the suggestions are relevant to the editing of any music no longer in copyright. There is an introductory chapter on the principles of editing and transcribing, followed by three chronologically arranged chapters devoted to medieval and early renaissance music, the Renaissance, and baroque and classical music. The final chapter deals with the preparation of copy and other practical matters. Some of the technicalities are presented in the form of tables and appendices; there are musical illustrations and sample score-layouts, and a bibliography. While the book does not aim to descript early notations in detail, some of the basic information is conveyed, particularly through the extensive discussion of such matters as reduced time values and the treatment of accidentals. For this revised edition, the author has incorporated a number of corrections, brought the bibliography up to date, and added a Postscript on stemmatics and textual criticism.

Beating Time & Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era chronicles the shifting relationships between ideas about time in music and science from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Centered on theories of musical meter, the book investigates the interdependence between theories of meter and conceptualizations of time from the age of Zarlino to the invention of the metronome. These formulations have evolved throughout the history of Western music, reflecting fundamental reevaluations not only of music but also of time itself. Drawing on paradigms from the history of science and technology and the history of philosophy, author Roger Mathew Grant illustrates ways in which theories of meter and time, informed by one another, have manifested themselves in the field of music. During the long eighteenth century, treatises on subjects such as aesthetics, music theory, mathematics, and natural philosophy began to reflect an understanding of time as an absolute quantity, independent of events. This gradual but conclusive change had a profound impact on the network of ideas connecting time, meter, character, and tempo. Investigating the impacts of this change, Grant explores the timekeeping techniques - musical and otherwise - that implemented this conceptual shift, both technologically and materially. Bringing together diverse strands of thought in a broader intellectual history of temporality, Grant's study fills an unexpected yet conspicuous gap in the history of music theory, and is essential reading for music theorists and composers as well as historical musicologists and practitioners of historically informed performance.