Throughout medieval Europe, male and female religious communities attached to churches, abbeys, and schools participated in devotional music making outside of the chanted liturgy. Newly collating over 400 songs from primary sources, this book reveals the role of Latin refrains and refrain songs in the musical lives of religious communities by employing novel interdisciplinary and analytical approaches to the study of medieval song. Through interpretive frameworks focused on time and temporality, performance, memory, inscription, and language, each chapter offers an original perspective on how refrains were created, transmitted, and performed. Arguing for the Latin refrain's significance as a marker of form and meaning, this book identifies it as a tool that communities used to negotiate their lived experiences of liturgical and calendrical time; to confirm their communal identity and belonging to song communities; and to navigate relationships between Latin and vernacular song and dance that emerge within their multilingual contexts.

From music written in praise of Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and English saints to the selection of Gospel readings by the Dominicans, this book introduces readers to the richness of medieval liturgical culture from across Britain and Ireland. Each of its three main sections opens with a chapter that offers a contextual frame for its key themes. With contributions from leading experts in pre-Reformation music and its sources, the book's focus on Insular liturgy - rather than that of only one part of Britain or Ireland - allows readers to learn about the devotional, political and creative networks at play in shaping liturgical practices: personal, secular, monastic, lay, and professional. The opening part includes broader discussions of Uses, including that of Salisbury, and case studies explore Insular witnesses to devotional activities in honour of both local cults and widely known figures, including St Columba, St Margaret, St Katherine, and the Magi.

Survey of the relationship between music and literature in 14c France, Italy and Britain, with appendix of all songs attributed to Chaucer. An absorbing survey... He is an expert on the French song of the period, consequently his wider view of Chaucer's musical background is well worth reading ... and he has much to say about Italy and England. The music is first-rate, and early music performers will find these songs a welcome addition to their repertory. EARLY MUSIC Although Chaucer himself was never described as a musician, a number of his poems are based on French models which belongto a well-established musical tradition, and there are also many references to musical activities in his larger works. This is the starting point for Dr Wilkins's book, which explores both the wider question of the relationship between music and literature in the fourteenth century and the specific area of Chaucer `songs'. He surveys the musical and literary scene in France, Italy and Britain during Chaucer's lifetime, with special emphasis on composers such as Machaut and Landini, and on the differences in national styles. The performance of music and the instruments used are also fully explored. The discussion of Chaucer's musical background is illustrated in the accompanyingsettings presented with words by Chaucer - ten ballades, three complaintes (or chants royaux), and one rondeau. Fully illustrated with black and white photographs and musical examples. New edition; first published 1979, 1980.

The Conductus repertory is the body of monophonic and polyphonic non-liturgical Latin song that dominated European culture from the middle of the twelfth century to the beginning of the fourteenth. In this book, Mark Everist demonstrates how the poetry and music interact, explores how musical structures are created, and discusses the geographical and temporal reach of the genre, including its significance for performance today. The volume studies what medieval society thought of the Conductus, its function in medieval society - whether paraliturgical or in other contexts - and how it fitted into patristic and secular Latin cultures. The Conductus emerges as a genre of great poetic and musical sophistication that brought the skills of poets and musicians into alignment. This book provides an all-encompassing view of an important but unexplored repertory of medieval music, engaging with both poetry and music even-handedly to present new and up-to-date perspectives on the genre.

This specially commissioned collection of thirteen essays explores the life and works of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), monastic founder, leader of a community of nuns, composer, active correspondent, and writer of religious visions, theological treatises, sermons, and scientific and medical texts. Aimed at advanced university students and new Hildegard researchers, the essays provide a broad context for Hildegard's life and monastic setting, and offer comprehensive discussions on each of the main areas of her output. Engagingly written by experts in medieval history, theology, German literature, musicology, and the history of medicine, the essays are grounded in Hildegard's twelfth-century context, and investigate her output within its monastic and liturgical environments, her reputation during and after her life, and the materiality of the transmission of her works, considering aspects of manuscript layout, illumination, and scribal practices at her Rupertsberg monastery.

A primary mode for the creation and dissemination of poetry in Renaissance Italy was the oral practice of singing and improvising verse to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. Singing to the Lyre is the first comprehensive study of this ubiquitous practice, which was cultivated by performers ranging from popes, princes, and many artists, to professionals of both mercantile and humanist background. Common to all was a strong degree of mixed orality based on a synergy between writing and the oral operations of memory, improvisation, and performance. As a cultural practice deeply rooted in language and supported by ancient precedent, cantare ad lyram (singing to the lyre) is also a reflection of Renaissance cultural priorities, including the status of vernacular poetry, the study and practice of rhetoric, the oral foundations of humanist education, and the performative culture of the courts reflected in theatrical presentations and Castiglione's Il cortegiano.

First full comprehensive guide to one of the most important genres of music in the Middle Ages. Motets constitute the most important polyphonic genre of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Moreover, these compositions are intrinsically involved in the early development of polyphony. This volume - the first to be devotedexclusively to medieval motets - aims to provide a comprehensive guide to them, from a number of different disciplines and perspectives. It addresses crucial matters such as how the motet developed; the rich interplay of musical,poetic, and intertextual modes of meaning specific to the genre; and the changing social and historical circumstances surrounding motets in medieval France, England, and Italy. It also seeks to question many traditional assumptions and received opinions in the area. The first part of the book considers core concepts in motet scholarship: issues of genre, relationships between the motet and other musico-poetic forms, tenor organization, isorhythm, notational development, social functions, and manuscript layout. This is followed by a series of individual case studies which look in detail at a variety of specific pieces, compositional techniques, collections, and subgenres. JARED C. HARTT is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. Contributors: Margaret Bent, Jacques Boogaart, Catherine A. Bradley, Alice V. Clark, Suzannah Clark, KarenDesmond, Lawrence Earp, Sarah Fuller, John Haines, Jared C. Hartt, Elizabeth Eva Leach, Dolores Pesce, Gael Saint-Cricq, Jennifer Saltzstein, Matthew P. Thomson, Stefan Udell, Anna Zayaruznaya, Emily Zazulia

Unlocks the secrets behind the images and music of an important Spanish musical manuscript compiled for a brotherhood of suspected heretics ca. 1500. The Rosary Cantoral is a rare and beautifully decorated manuscript of Latin plainchant for the Catholic Mass compiled in Toledo, Spain, around the year 1500. In an engaging and richly interdisciplinary essay, Lorenzo Candelaria approaches the Rosary Cantoral as a cultural artifact, unlocking the secrets behind its images and music to reveal the social history and rituals of an elite brotherhood dedicated to the rosary and aspects of the religious communityit served: the Dominicans of San Pedro Martir de Toledo. The Rosary Cantoral: Ritual and Social Design in a Chantbook from Early Renaissance Toledo presents a model for realizing the fuller significance of illuminatedmusic manuscripts as cultural artifacts and offers unprecedented insights into the social and devotional life of Toledo, Spain, around the turn of the sixteenth century. After solving the mystery of the Rosary Cantoral's origins,subsequent essays probe the meaning and cultural significance of the manuscript's iconography (including a border decoration after Albrecht Durer), its rare Spanish chants for the Mass, and two striking musical works for multiplevoices (one by Josquin Desprez and another on "L'homme arme"). Ultimately, this book focuses on the extraordinary circumstances that engendered the compilation of the Rosary Cantoral around 1500: a system of patronage between a brotherhood of suspected heretics and a religious house that was a key supporter of the Inquisition in Toledo. Lorenzo Candelaria (University of Texas at Austin) is co-author of American Music: A Panorama.

During the eighty years from approx. 1535 many thousands of Italian madrigals were composed. Here are 55 for mixed voices covering the whole range of types, and the whole period. All have been chosen for their musical value - they are small masterpieces.

Music played an exceptionally important role in the late Middle Ages - articulating people's social, psychological and eschatological needs. The process began with the training of choirboys whose skill was key to institutional identity. That skill was closely cultivated and directly sought by kings and emperors, who intervened directly in recruitment of choirboys and older singers in order to build and articulate their self-image and perceived status. Using the documentation of an exceptionally well preserved archive, this book focuses on music's functioning in an important church in late Medieval Northern France. It explores a period when musicians from this region set the agenda across Europe, developing what is still some of the most sophisticated music in the Western musical tradition. The book allows a close focus not on the great achievements of those who cultivated this music, but on the personal motivations that shaped their life and work.

The 'cyclic' polyphonic Mass has long been seen as the pre-eminent musical genre of the late Middle Ages, spawning some of the most impressive and engrossing musical edifices of the period. Modern study of these compositions has greatly enhanced our appreciation of their construction and aesthetic appeal. Yet close consideration of their meaning - cultural, social, spiritual, personal - for their composers and original users has begun only much more recently. This book considers the genre both as an expression of the needs of the society in which it arose and as a fulfilment of aesthetic priorities that arose in the wake of the Enlightenment. From this dual perspective, it aims to enhance both our appreciation of the genre for today's world, and our awareness of what it is that makes any cultural artefact endure: its susceptibility to fulfil the different evaluative criteria, and social needs, of different times.

Music theorists labelled the musical art of the 1330s and 1340s as 'new' and 'modern'. A close reading of writings on music theory and the polyphonic repertory from the first half of the fourteenth century reveals a modern musical art that arose due to specific innovations in music notation. The French ars nova employed as its theoretical fundament a new system for arranging musical time proposed by the astronomer and mathematician Jean des Murs. Challenging prevailing accounts of the ars nova, this book presents the 'new art' within the intellectual context of its time, revises the datings of Jean des Murs's writings on music theory, and presents the intersection of theory and practice for a crucial era in the history of music. Through contemporaneous accounts, Desmond explores how individuals were involved in 'changing' music in early fourteenth-century France, and the technical developments they pursued that precipitated this stylistic change.

During the years between the restoration of the Medici to Florence and the election of Cosimo I, the Medici family sponsored a series of splendid public festivals, reconstructed here by Anthony M. Cummings. Cummings has utilized unexpectedly rich sources of information about the musical life of the time in contemporary narrative accounts of these occasions--histories, diaries, and family memoirs. In this interdisciplinary work, he explains how the festivals combined music with art and literature to convey political meanings to Florentine observers. As analyzed by Cummings, the festivals document the political transformation of the city in the crucial era that witnessed the end of the Florentine republic and the beginnings of the Medici principate. This book will interest all students of the life and institutions of sixteenth-century Florence and of the Medici family. In addition, the author furnishes new evidence about the contexts for musical performances in early modern Europe. By describing such contexts, he ascertains much about how music was performed and how it sounded in this period of music history and shows that the modes of musical expression were more varied than is suggested by the relatively few surviving examples of actual pieces of music. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Plague, a devastating and recurring affliction throughout the Renaissance, had a major impact on European life. Not only was pestilence a biological problem, but it was also read as a symptom of spiritual degeneracy and it caused widespread social disorder. Assembling a picture of the complex and sometimes contradictory responses to plague from medical, spiritual and civic perspectives, this book uncovers the place of music - whether regarded as an indispensable medicine or a moral poison that exacerbated outbreaks - in the management of the disease. This original musicological approach further reveals how composers responded, in their works, to the discourses and practices surrounding one of the greatest medical crises in the pre-modern age. Addressing topics such as music as therapy, public rituals and performance and music in religion, the volume also provides detailed musical analysis throughout to illustrate how pestilence affected societal attitudes toward music.

Through forty-five creative and concise essays by an international team of authors, this Cambridge History brings the fifteenth century to life for both specialists and general readers. Combining the best qualities of survey texts and scholarly literature, the book offers authoritative overviews of central composers, genres, and musical institutions as well as new and provocative reassessments of the work concept, the boundaries between improvisation and composition, the practice of listening, humanism, musical borrowing, and other topics. Multidisciplinary studies of music and architecture, feasting, poetry, politics, liturgy, and religious devotion rub shoulders with studies of compositional techniques, musical notation, music manuscripts, and reception history. Generously illustrated with figures and examples, this volume paints a vibrant picture of musical life in a period characterized by extraordinary innovation and artistic achievement.

This volume provides a representative sample of the major genres of English medieval religious lyric. The arrangement of the texts are an important part of its value as an instrument of teaching and understanding, and the notes are extensive.

Its scope is impressive... a formidable achievement, indispensable for any serious and comprehensive study of early English drama. MEDIUM AEVUM Richard Rastall's two books on music in early English religious drama complement each other. Heaven Singing provides an overview of the evidence for music in the plays, and defines the place, nature and cultural contexts ofmusic in the drama; Minstrels Playing is a discussion of the evidence for every play in that repertory, and is therefore concerned with the place and nature of musical performance in each play individually. Where should there be music in an anonymous English religious play of the fifteenth or sixteenth century? What sort of music should it be, and by what forces should it be performed? This volume shows how music was used at the time of the plays' production, both through a close examination of individual texts, and of the place of music in the intellectual and artistic life of the middle ages. Richard Rastall begins by discussing the internal literary evidence of theplay texts, the surviving notated music in the plays, and documentary evidence of productions, before turning to the wider cultural context in which the plays were composed and performed. He considers the representational and dynamic functions of music in the plays, the relationship between music, drama and liturgy, and the performers themselves - who they were, and what they might be expected to do. Related factors necessary to the discovery of how musicwas used in late medieval drama are also considered, from medieval cosmology and the numerical construction of plays to the age and size of boy actors. Dr RICHARD RASTALL is Reader in Historical Musicology at the University of Leeds, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts.

Volume 3 of 3. This monumental three-volume work on the Italian madrigal from its beginnings about 1500 to its decline in the 17th century is based on the research of 40 years, and is a cultural history of the development of Italian music. Mr. Einstein, renowned musicologist, supplies a background and a sense of proportion to the field: he gives the right order to the single composers in the evolution fo the madrigal, attaches new values to old names, and places in the foreground the outstanding, but until now rather neglected, personality of Cipriano de Rore. His work is not, however, purely musicological; his object is to inquire into the functions of secular music in Italian life during the Cinquecento, and to contribute to our knowledge and understanding of that great century in general. Translated from the German by Oliver Strunk, Roger Sessions and Alexander H. Krappe. Originally published in 1948. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

How I wept at your hymns and songs, keenly moved by the sweet-sounding voices of your church wrote the recently converted Augustine in his "Confessions." Christians from the earliest period consecrated the hours of the day and the sacred calendar, liturgical seasons and festivals of saints. This volume collects one hundred of the most important and beloved Late Antique and Medieval Latin hymns from Western Europe.

These religious voices span a geographical range that stretches from Ireland through France to Spain and Italy. They meditate on the ineffable, from Passion to Paradise, in love and trembling and praise. The authors represented here range from Ambrose in the late fourth century ce down to Bonaventure in the thirteenth. The texts cover a broad gamut in their poetic forms and meters. Although often the music has not survived, most of them would have been sung. Some of them have continued to inspire composers, such as the great thirteenth-century hymns, the "Stabat mater "and "Dies irae.""

Pathbreaking study of a vast and intriguing repertoire: arrangements for keyboard instruments of songs, arias, and other vocal pieces, from the age William Byrd to that of Handel. Keyboard arrangements of vocal music flourished in England between1560 and 1760. Songs without Words, by noted harpsichordist and early-music authority Sandra Mangsen, is the first in-depth study of this topic, uncovering abody of material that is remarkably varied, musically interesting, and indicative of major trends in musical and social life at the time. Mangsen's Songs without Words argues that the pieces upon which these keyboardarrangements were based constituted a shared repertoire, akin to the jazz standards of the twentieth century. In Restoration England, the ballad tradition saw tunes and texts move between oral, manuscript, and printed transmissionand from street to playhouse and back again. During the eighteenth century, printed keyboard arrangements were aimed particularly at female amateur keyboardists and helped opera to become a widely popular genre. Songs without Words considers a wide range of model pieces, including songs of many kinds and arias and other numbers from operas and oratorios. The resulting keyboard versions range from simple and pedagogically oriented to highly virtuosic. Two central issues -- the relationship between an arrangement and its model and the reception and aesthetics of arrangements -- are explored in the framing chapters. The result is a study that will be of great interest toscholars, performers, and anyone who loves the music of the late Renaissance, Baroque, and early Classic eras. Sandra Mangsen is professor emerita of music at the University of Western Ontario.

Polyphony associated with the Parisian cathedral of Notre Dame marks a historical turning point in medieval music. Yet a lack of analytical or theoretical systems has discouraged close study of twelfth- and thirteenth-century musical objects, despite the fact that such creations represent the beginnings of musical composition as we know it. Is musical analysis possible for such medieval repertoires? Catherine A. Bradley demonstrates that it is, presenting new methodologies to illuminate processes of musical and poetic creation, from monophonic plainchant and vernacular French songs, to polyphonic organa, clausulae, and motets in both Latin and French. This book engages with questions of text-music relationships, liturgy, and the development of notational technologies, exploring concepts of authorship and originality as well as practices of quotation and musical reworking.

The complex relationship between myths and music is here investigated. Myths and stories offer a window onto medieval and early modern musical culture. Far from merely offering material for musical settings, authoritative tales from classical mythology, ancient history and the Bible were treated as foundations for musical knowledge. Such myths were cited in support of arguments about the uses, effects, morality and preferred styles of music in sources as diverse as theoretical treatises, defences or critiques of music, art, sermons, educational literature and books of moral conduct. Newly written literary stories too were believed capable of moral instruction and influence, and were a medium through which ideas about music could be both explored and transmitted. How authors interpreted and weaved together these traditional stories, or created their own, reveals much about changing attitudes across the period. Looking beyond the well-known figure of Orpheus, this collection explores the myriad stories that shaped not only musical thought, but also its styles, techniques and practices. The essays show that music itself performed and created knowledge in ways parallel to myth, and worked in tandem with old and new tales to construct social, political and philosophical views. This relationship was not static, however; as the Enlightenment dawned, the once authoritative gods became comic characters and myth became a medium forridicule. Overall, the book provides a foundation for exploring myth and story throughout medieval and early modern culture, and facilitating further study into the Enlightenment and beyond. KATHERINE BUTLER is a seniorlecturer in music at Northumbria University; SAMANTHA BASSLER is a musicologist of cultural studies, a teaching artist, and an adjunct professor in the New York metropolitan area. Contributors: Jamie Apgar, Katie Bank, Samantha Bassler, Katherine Butler, Elina G. Hamilton, Sigrid Harris, Ljubica Ilic, Erica Levenson, John MacInnis, Patrick McMahon, Aurora Faye Martinez, Jacomien Prins, Tim Shephard, Jason Stoessel, Ferdia J. Stone-Davis, Amanda Eubanks Winkler.

Late medieval motet texts are brimming with chimeras, centaurs and other strange creatures. In The Monstrous New Art, Anna Zayaruznaya explores the musical ramifications of this menagerie in the works of composers Guillaume de Machaut, Philippe de Vitry, and their contemporaries. Aligning the larger forms of motets with the broad sacred and secular themes of their texts, Zayaruznaya shows how monstrous or hybrid exempla are musically sculpted by rhythmic and textural means. These divisive musical procedures point to the contradictory aspects not only of explicitly monstrous bodies, but of such apparently unified entities as the body politic, the courtly lady, and the Holy Trinity. Zayaruznaya casts a new light on medieval modes of musical representation, with profound implications for broader disciplinary narratives about the history of text-music relations, the emergence of musical unity, and the ontology of the musical work.

Few now remember that the guitar was popular in England during the age of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare, and yet it was played everywhere from the royal court to the common tavern. This groundbreaking book, the first entirely devoted to the renaissance guitar in England, deploys new literary and archival material, together with depictions in contemporary art, to explore the social and musical world of the four-course guitar among courtiers, government servants and gentlemen. Christopher Page reconstructs the trade in imported guitars coming to the wharves of London, and pieces together the printed tutor for the instrument (probably of 1569) which ranks as the only method book for the guitar to survive from the sixteenth century. Two chapters discuss the remains of music for the instrument in tablature, both the instrumental repertoire and the traditions of accompanied song, which must often be assembled from scattered fragments of information.