A wide overview of court culture in the middle ages. The court exercised an enormous amount of influence on the culture of the middle ages, as the essays collected here demonstrate. They examine a wide variety of different areas of medieval courtly culture, from the history of the book through courtly music to the theory of courtesy and courtly love. While some authors deal with the central texts of courtly literature, such as Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, Marie de France's Lais, the romances of Chretien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Strassburg, and the corpus of courtly lyric in various languages, others consider less-studied works like Galeran de Bretagne, or the French version of the Disciplina Clericalis. Several contributions take a comparative approach to courtly texts outside the Western tradition, while others point to the courtly nature of chronicle literature and to courtly influences on religious-didactic works. The volume as a whole thus presents an overview of medieval court culture. Contributors: GLORIA ALLAIRE, LAURA D. BAREFIELD, ANNE BERTHELOT, BERT BEYNEN, JEAN BLACKER, WALTER BLUE, MAUREEN BOULTON, FRANKBRANDSMA, EMMA CAYLEY, MARCO CEROCCHI, CHRISTOPHER R. CLASON, ALAIN CORBELLARI, IVY A. CORFIS, PAUL CREAMER, EVELYN DATTA, JUDITH M. DAVIS, FIDEL FAJARDO-ACOSTA, YASMINA FOEHR-JANSSENS, STACY L. HAHN, CAROL HARVEY, C. STEPHEN JAEGER, KATHY M. KRAUSE, JUNE HALL MCCASH, MATTHIAS MEYER, EDWARD J. MILOWICKI, JEANNE A. NIGHTINGALE, CHRISTOPHER PAGE, ANA PAIRET, WENDY PFEFFER, RUPERT T. PICKENS, MARIA PREDELLI, SILVIA RANAWAKE, PAUL ROCKWELL, SAMUEL, N. ROSENBERG, JUDITH RICE ROTHSCHILD, MARY ROUSE, RICHARD ROUSE, MARIANNE SANDELS, SUSAN STAKEL, ALEXANDRA STERLING-HELLENBRAND, JOSEPH M. SULLIVAN, YUKO TAGAYA, RICHARD TRACHSLER, ADRIAN TUDOR, MARION UHLIG, LORI J. WALTERS, LOGAN E. WHALEN, VALERIE M. WILHITE, MONICA L. WRIGHT.

This book looks at the musical culture of death in early modern England. This book looks at the musical culture of death in early modern England. In particular, it examines musical funeral elegies and the people related to commemorative tribute - the departed, the composer, potential patrons, and friends and family of the deceased - to determine the place these musical-poetic texts held in a society in which issues of death were discussed regularly, producing a constant, pervasive shadow over everyday life. The composition of these songs reached a peak at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. Thomas Weelkes and Thomas Morley both composed musical elegies, as did William Byrd, Thomas Campion, John Coprario, and many others. Like the literary genre from which these musical gems emerged, there was wide variety in form, style, length, and vocabulary used. Embedded within them are clear messages regarding the social expectations, patronage traditions, and class hierarchy of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. En masse, they offer a glimpse into the complex relationship that existed between those who died, those who grieved, and attitudes toward both death and life. K. DAWN GRAPES is Assistant Professor of Music History at Colorado State University.

Part of the seminal Cambridge History of Music series, this volume departs from standard histories of early modern Western music in two important ways. First, it considers music as something primarily experienced by people in their daily lives, whether as musicians or listeners, and as something that happened in particular locations, and different intellectual and ideological contexts, rather than as a story of genres, individual counties, and composers and their works. Second, by constraining discussion within the limits of a 100-year timespan, the music culture of the sixteenth century is freed from its conventional (and tenuous) absorption within the abstraction of 'the Renaissance', and is understood in terms of recent developments in the broader narrative of this turbulent period of European history. Both an original take on a well-known period in early music and a key work of reference for scholars, this volume makes an important contribution to the history of music.

Based on highly original archival and palaeographical research, this is the first methodological and factual primer in English on the distinctive liturgical tradition of early medieval Spain. It provides clear and approachable blueprints for future work on the description and analysis (musical, theological and cultural) of this and other liturgies. For non-specialists, the authors introduce the main features of Old Hispanic liturgy, its manuscripts, its services and its liturgical genres. For specialists, they model a variety of ways to work with the Old Hispanic materials in depth, incorporating notational, musical, theological and historical perspectives. For those interested in musical notation, the book lays out a method for working with unpitched neumes, with illustrative results, that will inspire and challenge others working on monophonic chant. For historians and liturgists, the texts and melodies are analysed in combination with the theological context that informed their creation.

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.

Scholars and performers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries attempted to revive music that could evoke the Middle Ages. They invented new sounds and new ways of understanding medieval music. This is the fascinating story of the musicians and the societies in which they worked to remake a lost musical world.

for SATB unaccompanied or with percussion This energetic and highly rhythmic arrangement of a 15th- century carol uses a folksy call-and-response style, which helps the piece maintain its momentum right through to its thrilling fortissimo conclusion.

This collection of reprinted essays starts from the author's doctoral research on Jacopo Peri and the rise of opera and solo song in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Florence. It extends to broader issues concerning music and patronage in the city as they affected individual composers, patrons and institutions, and thence to the commerce of music printing and the book trade. It concludes with an attempt to suggest a broader view of these various issues as they impact upon musical life in the 'provinces' in Tuscany. There is a great deal of new documentary and other information here, but the aim is also to expand methodological horizons so as to prompt new ways of thinking about music in its contexts.

This Element explores the circulation of musical instruments, practices, and thought in premodern Eurasia at the crossroads of empires and nomadic cultures. It takes into consideration mechanisms of transmission, appropriation, adaptation, and integration that helped shape musical traditions that are perceived as culturally and geographically distinct yet are historically linked. The five stories featured here range from the geographically diverse performing groups during the Sui and Tang era, to the elusive musical world of Kucha in the Tarim Basin; from the fragmentary history of a single instrument linked to the Turkic peoples across Eurasia, to the transcontinental circulation of sound-making automata, including the organ, on both east-west and north-south axes. Within the conceptual background of cultural encounter and exchange, this Element provides possible strategies for integrating such information into the historical tapestry of Eurasian transcontinental networks as explored in other Elements in the series.

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.

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.

The universally acclaimed and award-winning Oxford History of Western Music is the eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin's provocative, erudite telling of the story of Western music from its earliest days to the present. Each book in this superlative five-volume set illuminates-through a representative sampling of masterworks- the themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to a significant period in the history of Western music.
This first volume in Richard Taruskin's majestic history, Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century, sweeps across centuries of musical innovation to shed light on the early forces that shaped the development of the Western classical tradition. Beginning with the invention of musical notation more than a thousand years ago, Taruskin addresses topics such as the legend of Saint Gregory and Gregorian chant, Augustine's and Boethius's thoughts on music, the liturgical dramas of Hildegard of Bingen, the growth of the music printing business, the literary revolution and the English madrigal, the influence of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and the operas of Monteverdi. Laced with brilliant observations, memorable musical analysis, and a panoramic sense of the interactions between history, culture, politics, art, literature, religion, and music, this book will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand this rich and diverse period.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This book presents 60 of the very best madrigals for SATB, chosen from the many hundreds of possible candidates. The major composers of the genre are each represented by several madrigals and the lesser figures by one or more.

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.

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.

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.