Composers at Work is the first comprehensive and systematic study of compositional process in Renaissance music. Owens draws on documentary, manuscript, and theoretical evidence to construct a striking new explanation of how composers actually worked. Through a study of autograph sketches, drafts, and fair copies of composers such as Henricus Isaac, Cipriano de Rore, Francesco Corteccia, and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Owens reveals a process of working in separate parts, line by line, and not in full score, as in our modern editions. This discovery has major implications for the analysis, editorial interpretation, and performance of early music.

This comprehensive collection of essays offers an overview of scholarly and analytical approaches toward the motet in its most varied incarnations from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. Featuring essays from the top scholars in the field, including Paula Higgins, Craig Monson, Patrick Macey, Anne Walters Robertson, Jessie Ann Owens, Margaret Bent, and Joshua Rifkin, this collection offers, through insightful reading of specific motets and motet repertoires, a broad-ranging analysis of the function and context of the motet in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

'This is a remarkable and important book: impeccably scholarly yet very readable, brimming with ideas and thoroughly engaging. It will be much enjoyed by musicians with any interest in the early violin or in English music of the 16th and 17th centuries.' Paul Doe in Early Music

Although Saint Cecilia is venerated throughout the Western world as the patron saint of music and Raphael's famous painting The Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia is filled with musical iconography, the ancient origins of Cecilia's association with music have long been shrouded in mystery. This book, a masterful investigation of the Cecilian cult from its beginnings in Christian antiquity down to the Renaissance, explains how Cecilia came to be linked with music and offers a new interpretation of Raphael's painting. Thomas Connolly finds the key to the mystery in a theme he identifies as "mourning-into-joy." This theme, rooted in the Bible and in Aristotle's doctrine of the passions of the soul, became prominent in the visual and literary arts as well as in theology and spirituality and expressed the soul's passages between vice and virtue as a conversion of sadness into joy. According to Connolly, this idea strongly influenced the legend and worship of Saint Cecilia, a model for all who sought spiritual transformation. Connolly argues that the medieval mystical mind saw music as an intimate expression of the experiences of conversion and spiritual growth and that the conjunction of spirit and music became crystallized in the figure of the saint. His explanation not only provides a better understanding of Raphael's work and other Renaissance and Baroque art but also clarifies puzzling literary questions concerning Saint Cecilia, such as Chaucer's treatment of her in "The Second Nun's Tale."

The chanson Doulce memoire, by Pierre Regnault, "dit Sandrin" (ca. 1490-1561), is a simple melody elegantly wedded to poetry that evokes nostalgia for something everyone has experienced a consuming, passionate love that exists only in bittersweet memory. This chanson was so popular that it was frequently reprinted and arranged in a variety of settings for singers and instrumentalists.

From 36 known arrangements, George Houle has selected 24 versions that require from one to six performers. Lutenists will find intabulations of varying difficulty, and the keyboard pieces range from teh very simple to an elaborate fantasy by Hernando de Cabezon. There are virtuosic arrangements for solo viola da gamba as well as duos and trios for many combinations of voices and instruments.

These settings, coupled with Houle's informative text, illustrate the ways Doulce memoire was performed by Renaissance musicians. Some versions show the players conforming to the ideas of the musical theorists of the day, while others demonstrate how much freedom an individual could exercise. For today's musicians, the anthology provides invaluable information on musica ficta and ornamentation.

Houle's performing edition in modern notation includes both scores and parts, the latter ingeniously laid out so that pages simulataneously required by two performers are never back to back. Thus this appealing music is immediately accessible and in a format that is convenient to use."

Over the past twenty-five years Europe and North America have witnessed an enormous revival of interest in early music. Since the late 1950s numerous professional and amateur ensembles have delighted audiences with the vocal and instrumental music of the twelffth to the sixteenth centuries, while scholars have addressed themselves to the many problems involved in its authentic re-creation. This book unites the two fields; it is both a summary of the most recent scholarly investigations into the subject and a practical guide to the performance of early music based on the experience of the author and others who have performed a sizable portion of the early repertory.

McGee lays out clearly the foundation and background of each of the performance problems, presenting the most recent research and pointing out areas of incomplete knowledge and controversy, and then introduces practical solutions based on the scholarship.

All the topics necessary for a historical performance of early music are discussed: tempo, rhythmic flow, instrumentation, ornamentation, articulation, improvisation, style, and singing technique, along with some practical hints for selecting a program and shoosing substitute instruments. The final chapters is a reference guide to modern editions of the music and an introduction to the scholarly literature on early music performances.

At the time of publication, this book was the first to address the problem of how to perform medieval and Renaissance music. It is intended for both the amateur performing musician and the serious student.

Almost a thousand years of music are treated in this volume on the performance practice of the Middle Ages, covering monophony and polyphony, sacred and secular, genre and theory. The essays selected deal with the most crucial of performers' decisions: pitch, rhythm, and performing forces, as well as related matters such as proportions, tunings, and the need for ornamentation. The introduction provides an overview of the major issues and resources, situating medieval music within the context of the early music revival and the debate on authenticity and providing an extended bibliography of relevant scholarship.

We know what, say, a Josquin mass looks like"but what did it sound like? This is a much more complex and difficult question than it may seem. Kenneth Kreitner has assembled twenty articles, published between 1946 and 2009, by scholars exploring the performance of music from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The collection includes works by David Fallows, Howard Mayer Brown, Christopher Page, Margaret Bent, and others covering the voices-and-instruments debate of the 1980s, the performance of sixteenth-century sacred and secular music, the role of instrumental ensembles, and problems of pitch standards and musica ficta. Together the papers form not just a comprehensive introduction to the issues of renaissance performance practice, but a compendium of clear thinking and elegant writing about a perpetually intriguing period of music history.

This collection of nineteen essays presents a broad spectrum of current research that will interest students of medieval music, history, or culture. Topics include a comparison of early chant transmission in Rome and Jerusalem; the relationship between the earliest chant notation and prosodic accents; conceptualizing rhythm in medieval music and poetry; the persistence of Guidonian organum in the later Middle Ages; a connection between Dante and St. Cecilia; and the development of the trecento madrigal. The essays, written by distinguished scholars, stem from a conference in honor of David G. Hughes, professor of medieval music at Harvard University and noted specialist of chant.

Between 1485 and 1492 Cardinal Ascanio Sforza was the recipient of a music treatise composed for him by "Florentius Musicus" (Florentius de Faxolis), who had served him in Naples and Rome. Now in Milan, the richly illuminated small parchment codex bears witness to the musical interests of the cardinal, himself an avid singer taught by Duke Ercole d'Este. Florentius, whose treatise, found in no other source, is edited here for the first time, evidently took the cardinal's predilections into account, for the Book on Music is unusual for its emphasis on "the praises, power, utility, necessity, and effect of music": he devotes far more space to citations from classical and medieval authors than is the norm, and his elevated style shows that he aspires to appear as a humanist and not merely a technician. Likewise, the production quality of the manuscript indicates the acceptance of music's place within the high culture of the Quattrocento. The author's unusual insights into the musical thinking of his day are discussed in the ample commentary. The editors, a Renaissance musicologist (Bonnie Blackburn) and a classical scholar (Leofranc Holford-Strevens), have combined their disciplines to pay close attention both to Florentius' text and to his teachings.

These two essays were written by Professor Blume for the monumental encyclopedia of which he was the editor, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. In the first study he examines the concept of the term 'Renaissance, ' summing up the views of art historians and others; the Renaissance attitude toward music: the treatment of the Renaissance as a period in music history: the various national styles and the types of composition in that period (this section constitutes about half of the essay); and finally the accomplishments of the Renaissance in music.

Throughout his distinguished career, Philip Brett wrote about the music of the Tudor period. He carried out pathbreaking work on the life and music of William Byrd (c.1540-1623), both as an editor and a historian. He also studied other composers working during the period, including John Taverner, Thomas Tallis, Orlando Gibbons, and Thomas Weelkes. Collecting these influential essays together for the first time, this volume is a tribute to Brett's agile mind and to his incomparable skill at synthesizing history and musical analysis. Byrd was a prominent court composer, but also a Catholic. Besides important instrumental music and English songs, he wrote a great deal of sacred music, some for his Protestant patrons, and some for his fellow Catholics who celebrated mass in secret. Ranging from the report of Brett's findings on the Paston manuscripts, an unpublished round-table paper that he delivered a few months before his untimely death, to his monograph-length study of Byrd's magnum opus, Gradualia, the essays collected here consider both sacred and secular music, and vocal and instrumental traditions, providing an intimate glimpse into what was unique about Byrd and his music. Elegantly written, with the particular brilliance for which Brett was known, this book opens a fascinating window onto one of the most fruitful periods of English musical history.

Martin Luther's relationship to music has been largely downplayed, yet music played a vital role in Luther's life -- and he in turn had a deep and lasting effect on Christian hymnody. In Luther's Liturgical Music Robin Leaver comprehensively explores these connections. Replete with tables, figures, and musical examples, this volume is the most extensive study on Luther and music ever published. Leaver's work makes a formidable contribution to Reformation studies, but worship leaders, musicians, and others will also find it an invaluable, very readable resource.

Early Music History is devoted to the study of music from the early Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century. Articles in Volume 21 include: 'Aaron's interpretation of Isidore and an illustrated copy of the Toscanello'; 'Musica mundana, Aristotelian natural philosophy and ptolemaic astronomy'; 'The Triodia Sacra as a key source for late-Renaissance music in southern Germany;' 'The debate over song in the Accademia Fiorentina.'

For this revised edition of Hildegard's liturgical song cycle, Barbara Newman has redone her prose translations of the songs, updated the bibliography and discography, and made other minor changes. Also included is an essay by Marianne Richert Pfau which delineates the connection between music and text in the Symphonia. Famous throughout Europe during her lifetime, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was a composer and a poet, a writer on theological, scientific, and medical subjects, an abbess, and a visionary prophet. One of the very few female composers of the Middle Ages whose work has survived, Hildegard was neglected for centuries until her liturgical song cycle was rediscovered. Songs from it are now being performed regularly by early music groups, and more than twenty compact discs have been recorded.

The writings gathered here finally make available in one place Lowinsky's major essays--including four previously unpublished ones--in two volumes that are lavishly provided with musical examples and illustrations.
Professor Lowinsky's method is the only kind of 'writing about music' that I value.--Igor Stravinsky

In the late sixteenth century, the French royal court was mobile. To distinguish itself from the rest of society, it depended more on its cultural practices and attitudes than on the royal and aristocratic palaces it inhabited. Using courtly song-or the "air de cour"-as a window, Jeanice Brooks offers an unprecedented look into the culture of this itinerant institution.
Brooks concentrates on a period in which the court's importance in projecting the symbolic centrality of monarchy was growing rapidly and considers the role of the "air" in defining patronage hierarchies at court and in enhancing courtly visions of masculine and feminine virtue. Her study illuminates the court's relationship to the world beyond its own confines, represented first by Italy, then by the countryside. In addition to the 40 editions of "airs de cour" printed between 1559 and 1589, Brooks draws on memoirs, literary works, and iconographic evidence to present a rounded vision of French Renaissance culture.
The first book-length examination of the history of "air de cour," this work also sheds important new light on a formative moment in French history.

Musicians in the 16th century had a vastly different understanding of the structure and performance of music than today's performers. In order to transform inexpressively notated music into passionate declamation, Renaissance singers treated scores freely, and it was expected that each would personalize the music through various modifications, which included ornamentation. Their role was one of musical re-creation rather than of simple interpretation-the score represented a blueprint, not a master plan, upon which they as performer built the music. As is now commonly recognized, this flexible approach to scores changed over the centuries; the notation on the page itself became an ostensible musical Urtext and performers began following it much more closely, their sole purpose being to reproduce what was thought to be the composer's intentions. Yet in recent years, scholars and performers are once again freeing themselves from the written page-but the tools for doing so have long been out of reach. With Passionate Voice gives these tools to modern singers of Renaissance music, enabling them to learn and master the art of "re-creative singing." Providing a much-needed historically-informed perspective, author Robert Toft discusses the music of composers ranging from Marchetto Cara to John Dowland in the context of late Renaissance rhetoric, modal theory (and its antecedents in language), and performance traditions. Focusing on period practice in England and Italy, the two countries which produced the music of greatest interest to today's performers, Toft reconstructs the style of sung delivery through contemporary treatises on music, rhetoric and oratory. Toft remains faithful to the ways these principles were explained in the period, and thus breathes new life into this vital art form. With Passionate Voice is sure to be essential for vocalists, teachers and coaches of early music repertoire.

This engaging study introduces Renaissance polyphony to a modern audience. It helps readers of all ages and levels of experience make sense of what they are hearing. How does Renaissance music work? How is a piece typical of its style and type; or, if it is exceptional, what makes it so? The makers of polyphony were keenly aware of the specialized nature of their craft. How is this reflected in the music they wrote, and how were they regarded by their patrons and audiences? Through a combination of detailed, nuanced appreciation of musical style and a lucid overview of current debates, this book offers a glimpse of meanings behind and beyond the notes, be they playful or profound. It will enhance the listening experience of students, performers and music lovers alike.

The Cantigas de Santa Maria is a vast collection of over 400 pieces, with texts in the Galician language, ascribed to King Alfonso the Wise (c. 1284). While most of the cantigas narrate miracles of the Virgin Mary, the corpus is carefully structured, so that every tenth piece is a song in her praise. This new edition has been prepared with both scholars and performers in mind. The texts have been newly prepared in a regularized spelling, with a parallel English version for those who seek a word-by-word understanding of the original. An introductory chapter, and notes on the individual texts, provide a context for a fuller understanding.

In the motets of Philippe de Vitry, Guillaume de Machaut, and their contemporaries, tenors have often been characterized as the primary shaping forces, prior in conception as well as in construction to the upper voices. Tenors are shaped by the interaction of talea and color, medieval terms now used to refer to the independent repetition of rhythms and pitches, respectively. The presence in the upper voices of the periodically repeating rhythmic patterns, often referred to as "isorhythm," has been characterized as an amplification of tenor structure. But a fresh look at the medieval treatises suggests a revised analytical vocabulary: for many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writers, both color and talea involved rhythmic repetition, the latter in the upper voices specifically. And attention to upper-voice taleae independently of tenor structures brings renewed emphasis to the significant portion of the repertory in which upper voices evince formal schemes that differ from those in the tenors. These structures in turn suggest a revision of the presumed compositional process for motets, implying that in some cases upper-voice text and forms may have preceded the selection and organization of tenors. Such revisions have implications for hermeneutic endeavors, since not only the forms of motet voices but the meanings of their texts change, depending on whether analysis proceeds from the tenor up, or from the top down. Where the presumed compositional and structural primacy afforded to tenors has encouraged a strand of interpretation that reads the upper-voice poetry as conforming to, and amplifying, the tenor text snippets and their liturgical contexts, a "bottom-down" view casts tenors in a supporting role and reveals the poetic impulse of the upper voices as the organizing principle of motets.

Improvisation and Inventio in the Performance of Medieval Music: A Practical Approach is an innovative and groundbreaking approach to medieval music as living repertoire. The book provides philosophical frameworks, primary-source analysis, and clear, actionable practices and exercises aimed at recovering the improvisatory and inventive aspects of medieval music for contemporary musicians. Aimed at both instrumentalists and vocalists, the book explores the utilization of musical models, the inventive implications of medieval notation, and the ways in which memory, mode, rhetoric, and primary source paradigms inform the improvisatory process in both monophonic and polyphonic music of the Middle Ages. Angela Mariani, an experienced performer of both medieval music and folk and traditional musics, rediscovers and explicates the processes of imagination, invention, and improvisation which historically energized both medieval music in its own period and in its revival in our own time. Based on decades of research, university teaching, ensemble direction, collaboration, and performance, Mariani's impassioned stance that "the elusive element of inventio, as the medieval rhetoricians would have called it, must always be provided by the performer in the present," emphasizes medieval music performance practice as a dynamic and still-vital tradition. Students, teachers, directors, and those interested in the wealth of expressive beauty found in the music of the middle ages will likewise find value and meaning in her clear and accessible prose, and in the practical processes and exercises that make this book unique within the literature of medieval performance practice.

It has become widely accepted among musicologists that medieval music is most profitably studied from interdisciplinary perspectives that situate it within broad cultural contexts. The origins of this consensus lie in a decisive reorientation of the field that began approximately four decades ago. For much of the twentieth century, research on medieval music had focused on the discovery and evaluation of musical and theoretical sources. The 1970s and 1980s, by contrast, witnessed calls for broader methodologies and more fully contextual approaches that in turn anticipated the emergence of the so-called 'New Musicology'. The fifteen essays in the present collection explore three interrelated areas of inquiry that proved particularly significant: the liturgy, sources (musical and archival), and musical symbolism. In so doing, these essays not only acknowledge past achievements but also illustrate how this broad, interdisciplinary approach remains a source for scholarly innovation.