Among the most memorable innovations of music and poetry in thirteenth-century France was a genre that seemed to privilege sound over sense. The polytextual motet is especially well-known to scholars of the Middle Ages for its tendency to conceal complex allegorical meaning in a texture that, in performance, made words less, rather than more, audible. It is with such musical sound that this book is concerned. What did it mean to create a musical effect so potentially independent from the meaning of words? Is it possible such supermusical effects themselves had significance? The Sense of Sound offers a radical recontextualization of French song in the heyday of the motet c.1260-1330, and makes the case for listening to musical sound against a range of other potently meaningful sonorities, often premised on non-verbal meaning. In identifying new audible interlocutors to music, it opens our ears to a broad spectrum of sounds often left out of historical inquiry, from the hubbub of the medieval city; to the eloquent babble of madmen; to the violent clamor of charivari; to the charismatic chatter of prayer. Drawing on a rich array of artistic evidence (music, manuscripts, poetry, and images) and contemporary cultural theory, it locates musical production in this period within a larger cultural environment concerned with representing sound and its emotional, ethical, and social effects. In so doing, The Sense of Sound offers an experiment in how we might place central the most elusive aspect of music's history: sound's vibrating, living effect.

Ephemeral, fragile, often left unbound, sixteenth-century songbooks led fleeting lives in the pockets of singers and on the music desks of instrumentalists. Constantly in action, they were forever being used up, replaced, or abandoned as ways of reading changed. As such they document the acts of early musicians and the practices of everyday life at the unseen margins of elite society. Materialities is a cultural history of song on the page. It addresses a series of central questions concerning the audiences for written music by concentrating on the first genre to be commercialized by music printers: the French chanson. Scholars have long stressed that chansons represent the most broadly disseminated polyphony of the sixteenth century, but Materialities is the first book to account for the cultural reach of the chanson across a considerable cross-section of European society. Musicologist Kate van Orden brings extensive primary research and new analytical models to bear in this remarkable history of songbooks, music literacy, and social transformation during the first century of music printing. By tracking chansons into private libraries and schoolrooms and putting chansonniers into dialogue with catechisms, civility manuals, and chapbooks, Materialities charts the social distribution of songbooks, the gradual moralization of song, and the ways children learned their letters and notes. Its fresh conclusions revise several common assumptions about the value early moderns attributed to printed music, the levels of literacy required to perform polyphony, and the way musicians did or did not "read" their songbooks. With musical perspectives that can invigorate studies of print culture and the history of reading, Materialities is an essential guide for musicologists working with original sources and historians of the book interested in the vocal performances that operated alongside print.

There is a striking similarity between Marian devotional songs and secular love songs of the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Two disparate genres-one sacred, the other secular; one Latin, the other vernacular-both praise an idealized, impossibly virtuous woman. Each does so through highly stylized derivations of traditional medieval song forms - Marian prayer derived from earlier Gregorian chant, and love songs and lyrics from medieval courtly song. Yet despite their obvious similarities, the two musical and poetic traditions have rarely been studied together. Author David Rothenberg takes on this task with remarkable success, producing a useful and broad introduction to Marian music and liturgy, and then coupling that with an incisive comparative analysis of this devotional form with the words and music of secular love songs of the period. The Flower of Paradise examines the interplay of Marian devotional and secular poetics within polyphonic music from c. 1200 to c. 1500. Through case studies of works that demonstrate a specific symbolic resonance between Marian devotional and secular song, the book illustrates the distinctive ethos of this period in European culture. Rothenberg makes use of an impressive command of liturgical and religious studies, literature and poetry, and art history to craft a study with wide application across disciplinary boundaries. With its broad scope and unique, incisive analysis, this book is suited for scholars, students, and general readers alike. Undergraduate and graduate students of musicology, Medieval and Renaissance studies, comparative literature, art history, Western reglious history, and music history-especially that of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and sacred music-will find this book a useful and informative resource on the period. The Flower of Paradise is also of interest to those with a particular dedication to any of its diverse subject areas. For individuals involved in religious organizations or those who frequent Medieval or Renaissance cultural sites and museums, this book will deepen their knowledge and open up new ways of thinking about the history and development of secular and sacred music and the Marian tradition.

Mirrors of Heaven or Worldly Theaters? Venetian Nunneries and Their Music explores the dynamic role of music performance and patronage in the convents of Venice and its lagoon from the sixteenth century to the fall of Venice around 1800. Examining sacred music performed by the nuns themselves and by professional musicians they employed, author Jonathan E. Glixon considers the nuns as collective patrons, of both musical performances by professionals in their external churches-primarily for the annual feast of the patron saint, a notable attraction for both Venetians and foreign visitors-and of musical instruments, namely organs and bells. The book explores the rituals and accompanying music for the transitions in a nun's life, most importantly the ceremonies through which she moved from the outside world to the cloister, as well as liturgical music within the cloister, performed by the nuns themselves, from chant to simple polyphony, and the rare occasions where more elaborate music can be documented. Also considered are the teaching of music to both nuns and girls resident in convents as boarding students, and entertainment-musical and theatrical-by and for the nuns. Mirrors of Heaven, the first large-scale study of its kind, contains richly detailed appendices featuring a calendar of musical events at Venetian nunneries, details on nunnery organs, lists of teachers, and inventories of musical and ceremonial books, both manuscript and printed. A companion website supplements the book's musical examples with editions of complete musical works, which are brought to life with accompanying audio files.

What is the point of reading about the music written before 1600? There are two good reasons. First, much of it is very beautiful and most enjoyable. The timeless dignity of plainchant, the mellow consonance of Dufay's chansons, and the dramatic delights of the Renaissance madrigals - these count among life's great pleasures to those who know them. Second, during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, European musicians, theorists and craftsmen laid the technical foundations for their successors, the foundations of the classical music that is enjoyed across the world today.

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.

The Hispanic rite, a medieval non-Roman Western liturgy, was practiced across the Iberian Peninsula for over half a millennium and functioned as the most distinct marker of Christian identity in this region. As Christians typically began every liturgical day throughout the year by singing a vespertinus, this chant genre in particular provides a unique window into the cultural and religious life of medieval Iberia. The Hispanic rite has the largest corpus of extant manuscripts of all non-Roman liturgies in the West, which testifies to the importance placed on their transmission through political and cultural upheavals. Its chants, however, use a notational system that lacks clear specification of pitch and has kept them barred from in-depth study. Text, Liturgy and Music in the Hispanic Rite is the first detailed analysis of the interactions between textual, liturgical, and musical variables across the entire extant repertoire of a chant genre central to the Hispanic rite, the vespertinus. By approaching the vespertini through a holistic methodology that integrates liturgy, melody, and text, author Raquel Rojo Carrillo identifies the genre's norms and traces the different shapes it adopts across the liturgical year and on different occasions. In this way, the book offers an unprecedented insight into the liturgical edifice of the Hispanic rite and the daily experience of Christians in medieval Iberia.

Martin Luther was the architect and engineer of the Protestant Reformation, which transformed Germany five hundred years ago. In Martin Luther and the Arts, Andreas Loewe and Katherine Firth elucidate Luther's theory and practice, demonstrating the breadth, flexibility and rigour of Luther's use of the arts to reach audiences and convince them of his Reformation message using a range of strategies, including music, images and drama alongside sermons, polemical tracts, and his new translation of the Bible into German. Extensively based on German and English sources, including often neglected aspects of Luther's own writings, Loewe and Firth offer a valuable survey for theologians, historians, art historians, musicologists and literary studies scholars interested in interdisciplinary comparisons of Luther's work across the arts.

In the late 1960s, a new movement emerged championing historically informed 'authentic' approaches to performance. Heard today in concert halls across the world and in a library's worth of recordings, it has completely transformed the way in which we listen to 'old' music, while revolutionizing the classical music profession in the process. Yet the rise of Early Music has been anything but uncontroversial. Historically informed performance (HIP) has provoked heated debate amongst musicologists, performers and cultural sociologists. Did HIP's scholar-performers possess the skills necessary to achieve their uncompromising agenda? Was interest in historically informed performance just another facet of the burgeoning heritage industry? And was the widespread promotion of early music simply a commercial ruse to make money put forward by profit-driven record companies?
In The Art of Re-enchantment: Making Early Music in the Modern Age, author Nick Wilson answers these and other questions through an in-depth analysis of the early music movement in Britain from the 1960s to the present day. While other books have examined the history of early music's revival, this interdisciplinary study is unique in its focus on how various constituencies actually made their living from the early music business. Through chapters discussing the professionalization of early music, the influence of institutions such as the BBC and record companies, and the entrepreneurial role of leading early music pioneers, this book will shed new light on one of the most fascinating and influential movements in 20th Century art music.
The Art of Re-enchantment begins a much-needed conversation about the true value of art and authenticity today. This volume is a must have for early music fans and performers, music historians and musicologists with an interest in performance practice, and anyone interested in the production, distribution and consumption of music.

The Critical Nexus confronts an important and vexing enigma of early writings on music: why chant, which was understood to be divinely inspired, needed to be altered in order to work within the then-operative modal system. To unravel this mystery, Charles Atkinson creates a broad framework that moves from Greek harmonic theory to the various stages in the transmission of Roman chant, citing numerous music treatises from the sixth to the twelfth century. Out of this examination emerges the central point behind the problem: the tone-system advocated by writers coming from the Greek harmonic tradition was not suited to the notation of chant and that this basic incompatibility led to the creation of new theoretical constructs. By tracing the path of subsequent adaptation at the nexus of tone-system, mode, and notation, Atkinson promises new and far-reaching insights into what mode meant to the medieval musician and how the system responded to its inherent limitations.
Through a detailed examination of the major musical treatises from the sixth through the twelfth centuries, this text establishes a central dichotomy between classical harmonic theory and the practices of the Christian church. Atkinson builds the foundation for a broad and original reinterpretation of the modal system and how it relates to melody, grammar, and notation. This book will be of interest to all musicologists, music theorists working on mode, early music specialists, chant scholars, and medievalists interested in music.

Music both influences and reflects the times in which it was created. In the Middle Ages, the previous Dark Ages, the Crusades, and the feudal system all impacted the types and forms of music in the period. Charlemagne standardized the church mass and promoted the Gregorian chant, to the point of threatening excommunication if any other were performed. Musical notation -- the staff line -- was developed during the period. The troubadours of France, Meistersingers of Germany, the Cantus Firmus of Italy, and the instruments that played the music are all included in this thorough guide to music of the middle ages.

Topics include: the British Isles, Dance Music, Eastern Europe, France, Germanic Lands, Harps, Italy, the Low Countries, Spain, and more.

In Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle, contributors from musicology, literary studies, history, and art history provide an account of the works of 13th-century composer Adam de la Halle, one of the first named authors of medieval vernacular music for whom a complete works manuscript survives. The essays illuminate Adam's generic transformations in polyphony, drama, debate poetry, and other genres, while also emphasizing his place in a large community of trouveres active in the bustling urban environment of Arras. Exploring issues of authorship and authority, tradition and innovation, the material contexts of his works, and his influence on later generations, this book provides the most complete and up-to-date picture available in English of Adam's oeuvre. Contributors are Alain Corbellari, Mark Everist, Anna Kathryn Grau, John Haines, Anne Ibos-Auge, Daniel E. O'Sullivan, Judith A. Peraino, Isabelle Ragnard, Jennifer Saltzstein, Alison Stones, Carol Symes, and Eliza Zingesser.

Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria explores the nature of sound as a powerful yet ambivalent force in the religious struggles that permeated Germany during the Counter-Reformation. Author Alexander J. Fisher goes beyond a musicological treatment of composers, styles, and genres to examine how music, and more broadly sound itself, shaped the aural landscape of Bavaria as the duchy emerged as a militant Catholic bulwark. Fisher focuses particularly on the ways in which sound-including bell-ringing, gunfire, and popular song, as well as cultivated polyphony-not only was deployed by Catholic secular and clerical elites to shape the religious identities of Bavarian subjects, but also carried the potential to challenge and undermine confessional boundaries. Surviving literature, archival documents, and music illustrate the ways in which Bavarian authorities and their allies in the Catholic clergy and orders deployed sound to underline crucial theological differences with their Protestant antagonists, notably the cults of the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, and the saints. Official and popular rituals like divine worship, processions, and pilgrimages all featured distinctive sounds and music that shaped and reflected an emerging Catholic identity. Although officials imposed a severe regime of religious surveillance, the Catholic state's dominance of the soundscape was hardly assured. Fisher traces archival sources that show the resilience of Protestant vernacular song in Bavaria, the dissemination and performance of forbidden, anti-Catholic songs, the presence of Lutheran chorales in nominally Catholic church services into the late 16th century, and the persistence of popular "noise" more generally. Music, Piety, and Propaganda thus reveals historical, theological, and cultural issues of the period through the piercing dimension of its sounds, bringing into focus the import of sound as a strategic cultural tool with significant impact on the flow of history.

Music and the Commedia dell'Arte narrates the story of the most famous commedia dell'arte troupe of the late Renaissance, focusing in particular on the representation of women on stage and on the role of music-making in their craft. It provides a rich context for the study of musical-theatrical performance before the advent of opera and re-defines our perceptions of women, music and theatre in the Renaissance.

A comprehensive catalogue of the surviving polyphonic song repertory 1415-1480 in any European language. The catalogue will be an essential work of reference for anyone interested in the music of the 15th century.

A new kind of songbook emerged in the later fifteenth century: personalized, portable, and lavishly decorated. Five closely related chansonniers, copied in the Loire Valley region of central France c. 1465-c. 1475, are the earliest surviving examples of this new genre.
The Loire Valley Chansonniers preserve the music of such renowned composers as Guillaume Du Fay, Johannes Ockeghem, and Antoine Busnoys. But their importance as musical sources has overshadowed the significance of these manuscripts as artifacts in their own right.
This book places the physical objects at center, investigating the means by which they were produced and the broader culture in which they circulated. Jane Alden performs a codicological autopsy upon the manuscripts and reveals the hitherto unrecognized role of scribes in shaping the transmission and reception of the chanson repertory. Alden also challenges the long-held belief that the Loire Valley Chansonniers were intended for royal or noble patrons. Instead, she argues that a rising class of bureaucrats--notaries, secretaries, and other court officials--commissioned these exquisite objects. Active as writers and participants in poetry competitions, these individuals may even have written some of the chansons' texts.
The unique integration of image, text, and music found in chansonniers extends their appeal to a broad readership. But for the nineteenth-century scholars who rediscovered these manuscripts, the larger literary and visual resonances were not of primary interest. Alden documents the tangle of motivations--national identity, populist politics, and the rise of the musical masterwork--that informed the earliest writings on these books. Only now is their multifaceted structure the inspiration for a new generation of readers.

For all that has been written about Renaissance Florence we know relatively little about its musical life, its religious life, and the aspirations of its average citizens. This book contributes significantly to all understanding of all of these by documenting and interpreting the corporate patronage of an important Florentine musical repertory over a period of some 200 years. From the late thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries at least twelve lay confraternities sponsored a widespread musical activity involving a specialized network of singers and instrumentalists. The meticulous records kept by these companies reveal a wealth of information about the musicians' conditions and patterns of activity, the central role of music in the companies' vernacular liturgy (especially as conditioned by bequests), and vital performance practice issues such as the role of instruments in vocal performance, the shift from monophonic to polyphonic practice, and the interaction of written and unwritten musical traditions. Because the companies were, in many respects, both a microcosm and characteristic manifestation of this remarkable Renaissance city, the author also seeks to explain how mendicant spirituality, guild society, and devotional images and imagination provide the essential context for understanding the function and significance of laudesi practice and repertoire. This book well be welcomed not only by musicologists, but by Italianists and late medieval and early modern scholars in general.

Despite its rather forbidding name, the `Chromatic Fourth' is one of the most familiar short themes in virtually all western music over the four hundred years before the middle of our century. It is a sequence of six notes that can be heard in a huge variety of ways, most originally, effectively, and beautifully in the work of the greatest composers, from the madrigalists to Stravinsky, from Byrd to Bartok, with telling examples in the operas of Monteverdi, Mozart, and Wagner, or in the keyboard music of Bull, Bach, and Schubert. Although the existence of the chromatic fourth has long been recognized, and occasionally mentioned by music historians, this is the first thorough-going attempt to trace its likely origins and its evolution over four hundred years. With over 200 music examples, Peter Williams demonstrates the theme's wonderful variety, and shows that it was used by composers not only as a means of emotional expression, but also as a structural device.

Honey Meconi presents the first English-language study of the life, music, and historical reception of Pierre de la Rue (who died in 1518), leading composer at the famed Habsburg-Burgundian court of Maximilian I, Philip the Fair, Juana of Castile, Marguerite of Austria, and the future Charles V. She draws on extensive documentation to present a comprehensive study of La Rue's life and a complete record of the transmission of his music across Europe.

This annotated chronology of western music is the third in a series of outlines on the history of music in western civilization. It contains a 120-page annotated bibliography, followed by a detailed, documented outline that is divided into ten chapters. Each chapter is written in chronological order with every line being documented by means of abbreviations that refer to the annotated bibliography. There are short biographies of the theorists and detailed discussions of their works. The information on music is organized by classes of music rather than by composer. Also included are lists of manuscripts with descriptions of their contents and notations as to where they may be found. The material for the outline has been taken from primary and secondary sources along with articles from periodicals. Like the other two volumes in this series, Music History from the Late Roman through the Gothic Periods, 313-1425 and Music History During the Renaissance Period, 1425-1520, this volume will be an important research tool for anyone interested in music history.

The Divine Office--or, the cycle of daily worship services other than the Mass--constitutes the most important body of liturgical texts and music for medieval studies. It is a collection of spiritual works that is central to the culture of the Middle Ages. This volume addresses the Office from a variety of points of view, allowing the reader to grasp the current state of research and to make connections.

This book is the first full-length study of the courtly love songs of the trouvere to address the central musical problems of the repertoire as a whole, embracing source studies, interpretation, historiography, and analysis. The argument of the book revolves around three axes, each of which is essential to the appreciation of the others: problems concerning the extant manuscript tradition; the crucial role of orality; and stylistic changes and plurality in the reperotire. For the first time, a full overview of the sources and notation is undertaken. This reveals the idiosyncrasies of individual manuscripts but, more importantly, it identifies two basic phases in the manuscript tradition. The study of melodic variants reveals the performance art that lies at the heart of the courtly grand chant; processes and techniques of variation are examined, bringing us to a closer understanding of the tenets of the melodic art of the early trouveres. A close study of select trouveres from the different generation reveals stylstic change and plurality, particularly in the melodic art which in some respects was less prescribed than the poetic texts. Consequently the courtly songs of the trouveres truly come alive in this book.

Essays illuminating a complex and sophisticated musical manuscript. The Segovia Manuscript (Cathedral of Segovia, Archivo Capitular) has puzzled musicologists ever since its rediscovery at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is unique: no other manuscript of the period transmits a comparable blend of late fifteenth-century music, consisting of 204 sacred works and vernacular pieces in Flemish, French, Italian, and Spanish. An important group of pedagogical pieces by French and Flemish composers may preserve transcriptions of instrumental improvisation. This summary might suggest a messy collection, but on the contrary the manuscript is arranged with care, copied by one proficient scribe (except perhaps for the Spanish texts), who obviously followed a predetermined master plan. But which plan, who designed it, and why was the person responsible so interested in this combination? The essays here aim to treat every dimension of this fascinating source. New discoveries help date the manuscript and explain how it came to Segovia; particular attention is paid to the main scribe, now determined to be Flemish, and his relation with northern composers and repertory, above all that of Jacob Obrecht, Alexander Agricola, and Henricus Isaac; and the vexed question of the conflicting attributions is considered afresh and found to affect only a few of the fascicles. The contributors also look at questions of ownership and function. . WOLFGANG FUHRMANN is Professor of Musicology at Leipzig University; CRISTINA URCHUEGUIA is Professor of Musicology at the University of Bern. Contributors: Bonnie J. Blackburn, Wolfgang Fuhrmann, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Tess Knighton, Kenneth Kreitner, Honey Meconi, Emilio Ros-Fabregas, Cristina Urchueguia, Rob C. Wegman

In the late fifteenth century the newly built Sistine Chapel was home to a vigorous culture of musical composition and performance. Josquin des Prez stood at its center, singing and composing for the pope's private choir. Josquin's Rome offers a new reading of the composer's work in light of the repertory he and his fellow papal singers performed from the chapel's singers' box. Comprising the single largest surviving corpus of late fifteenth-century sacred music, these pieces served as a backdrop for elaborately choreographed liturgical ceremonies--a sonic analogue to the frescoes by Botticelli, Perugino, and their contemporaries that adorn the chapel's walls. Jesse Rodin uses a comparative approach to uncover this aesthetically and intellectually rich musical tradition. He confronts longstanding problems concerning the authenticity and chronology of Josquin's music while offering nuanced readings of scandalously understudied works by the composer's contemporaries. The book further contextualizes Josquin by locating intersections between his music and the wider soundscape of the Cappella Sistina. Central to Rodin's argument is the idea that these pieces lived in performance. The author puts his interpretations into practice through a series of exquisite recordings by his ensemble, Cut Circle (available both on the companion website and as a CD from Musique en Wallonie). Josquin's Rome is an essential resource for musicologists, scholars of the Italian Renaissance, and enthusiasts of early music.

Juxtaposing artistic and musical representations of the emotions with medical, philosophical and scientific texts in Western culture between the Renaissance and the twentieth century, the essays collected in this volume explore the ways in which emotions have been variously conceived, configured, represented and harnessed in relation to broader discourses of control, excess and refinement. Since the essays explore the interstices between disciplines (e.g. music and medicine, history of art and philosophy) and thereby disrupt established frameworks within the histories of art, music and medicine, traditional narrative accounts are challenged. Here larger historical forces come into perspective, as these papers suggest how both artistic and scientific representations of the emotions have been put to use in political, social and religious struggles, at a variety of different levels.