As a distinctive and attractive musical repertory, the hundred-odd English carols of the fifteenth century have always had a ready audience. But some of the key viewpoints about them date back to the late 1920s, when Richard L. Greene first defined the poetic form; and little has been published about them since the burst of activity around 1950, when a new manuscript was found and when John Stevens published his still definitive edition of all the music, both giving rise to substantial publications by major scholars in both music and literature. This book offers a new survey of the repertory with a firmer focus on the form and its history. Fresh examination of the manuscripts and of the styles of the music they contain leads to new proposals about their dates, origins and purposes. Placing them in the context of the massive growth of scholarly research on other fifteenth-century music over the past fifty years gives rise to several fresh angles on the music.

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.

Since the days in the early twentieth century when the study of pre-Reformation English music first became a serious endeavour, a conceptual gap has separated the scholarship on English and continental music of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The teaching which has informed generations of students in influential textbooks and articles characterizes the musical life of England at this period through a language of separation and conservatism, asserting that English musicians were largely unaware of, and unaffected by, foreign practices after the mid-fifteenth century. The available historical evidence, nevertheless, contradicts a facile isolationist exposition of musical practice in early Tudor England. The increasing appearance of typically continental stylistic traits in mid-sixteenth-century English music represents not an arbitrary and unexpected shift of compositional approach, but rather a development prefaced by decades of documentable historical interactions. Theodor Dumitrescu treats the matter of musical relations between England and continental Europe during the first decades of the Tudor reign (c.1485-1530), by exploring a variety of historical, social, biographical, repertorial and intellectual links. In the first major study devoted to this topic, a wealth of documentary references scattered in primary and secondary sources receives a long-awaited collation and investigation, revealing the central role of the first Tudor monarchs in internationalizing the royal musical establishment and setting an example of considerable import for more widespread English artistic developments. By bringing together the evidence concerning Anglo-continental musical relations for the first time, along with new documents and interpretations concerning musicians, music manuscripts and theory sources, the investigation paves the way for a new evaluation of English musical styles in the first half of the sixteenth century.

What is the relationship between Eros and music? How does the intersection of love and music contribute to define the perimeter of Early Modern love? The Early Moderns hold parallel discourses on the metaphysical doctrines of love and music as theories of harmony. Statements of love as music, of music as love, and of both as harmonic ideals, are found across a wide range of cultural contexts, highlighting the understanding of love as a cultural construct. The book assesses the complexity of cultural discourses on this linkage of Eros and music. The ambivalence of music as an erotic agent is enacted in the controversy over dancing and reflected in the ubiquitous symbolism of music instruments. Likewise, the trivialization of musical imagery in madrigal lyrics and love poetry highlights a sense of degradation and places the love-music relationship at the meeting point of two epistemes. The book also shows the symbolic deployment of the intertwined ideas of love and music in the English epyllion, and offers close readings of Shakespeare's poems The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis. The book is the first to propose an overview of the theoretical, cultural and poetical intersections of Eros and music in Early Modern England. It discusses the connections in a richly interdisciplinary manner, drawing on a wealth of primary material which includes rhetoric, natural philosophy, educational literature, medicine, music theory and musical performance, dance books, performance politics, Protestant pamphlets and sermons, and emblem books.

Giulio Cesare Brancaccio was a Neapolitan nobleman with long practical experience of military life, first in the service of Charles V and later as both soldier and courtier in France and then at the court of Alfonso II d'Este at Ferrara. He was also a virtuoso bass singer whose performances were praised by both Tasso and Guarini - he was even for a while the only male member of the famous Ferrarese court Concerto delle dame, who established a legendary reputation during the 1580s. Richard Wistreich examines Brancaccio's life in detail and from this it becomes possible to consider the mental and social world of a warrior and courtier with musical skills in a broader context. A wide-ranging study of bass singing in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italy provides a contextual basis from which to consider Brancaccio's reputation as a performer. Wistreich illustrates the use of music in the process of 'self-fashioning' and the role of performance of all kinds in the construction of male noble identity within court culture, including the nature and currency of honour, chivalric virtA(1) and sixteenth-century notions of gender and virility in relation to musical performance. This fascinating examination of Brancaccio's social world significantly expands our understanding of noble culture in both France and Italy during the sixteenth century, and the place of music-making within it.

John Taverner's lectures on music constitute the only extant version of a complete university course in music in early modern England. Originally composed in 1611 in both English and Latin, they were delivered at Gresham College in London between 1611 and 1638, and it is likely that Taverner intended at some point to publish the lectures in the form of a music treatise. The lectures, which Taverner collectively titled De Ortu et Progressu Artis Musicae ("On the Origin and Progress of the Art of Music"), represent a clear attempt to ground musical education in humanist study, particularly in Latin and Greek philology. Taverner's reliance on classical and humanist writers attests to the durability of music's association with rhetoric and philology, an approach to music that is too often assigned to early Tudor England. Taverner is also a noteworthy player in the seventeenth-century Protestant debates over music, explicitly defending music against Reformist polemicists who see music as an overly sensuous activity. In this first published edition of Taverner's musical writings, Joseph M. Ortiz comprehensively introduces, edits, and annotates the text of the lectures, and an appendix contains the existing Latin version of Taverner's text. By shedding light on a neglected figure in English Renaissance music history, this edition is a significant contribution to the study of musical thought in Renaissance England, humanism, Protestant Reformism, and the history of education.

Who were the first owners of the music published in England in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries? Who went to 'the dwelling house of ... T. East, by Paules wharfe' and bought a copy of Byrd's Psalmes, sonets, & songs when it appeared in 1588? Who purchased a copy of Dowland's First booke of songes in 1597? What other books formed part of their music library? In this survey of surviving books of music published before 1640, David Greer has gleaned information about the books' early and subsequent owners by studying the traces they left in the books themselves: handwritten inscriptions, including names and other marks of ownership - even the scribbles and drawings a child of the family might put into a book left lying about. The result is a treasure trove of information about musical culture in early modern England. From inscriptions and marks of ownership Greer has been able to re-assemble early sets of partbooks, as well as collections of books once bound together. The search has also turned up new music. At a time when paper was expensive, new pieces were copied into blank spaces in printed books. In these jottings we find a 'hidden repertory' of music, some of it otherwise undiscovered music by known composers. In other cases, we see owners altering the words of songs, to suit new and personal purposes: a love-song in praise of Daphne becomes a heartfelt song to 'my Jesus'; and 'Faire Leonilla' becomes Ophelia (perhaps the first mention of this character in Hamlet outside the play itself). On a more practical level, the users of the music sometimes made corrections to printing errors, and there are indications that some of these were last-minute corrections made in the printing-house (a useful guide for the modern editor). The temptation to 'scribble in books' was as irresistible to some Elizabethans as it is to some of us today. In doing so they left us clues to their identity, how they kept their music, how they used it, and the multifarious ways in which it played a part in their lives.

Music in Wales has long been a neglected area. Scholars have been deterred both by the need for a knowledge of the Welsh language, and by the fact that an oral tradition in Wales persisted far later than in other parts of Britain, resulting in a limited number of sources with conventional notation. Sally Harper provides the first serious study of Welsh music before 1650 and draws on a wide range of sources in Welsh, Latin and English to illuminate early musical practice. The book challenges two prevailing assumptions, both of them false: namely that music in Wales before 1650 is impoverished and elusive; and that the extant sources are too obscure to warrant serious study. Harper demonstrates that there is a far wider body of source material than is generally realised, comprising liturgical manuscripts, archival materials, chronicles and retrospective histories, inventories of pieces and players, vernacular poetry, and treatises.The book is structured around three distinct musical categories: the uniquely Welsh practice of cerdd dant ('the music of the string', for harp and crwth); the Latin liturgy in Wales and its embellishment, and 'Anglicised' sacred and secular materials from c. 1580, which show Welsh music mirroring English practice. Taken together, the primary material presented in this book bears witness to a flourishing and unique musical tradition of considerable cultural significance, aspects of which have an important bearing on wider musical practice beyond Wales.

The treatise on musica plana and musica mensurabilis written by Lambertus/Aristoteles is our main witness to thirteenth-century musical thought in the decades between the treatises of Johannes de Garlandia and Franco of Cologne. Most treatises on music of this century - except for Franco's treatise on musical notation - survive in only a single copy; Lambertus's Ars musica, extant in five sources, is thus distinguished by a more substantial and long-lasting manuscript tradition. Unique in its ambitions, this treatise presents both the rudiments of the practice of liturgical chant and the principles of polyphonic notation in a dense and rigorous manner like few music treatises of its time - a conceptual framework characteristic of Parisian university culture in the thirteenth century. This new edition of Lambertus's treatise is the first since Edmond de Coussemaker's of 1864. Christian Meyer's meticulous edition is displayed on facing pages with Karen Desmond's English translation, and the treatise and translation are prefaced by a substantial introduction to the text and its author by Christian Meyer, translated by Barbara Haggh-Huglo.

This book presents the most recent findings of twenty of the foremost European and North American researchers into the music of the Middle Ages. The chronological scope of their topics is wide, from the ninth to the fifteenth century. Wide too is the range of the subject matter: included are essays on ecclesiastical chant, early and late (and on the earliest and latest of its supernumerary tropes, monophonic and polyphonic); on the innovative and seminal polyphony of Notre-Dame de Paris, and the Latin poetry associated with the great cathedral; on the liturgy of Paris, Rome and Milan; on musical theory; on the emotional reception of music near the end of the medieval period and the emergence of modern sensibilities; even on methods of encoding the melodies that survive from the Middle Ages, encoding that makes it practical to apply computer-assisted analysis to their vast number. The findings presented in this book will be of interest to those engaged by music and the liturgy, active researchers and students. All the papers are carefully and extensively documented by references to medieval sources.

John Harley's Thomas Tallis is the first full-length book to deal comprehensively with the composer's life and works. Tallis entered the Chapel Royal in the middle of a long life, and remained there for over 40 years. During a colourful period of English history he famously served King Henry VIII and the three of Henry's children who followed him to the throne. His importance for English music during the second half of the sixteenth century is equalled only by that of his pupil, colleague and friend William Byrd. In a series of chronological chapters, Harley describes Tallis's career before and after he entered the Chapel. The fully considered biography is placed in the context of larger political and cultural changes of the period. Each monarch's reign is treated with an examination of the ways in which Tallis met its particular musical needs. Consideration is given to all of Tallis's surviving compositions, including those probably intended for patrons and amateurs beyond the court, and attention is paid to the context within which they were written. Tallis emerges as a composer whose music displays his special ability in setting words and creating ingenious musical patterns. A table places most of Tallis's compositions in a broad chronological order.

Historians of instruments and instrumental music have long recognised that there was a period of profound change in the seventeenth century, when the consorts or families of instruments developed during the Renaissance were replaced by the new models of the Baroque period. Yet the process is still poorly understood, in part because each instrument has traditionally been considered in isolation, and changes in design have rarely been related to changes in the way instruments were used, or what they played. The essays in this book are by distinguished international authors that include specialists in particular instruments together with those interested in such topics as the early history of the orchestra, iconography, pitch and continuo practice. The book will appeal to instrument makers and academics who have an interest in achieving a better understanding of the process of change in the seventeenth century, but the book also raises questions that any historically aware performer ought to be asking about the performance of Baroque music. What sorts of instruments should be used? At what pitch? In which temperament? In what numbers and/or combinations? For this reason, the book will be invaluable to performers, academics, instrument makers and anyone interested in the fascinating period of change from the 'Renaissance' to the 'Baroque'.

Thomas Tomkins (1572-1656), a major figure of the Golden Age of British music, was arguably the greatest of all Welsh-born composers. Living through one of the most revolutionary periods in British history, his professional life was spent in the service of the Crown and the Church at both the Chapel Royal and Worcester Cathedral. Surviving the Civil War, the suppression of the music of the English Church, the closure of the Chapel Royal, the destruction of his organ at Worcester and the devastation of the city, Tomkins was able to find the strength and inspiration to continue composing secular music of fine quality. Much of Tomkins's output has survived, including his collection of music for the Anglican rite, Musica Deo Sacra, published posthumously in 1668. His work embraced both sacred and secular vocal music, pieces for keyboard and for viol consort, thereby proving him to be one of the most versatile figures of English Renaissance music. The first part of the book provides an absorbing biography of Tomkins, setting his life into fascinating historical context. The second and third parts include major essays on Tomkins by Denis Stevens, Bernard Rose, Peter James and David Evans, all authorities on the music of the period with each providing perceptive insights into Tomkins's music. The result is a successful piece of collective work that properly places Tomkins and his achievements in his time and enables readers to reassess him properly in relation to his elders and contemporaries. Tomkins has still not reached the 'household name' status of his great teacher, William Byrd, or of his close friend and colleague, Orlando Gibbons, but he is undoubtedly worthy of much greater recognition. The book complements the increasing number of live performances and recordings of Tomkins's music, both sacred and secular, and such a comprehensive account of the man and his work should appeal to early music scholars, performers and music lovers alike.

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.

This book reconstructs and studies the music, liturgy, and illustrations of a twelfth-century manuscript from the Austrian monastery in Lambach. The manuscript was taken apart in the fifteenth century and subsequently sold to various collectors in the twentieth century. The pages are here brought together (albeit photographically) for the first time since the original manuscript was dismantled five centuries ago. The book includes a black-and-white facsimile of the recovered portion of the manuscript. Charts and tables are used to demonstrate how it compares to other twelfth-century liturgical manuscripts.

A timely addition to Routledge's "Criticism and Analysis of Early Music" series, this collection of essays examines the common compositional practice of borrowing or imitation in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century music, addressing how and why borrowing was used, the significance of borrowing, the techniques of borrowing, and its recognizable features. The book provides a broad overview of this common practice and sheds light on previously unexplored aspects of early musical borrowing. It functions as both an introduction to the subject as well as a guide for further research. The contributors, all highly regarded in their field, offer new insights that will change the way we view borrowing.

John Taverner was the leading composer of church music under Henry VIII. His contributions to the mass and votive antiphon are varied, distinguished and sometimes innovative; he has left more important settings for the office than any of his predecessors, and even a little secular music survives. Hugh Benham, editor of Taverner's complete works for Early English Church Music, now provides the first full-length study of the composer for over twenty years. He places the music in context, with the help of biographical information, discussion of Taverner's place in society, and explanation of how each piece was used in the pre-Reformation church services. He investigates the musical language of Taverner's predecessors as background for a fresh examination and appraisal of the music in the course of which he traces similarities with the work of younger composers. Issues confronting the performer are considered, and the music is also approached from the listener's point of view, initially through close analytical inspection of the celebrated votive antiphon Gaude plurimum.

Originally published in 1978, Medieval Music explores the fascinating development of medieval western music from its often obscure origins in the Jewish synagogue and early Church, to the mid-fifteenth century. The book is intended as a straightforward survey of medieval music and emphases the technical aspects such as form, style and notation. It is illustrated by nearly one hundred musical examples, the majority of which have been transcribed from original sources and many of which contains chapters on Latin chant and other forms of sacred monophony, secular song, early polyphony, the ars antiqua, French and Italian fourteenth-century music, English music, and fifteenth-century music. Each chapter is followed by a classified bibliography divided into musical sources, literary sources and modern studies; in addition to a comprehensive bibliography.

The epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, are among the oldest surviving works of literature derived from oral performance. Deeply embedded in these works is the notion that they were intended to be heard: there is something musical about Homer's use of language and a vivid quality to his images that transcends the written page to create a theatrical experience for the listener. Indeed, it is precisely the theatrical quality of the poems that would inspire later interpreters to cast the Odyssey and the Iliad in a host of other media-novels, plays, poems, paintings, and even that most elaborate of all art forms, opera, exemplified by no less a work than Monteverdi's Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria. In Performing Homer: The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera, scholars in classics, drama, Italian literature, art history, and musicology explore the journey of Homer's Odyssey from ancient to modern times. The book traces the reception of the Odyssey though the Italian humanist sources-from Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto-to the treatment of the tale not only by Monteverdi but also such composers as Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Gluck, and Alessandro Scarlatti, and the dramatic and poetic traditions thereafter by such modern writers as Derek Walcott and Margaret Atwood.

This second selection of essays by David Fallows draws the focus towards individual composers of the 'long' fifteenth century and what we can learn about their songs. In twenty-one essays on the secular works of composers from Ciconia and Oswald von Wolkenstein via Binchois, Ockeghem, Busnoys and Regis to Josquin, Henry VIII and Petrus Alamire, one repeated theme is how a consideration of the songs can help the way to a broader understanding of a composer's output. Since there are more song sources and more individual pieces now available for study, there are more handles for dating, for geographical location and for social alignment. Another theme concerns the various different ways in which particular songs have their impact on the next generations. Yet another concerns the authorshop of poems that were set to music by Binchois and Ciconia in particular. A group of essays on Josquin were parerga to the author's edition of his four-voice secular music for the New Josquin Edition (2005) and to his monograph on the composer (2009).

This selection of nineteen essays by Nigel Wilkins, in English and in French, is characterised by an inter-disciplinary approach crossing the borders between music, language, literature, history, palaeography and iconography. The principal topic is lyric poetry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, mostly French and English, both with and without music, and in various contexts. Guillaume de Machaut, the dominant poet-musician of the age, is the central figure: his influence is traced in poets such as Froissart, Deschamps, Christine de Pisan, Charles d'Orleans, Villon, Gower and Chaucer, and in the poet-musicians who came after him. The question of patronage is investigated. The development of the principal lyric forms, rondeau, ballade and virelai, is explored on both sides of the Channel, as is the way they were used, for example in miracle plays and in court entertainment. A Flemish painting of 1493 helps us discover the rAle of music in the ceremonies of trade and religious guilds; a memorial brass from King's Lynn reveals the importance of music in the ceremonial of feasts. Wider themes are also explored, such as the association of music with the Devil, the use of several languages combined in certain musical contexts, and the controversial role of inspiration in musical composition.

This second selection of studies by Frank D'Accone, again based principally on the documentary evidence, follows the development through the mid 16th century of musical chapels at the Cathedral and the Baptistery of Florence and of musical establishments at the Santissima Annunziata and San Lorenzo. The lives, careers and works of composers associated with these churches are illustrated and their works analyzed, particularly the theoretical treatise by Fra Mauro, the madrigals of Mauro Matti and the ambitiously conceived canzone cycle of Mattia Rampollini. The final studies, moving into the 17th century, look at the music for Holy Week, and the unprecedented programme of performances at Santa Maria Novella.

The practice and composition of music require patronage and institutional support, and they require it in a different fashion from that found in other forms of art. This collection of essays brings together the most recent and important contributions by leading scholars in the field to this crucial aspect of Renaissance musical culture. The articles approach the topic from a number of perspectives and consider the institutions and individuals engaged in supporting music; the systems of employment, benefices and sponsorship put in place to facilitate the support; and where, how and why music was sung and played. Taken together, these articles enable conclusions to be drawn about the interests of patrons and about the social and artistic status of musicians and composers within the courtly and urban context.

First published in 1998, this volume brings together the most part of the author's work on medieval polyphony. The most significant advance in music during the period in the High Gothic was the development of a system of rhythm and of its notation, the modern understanding of which was to a considerable extent obscured by an undue emphasis on the so-called rhythmic modes. The investigation of this topic forms the centre of this book, and a related essay deals with rhythmic Latin poetry. Other pieces survey the accomplishments of Europe's first great composer and the flourishing of the medieval motet, whose rise he stimulated, while several essays focus on English polyphony, and on what remains of the motets of Philippe de Vitry, a major figure in Parisian intellectual circles of the 14th century.

The emergence of music printing and publishing in the early 16th century radically changed how music was circulated, and how the musical source (printed or manuscript) was perceived, and used in performance. This series of close studies of the structure and content of 16th-century and early 17th-century editions (and some manuscripts) of music draws conclusions in a number of areas - printing techniques for music; the habits of different type-setters and scribes, and their view of performing practice; publishers' approaches to the musical market and its abilities and interests; apparent changes of plan in preparing editions; questions of authorship; evidence in editions and manuscripts for interpreting different levels of notation; ways in which scribes could influence performers' decisions, and others by which composers could exploit unusual sonorities.