Early Music History is devoted to the study of music from the early Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century. It demands the highest standards of scholarship from its contributors, all of whom are leading academics in their fields. It gives preference to studies pursuing interdisciplinary approaches and to those developing novel methodological ideas. The scope is exceptionally broad and includes manuscript studies, textual criticism, iconography, studies of the relationship between words and music and the relationship between music and society. Articles in volume twenty-one include: Musica mundana, Aristotelian natural philosophy and Ptolemaic astronomy; Eros and thanatos: a Ficinian and Laurentian reading of Verdelot's Si lieta e grata morte; The debate on song in the Academia Fiorentina.

Early Music History is devoted to the study of music from the early Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century. It demands the highest standards of scholarship from its contributors, all of whom are leading academics in their fields. It gives preference to studies pursuing interdisciplinary approaches and to those developing novel methodological ideas. The scope is exceptionally broad and includes manuscript studies, textual criticism, iconography, studies of the relationship between words and music and the relationship between music and society. Articles in volume twenty include: Encompassing past and present: quotations and their function in Machaut's motets; The Vatican organum treatise re-examined; Who 'made' the Magnus liber?

Early Music History is devoted to the study of music from the early Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century. It demands the highest standards of scholarship from its contributors, all of whom are leading academics in their fields. It gives preference to studies pursuing interdisciplinary approaches and to those developing novel methodological ideas. The scope is exceptionally broad and includes manuscript studies, textual criticism, iconography, studies of the relationship between words and music and the relationship between music and society. Articles in volume twenty-three include: Guillaume de Machaut and his canonry of Reims 1338-1377; 'Notes as a garland': the chronology and narrative of Byrd's Gradualia; Reading carnival: the creation of a Florentine carnival song; Schein's occasional music and the social order in 1620s Leipzig.

This volume presents a series of important essays by American and European scholars on some of the problems involved in attempting to perform music of the late Middle ages. The essays are based on papers read at a conference held at the New York University Center for Early Music in 1981 and they concern a varied selection of aspects of the subject; behind many lies an interest in the reopened question of how far instruments had a role in performing secular or sacred music. Among the questions tackled are: the types of harps found in fourteenth-century Italy, and their probable uses; the numbers of singers needed (with their ranges) for fourteenth-century English music; evidence for the use of instruments in the thirteenth century and for wind articulation in the late fourteenth; specific performing ensembles of the fifteenth century, and what they may have sung in a polyphonic Mass.

In Poetry and Music in Medieval France, first published in 2003, Ardis Butterfield examines vernacular song in medieval France. She begins with the moment when French song first survives in writing in the early thirteenth century, and examines a large corpus of works which combine elements of narrative and song, as well as a range of genres which cross between different musical and literary categories. Emphasising the cosmopolitan artistic milieu of Arras, Butterfield describes the wide range of contexts in which secular songs were quoted and copied, including narrative romances, satires and love poems. She uses manuscript evidence to shed light on medieval perceptions of how music and poetry were composed and interpreted. The volume is well illustrated to demonstrate the rich visual culture of medieval French writing and music. This interdisciplinary study will be of interest to both literary and musical scholars of late medieval culture.

This is a fascinating study of the making of the Harley Psalter, an illustrated manuscript which was produced at Christ Church, Canterbury, over a period of about 100 years, from c. 1020 to c. 1130. The Harley Psalter was closely based on the Utrecht Psalter, the most celebrated of all Carolingian illuminated manuscripts. Through meticulous observation of the Harley Psalter, William Noel analyses how the artists and scribes worked with each other and with their manuscript exemplars in making their illustrated text. The author demonstrates that this work is best understood not as a copy of the Utrecht Psalter, but rather as one of a series of Anglo-Saxon manuscript experiments that incorporated its imagery. This is a crucial work for understanding the development of art, script and book making during what has been termed the 'golden age' of Anglo-Saxon art.

This book is a history of the early musical life of the Parisian cathedral of Notre Dame. All aspects of the musical establishment of Notre Dame are covered, from Merovingian times to the period of the wars of religion in France. Nine discrete essays discuss the history of Parisian chant and liturgy and the pattern and structure of the cathedral services in the late Middle Ages; Notre Dame polyphony and the composers most closely associated with the cathedral, among them Leoninus, Perotinus and Philippe de Vitry; the organ and its repertoire; the choir, the musical education and performing traditions; and the relationship of the cathedral to the court.

This book explores the role of music in an early fourteenth-century French manuscript (BN, fr. 146). The musical repertories found in this manuscript, particularly those interpolated into the Old French satire, the Roman de Fauvel, are frequently used to illuminate the wider history of French medieval music. This study sets the manuscript against the wider culture of Parisian book-making, showing how in devising new systems of design and folio layout, its creators developed a new kind of materiality in music: it illustrates how music is expressive in ways that are unperformable apart from its visual representation. This study is primarily concerned with the workings of fr. 146; however, it also argues that the new attitudes to (material) music-making embodied in that manuscript serve as a model for exploring other music manuscripts to emerge in late-medieval France.

Guillaume de Machaut, renowned fourteenth-century French composer and poet, wrote the first polyphonic Mass and many other important musical works. Friend of royalty, prelates, noted poets and musicians, Machaut was a cosmopolitan presence in late medieval Europe. He also served as canon of the cathedral of Reims, an ancient and influential archiepiscopal see and the coronation site of French kings. This exploration of Machaut's life and work focuses on his music based on ecclesiastical chants: twenty-three motets, the David Hocket, and the Mass of Our Lady. The meaning of his music can often be understood through study of its context in fourteenth-century Reims. Machaut emerges as a composer deeply involved in the great crises of his day, one who skilfully and artfully expresses profound themes of human existence in ardent music and poetry.

Olivier Messiaen stands as one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century and among the foremost religious artists of any era. When he died in 1992, the prevailing image was of a deeply religious man whose only sources of inspiration were God and Nature, and of a composer whose music progressed along an entirely individual path, impervious to contemporaneous events and the whims both of his fellow artists and the critics. The Life of Messiaen paints a more nuanced picture of the man and the musician, peering behind Messiaen's public persona to examine the private difficulties and creative struggles that were the true backdrop to many of his greatest achievements. Based upon the latest research, including previously overlooked sources, this book provides an excellent introduction to Messiaen's life and work, presenting a fascinating new perspective of a man whose story is more remarkable than the myths surrounding it.

Olivier Messiaen stands as one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century and among the foremost religious artists of any era. When he died in 1992, the prevailing image was of a deeply religious man whose only sources of inspiration were God and Nature, and of a composer whose music progressed along an entirely individual path, impervious to contemporaneous events and the whims both of his fellow artists and the critics. The Life of Messiaen paints a more nuanced picture of the man and the musician, peering behind Messiaen"s public persona to examine the private difficulties and creative struggles that were the true backdrop to many of his greatest achievements. Based upon the latest research, including previously overlooked sources, this book provides an excellent introduction to Messiaen's life and work, presenting a fascinating new perspective of a man whose story is more remarkable than the myths surrounding it.

James Grier documents the musical activities of Ademar de Chabannes, eleventh-century monk, historian, homilist and tireless polemicist for the apostolic status of Saint Martial, patron saint of the abbey that bore his name in Limoges. Ademar left behind some 451 folios of music with notation in his autograph hand, a musical resource without equal before the seventeenth century. He introduced, at strategic moments, pieces familiar from the standard liturgy for an apostle and items of his own composition. These reveal Ademar to be a supremely able designer of liturgies and a highly original composer. This study analyzes his accomplishments as a musical scribe, compiler of liturgies, editor of existing musical works and composer; it also offers a speculative consideration of his abilities as a singer; and finally, it places Ademar's musical activities in the context of liturgical, musical and political developments at the abbey of Saint Martial in Limoges.

This book examines a central group of music theory treatises that have formed the background to the study of Renaissance music. Taking theorists' music examples as a point of departure, it explores fundamental questions about how music was read, and by whom, situating the reading in specific cultural contexts. Numerous broader issues are addressed in the process: the relationship of theory and praxis; access to, and use of, printed musical sources; stated and unstated agendas of theorists; orality and literacy as it was represented via music print culture; the evaluation of anonymous repertories; and the analysis of repertories delineated by boundaries other than the usual ones of composer and genre. In particular this study illuminates the ways in which Renaissance theorists' choices have shaped later interpretation of earlier practice, and reflexively the ways in which modern theory has been mapped on to that practice.

This book provides an in-depth study of the late medieval chanson, from Gace Brule through Guillaume Du Fay. It is largely concerned with interpretation of the way accidentals function, not only at the level of local detail but also as part of the overall design. Thomas Brothers thus explores the way inflections are used by the composer as an expressive tool. The background problem to which this study responds is the conceptual difficulty we have in interpreting pitch syntax in this repertory. Support for this approach comes from reference to causa pulchritudinis ('by reason of beauty'), a justification for chromatic writing first encountered at the beginning of the fourteenth century. In advancing an interpretation of the musical side of the chanson, Thomas Brothers aims to bring standards closer to what has been achieved in study of sister disciplines of art and literature.

This interdisciplinary collection examines musical culture in urban centres in Renaissance Europe and the New World. Although musicologists have indeed already investigated such topics, lack of familiarity with (urban) historical methodologies has often resulted in failure to explore fully the ways in which the urban environment had an impact on musical activity of all kinds; neither is this question adequately addressed by urban historians. This book thus aims to integrate musicological and urban-historical approaches. To urban historians it shows the range of work undertaken by music historians; to musicologists it presents some different approaches, questions and perspectives which suggest new lines of enquiry for future investigations. Not only does this book contribute to musicology, but it also adds considerably to urban history scholarship.

This book describes instrumental music and its context in German society of the late middle ages - from about 1350 to 1520. Players at that time improvised, much like jazz musicians of our day, but because they did not use notated music, only scant remnants of their activity have survived in written sources, and much has been left obscure. This book attempts to reconstruct an image of their music, discussing the instruments, ensembles, and performance practices of the time. What emerges from this study is a fundamental reappraisal of late medieval culture. A musical life is reconstructed which was not only extraordinary in its own time, but which also laid the foundations of an artistic culture that later produced such giants as Schutz, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.

This is the first full-length study of the vernacular motet in thirteenth-century France. The motet was the most prestigious type of music of that period, filling a gap between the music of the so-called Notre-Dame School and the Ars Nova of the early fourteenth century. This book takes the music and the poetry of the motet as its starting-point and attempts to come to grips with the ways in which musicians and poets treated pre-existing material, creating new artefacts. The book reviews the processes of texting and retexting, and the procedures for imparting structure to the works; it considers the way we conceive genre in the thirteenth-century motet, and supplements these with principles derived from twentieth-century genre theory. The motet is viewed as the interaction of literary and musical modes whose relationships give meaning to individual musical compositions.

In recent years the study of medieval courts has become a flourishing field. The courts of kings and popes, or of the Burgundian dukes, have usually attracted most attention. This book offers by contrast a wide-ranging study of a little-known, medium-sized court - that of Guelders in the Low Countries. Guelders offers an excellent vantage point for the study of European late medieval court culture. It was surrounded by the vast territories of the dukes of Burgundy, and it felt the growing power of the Valois dukes, yet the duchy managed to remain independent until 1473. Rich archival sources - including a long and virtually unbroken series of ducal accounts - reveal much about the rise of territorial or 'proto-national' awareness and about the role of the court in this process. The book also conveys the striking cultural and political richness of the court, poised between French and German spheres of influence.

During the lifetime of Guillaume Du Fay (c. 1400 1474) the motet underwent a profound transformation. Because of the protean nature of the motet during this period, problems of definition have always stood in the way of a full understanding of this crucial shift. Through a comprehensive survey of the surviving repertory, Julie Cumming shows that the motet is best understood on the level of the subgenre. She employs new ideas about categories taken from cognitive psychology and evolutionary theory to illuminate the process by which the subgenres of the motet arose and evolved. One important finding is the nature and extent of the crucial role that English music played in the genre's transformation. Cumming provides a close reading of many little-known pieces; she also shows how Du Fay's motets were the product of sophisticated experimentation with generic boundaries.

Salamone Rossi (c.1570-c.1627) occupies a unique place in Renaissance music culture: he was the earliest outstanding Jewish composer to work in the European art music tradition. Working for the Gonzaga dukes in Mantua, yet remaining faithful to his own religious community, Rossi has a biography fraught with difficult and often exciting questions of socio-cultural order. How Rossi solved, or appears to have solved, the problem of conflicting interests is a subject worthy of inquiry, not only because we want to know more about Rossi, but also because Rossi can stand as a paradigm for other Jewish figures who, contemporary with him, moved between different cultures.

The attempt to play music with the styles and instruments of its era--commonly referred to as the early music movement--has become immensely popular in recent years. For instance, Billboard's "Top Classical Albums" of 1993 and 1994 featured Anonymous 4, who sing medieval music, and the best-selling Beethoven recording of 1995 was a period-instruments symphony cycle led by John Eliot Gardiner, who is Deutsche Grammophon's top-selling living conductor. But the movement has generated as much controversy as it has best-selling records, not only about the merits of its results, but also about the validity of its approach. To what degree can we recreate long-lost performing styles? How important are historical period instruments for the performance of a piece? Why should musicians bother with historical information? Are they sacrificing art to scholarship?
Now, in Inside Early Music, Bernard D. Sherman has invited many of the leading practitioners to speak out about their passion for early music--why they are attracted to this movement and how it shapes their work. Readers listen in on conversations with conductors Gardiner, William Christie, and Roger Norrington, Peter Phillips of the Tallis Scholars, vocalists Susan Hellauer of Anonymous 4, forte pianist Robert Levin, cellist Anner Bylsma, and many other leading artists. The book is divided into musical eras--Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Classic and Romantic--with each interview focusing on particular composers or styles, touching on heated topics such as the debate over what is "authentic," the value of playing on period instruments, and how to interpret the composer's intentions. Whether debating how to perform Monteverdi'smadrigals or comparing Andrew Lawrence-King's Renaissance harp playing to jazz, the performers convey not only a devotion to the spirit of period performance, but the joy of discovery as they struggle to bring the music most truthfully to life. Spurred on by Sherman's probing questions and immense knowledge of the subject, these conversations movingly document the aspirations, growing pains, and emerging maturity of the most exciting movement in contemporary classical performance, allowing each artist's personality and love for his or her craft to shine through.
From medieval plainchant to Brahms' orchestral works, Inside Early Music takes readers-whether enthusiasts or detractors-behind the scenes to provide a masterful portrait of early music's controversies, challenges, and rewards.

Ardis Butterfield examines the relationship between the poetry and music of medieval France. Beginning when French song was first set into writing in the early thirteenth century, Butterfield describes the wide range of contexts in which secular songs were quoted and copied. Including narrative romances, satires and love poems, the book reveals the development of French song and narrative genres during a significant period of history.

This book explores the role of music in an early fourteenth-century French manuscript (BN, fr. 146). The musical repertories found in this manuscript, particularly those interpolated into the Old French satire, the Roman de Fauvel, are frequently used to illuminate the wider history of French medieval music. This study sets the manuscript against the wider culture of Parisian book-making, showing how in devising new systems of design and folio layout, its creators developed a new kind of materiality in music: it illustrates how music is expressive in ways that are unperformable apart from its visual representation. This study is primarily concerned with the workings of fr. 146; however, it also argues that the new attitudes to (material) music-making embodied in that manuscript serve as a model for exploring other music manuscripts to emerge in late-medieval France.

Iain Fenlon explores how music was an 'instrument' of those in power in late Renaissance Italy. Focusing on major urban centres - Mantua, Milan, Rome, Florence, and Venice - he argues that, far from losing its vigour after 1530, Italian culture was in fact transformed, as both individuals and institutions reacted to new political, economic, and religious circumstances.

Early Music History is devoted to the study of music from the early Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century. The scope is exceptionally broad and includes manuscript studies, textual criticism, iconography, studies of the relationship between words and music, and the relationship between music and society. The journal gives preference to studies pursuing interdisciplinary approaches and to those developing new methodological ideas.