'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

This is the first study in modern times dealing exclusively with the flutes used in the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical eras. It details the history of the transverse flute from 1500 until the early nineteenth century. Advice is given on acquiring instruments, and their care and maintenance. Additional chapters guide the reader to sources about relevant technique and style, recommend repertoire, and give general advice to the modern player. The text is enhanced by numerous photographs of important historic flutes.

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.

This is the first volume of a magisterial survey of English music that charts its development from its beginnings in the early monastic institutions to the rise of 17th-century opera and masque and instrumental music, culminating in the genius of Henry Purcell.

The Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis was founded in honour of Dionysius, one of seven missionaries sent from Rome to Gaul around 250. It grew to be one of the most powerful monasteries in western Christendom and enjoyed a central position in French history as the first Gothic abbey, royal necropolis, and place of origin of the chronicles of the kings. This is a study of the music and ritual at Saint-Denis from the sixth to the sixteenth century. It is based on an examination of the liturgical books and archival sources relating to the abbey, in particular the surviving service-books, which tell us much about the history of the music and of the Divine Office at Saint-Denis. Anne Robertson also looks at the tropes and sequences proper to the office for Saint-Denis, provides information on the performance practices, instruments, musicians, and liturgists from the abbey, and offers an account of the history of the liturgy from the Council of Tours in 567 to the pillage of the abbey by the Huguenots in 1567, thus explicating the extant liturgical codices from Saint-Denis. For the author the ritual and history of the abbey is also inextricably linked to the reconstruction of its various buildings, the decorations of the church, even the monks' ambitions. This is a fascinating and wide-ranging study of this extraordinary institution.

Few bodies of Western music are as widely respected, studied, and emulated as the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach. Despite the esteem which Bach's contributions brought to the genre, however, the origin and early history of the fugue remain poorly understood. Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach addresses both the history and methodology of the pre-Bach fugue (from roughly 1500 to 1700), and, of greatest significance to the literature, it seeks to present a way out of the methodological dilemma of uncertainty which has plagued previous scholarly attempts by considering what musicians of the time had to say about the fugue: what it was, what it was not, how important it was, and where and how a composer should (or shouldn't) use it. Paul Mark Walker is director of the Early Music Ensemble at the University of Virginia and an expert on the history of the fugue.

In the years following the Act of Uniformity in 1549, musicians seemed to thrive on the challenge of the New Prayer Book, and the successive reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I bought a rich and varied repertory of vernacular church music. Peter Le Huray traces these developments in great detail, drawing on many contemporary sources to illuminate the music and its social and religious background.

Volume 2 of 3. This monumental three-volume work on the Italian madrigal from its beginnings about 1500 to its decline in the 17th century is based on the research of 40 years, and is a cultural history of the development of Italian music. Mr. Einstein, renowned musicologist, supplies a background and a sense of proportion to the field: he gives the right order to the single composers in the evolution fo the madrigal, attaches new values to old names, and places in the foreground the outstanding, but until now rather neglected, personality of Cipriano de Rore. His work is not, however, purely musicological; his object is to inquire into the functions of secular music in Italian life during the Cinquecento, and to contribute to our knowledge and understanding of that great century in general. Translated from the German by Oliver Strunk, Roger Sessions and Alexander H. Krappe. Originally published in 1948. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A richly detailed portrait of the music and surrounding culture in one of history's most creative eras.

Music in the Age of the Renaissance, written by one of the country's leading scholars, brings to life the musical styles and genres that mark this humanistic period of artistic and scientific revolution. In his compelling treatment of how the music was developed and transmitted, Professor Leeman Perkins grounds his narrative firmly in political, religious, social, and cultural history, opening a window onto the lavish courts, magnificent churches, and thriving urban centers in which music played such a vital role. The latest, best, and most comprehensive survey of Renaissance music to appear in over forty years.

Volume 3 of 3. This monumental three-volume work on the Italian madrigal from its beginnings about 1500 to its decline in the 17th century is based on the research of 40 years, and is a cultural history of the development of Italian music. Mr. Einstein, renowned musicologist, supplies a background and a sense of proportion to the field: he gives the right order to the single composers in the evolution fo the madrigal, attaches new values to old names, and places in the foreground the outstanding, but until now rather neglected, personality of Cipriano de Rore. His work is not, however, purely musicological; his object is to inquire into the functions of secular music in Italian life during the Cinquecento, and to contribute to our knowledge and understanding of that great century in general. Translated from the German by Oliver Strunk, Roger Sessions and Alexander H. Krappe. Originally published in 1948. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A primary mode for the creation and dissemination of poetry in Renaissance Italy was the oral practice of singing and improvising verse to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. Singing to the Lyre is the first comprehensive study of this ubiquitous practice, which was cultivated by performers ranging from popes, princes, and many artists, to professionals of both mercantile and humanist background. Common to all was a strong degree of mixed orality based on a synergy between writing and the oral operations of memory, improvisation, and performance. As a cultural practice deeply rooted in language and supported by ancient precedent, cantare ad lyram (singing to the lyre) is also a reflection of Renaissance cultural priorities, including the status of vernacular poetry, the study and practice of rhetoric, the oral foundations of humanist education, and the performative culture of the courts reflected in theatrical presentations and Castiglione's Il cortegiano.

Vocal music was at the heart of English Renaissance poetry and drama. Virtuosic actor-singers redefined the theatrical culture of William Shakespeare and his peers. Composers including William Byrd and Henry Lawes shaped the transmission of Renaissance lyric verse. Poets from Philip Sidney to John Milton were fascinated by the disorienting influx of musical performance into their works. Musical performance was a driving force behind the period's theatrical and poetic movements, yet its importance to literary history has long been ignored or effaced. This book reveals the impact of vocalists and composers upon the poetic culture of early modern England by studying the media through which-and by whom-its songs were made. In a literary field that was never confined to writing, media were not limited to material texts. Scott Trudell argues that the media of Renaissance poetry can be conceived as any node of transmission from singer's larynx to actor's body. Through his study of song, Trudell outlines a new approach to Renaissance poetry and drama that is grounded not simply in performance history or book history but in a more synthetic media history.

Although, according to the author, much sound research, has been done in the Dufay era in recent years," Charles Hamm's book marks the first time an attempt has been made at a comprehensive chronology of the works of this composer. Professor Hamm approaches all Dufay's compositions from the point of view of mensural practice, and has been able to date each piece more precisely than would have been possible in a chronology based on manuscript studies or stylistic analyses. He has divided the works into nine groups, according to details of mensural usage, and on the basis of datable works and other evidence has suggested dates within which the pieces of each group were written. Based on his study of Dufay's mensural practice, the author suggests that the Missa Sancti Antoni and several other works attributed to Dufay may not have been written by him. Originally published in 1964. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Musical notation is a powerful system of communication between musicians, using sophisticated symbolic, primarily non-verbal means to express musical events in visual symbols. Many musicians take the system for granted, having internalized it and their strategies for reading it and translating it into sound over long years of study and practice. This book traces the development of that system by combining chronological and thematic approaches to show the historical and musical context in which these developments took place. Simultaneously, the book considers the way in which this symbolic language communicates to those literate in it, discussing how its features facilitate or hinder fluent comprehension in the real-time environment of performance. Moreover, the topic of musical as opposed to notational innovation forms another thread of the treatment, as the author investigates instances where musical developments stimulated notational attributes, or notational innovations made practicable advances in musical style.

As a distinguished scholar of Renaissance music, James Haar has had an abiding influence on how musicology is undertaken, owing in great measure to a substantial body of articles published over the past three decades. Collected here for the first time are representative pieces from those years, covering diverse themes of continuing interest to him and his readers: music in Renaissance culture, problems of theory as well as the Italian madrigal in the sixteenth century, the figures of Antonfrancesco Doni and Giovanthomaso Cimello, and the nineteenth century's views of early music.

In this collection, the same subject is seen from several angles, and thus gives a rich context for further exploration. Haar was one of the first to recognize the value of cultural study. His work also reminds us that the close study of the music itself is equally important. The articles contained in this book show the author's conviction that a good way to address large problems is to begin by focusing on small ones.

Originally published in 1998.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

An exceptional text for undergraduate and graduate music students, Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style uses a wide variety of carefully graded exercises to present guidelines for writing and analyzing 16th-century music. The only species counterpoint text that draws directly on Renaissance treatises, it provides a conceptual framework to guide students through composition and analysis as it teaches them general structural principles. With stylistically diverse examples including not only motets and mass movements but also French chansons, German chorale settings, English canzonets, Italian madrigals, and Spanish organ hymns, villancicos, and ricercars, the book gives students a "real-life" feel for the subject. It distinguishes between technical requirements ("hard" rules) and stylistic guidelines ("soft" rules), and includes coordinated exercises that allow students to develop their skills systematically. The concluding chapters provide the formal and conceptual building blocks for longer pieces and encourage students to understand analysis and composition as complementary activities. By the end of the book, students are writing real compositions, not just drill exercises. The text also features progressively graded exercises, historical asides that explain important topics and issues of the period, and some notes in the preface on using the book in the classroom. Combining the historical accuracy of "style-oriented" texts with the more systematic species counterpoint approach, this book offers a unique alternative to other methods. Now in its second edition, Modal Counterpoint, Renaissance Style integrates improvisation activities and new repertoire examples into many chapters; revises the chapter on three-part writing (Chapter 14) so that it pays more attention to rules and strategies; reworks the chapters on cadences (Chapter 10) and on writing two parts in mixed values (Chapter 11) to make them more accessible to students; incorporates clarified instructions throughout; and includes a summary of rules.

Just as our society delights in citations, quotations, and allusions in myriad contexts, not least in popular song, late medieval poets and composers knew well that such references could greatly enrich their own works. In The Art of the Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut, author Yolanda Plumley explores the penchant for borrowing in chansons and lyrics from fourteenth-century France, uncovering a practice integral to the experiments in form, genre, and style that ushered in a new school of lyric.
Working across disciplinary boundaries, Plumley traces creative appropriations in the burgeoning "fixed forms" of this new tradition to build a more intimate understanding of the shared experience of poetry and music in the generations leading up to, and including, Guillaume de Machaut. Exploring familiar and less studied collections of songs as well as lyrics without music, this book sheds valuable light on the poetic and musical knowledge of authors and their audiences, and on how poets and composers devised their works and engaged their readers or listeners. It presents fresh insights into when and in which milieus the classic Ars nova polyphonic chanson took root and flourished, and into the artistic networks of which Machaut formed a part. As Plumley reveals, old songs lingered alongside the new in the collective imagination well beyond what the written sources imply, reminding us of the continued importance of memory and orality in this age of increasing literacy.
The first detailed study of citational practice in the French fourteenth-century song-writing tradition, The Art of Grafted Song will appeal to students and scholars of medieval French music and literature, cultural historians, and others interested in the historical and social context of music and poetry in the late Middle Ages.

Praise for the cloth edition:
"Commendable in itsscholarship... should prove of interest to linguists, medievalists, and Renaissanceacademicians, as well as to fastidious performers of early music." --Choice

"Singing Early Music is a pioneering work ofsurpassing quality that cannot be too highly recommended." -- Journal ofSinging

"Addresses the needs of the performer directly, giving historical pronunciations for a range of languages [and] sample texts.... TheCD that comes with the book will prove invaluable.... David Klausner's recording isadmirably consistent and convincing across the wide range of languages." --Early Music

Modern musical training tends to focus primarily on performance practices of the Classical and Romantic periods, and most performers come to the music of the Renaissance with well-honed but anachronistic ideas and concepts. As a result, elemental differences between 16th-century repertoire and that of later epochs tend to be overlooked-yet it is just these differences which can make a performance truly stunning. The Performance of 16th-Century Music offers a remedy for the performer, presenting the information and guidance that will enable them to better understand the music and advance their technical and expressive abilities. Drawing from nearly 40 years of performing, teaching, and studying this repertoire and its theoretical sources, renowned early music specialist Anne Smith outlines several major areas of technical knowledge and skill needed to perform the music of this period. She takes the reader through part-books and choirbooks; solmization; rhythmic inequality; and elements of structure in relation to rhetoric of the time; while familiarizing them with contemporary criteria and standards of excellence for performance. Through The Performance of 16th-Century Music, today's musicians will gain fundamental insight into how 16th-century polyphony functions, and the tools necessary to perform this repertoire to its fullest and glorious potential.

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.

Although, according to the author, much sound research, has been done in the Dufay era in recent years," Charles Hamm's book marks the first time an attempt has been made at a comprehensive chronology of the works of this composer. Professor Hamm approaches all Dufay's compositions from the point of view of mensural practice, and has been able to date each piece more precisely than would have been possible in a chronology based on manuscript studies or stylistic analyses. He has divided the works into nine groups, according to details of mensural usage, and on the basis of datable works and other evidence has suggested dates within which the pieces of each group were written. Based on his study of Dufay's mensural practice, the author suggests that the Missa Sancti Antoni and several other works attributed to Dufay may not have been written by him. Originally published in 1964. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

What does it mean to author a piece of music? What transforms the performance scripts written down by musicians into authored books? In this fascinating cultural history of Western music's adaptation to print, Kate van Orden looks at how musical authorship first developed through the medium of printing. When music printing began in the sixteenth century, publication did not always involve the composer: printers used the names of famous composers to market books that might include little or none of their music. Publishing sacred music could be career-building for a composer, while some types of popular song proved too light to support a reputation in print, no matter how quickly they sold. Van Orden addresses the complexities that arose for music and musicians in the burgeoning cultures of print, concluding that authoring books of polyphony gained only uneven cultural traction across a century in which composers were still first and foremost performers.

Volume 1 of 3. This monumental three-volume work on the Italian madrigal from its beginnings about 1500 to its decline in the 17th century is based on the research of 40 years, and is a cultural history of the development of Italian music. Mr. Einstein, renowned musicologist, supplies a background and a sense of proportion to the field: he gives the right order to the single composers in the evolution fo the madrigal, attaches new values to old names, and places in the foreground the outstanding, but until now rather neglected, personality of Cipriano de Rore. His work is not, however, purely musicological; his object is to inquire into the functions of secular music in Italian life during the Cinquecento, and to contribute to our knowledge and understanding of that great century in general. Translated from the German by Oliver Strunk, Roger Sessions and Alexander H. Krappe. Originally published in 1948. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Through forty-five creative and concise essays by an international team of authors, this Cambridge History brings the fifteenth century to life for both specialists and general readers. Combining the best qualities of survey texts and scholarly literature, the book offers authoritative overviews of central composers, genres, and musical institutions as well as new and provocative reassessments of the work concept, the boundaries between improvisation and composition, the practice of listening, humanism, musical borrowing, and other topics. Multidisciplinary studies of music and architecture, feasting, poetry, politics, liturgy, and religious devotion rub shoulders with studies of compositional techniques, musical notation, music manuscripts, and reception history. Generously illustrated with figures and examples, this volume paints a vibrant picture of musical life in a period characterized by extraordinary innovation and artistic achievement.

A man of huge reputation in his lifetime, the fifteenth century composer Binchois remains for us, at the turn of the twenty-first century, one of the key musical figures of his age. In addressing various facets of his life, music, influences, and the world he inhabited, this volume casts new light not only on this enigmatic composer himself but also on the fascinating culture in which his musical personality was shaped.