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Books > Music > Western music, periods & styles > Medieval & Renaissance music (c 1000 to c 1600)
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.
First published in 1999, this volume is the first full-length study to deal with the life and music of Orlando Gibbons since E.H. Fellowes's short book, originally published in 1923. John Harley investigates in detail the family and musical background from which Orlando Gibbons emerged, and gives a fascinating account of the activities of his father, William Gibbons, as a wait in Oxford and Cambridge. He traces, too, the activities of Orlando's brothers - Edward, who was the master of the choristers at King's College, Cambridge and later at Exeter Cathedral; Ferdinando, who may have taken over from his father as head of the Cambridge waits, and who became a wait in Lincoln; and Ellis, who contributed two madrigals to Thomas Morley's collection of 1601, The Triumphs of Oriana. Attention naturally focuses principally on Orlando Gibbons. A full record is given of his remarkably youthful appointment as an organist of the Chapel Royal (he was probably less than twenty at the time) and of his life at court. His additional appointments as one of Prince Charles's musicians and as organist of Westminster Abbey are also described, as is his sudden and premature death in his early forties. Gibbons's music is carefully examined in a series of chapters dealing with his pieces for keyboard and for viols, his songs, his full and verse anthems, and his works for the Anglican liturgy. His development as a composer within these genres is followed, and the character of particular pieces is considered. John Harley concludes that whereas, at one time, Gibbons 'tended to be admired as a successor to Tallis and Byrd, working in a style not essentially different from theirs', it is now 'easier to view him as a pioneer, whose work was cut short by his untimely death'. Orlando Gibbons's son Christopher was only a child when his father died, but he became one of the foremost composers and keyboard players of his generation, writing and performing chamber works and music for the stage during the Commonwealth. Following the Restoration of King Charles II, Christopher Gibbons gained his father's former posts at the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey, for which establishments he wrote a number of anthems. His importance is recognized by the inclusion of a long chapter on his life and works.
- Offers a diverse snapshot of current studies of music notation as material culture, encompassing a wide range of methodological approaches - Broad historical and regional/stylistic scope, covering material from the middle ages to the present
This book offers new insights into the musical, poetic, and curatorial reception of thirteenth-century composers' works in their own time. It uncovers, beneath the surface of an anonymous motet book, unsuspected interactions between authors and traces of compositional identities.
- Applies cutting-edge musical-linguistic approach to the music of early modern England - Uses analysis of emphasis to produce new insights into composers' liturgical music, showing how their settings create different interpretations of the religious text - Relevant to musicology, music theory, and religious history
A study of how the secular lyrics of the French composer Orlando di Lasso were reworked by Protestant printers in the sixteenth century to convey new spiritual meanings. This book aims to enrich our understanding of the French secular music of Orlando di Lasso, using those songs as a means of understanding a particular community of Renaissance readers and the music books they created. Lasso's secular songs figured quite prominently in a number of collections of devotional songs issued by Protestant printers in the late sixteenth century. Lasso's profane lyrics were changed to convey spiritual meanings. This study uses theexample of such reworkings as a means of discovering how such a repertory was heard and understood by a particular community of listeners, and in so doing, it explores the history of these chansons in print, and the history of thespiritual attitudes that shaped their reception among the Huguenots. Richard Freedman is Associate Professor of Music at Haverford College.
Throughout early modern Europe, patronage became a means for the dominant classes to highlight their wealth, intellectual finesse, and cultural and political agendas, particularly within the court and religious institutions. Musical events like operas and carnival parades were an especially essential component of this patronage. However, the ways in which music patronage changed during the second half of the seventeenth century have largely remained underexplored. At the time, profound social and cultural transformations influenced the production and consumption of music in radical and permanent ways, not least through the influence of the Colonna family - Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna and his wife Maria Mancini. Two of the most active patrons of seventeenth-century Italy, they were particularly active in the musical life of Rome. Through their sponsorship of an unprecedented number of operas, serenatas, and oratorios, they supported the careers of the most prominent composers, librettists, and musicians of the period. A new exploration of this period of music patronage, The Politics of Princely Entertainment follows Lorenzo Onofrio and Maria beyond the borders of Rome and through their far-reaching personal and institutional travels - to Venice, Naples, and the Kingdom of Aragon. Author Valeria De Lucca traces the journeys of not only scores and librettos, but also the singers, composers, and librettists whose art reached these distant corners of Europe through the Colonna family's patronage activities. The Politics of Princely Entertainment is a welcome addition to scholarly understanding of music patronage beyond traditional boundaries of gender, geography, and institutions.
The so-called Cancionero de la Sablonara is a highly selective manuscript collection of seventy-five Spanish polyphonic art-songs, composed primarily at the Spanish Court during the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Named after its scribe and compiler, Claudio de Sablonara (the chief copyist of the Spanish Royal Chapel), it constitutes one of the relatively few extant relics of the court's prodigious musical repertoire. The majority of the songs, comprising genuine Spanish genres and set for two, three and four voices, were written by leading composers of the time. The high quality of the musical settings is matched by the poetry, with texts by prominent literary figures of the Golden Age. This long-awaited critical edition of the Cancionero de la Sablonara offers a complete transcription of both the poetry and the music, whilst introductory chapters review the scholarship and research to date on the manuscript.The notes and introduction to this volume are in English. Professor JUDITH ETZION is chair of the Musicology Department, Tel Aviv University.
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?
A translation of three works from the second half of the 13th century: Rutebeuf's Renart le Bestourné, the anonymous Le Couronnement de Renart and Jacquemart Gielée's Renart le Nouvel. These savage and highly entertaining satires are in a league of their own, and Renart le Nouvel contains important music which is reproduced in the text.
The manuscript Seville, Biblioteca Colombina y Capitular 5-2-25, a composite of dozens of theoretical treatises, is one of the primary witnesses to late medieval music theory. Its numerous copies of significant texts have been the focus of substantial scholarly attention to date, but the shorter, unattributed, or fragmentary works have not yet received the same scrutiny. In this monograph, Cook demonstrates that a small group of such works, linked to the otherwise unknown Magister Johannes Pipudi, is in fact much more noteworthy than previous scholarship has observed. The not one but two copies of De arte cantus are in fact one of the earliest known sources for the Libellus cantus mensurabilis, purportedly by Jean des Murs and the most widely copied music theory treatise of its day, while Regulae contrapunctus, Nota quod novem sunt species contrapunctus, and a concluding set of notes in Catalan are early witnesses to the popular Ars contrapuncti treatises also attributed to des Murs. Disclosing newly discovered biographical information, it is revealed that Pipudi is most likely one Johannes Pipardi, familiar to Cardinal Jean de Blauzac, Vicar-General of Avignon. Cook provides the first biographical assessment for him and shows that late fourteenth-century Avignon was a plausible chronological and geographical milieu for the Seville treatises, hinting provocatively at a possible route of transmission for the Libellus from Paris to Italy. The monograph concludes with new transcriptions and the first English translations of the treatises.
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.
John Dowland: A Research and Information Guide offers the first comprehensive guide to the musical works and literature on one of the major composers of the English Renaissance. Including a catalog of works, discography of recordings, extensive annotated bibliography of secondary sources, and substantial indexes, this volume is a major reference tool for all those interested in Dowland's works and place in music history, and a valuable resource for researchers of Renaissance and English music.
Music was, in some form or another, a pastime enjoyed by all in sixteenth-century society, and a fundamental part of their lives. It was both through the use of music and partly as a result of its existence that many religious changes occurred during the Reformation. This book explores the part played by music, especially group singing, in the unfolding of the Protestant reforms in Strasbourg. It considers both ecclesiastical and 'popular' songs in the city, examining how both genres fitted into people's lives during this time of strife, and how the provision and dissemination of music as a whole affected, and in turn was affected by, the new ecclesiastical arrangement. Whilst it would be naive to assume that the congregations were transformed from impious to pious overnight as the result of the introduction of German hymns, it is clear that there were real and concerted efforts on the part of reformers to get people to embrace the new faith, and writing hymns for them to sing was central to the process. Drawing upon a range of sources - including liturgical orders and hymnals, polemical songs, chronicles of the Reformation and text manuscripts - the book explores the methods by which new songs were introduced in Strasbourg churches, and suggests how congregations might have learnt them. In so doing it provides an account of the process by which reformers found music a place in the new Church, and used it to promote their wider reform agenda.
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.
This book provides the first scholarly history of the viola d'amore, a popular bowed string instrument of the Baroque era, with a unique tone produced by a set of metal sympathetic strings. Composers like Bach made use of the viola d'amore for its particular sound, but the instrument subsequently fell out of fashion amid orchestral standardisation, only to see a revival as interest in early music and historical performance grew. Drawing on literary accounts, iconography, and surviving instruments, this study examines the origins and development of this eye-catching string instrument in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It explores the rich variation of designs displayed in extant viola d'amore specimens, both as originally constructed and as a result of conversion and repair. The viola d'amore is then set into the wider context of Elizabethan England's development of instruments with wire strings, and its legacy in the form of the baryton which emerged in the early seventeenth century, followed by a look at the viola d'amore's own nomenclatorial and organological influence. The book closes with a discussion of the viola d'amore's revival, and its use and manufacture today. Offering insights for organological research and historical performance practice, this study enhances our knowledge of both the viola d'amore and its wider family of instruments.
A popular crowd-pleaser in the late 16th and mid-17th century, the dramatic jig was a short, comic, bawdy musical-drama which included elements of dance, slapstick and disguise. With a cast of ageing cuckolds and young head-strong wives, knavish clowns, roaring soldiers and country bumpkins, jigs often followed as afterpieces at London's playhouses, and were performed at fairs, in villages and in private houses. Troublesome to the authorities, they drew the crowds by offering a lively antidote to more sober theatrical fare. This performance edition presents for the first time nine examples of English dramatic jigs from the late sixteenth century through to the Restoration; the scripts are re-united as far as possible with their original tunes. It gives a comprehensive history, discusses sources, plots, instrumentation and dancing, and offers practical information on staging jigs today. Includes: Transcriptions of the original texts Contextual notes: plot synopses and discussion of sources, themes and audience reception Musical notation for each tune, with suggestions for underlay and chords, and notes on instrumention and style Appendix of dance instructions and reconstructions
This is the first dedicated study of the musical patronage of Roman baronial families in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Patronage - the support of a person or institution and their work by a patron - in Renaissance society was the basis of a complex network of familial and political relationships between clients and patrons, whose ideas, values, and norms of behavior were shared with the collective. Bringing to light new archival documentation, this book examines the intricate network of patronage interrelationships in Rome. Unlike other Italian cities where political control was monocentric and exercised by single rulers, sources of patronage in Rome comprised a multiplicity of courts and potential patrons, which included the pope, high prelates, nobles and foreign diplomats. Morucci uses archival records, and the correspondence of the Orsini and Colonna families in particular, to investigate the local activity and circulation of musicians and the cultivation of music within the broader civic network of Roman aristocratic families over the period. The author also shows that the familial union of the Medici and Orsini families established a bidirectional network for artistic exchange outside of the Eternal City, and that the Orsini-Colonna circle represented a musical bridge between Naples, Rome, and Florence.
The Tropologion is considered the earliest known extant chant book from the early Christian world which was in use until the twelfth century. The study of this book is still in its infancy. It has generally been believed that the book has survived in Georgian translation under the name 'ladgari' but similar books have been discovered in Greek, Syriac and Armenian. All the copies clearly show that the spread and the use of the book were much greater than we had previously assumed and the Georgian ladgari is only one of its many versions. The study of these issues unquestionably confirms the earliest stage of the compilation of the book, in Jerusalem or its environs, and shows its uninterrupted development from Jerusalem to the Stoudios monastery, the most important monastery of Constantinople. Over time many new pieces and new authors were added to the Tropologion. It is almost certain that it was the Stoudios school of poet-composers that divided the content of the Tropologion and compiled separate collections of books, each one containing a major liturgical cycle. In the beginning all of the volumes kept the old title but in the tenth century the copies of the book were renamed, probably according to the liturgical repertory included, and by the thirteenth century the title 'Tropologion' is no longer found in the Greek sources as it became superfluous, and fell out of use.
The Ordo Virtutum, Hildegard von Bingen's twelfth-century music-drama, is one of the first known examples of a large-scale composition by a named composer in the Western canon. Not only does the Ordo's expansive duration set it apart from its precursors, but also its complex imagery and non-biblical narrative have raised various questions concerning its context and genre. As a poetic meditation on the fall of a soul, the Ordo deploys an array of personified virtues and musical forces over the course of its eighty-seven chants. In this ambitious analysis of the work, Michael C. Gardiner examines how classical Neoplatonic hierarchies are established in the music-drama and considers how they are mediated and subverted through a series of concentric absorptions (absorptions related to medieval Platonism and its various theological developments) which lie at the core of the work's musical design and text. This is achieved primarily through Gardiner's musical network model, which implicates mode into a networked system of nodes, and draws upon parallels with the medieval interpretation of Platonic ontology and Hildegard's correlative realization through sound, song, and voice.
The Safavid era (1501-1722) is one of the most important in the history of Persian culture, celebrated especially for its architecture and art, including miniature paintings that frequently represent singers and instrumentalists. Their presence reflects a sophisticated tradition of music making that was an integral part of court life, yet it is one that remains little known, for the musicological literature of the period is rather thin. There is, however, a significant exception: the text presented and analysed here, a hitherto unpublished and anonymous theoretical work probably of the middle of the sixteenth century. With a Sufi background inspiring the use of the nay as a tool of theoretical demonstration, it is exceptional in presenting descriptive accounts of the modes then in use and suggesting how these might be arranged in complex sequences. As it also gives an account of the corpus of rhythmic cycles it provides a unique insight into the basic structures of art-music during the first century of Safavid rule.
The question of tonality's origins in music's pitch content has long vexed many scholars of music theory. However, tonality is not ultimately defined by pitch alone, but rather by pitch's interaction with elements like rhythm, meter, phrase structure, and form. Hearing Homophony investigates the elusive early history of tonality by examining a constellation of late-Renaissance popular songs which flourished throughout Western Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century. Megan Kaes Long argues that it is in these songs, rather than in more ambitious secular and sacred works, that the foundations of eighteenth century style are found. Arguing that tonality emerges from features of modal counterpoint - in particular, the rhythmic, phrase structural, and formal processes that govern it - and drawing on the arguments of theorists such as Dahlhaus, Powers, and Barnett, she asserts that modality and tonality are different in kind and not mutually exclusive. Using several hundred homophonic partsongs from Italy, Germany, England, and France, Long addresses a historical question of critical importance to music theory, musicology, and music performance. Hearing Homophony presents not only a new model of tonality's origins, but also a more comprehensive understanding of what tonality is, providing novel insight into the challenging world of seventeenth-century music.
Volume II of The Viola da Gamba Society Index of Manuscripts Containing Consort Music includes manuscripts associated with John Browne (Clerk of the Parliaments), Philip Falle (prebendary at Durham), Sir Gabriel Roberts, John St Barbe of Broadlands, the Withy family of Worcester and Oxford and an anonymous late-seventeenth century scribe. As well as a detailed inventory of every manuscript (with anonymous works identified where possible), the descriptions include information on date, size, binding, paper, rastra, watermarks, collations, scripts, inscriptions and provenance, together with bibliographical references. Brief notes on the owners and copyists are provided. Of particular importance is the inclusion of facsimiles of all hands.
Claudio Monteverdi: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography that navigates the vast scholarly resources on the composer with the most updated compilation since 1989. Claudio Monteverdi transformed and mastered the principal genres of his day and his works influenced generations of musicians and other artists. He initiated one of the most important aesthetic debates of the era by proposing a new relationship between poetry and harmony. In addition to scholarship by musicologists and music theorists, Monteverdi's music has attracted attention from literary scholars, cultural historians, and critical theorists. Research into Monteverdi and Renaissance and early baroque studies has expanded greatly, with the field becoming more complex as scholars address such issues as gender theory, feminist criticism, cultural theory, new criticism, new historicism, and artistic and popular cultures. The guide serves both as a foundational starting point and as a gateway for future inquiry in such fields as court culture, opera, patronage, and Italian poetry.
After Robert Armin joined the Chamberlain's Men, singing in Shakespeare's dramas catapulted from 1.25 songs and 9.95 lines of singing per play to 3.44 songs and 29.75 lines of singing, a virtually unnoticed phenomenon. In addition, many of the songs became seemingly improvisatory-similar to Armin's personal style as an author and solo comedian. In order to study Armin's collaborative impact, this interdisciplinary book investigates the songs that have Renaissance music that could have been heard on Shakespeare's stage. They occur in some of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and The Tempest. In fact, Shakespeare's plays, as we have them, are not complete. They are missing the music that could have accompanied the plays' songs. Significantly, Renaissance vocal music, far beyond just providing entertainment, was believed to alter the bodies and souls of both performers and auditors to agree with its characteristics, directly inciting passions from love to melancholy. By collaborating with early modern music editor and performing artist Lawrence Lipnik, Catherine Henze is able to provide new performance editions of seventeen songs, including spoken interruptions and cuts and rearrangement of the music to accommodate the dramatist's words. Next, Henze analyzes the complete songs, words and music, according to Renaissance literary and music primary sources, and applies the new information to interpretations of characters and scenes, frequently challenging commonly held literary assessments. The book is organized according to Armin's involvement with the plays, before, during, and after the comic actor joined Shakespeare's company. It offers readers the tools to interpret not only these songs, but also vocal music in dramas by other Renaissance playwrights. Moreover, Robert Armin and Shakespeare's Performed Songs, written with non-specialized terminology, provides a |
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