The Keyboard Music of J.S. Bach provides an introduction to and comprehensive discussion of all the music for harpsichord and other stringed keyboard instruments by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Often played today on the modern piano, these works are central not only to the Western concert repertory but to musical pedagogy and study throughout the world.
Intended as both a practical guide and an interpretive study, the book consists of three introductory chapters on general matters of historical context, style, and performance practice, followed by fifteen chapters on the individual works, treated in roughly chronological order. The works discussed include all of Bach's individual keyboard compositions as well as those comprising his famous collections, such as the Well-Tempered Clavier, the English and French Suites, and the Art of Fugue.

In this book on Richard Wagner's compelling but enigmatic masterpiece Goetterdammerung, the final opera of his monumental Ring tetralogy, Alexander H. Shapiro advances an ambitious new interpretation which uncovers intriguing new facets to the work's profound insights into the human condition. By taking a fresh look at the philosophical and historical influences on Wagner, and critically reevaluating the composer's intellectual worldview as revealed in his own prose works, letters, and diary entries, the book challenges a number of conventional views that continue to impede a clear understanding of this work's meaning. The book argues that Goetterdammerung, and hence the Ring as a whole, achieves coherence when interpreted in terms of contemporary nineteenth-century theories of progress, and, in particular, G.W.F. Hegel's philosophies of mind and history. A central target of the book is the article of faith that has come to dominate Wagner scholarship over the years - that Wagner's encounter in 1854 with Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy conclusively altered the final message of the Ring from one of historical optimism to existential pessimism. The author contends that Schopenhauer's uncompromising denigration of the will and denial of the possibility for human progress find no place in the written text of the Ring or in a plausible reading of the final musical setting. In its place, the author discovers in the famous Immolation Scene a celebration of mankind's inexhaustible capacity for self-improvement and progress. The author makes the further compelling case that this message of progress is communicated not through Siegfried, the traditional male hero of the drama, but through Brunnhilde, the warrior goddess who becomes a mortal woman. In her role as a battle-tested world-historical prophet she is the true revolutionary change agent of Wagner's opera who has the strength and vision to comprehend and thereby shape human history. This highly lucid and accessible study is aimed not only at scholars and researchers in the fields of opera studies, music and philosophy, and music history, but also Wagner enthusiasts, and readers and students interested in the history and philosophy of the nineteenth century.

The Nature of Nordic Music explores two distinctive yet complementary understandings of the term 'nature': the inherent features, characters and qualities of contemporary Nordic music, and how the elemental forces of nature, the phenomena of the physical world (landscape, climate, environment), inspire and condition creativity here. Within a broader debate about the meaning of 'Nordicness', 12 case studies challenge our assumptions about a 'Nordic tone' to reveal a creative energy that is diverse and cosmopolitan in outlook. Each of the three parts of the book - 'Identities', 'Images' and 'Environments' - accommodates an eclectic array of musical genres (classical, popular, jazz, folk, electronic). This book will appeal to anyone interested in Nordic music and culture, especially students and researchers.

Extant manuscripts are the principal medieval testimony to the art of monophonic song. Literary texts and archival materials, a few theoretical works, and numerous visual representations provide helpful perspective, but our path to the poets and singers lies through the efforts of scribes, and the myriad problems in interpreting what they tell us cast a long shadow over all research on monophonic song. The essays gathered here represent the principal themes and issues that have occupied scholars of late medieval monophonic songs over the last half century: their place in history and society, the role of women as composers and performers, poetic and musical structures, styles, and genres, relationships between poems and melodies, written and oral transmission, and performance practices. Studying how each of these themes is played out across repertoires, cultures, decades, and locations offers a rich and variegated panorama of the practice of song in late medieval Europe.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) is now rightly recognized as one of the greatest and most original composers of the nineteenth century. His keen understanding of poetry and his uncanny ability to translate his profound understanding of human nature into remarkably balanced compositions marks him out from other contemporaries in the field of song. Schubert was one of the first major composers to devote so much time to song and his awareness that this genre was not rated highly in the musical hierarchy did not deter him, throughout a short but resolute and hard-working career, from producing songs that invariably arrest attention and frequently strike a deeply poetic note. Schubert did not emerge as a composer until after his death, but during his short lifetime his genius flowered prolifically and diversely. His reputation was first established among the aristocracy who took the art music of Vienna into their homes, which became places of refuge from the musical mediocrity of popular performance. More than any other composer, Schubert steadily graced Viennese musical life with his songs, piano music and chamber compositions. Throughout his career he experimented constantly with technique and in his final years began experiments with form. The resultant fascinating works were never performed in his lifetime, and only in recent years have the nature of his experiments found scholarly favor. In The Unknown Schubert contributors explore Schubert's radical modernity from a number of perspectives by examining both popular and neglected works. Chapters by renowned scholars describe the historical context of his work, its relation to the dominant artistic discourses of the early nineteenth century, and Schubert's role in the paradigmatic shift to a new perception of song. This valuable book seeks to bring Franz Schubert to life, exploring his early years as a composer of opera, his later years of ill-health when he composed in the shadow of death, and his efforts to reflect in his music his own profound inner experience.

In Making Light Raymond Knapp traces the musical legacy of German Idealism as it led to the declining prestige of composers such as Haydn while influencing the development of American popular music in the nineteenth century. Knapp identifies in Haydn and in early popular American musical cultures such as minstrelsy and operetta a strain of high camp-a mode of engagement that relishes both the superficial and serious aspects of an aesthetic experience-that runs antithetical to German Idealism's musical paradigms. By considering the disservice done to Haydn by German Idealism alongside the emergence of musical camp in American popular music, Knapp outlines a common ground: a humanistically based aesthetic of shared pleasure that points to ways in which camp receptive modes might rejuvenate the original appeal of Haydn's music that has mostly eluded audiences. In so doing, Knapp remaps the historiographical modes and systems of critical evaluation that dominate musicology while troubling the divide between serious and popular music.

In late eighteenth-century Vienna and the surrounding Habsburg territories, over 50 minor-key symphonies by at least 11 composers were written. These include some of the best-known works of the symphonic repertoire, such as Haydn's 'Farewell' Symphony and Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550. The driving energy, intense pathos and restlessness of these compositions demand close attention and participation from the listener, and pose urgent questions about meaning and interpretation.
In response to these questions, The Viennese Minor-Key Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Mozart combines historical perspectives with recent developments in music analysis to shed new light on this distinctive part of the repertoire. Through an intertextual, analytical approach, author Matthew Riley treats the minor-key symphony as a subgenre of several strands, reconstructing the compositional world it occupied. His work enables signals to be understood, puts characteristic strategies in clear relief, and ultimately reveals the significance this music held for both composers and listeners of the time. Riley gives us a fresh picture of the familiar masterpieces of Haydn and Mozart, while also focusing on lesser known composers.

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.

An icon of British national identity and one of the most widely performed twentieth-century composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams has been as much misunderstood as revered; his international impact and enduring influence on areas as diverse as church music, film scores and popular music has been insufficiently appreciated. This volume brings together a team of leading scholars, examining all areas of the composer's output from new perspectives, and re-evaluating the cultural politics of his lifelong advocacy for the music-making of ordinary people. Surveys of major genres are complemented by chapters exploring such topics as the composer's relationship with the BBC and his studies with Ravel; uniquely, the book also includes specially commissioned interviews with major living composers Peter Maxwell Davies, Piers Hellawell, Nicola Lefanu and Anthony Payne. The Companion is a vital resource for all those interested in this pivotal figure of modern music.

Arthur Foote (1853-1937) was one of the most important American composers who worked creatively in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His musical style was at first Germanic in orientation, soon changing to include Anglo-Americanisms and modifications derived from French and Russian composers. His compositions were highly esteemed by his contemporaries. Moreover, today's listeners continue to be struck by the coherency of his music, both in its general form and in its details. They note a command of craft, an integration of tone with desired expression, and an honest straightforward sound that brooks no pretentious complexities or enigmas of meaning. In addition, he was admired as an educator, musical theorist, keyboard performer, and choral music director. His books and articles on keyboard pedagogy and those containing his insightful contemplation of aspects of modulation and third-relationships in musical structures are still of great value. Assiduous as he was in preserving various aspects of his public life in his several scrapbooks, Foote strove to keep his private life out of the public eye. He discouraged the publication of his more personal letters, and late in life even desired their destruction. This book attempts to gather all the available information in order to give information about the man, his life, and his thinking. Lastly, it looks into the music, what it is, why and where it was written, and what its significance is. With bibliography and musical examples.

The last of the Spanish Romantics, composer, conductor, and impresario Federico Moreno Torroba (1891-1982) left his mark on virtually every aspect of Spanish musical culture during a career which spanned six decades, and saw tremendous political and cultural upheavals. After Falla, he was the most important and influential musician: in addition to his creative activities, he was President of the General Society of Authors and Editors and director of the Academy of Fine Arts and Teatro Zarzuela. His enduring contributions as a composer include copious amounts of guitar music composed for Andres Segovia and several highly successful zarzuelas which remain in the repertoire today. Written by two leading experts in the field, Federico Moreno Torroba: A Musical Life in Three Acts explores not only his life and work, but also the relationship of his music to the cultural milieu in which he moved. It sheds particular light on the relationship of Torroba's music and the cultural politics of Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939-75). Torroba came of age in a cultural renaissance that sought to reassert Spain's position as a unique cultural entity, and authors Walter A. Clark and William Krause demonstrate how his work can be understood as a personal, musical response to these aspirations. Clark and Krause argue that Torroba's decision to remain in Spain even during the years of Franco's dictatorship was based primarily not on political ideology but rather on an unwillingness to leave his native soil. Rather than abandon Spain to participate in the dynamic musical life abroad, he continued to compose music that reflected his conservative view of his national and personal heritage. The authors contend that this pursuit did not necessitate allegiance to a particular regime, but rather to the non-political exaltation of Spain's so-called 'eternal tradition', or the culture and spirit that had endured throughout Spain's turbulent history. Following Franco's death in 1975, there was ambivalence towards figures like Torroba who had made their peace with the dictatorship and paid a heavy price in terms of their reputation among expatriates. Moreover, his very conservative musical style made him a target for the post-war avant-garde, which disdained his highly tonal and melodic espanolismo. With the demise of high modernism, however, the time has come for this new, more distanced assessment of Torroba's contributions. Richly illustrated with figures and music examples, and with a helpful discography for reference, this biography brings a fresh perspective on this influential composer to Latin American and Iberian music scholars, performers, and lovers of Spanish music alike.

The Romantic pianist-the solo pianist who plays nineteenth-century piano music-has become an attractive figure in the popular imagination, considering the innumerable artworks, literature, and films representing this performer's seductive allure. Dreams of Love pursues a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach to understanding the "romantic" pianist as a cultural icon, focusing on the role of technology in producing and perpetuating this mythology over the past two centuries. Sound recording and cinema have shaped the pianist's music and image since the early twentieth century, but these contemporary media technologies build upon practices established during the early nineteenth century: the influence of the piano keyboard on early telegraphs and typewriters, the invention of the solo recital alongside developments in photography, and the ways that piano design and the placement of the instrument on stage structure our viewing-listening perspectives. The concept of technology can be broadened to include the performance of gender and sexuality as further ways of making the pianist into an attractive cultural figure. The book's three sections deal with the touch, sights, and sounds of the Romantic pianist's playing as mediated through various forms of technology. Analyzing these persistent Liebestraume and exploring how they function can reveal their meaning for performers, audiences, and music lovers of the past and present too.

Combining practitioner insight with academic background, this book offers a useful framework on retail strategy with unusual breadth and depth. It communicates contemporary retail thought from the perspectives of both senior international retailers and expert observers. It is structured around four sections: retailing in an international context; chapters from faculty at Templeton College in Oxford outlining the key issues with review questions, discussion topics, assignments and further reading; in-depth interviews with senior executives in the world's major retailers conducted by the Oxford Institute of Retail Management (each case is backed up by company and sector information to demonstrate the changing retail and global environment); and a summary and overview with further exercises assignments and recommended reading.The book is designed for both students and executives needing to understand the complexities of the latest global developments and thinking.

Two extraordinary personalities, and one remarkable friendship, are reflected in the unique corpus of letters from Anglo-Parsi composer-critic Kaikhosru Sorabji (1892-1988) to Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) (1894-1930): a fascinating primary source for the period 1913-1922 available in a complete scholarly edition for the first time. The volume also provides a new contextual, critical and interpretative framework, incorporating a myriad of perspectives: identities, social geographies, style construction, and mutual interests and influences. Pertinent period documents, including evidence of Heseltine's reactions, enhance the sense of narrative and expand on aesthetic discussions. Through the letters' entertaining and perceptive lens, Sorabji's early life and compositions are vividly illuminated and Heseltine's own intriguing life and work recontextualised. What emerges takes us beyond tropes of otherness and eccentricity to reveal a persona and a narrative with great relevance to modern-day debates on canonicity and identity, especially the nexus of ethnicity, queer identities and Western art music. Scholars, performers and admirers of early twentieth-century music in Britain, and beyond, will find this a valuable addition to the literature. The book will appeal to those studying or interested in early musical modernism and its reception; cultural life in London around and after the First World War; music, nationality and race; Commonwealth studies; and music and sexuality.

David Damschroder's ongoing reformulation of harmonic theory continues with a dynamic exploration of how Beethoven molded and arranged chords to convey bold conceptions. This book's introductory chapters are organized in the manner of a nineteenth-century Harmonielehre, with individual considerations of the tonal system's key features illustrated by easy-to-comprehend block-chord examples derived from Beethoven's piano sonatas. In the masterworks section that follows, Damschroder presents detailed analyses of movements from the symphonies, piano and violin sonatas, and string quartets, and compares his outcomes with those of other analysts, including William E. Caplin, Robert Gauldin, Nicholas Marston, William J. Mitchell, Frank Samarotto, and Janet Schmalfeldt. Expanding upon analytical practices from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and strongly influenced by Schenkerian principles, this fresh perspective offers a stark contrast to conventional harmonic analysis - both in terms of how Roman numerals are deployed and how musical processes are described in words.

This title was first published in 2002. Challenging the accepted orthodoxy on Nietzsche's views on art, this book seeks both to challenge and to establish a new set of concerns as far as discourses on Nietzsche's thoughts on aesthetics are concerned, whilst at the same time using such insights to illuminate more central concerns of Nietzsche scholarship, such as the will to power, the illusion/truth question, the eternal return, the death of God, tragedy, Wagner. Following the development of Nietzsche's thoughts on art from his earliest writings to his last, Pothen counters traditionally accepted interpretations by suggesting a need to recognize the deep suspicion and at times hostility that Nietzsche displays towards art and the artist throughout his text by emphasising the philosophical arguments underlying this deep suspicion, and by viewing this tendency as something deeply connected to the other areas of his thought. Readers with interests in Nietzsche studies, aesthetics, German philosophy, and the philosophy of music, will find this a particularly invaluable and distinctive contribution to Nietzsche scholarship.

Original and brilliant study...Anyone interested in keyboard instruments of any kind will find in it a great fund of information and insight into matters of general musical interest, especially the performance of Bach's music. EARLY MUSIC TODAY Friederich Griepenkerl, in his 1844 introduction to Volume 1 of the first complete edition of J. S. Bach's organ works, wrote: "Actually the six Sonatas and the Passacaglia were written for a clavichord with two manuals and pedal, an instrument that, in those days, every beginning organist possessed, which they used beforehand, to practice playing with hands and feet in order to make effective use of them at the organ. It would be a good thing to let such instruments be made again, because actually no one who wants to study to be an organist can really do without one." What was the role of the pedal clavichord in music history? Was it a cheap practice instrument for organists or was Griepenkerl right? Was it a teaching tool that helped contribute to the quality of organ playing in its golden age? Most twentieth-century commentary on the pedal clavichord as an historical phenomenon was written in a kind of vacuum, since there were no playable historical models with which to experiment and from which to make an informed judgment. At the heart of Bach and the Pedal Clavichord: An Organist's Guide are some extraordinary recent experiments from the GAteborg Organ Art Center (GOArt) at GAteborg University. The Johan David Gerstenberg pedal clavichord from 1766, now in the Leipzig University museum, was documented and reconstructed; the new copy was then used for several years as a living instrument for organ students and teachers to experience. On thebasis of these experiments and experiences, the book explores, in new and artful ways, Bach's keyboard technique, a technique preserved by his first biographer, J. N. Forkel (1802), and by Forkel's own student, Griepenkerl. It also sifts and weighs the assumptions and claims made for and aga

What is it like to work as a classical musician today? How can we explain ongoing gender, racial, and class inequalities in the classical music profession? What happens when musicians become entrepreneurial and think of themselves as a product that needs to be sold and marketed? Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work explores these and other questions by drawing on innovative, empirical research on the working lives of classical musicians in Germany and the UK. Indeed, Scharff examines a range of timely issues such as the gender, racial, and class inequalities that characterise the cultural and creative industries; the ways in which entrepreneurialism - as an ethos to work on and improve the self - is lived out; and the subjective experiences of precarious work in so-called 'creative cities'. Thus, this book not only adds to our understanding of the working lives of artists and creatives, but also makes broader contributions by exploring how precarity, neoliberalism, and inequalities shape subjective experiences. Contributing to a range of contemporary debates around cultural work, Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of Sociology, Gender and Cultural Studies.

English keyboard music reached an unsurpassed level of sophistication in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as organists such as William Byrd and his students took a genre associated with domestic, amateur performance and treated it as seriously as vocal music. This book draws together important research on the music, its sources and the instruments on which it was played. There are two chapters on instruments: John Koster on the use of harpsichord during the period, and Dominic Gwynn on the construction of Tudor-style organs based on the surviving evidence we have for them. This leads to a section devoted to organ performance practice in a liturgical context, in which John Harper discusses what the use of organs pitched in F may imply about their use in alternation with vocal polyphony, and Magnus Williamson explores improvisational practice in the Tudor period. The next section is on sources and repertoire, beginning with Frauke Jurgensen and Rachelle Taylor's chapter on Clarifica me Pater settings, which grows naturally out of the consideration of improvisation in the previous chapter. The next two contributions focus on two of the most important individual manuscript sources: Tihomir Popovic challenges assumptions about My Ladye Nevells Booke by reflecting on what the manuscript can tell us about aristocratic culture, and David J. Smith provides a detailed study of the famous Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. The discussion then broadens out into Pieter Dirksen's consideration of a wider selection of sources relating to John Bull, which in turn connects closely to David Leadbetter's work on Gibbons, lute sources and questions of style.

Sounding Authentic considers the intersecting influences of nationalism, modernism, and technological innovation on representations of ethnic and national identities in twentieth-century art music. Author Joshua S. Walden discusses these forces through the prism of what he terms the "rural miniature": short violin and piano pieces based on folk song and dance styles. This genre, mostly inspired by the folk music of Hungary, the Jewish diaspora, and Spain, was featured frequently on recordings and performance programs in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, Sounding Authentic shows how the music of urban Romany ensembles developed into nineteenth-century repertoire of virtuosic works in the style hongrois before ultimately influencing composers of rural miniatures. Walden persuasively demonstrates how rural miniatures represented folk and rural cultures in a manner that was perceived as authentic, even while they involved significant modification of the original sources. He also links them to the impulse toward realism in developing technologies of photography, film, and sound recording. Sounding Authentic examines the complex ways the rural miniature was used by makers of nationalist agendas, who sought folkloric authenticity as a basis for the construction of ethnic and national identities. The book also considers the genre's reception in European diaspora communities in America where it evoked and transformed memories of life before immigration, and traces how many rural miniatures were assimilated to the styles of American popular song and swing. Scholars interested in musicology, ethnography, the history of violin performance, twentieth-century European art music, the culture of the Jewish Diaspora and more will find Sounding Authentic an essential addition to their library.

The first book-length study of musical education and culture in twentieth-century Oxford. Music has always played a central role in the life of Oxford, in both the city and university, through the great collegiate choral foundations, the many amateur choirs and instrumentalists, and the professional musicians regularly drawn to perform there. Oxford, with its collegiate system and centuries-long tradition of musical activity, presents a distinctive and multi-layered picture of the role of music in urban culture and university life. The chapters in this book shed light on music's unique ability to link 'town and gown', as shown by the Oxford Bach Choir, the city's many churches, and the major choral foundations. The twentieth century saw the emergence of new musical initiatives and the book traces the development of these, including the University's Faculty of Music and the University Opera Club. Further, it explores music in the newly-founded women's colleges, contrasted with the musical society formed in 1930 at University College, an ancient men's college. The work of Oxford composers, including George Butterworth, Nicola Lefanu, Edmund Rubbra, and William Walton, as well as the composer for several 'Carry on' films, Bruce Montgomery, is surveyed. Two remarkable figures, Sir Hugh Allen and Sir Jack Westrup, recur throughout the book in a variety of contexts. The volume is indispensable reading for scholars and students of musical life in twentieth-century Britain, as well as those interested generally in the history of Oxford's thriving cultural life.

This book assesses the influence and reception of many different forms of guitar playing upon the classical guitar and more specifically through the prism of John Williams. Beginning with an examination of Andres Segovia and his influence upon Williams' life's work, a further three incisive chapters cover key areas such as performance, perception, education and construction, considering social and cultural contexts of the guitar over the past century. A final chapter on new directions in classical guitar examines the change in reception of the instrument from the mid-1970s to the present day, and Williams' impact upon what might be termed 'standard classical guitar repertoire'. With in-depth discussion of the cultural and perceptual impact of Williams' more daring crossover projects and numerous musical examples, this is an informative reference for all classical guitar practitioners, as well as scholars and researchers of guitar studies, reception studies, cultural musicology and performance studies. An online lecture by the author and a transcript of the author's interview with John Williams are also available as e-resources.

The German lied, or art song, is considered one of the most intimate of all musical genres-often focused on the poetic speaker's inner world and best suited for private and semi-private performance in the home or salon. Yet, problematically, any sense of inwardness in lieder depends on outward expression through performance. With this paradox at its heart, Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century explores the relationships between early nineteenth-century theories of the inward self, the performance practices surrounding inward lyric poetry and song, and the larger conventions determining the place of intimate poetry and song in the public concert hall. Jennifer Ronyak studies the cultural practices surrounding lieder performances in northern and central Germany in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, demonstrating how presentations of lieder during the formative years of the genre put pressure on their sense of interiority. She examines how musicians responded to public concern that outward expression would leave the interiority of the poet, the song, or the performer unguarded and susceptible to danger. Through this rich performative paradox Ronyak reveals how a song maintains its powerful intimacy even during its inherently public performance.

The enigmatic character of The Art of Fugue became apparent as early as in its first edition, printed more than a year after the composer's death. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who published both the first and the second editions, raised several unsolved questions regarding this opus. Anatoly P Milka presents a consistent and coherent solution to the unresolved questions about the history, structure and appearance of J.S. Bach's The Art of Fugue, opening new perspectives for further exploration of this musical masterpiece. Milka challenges the present scholarly consensus that there exist two different versions of The Art of Fugue (the Autograph and the Original Edition) and argues that Bach had considered four versions, of which only two are apparent and have been discussed so far. Only Bach's illness and death prevented him from fulfilling his plan and publishing a fourth, conclusive version of his opus.

This book critically explores ways in which our understanding of late medieval liturgy can be enhanced through present-day enactment. It is a direct outcome of a practice-led research project, led by Professor John Harper and undertaken at Bangor University between 2010 and 2013 in partnership with Salisbury Cathedral and St Fagans National History Museum, near Cardiff. The book seeks to address the complex of ritual, devotional, musical, physical and architectural elements that constitute medieval Latin liturgy, whose interaction can be so difficult to recover other than through practice. In contrast with previous studies of reconstructed liturgies, enactment was not the exclusive end-goal of the project; rather it has created a new set of data for interpretation and further enquiry. Though based on a foundation of historical, musicological, textual, architectural and archaeological research, new methods of investigation and interpretation are explored, tested and validated throughout. There is emphasis on practice-led investigation and making; the need for imagination and creativity; and the fact that enactment participants can only be of the present day. Discussion of the processes of preparation, analysis and interpretation of the enactments is complemented by contextual studies, with particular emphasis on the provision of music. A distinctive feature of the work is that it seeks to understand the experiences of different groups within the medieval church - the clergy, their assistants, the singers, and the laity - as they participated in different kinds of rituals in both a large cathedral and a small parish church. Some of the conclusions challenge interpretations of these experiences, which have been current since the Reformation. In addition, some consideration is given to the implications of understanding past liturgy for present-day worship.