The first large-scale study of the music of Herbert Howells, prodigiously gifted musician and favourite student of the notoriously hard-to-please Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Herbert Howells (1892-1983) was a prodigiously gifted musician and the favourite student of the notoriously hard-to-please Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Throughout his long life, he was one of the country's most prominent composers, writing extensively in all genres except the symphony and opera. Yet today he is known mostly for his church music, and there is as yet relatively little serious study of his work. This book is the first large-scale study of Howells's music, affording both detailed consideration of individual works and a broad survey of general characteristics and issues. Its coverage is wide-ranging, addressing all aspects of the composer's prolific output and probing many of the issues that it raises. The essays are gathered in five sections: Howells the Stylist examines one of the most striking aspect of the composer's music, its strongly characterised personal voice; Howells the VocalComposer addresses both his well-known contribution to church music and his less familiar, but also important, contribution to the genre of solo song; Howells the Instrumental Composer shows that he was no less accomplished for his work in genres without words, for which, in fact, he first made his name; Howells the Modern considers the composer's rather overlooked contribution to the development of a modern voice for British music; and Howells in Mourning explores the important impact of his son's death on his life and work. The composer that emerges from these studies is a complex figure: technically fluent but prone to revision and self-doubt; innovative but also conservative; a composer with an improvisational sense of flow who had a firm grasp of musical form; an exponent of British musical style who owed as much to continental influence as to his national heritage. This volume, comprising a collection of outstanding essays by established writers and emergent scholars, opens up the range of Howells's achievement to a wider audience, both professional and amateur. PHILLIP COOKE is Lecturer in Composition at theUniversity of Aberdeen. DAVID MAW is Tutor and Research Fellow in Music at Oriel College, Oxford, holding Lectureships also at Christ Church, The Queen's and Trinity Colleges. CONTRIBUTORS: Byron Adams, Paul Andrews, Graham Barber, Jonathan Clinch, Phillip A. Cooke, Jeremy Dibble, Lewis Foreman, Fabian Huss, David Maw, Diane Nolan Cooke, Lionel Pike, Paul Spicer, Jonathan White. Foreword by John Rutter.

The final section of the Montpellier Codex analysed in full for the first time, with major implications for late-medieval music. The Montpellier Codex (Bibliotheque interuniversitaire, Section Medecine, H.196) occupies a central place in scholarship on medieval music. This small book, packed with gorgeous gold leaf illuminations, historiated initials, and exquisite music calligraphy, is one of the most famous of all surviving music manuscripts, fundamental to understandings of the development of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century polyphonic composition. At some point in its historyan eighth section (fascicle) of 48 folios was appended to the codex: when and why this happened has long perplexed scholars. The forty-three works contained in the manuscript's final section represent a collection of musical compositions, assembled at a complex moment of historical change, straddling the historiographical juncture between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This book provides the first in-depth exploration of the contents and contexts of the Montpellier Codex's final fascicle. It explores the manuscript's production, dating, function, and notation, offering close-readings of individual works, which illuminate compositionally progressive features of therepertoire as well as its interactions with existing musical and poetic traditions, from a variety of perspectives: thirteenth- and fourteenth-century music, art history, and manuscript culture. CATHERINE A. BRADLEY isan Associate Professor at the University of Oslo; KAREN DESMOND is Assistant Professor of Music at Brandeis University. Contributors: Rebecca A. Baltzer, Edward Breen, Sean Curran, Rachel Davies, Margaret Dobby, Mark Everist, Solomon Guhl-Miller, Anna Kathryn Grau, Oliver Huck, Anne Ibos-Auge, Eva M. Maschke, David Maw, Dolores Pesce, Alison Stones, Mary Wolinski

Articles on English music, from the medieval period to the present day, centred on four of the major areas of scholarly enquiry. The major themes of the essays in this collection reflect the work of the distinguished scholar John Caldwell, professor of music at Oxford University and a composer in his own right. There is a strong focus on early music, with contributions considering the medieval carol, sources for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century harpsichord music, and the transmission of fifteenth-century English music to the Continent; but they range right up to the twentieth century, with an examination of music in Oxford. All are concerned in one way or another with themes which recur in Professor Caldwell's scholarship: sources; style; performance; and historiography. Contributors: SALLY HARPER, DAVID HILEY, EMMA HORNBY, HARRY JOHNSTONE, MARGARET BENT, DAVID MAW, MATTHIAS RANGE, REINHARD STROHM, PETER WRIGHT, MAGNUS WILLIAMSON, JOHN HARPER, SIMON MCVEIGH, CHRISTOPHER PAGE, OWEN REES, SUSAN WOLLENBERG, JOHN ARTHUR SMITH, BENNETT ZON, DAVID MAW. To subscribe to the Tabula Gratulatoria for this volume, CLICK HERE