How is it possible to talk or write about music? What is the link between graphic signs and music? What makes music meaningful? In this book, distinguished scholar Leo Treitler explores the relationships among language, musical notation, performance, compositional practice, and patterns of culture in the presentation and representation of music. Treitler engages a wide variety of historical sources to discuss works from medieval plainchant to Berg s opera Lulu and a range of music in between."

Leo Treitler's seventeen classic essays trace the creation and spread of song (cantus), sacred and secular, through oral tradition and writing, in the European Middle Ages. The author examines songs in particular - their design, their qualities and character, their expressive meanings, and their adaptation to their communal and ritual roles - and explores the chances for, and the obstacles to, our understanding of traditions that were alive a thousand years ago. Ranging from c. 900 (when the written transmission of medieval songs began) to 1200, Treitler shows how the earlier, purely oral traditions can be examined only through the lens of what has been captured in writing, and focuses on the invention and uses of writing systems for representing these oral traditions. Each of these seminally influential essays has been revised to take account of recent developments, and is prefaced with a new introduction to highlight the historical issues. The accompanying CD contains performances of much of the music discussed.

Writers of the time explored its links with grammar and rhetoric, reported on the music of non-European peoples, and debated the role of music in religious and other spheres. The forty-five readings chosen for this volume by Gary Tomlinson cover a gamut that includes composers, theorists, poets, philosophers, courtiers, scholars, kings, and popes. Through the eyes of Bembo and Byrd, Du fay and Erasmus, Peacham and Palestrina, Charles IX and Gregory XIII, Calvin and Castiglione, Aaron, Tinctoris, Morley, and Zarlino, we see the many worlds of music in the Renaissance.

Leo Theitler is a central figure in American musicology, both for his writings on medieval and Renaissance music and for his influential work on historical analysis. In this elegant book he develops a powerful statement of what music analysis and criticism in relation to historical understanding can be. His aim is an understanding of the music of the past not only in its own historical context but also as we apprehend it now, and as we assimilate it to our current interests and concerns. He elucidates his views through unique new interpretations of major works from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries.