The emergence of music printing and publishing in the early 16th century radically changed how music was circulated, and how the musical source (printed or manuscript) was perceived, and used in performance. This series of close studies of the structure and content of 16th-century and early 17th-century editions (and some manuscripts) of music draws conclusions in a number of areas - printing techniques for music; the habits of different type-setters and scribes, and their view of performing practice; publishers' approaches to the musical market and its abilities and interests; apparent changes of plan in preparing editions; questions of authorship; evidence in editions and manuscripts for interpreting different levels of notation; ways in which scribes could influence performers' decisions, and others by which composers could exploit unusual sonorities.

The field of Renaissance music has been central to the interests of musicologists for at least a century. In recent decades a wealth of important writing has not only explored traditional issues but also vastly expanded the range of topics and approaches under consideration, so that our understanding of the music itself and of its uses and reception on the part of the Renaissance listener and performer has broadened. This series presents a selection of important articles on key issues in the field of Renaissance music written by leading scholars and musicologists. Each volume is edited by an expert in the field, whose selection of reprinted articles is accompanied by a specially written introduction and detailed bibliography. The volumes are arranged thematically beginning with a study of what we now understand, in musical terms, of the concepts involved in the words Renaissance, Reformation or Counter-Reformation, and followed by volumes which focus on a single set of topics, for example theory, sources, patronage and secular or religious music. This series of six volumes on Renaissance Music is a major resource for specialist music libraries and academics.

This volume presents a series of important essays by American and European scholars on some of the problems involved in attempting to perform music of the late Middle ages. The essays are based on papers read at a conference held at the New York University Center for Early Music in 1981 and they concern a varied selection of aspects of the subject; behind many lies an interest in the reopened question of how far instruments had a role in performing secular or sacred music. Among the questions tackled are: the types of harps found in fourteenth-century Italy, and their probable uses; the numbers of singers needed (with their ranges) for fourteenth-century English music; evidence for the use of instruments in the thirteenth century and for wind articulation in the late fourteenth; specific performing ensembles of the fifteenth century, and what they may have sung in a polyphonic Mass.