You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Medieval music has been made and remade over the past two hundred years. For the nineteenth century it was vocal, without instrumental accompaniment, but with barbarous harmony that no one could have wished to hear. For most of the twentieth century it was instrumentally accompanied, increasingly colourful and increasingly enjoyed. At the height of its popularity it sustained an industry of players and instrument makers, all engaged in recreating an apparently medieval performance practice. During the 1980s it became vocal once more, exchanging colour and contrast for cleanliness and beauty. But what happens to produce such radical changes of perspective? And what can we learn from them about the way we interact with the past? How much is really known about the way medieval music sounded? Or have modern beliefs been formed and sustained less by evidence than the personalities of scholars and performers, their ideologies and their musical tastes?
Shape is a concept widely used in talk about music, helping musicians in many genres to rehearse, teach and think about what they do. What makes a concept from vision so invaluable to work in sound? Music & Shape reveals the many ways in which shape is essential to music.
Featuring fascinating accounts from practitioners, this Companion examines how developments in recording have transformed musical culture.
Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame stands as an enduring monument of medieval musical art. As such it is one of the most widely studied and performed works of music written before 1600. The Mass itself, however, is surrounded by uncertainty; its date of composition is unknown, its purpose is unclear, and its construction yields much ambiguity. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has now prepared a much-needed modern performing edition of this work, published by OUP's music department. This companion volume defines his editorial methods in the context of the minefield of controversies surrounding the principles of editing music of this period, and indeed of the many different interpretations of the compositional structure and function of the music. Relating the Mass to other works of the period, he provides the student and performer with an invaluable guide to its intricacies, while his approach will be welcomed by scholars as both controversial and stimulating.
Investigating Musical Performance considers the wide range of perspectives on musical performance made tangible by the cross-disciplinary studies of the last decades and encourages a comparison and revision of theoretical and analytical paradigms. The chapters present different approaches to this multi-layered phenomenon, including the results of significant research projects. The complex nature of musical performance is revealed within each section which either suggests aspects of dialogue and contiguity or discusses divergences between theoretical models and perspectives. Part I elaborates on the history, current trends and crucial aspects of the study of musical performance; Part II is de...
In this fascinating study, Robert Philip argues that recordings of the early twentieth-century provide an important, and hitherto neglected, resource in the history of musical performance.
This volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Applied to the study of music, this approach enables us to reconcile the human, social, factual, and technological aspects of the musical world, and opens the prospect of new areas of inquiry in musicology and sound studies. Drawing together contributions from a wide range of scholars, the book’s four sections focus on key areas of music study that are impacted by STS: organology, sound studies, music history, and epistemology.
Where is the academic study of music today, and what paths should it take into the future? Should we be looking at how music relates to society and constructs meaning through it, rather than how it transcends the social? Can we ‘remix’ our discipline and attempt to address all musics on an equal basis, without splitting ourselves in advance into subgroups of ‘musicologists’, ‘theorists’, and ‘ethnomusicologists’? These are some of the crucial issues that Nicholas Cook has raised since he emerged in the 1990s as one of the UK’s leading and most widely read voices in critical musicology. In this book, collaborators and former students of Cook pursue these questions and others raised by his work—from notation, historiography, and performance to the place of music in multimedia forms such as virtual reality and video games, analysing both how it can bring people together and the ways in which it has failed to do so.
One of the most widely studied and performed works of music written before 1600, Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame stands as an enduring monument of medieval musical art. The mass itself, however, is surrounded by uncertainty; its date of composition remains unknown, its purpose is unclear, and its construction yields much ambiguity. A controversial new approach to Machaut's composition technique, this volume provides a case study in the application of music ficta and a detailed introduction to performance. Relating the Mass to other works of the period, this introduction is an invaluable guide to its intricacies.
Guillaume de Machaut was the foremost poet-composer of his time. Studies look at all aspects of his prodigious output.