You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Tonal consciousness, in the sense of a clear intuition about which note or chord a piece of music will finish on, is as much a part of our everyday experience of music as it is of contemporary music theory. This book asks to what extent such tonal consciousness might have operated in the minds of musicians of the Middle Ages, given the different tone world found in the modes of Gregorian chant, in troubadour and trouvère music, in Minnesang and in the early polyphony based upon chant. The author's approach is analytical, focusing on modality and balancing up-to-date concepts and methods of music analysis with those insights into their own compositional needs and processes that the people of the Middle Ages provided themselves through their writings about music. The book examines a range of both music sources and theoretical sources from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. This is a ground-breaking contribution both to the study of medieval music and to music analysis.
The Speculum musicae of the early fourteenth century, with nearly half a million words, is by a long way the largest medieval treatise on music, and probably the most learned. Only the final two books are about music as commonly understood: the other five invite further work by students of scholastic philosophy, theology and mathematics. For nearly a century, its author has been known as Jacques de Liège or Jacobus Leodiensis. ’Jacobus’ is certain, fixed by an acrostic declared within the text; Liège is hypothetical, based on evidence shown here to be less than secure. The one complete manuscript, Paris BnF lat. 7207, thought by its editor to be Florentine, can now be shown on the basi...
Tekla Bude starts from a simple premise--that music requires a body to perform it--to rethink the relationship between music, matter, and the body in the late medieval period. Sonic Bodies argues that writers thought of "music" and "the body" as mutually dependent and historically determined processes that called each other into being.
Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song focuses on two twelfth-century musical-poetic practices of southern France - the sacred Aquitanian versus and the vernacular troubadour lyric - and newly interprets them within their shared context of the early Crusades.
Songs, Scribes, and Society explores the cultural and musical importance of five 15th-century Chansonniers - personalized, portable, and lavishly decorated songbooks - from the Loire Valley of France. Author Jane Alden treats the Chansonniers as physical artifacts to reveal their cultural context and its relationship to their commission, creation, and use.
"The book ranges widely over French, English and Italian motets, mostly between the 1310s and the 1420s. About half the chapters are previously unpublished, the remainder revised to varying degrees from previous publications and now organised into Parts devoted to compositional techniques, Fauvel and Vitry, Machaut, the Musician motets, English motets, Italian motets, music for popes and courts. Transcriptions of entire motets complement the musical analyses, many downloadable from the companion website. Chapters vary in their technical demands, allowing readers to select as appropriate. The five Musician motets of Part IV (chs. 15-21) praise over sixty musicians and range over many decades,...
Challenges current accounts of the French ars nova, a musical art that was both criticised and heralded for its modernity.
This is the first full-length study of the vernacular motet in thirteenth-century France. The motet was the most prestigious type of music of that period, filling a gap between the music of the so-called Notre-Dame School and the Ars Nova of the early fourteenth century. This book takes the music and the poetry of the motet as its starting-point and attempts to come to grips with the ways in which musicians and poets treated pre-existing material, creating new artefacts. The book reviews the processes of texting and retexting, and the procedures for imparting structure to the works; it considers the way we conceive genre in the thirteenth-century motet, and supplements these with principles derived from twentieth-century genre theory. The motet is viewed as the interaction of literary and musical modes whose relationships give meaning to individual musical compositions.
This book, first published in 2003, examines the relationship between poetry and music in medieval France.
The motet was unquestionably one of the most important vocal genres from its inception in late twelfth-century Paris through the Counter-Reformation and beyond. Heard in both sacred and secular contexts, the motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance incorporated a striking wealth of meaning, its verbal textures dense with literary, social, philosophic, and religious reference. In Hearing the Motet, top scholars in the field provide the fullest picture yet of the motet's "music-poetic" nature, investigating the virtuosic interplay of music and text that distinguished some of the genre's finest work and reading individual motets and motet repertories in ways that illuminate their historical and...