You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
First full comprehensive guide to one of the most important genres of music in the Middle Ages.
"This work provides an interdisciplinary and historical exploration of various techniques leveraging writing in order to capture sound. Collectively, the essays in this work focus on questions of language and expression as much as the method and theory of both sound and writing"--
A reflection on the idea of the "composer" in the medieval period, including a study of the individuals and groups active in the creation of medieval music. The modern concept of the individual composer is central to accounts of Western music, and continues to represent a critical field of research in musicology. However, this approach cannot be straightforwardly transposed to the Middle Ages, as it does not reflect the complex creative realities of medieval composition, and conflicts with the evidence from extant sources and documentation. This collection, the first full-length study of the subject, questions and revises the concept of the composer for the medieval period through five thema...
The collection of motets in manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds fr. 12615, known as the Chansonnier de Noailles, brings together ninety-one thirteenth-century motets in two to four parts, whose upper voices are all sung to vernacular texts. It is one of six diverse collections contained in the manuscript; it shares space with three different compilations of monophonic songs, a collection of songs and dits, various nonlyric texts, and several later additions, all gathered in a codex closely tied to the former northern province of Artois and in particular to the city of Arras. The motet collection is notable in several respects: with its ninety-one pieces it is the f...
Redefines musical analysis for a period that marks the beginnings of composition as we know it now.
This monograph offers a comprehensive study of the topos of the malmariée or the unhappily married woman within the thirteenth-century motet repertory, a vocal genre characterized by several different texts sounding simultaneously over a foundational Latin chant. Part I examines the malmariée motets from three vantage points: (1) in light of contemporaneous canonist views on marriage; (2) to what degree the French malmariée texts in the upper voices treat the messages inherent in the underlying Latin chant through parody and/or allegory; and (3) interactions among upper-voice texts that invite additional interpretations focused on gender issues. Part II investigates the transmission profi...
Medieval Sex Lives examines courtly song as a complex cultural product and social force in the early fourteenth century, exploring how it illuminates the relationship between artistic production and the everyday lives of the elites for whom this music and poetry was composed and performed. In a focused analysis of the Oxford Bodelian Library's Douce 308 manuscript—a fourteenth-century compilation that includes over five hundred Old French lyrics composed over two centuries alongside a narrative account of elaborate courtly festivities centered on a week-long tournament—Elizabeth Eva Leach explores two distinct but related lines of inquiry: first, why the lyric tradition of "courtly love"...
The Monstrous New Art reveals the depth of medieval composers' engagement with monstrous and hybrid creatures and ideas.
A unique capacity of measured polyphony is to give precisely fixed places not only to musical notes, but also to individual words in relation to them and each other. The Motet in the Late Middle Ages offers innovative approaches to the equal partnership of music and texts in motets of the fourteenth century and beyond, showcasing the imaginative opportunities afforded by this literal kind of intertextuality, and yielding a very different narrative from the common complaint that different simultaneous texts make motets incomprehensible. As leading musicologist Margaret Bent asserts, they simply require a different approach to preparation and listening. In this book, Bent examines the words an...
This volume brings together literary and musical compositions of medieval France, including the Occitanian region, identifying the use of voice in these works as a way of articulating gendered identities. The contributors to this volume argue that because medieval texts were often read or sung aloud, voice is central for understanding the performance, transmission, and reception of work from the period across a wide variety of genres. These essays offer close readings of narrative and lyric poetry, chivalric romance, sermons, letters, political writing, motets, troubadour and trouvère lyric, crusade songs, love songs, and debate songs. Through literary, musical, and historiographical analys...