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Books : Entertainment : Music : Musical Genres : Medieval
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This is an excellent reference volume including essays on all aspects of medieval music performance. With forty essays written by experts in the field on everything from repertoire, voices and instruments to basic theory, all aspects of recreation are treated. This guide has already proven indispensable to performers and scholars of medieval music. Chapters on vocal and choral music; various types of ensembles; profiles of specific instruments; instrumentation; performance practice issues; theory; dance; regional profiles of Renaissance music, and guidelines for directors are all treated. It is a comprehensive and authoritative reference by leading performers in the field for a variety of enthusiasts.
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The Violin Play-Along Series will help you play your favorite songs quickly and easily. Just follow the music, listen to the CD to hear how the violin should sound, and then play along using the separate backing tracks. With the melody and lyrics included in the book, you may also choose to sing along. Chord symbols are provided should you wish to elaborate on the melody. The audio CD is playable on any CD player. For PC and MAC computer users, the CD is enhanced so you can adjust the recording to any tempo without changing pitch! This volume includes the songs: The Earl's Chair * Flowers of Edinburgh * The Gold Ring * Harvest Home * Haste to the Wedding * Julia Delaney * Lord Mayo (Tiarna Mhaigheo) * Rights of Man.
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The only systematic survey of its kind! The great composers of the sixteenth century Palestrina, Victoria, des Pres, Lassus, and Morales employed a common body of techniques in their approach to ecclesiastical art music before the development of harmony. Now available from Waveland Press, this systematic survey of examples of their music stresses these similarities, thereby helping musicians to master the techniques of sixteenth-century counterpoint. Since the basis of mastery lies in the ability to understand and to write in two and three voices, the editors have included twenty-six examples of two-voice writing and twenty-seven examples of three-voice writing. Samples of four- and five-voice writing, as well as larger, multi-movement Masses, have been included for more advanced students. Identification of sources, commentary and translations are provided at the end of the collection.
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Ranging chronologically from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and philosophies of the European Middle Ages. Engaging a wide range of premodern texts and contexts, from the musicality of sodomy in twelfth-century polyphony to Chaucer’s representation of pedagogical violence in the Prioress’s Tale, from early Christian writings on the music of the body to the plainchant and poetry of Hildegard of Bingen, the author argues that medieval music was quintessentially a practice of the flesh.
The book reveals a sonorous landscape of flesh and bone, pleasure and pain, a medieval world in which erotic desire, sexual practice, torture, flagellation, and even death itself resonated with musical significance and meaning. In its insistence on music as an integral part of the material cultures of the Middle Ages, the book presents a revisionist account of an important aspect of premodern European civilization that will be of compelling interest to historians of literature, music, religion, and sexuality, as well as scholars of cultural, gender, and queer studies.
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"[I]nvaluable for musicologists and troubadour scholars interested in knowing about the 'whole song', and it also provides an excellent introduction to troubadour music for the historian, philologist or, indeed, anyone with a passing interest." -- David Cashman, Parergon
"It is a down-to-earth treatment of the discernible facts, ordered according to the type of evidence that survives. It is a book to sober up the discipline." -- Daniel Leech-Wilkinson,Times Literary Supplement
"[A] welcome guide for the growing number of performers wishing to recreate these magical treaures from the medieval Midi." -- Donna Mayer-Martin, Notes
The Music of the Troubadours is the first comprehensive critical study of the 315 extant melodies of the troubadours of Occitania. It begins with an overview of their social and political milieu in the 12th and 13th centuries, then provides brief biographies of the 42 troubadours whose music survives. The four manuscripts that transmit this music are described in detail, with attention to their genesis in the overlapping roles of composers, singers, and scribes.To examine the poetic traditions within which the troubadours composed, Aubrey discusses genre, versification, and poetic style. An in-depth analysis of melodic forms and styles reveals traits of individual composers and offers a broad view of the chronological development of the music of the troubadours. Performance practice issues such as rhythm, ornamentation, chromatic inflections, and the use of instruments are explored, thus helping modern performers to bring these ancient treasures to life again.
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Drawing on the work of leading British and American scholars, this revised volume presents an informed, timely picture of music from the fourth through the fourteenth century A.D. It begins with a discussion of Christian chant in the Mediterranean and goes on to cover Gregorian chant, liturgical drama, medieval song, instrumental music, and early polyphony down to the monumental organa composed at the cathedral of Notre Dame in the twelfth century. The new edition has been revised to incorporate the wealth of new research on early music done since Hughes's first edition was published in 1954, and includes over 200 musical examples and an exhaustive bibliography.
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This new and illuminating study of medieval polyphony examines the links between music and contemporary political, civil and religious events. The period from the second half of the twelfth century to the second half of the fifteenth is of great historical interest since it marks the development of polyphonic forms and the birth of mensural music. There is also the earliest evidence of individual composers, from Léonin and Pérotin to Machaut, Landini and Dufay. Alberto Gallo pays particular attention to the elaboration of refined techniques of composing, often drawing a parallel with the techniques of rhetoric and poetry. The writing down of music and also theory are shown to be essential stages of composition. Professor Gallo also describes the birth of the professional composer and the flowering of those permanent institutions within which musicians worked and which for centuries characterized European music. Professor Gallo has taken the opportunity of this first English edition to update the text, and to add notes.
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The Sound of Medieval Song is a study of how sacred and secular music was actually sung during the Middle Ages. The source of the information is the actual notation in the early manuscripts as well as statements found in approximately 50 theoretical treatises written between the years 600-1500. The writings describe various singing practices and both desirable and undesirable vocal techniques, providing a fairly accurate picture of how singers approached the music of the period.
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Our knowledge of medieval music - from the dramatic and melodic riches of the thirteenth century to such highlights of the fifteenth century as the pieces in the Old Hall Manuscript - rests almost wholly on the existence of the manuscripts that have survived. Many illuminated manuscripts similarly contain detailed depictions of musicians with their instruments providing a valuable source of reference for performers today. A lively introduction to all aspects of medieval music for anyone who enjoys listening to works of the period.
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Goes deeper than the history of a profession: it suggests a new way of looking at the exercise of power useful and rewarding. Eric Christiansen in the DAILY TELEGRAPH Originally the word `minstrel' meant `little servant to the king'and the crux of the profession was versatility musical skills were never enough in themselves. Fools, acrobats, singers, conjurors and puppeteers, this is the first book to tell the whole of the minstrels' story and put it into a developing historical perspective.
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This volume consists of original papers first read at King's College, Cambridge, in 1979 at an international conference on medieval and Renaissance music. The contributors are distinguished in a wide variety of musicological interests but all are concerned in one way or another with pursuing the most urgent and promising directions for research in early music history. The result, far from being merely a further collection of essays applying well-tried approaches to familiar material, constantly seeks to expand the scope of musicology itself, and many of the contributions arc inter-disciplinary in method. The four main topics of the conference were carefully chosen, with some editorial control exercised for each session. This is reflected in four sections of closely related papers in the book. Two of these are concerned with the patronage of music: by the Church in fifteenth-century England, Italy and France, and in a broader context in Italy from 1450 to 1550. A group of essays on sixteenth-century instrumental music separates these, and the book concludes with five papers on theories of filiation as applied to music sources from the tenth to the sixteenth century.
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Since the spring of 1994 there have been sales of almost two million copies of the Angel recording of Chant, sung by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain. People are drawn irresistibly to its peaceful sound, but very few of them know anything about the tradition or meaning of Gregorian Chant or understand the language in which it is sung. In this companion book, which includes the full text of the Chant CD with translations from the Latin, Katharine Le Mee traces the historical and liturgical sources of the chant and provides answers to everyone's questions about what Gregorian Chant is, how it is written and sung, the latest research on its therapeutic qualities, and the extraordinary effect its simple, pure, unaccompanied tones can have on the body, mind, and heart.At a time when we are all feeling so overworked and under pressure, the calm, measured, almost transcendent sound of the monks singing these ancient melodies seems to put us in touch with our true selves. It is as though, in listening to their song, we share in the monks' aspirations, devotion, and experience. The sudden popularity of this music today -- after 1,300 years -- is indicative of the deep spiritual hunger manifesting everywhere. Here is a book that explains how and in what ways Gregorian Chant can begin to nourish us and transform our lives.
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This work unites important theological-philosophical subjects discussed by Robert Grosseteste throughout his prodigious output, with those exemplified by an anonymous contemporary English writer on music. It shows how music collaborated with the other liberal arts, operating within the early university curriculum as a ministry discipline. Music made accessible through the "figurae" of its notation, and through sound, otherwise nearly unapproachable, new Aristotelian concepts. The influence was reciprocal in that new Aristotelian tools and conceptualization greatly influenced music notation and style. Music theory has been studied in isolation, as pertaining only to music. This study relates music of the early 13th century to its intellectual context, overturning dogma, uncritically accepted since the beginning of this century, concerning so-called "modal rhythm", and showing how "contrary motion", rather than forming a musical convention, demonstrated a key Aristotelian concept.
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Studying Gregorian chant presents many problems to the researcher because its most important stages of development were not recorded in writing. From the sixth to the tenth century, this form of music existed only in song as medieval musicians relied on their memories and voices to pass each verse from one generation to the next.Peter Jeffery offers an innovative new approach for understanding how these melodies were created, memorized, performed, and modified. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, including anthropology and ethnomusicology, he identifies characteristics of Gregorian chant that closely resemble other oral traditions in non-Western cultures and demonstrates ways music historians can take into account the social, cultural, and anthropological contexts of chant's development.
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The rich medieval French tradition of vernacular devotional songs has not received much scrutiny. With Prions en chantant, Marcia Epstein aims to remedy that situation by offering an edition of largely anonymous trouv¦re devotional songs, designed for both scholars and performers, from two late-thirteenth-century manuscripts.
The majority of the music is published here for the first time. Sixty-one songs are presented, with forty-nine songs exhibited in Old French with a facing-page modern English translation followed by old musical notation and facing-page with modern musical transcription. An additional twelve songs, which lack music in the original sources, are represented by the Old French text and the modern English translation only. The introduction extensively describes the social, musical, literary and theological aspects of the trouv¦re songs contained in the volume. This is a valuable and welcome addition to the study of medieval music.
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Music both influences and reflects the times in which it was created. In the Middle Ages, the previous Dark Ages, the Crusades, and the feudal system all impacted the types and forms of music in the period. Charlemagne standardized the church mass and promoted the Gregorian chant, to the point of threatening excommunication if any other were performed. Musical notation — the staff line — was developed during the period. The troubadours of France, Meistersingers of Germany,the Cantus Firmus of Italy, and the instruments that played the music are all included in this thorough guide to music of the middle ages.
Topics include: the British Isles, Dance Music, Eastern Europe, France, Germanic Lands, Harps, Italy, the Low Countries, Spain, and more.
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Early Music History is devoted to the study of music from the early Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century. The scope is exceptionally broad and includes manuscript studies, textual criticism, iconography, studies of the relationship between words and music, and the relationship between music and society.
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The Regule of Robertus de Handlo and the Summa of Johannes Hanboys are among the few major texts of medieval English music theory. The first directly influenced the latter, and both deal with unique notational practices found in English music of the fourteenth century. These two texts were edited by Edmon de Coussemaker in the nineteenth century in editions that have come to be recognized as seriously deficient. Now Peter M. Lefferts has paired them in a new critical edition that is far superior in its accuracy and scholarly underpinnings.The Regule of 1326 provides one of the two most comprehensive views of late ars antiqua notational developments. Handlo takes as his point of departure the first part, on notation, of one of those widely circulated, abbreviated versions of the teachings of Franco of Cologne that begin in most sources with the motto, "Gaudent brevitate moderni." The Summa of Hanboys, written around 1375, takes Handlo as a point of departure and incorporates an abbreviated redaction of the Regule, along with citations of other later English authorities, into an exhaustively systematic survey of ars nova forms and rests. Building on a line of development in English theory, Hanboys expanded the mensural system to a total of eight figures.
For this edition, Lefferts has thoroughly reexamined, edited, and appraised the single extant source of each treatise. Full descriptions of these sources are provided and the documents are illustrated with a plate from each. Each treatise is presented in its original Latin, with a fully annotated translation on facing pages. Leffert's introduction discusses the authors, places the treatise in the context of the theoretical traditions of fourteenth-century France and England, and reviews their contents in detail. Indexes of terms, names, and subjects are included. Appendixes provide a concordance to the music examples from the Regule that recur in the Summa and transcriptions of two English motet fragments that exhibit insular notational practices discussed in the treatises. Leffert's work will be seen as a major contribution to our understanding of medieval English music.