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73 results in Medieval and Renaissance Music

Page 1 of 4

The Making of the Dominican Liturgy and its Chant
  • Eleanor J. Giraud
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • The founding and establishment of the Dominican order of friars was one of the defining developments of the first half of the thirteenth century. After a period of rapid growth and spread, the Order set about establishing and promulgating forms of worship for use in all of its communities. This liturgy became highly influential and was used well beyond the Dominicans' own churches. This book considers the making of the Dominican liturgy and its chant from two perspectives: first, the material production of Dominican liturgical books, and second the crafting of a unique Dominican liturgical tradition. This is explored through the microcosm of the three thirteenth-century exemplars, which acted as a blueprint for the Dominican liturgy for centuries to come. This study of the physical and conceptual making of the liturgy, considered in dialogue, illuminates the development of the Dominican liturgy, granting us new insights into the practices and values of those involved.

Maddalena Casulana
  • Music Advocating for Women in Early Modern Italy
  • Catherine Deutsch
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    04 December 2025
  • Maddalena Casulana (ca. 1535–ca. 1590) was the first woman to publish music under her own name and one of the first women to speak out publicly against the misogyny in sixteenth-century Italy. This book is the first comprehensive study dedicated to her and provides the first in-depth exploration of her life, work and music. Situating Casulana's pioneering contributions within the broader context of Renaissance music and gender history, the book reveals her as a key figure at the intersection of proto-feminist thought and early modern music. Through reconstructed madrigals, new archival research, and interdisciplinary analysis, this work will appeal to scholars of musicology, gender studies, and Renaissance history, as well as performers interested in reviving historically overlooked musical voices. Casulana's legacy speaks to both academic and contemporary audiences, making her an essential figure in the history of women in music.

The Science of Music
  • Knowledge Production in Medieval Baghdad and Beyond
  • Mohammad Sadegh Ansari
  • Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • How did the medieval Islamic intellectual tradition conceptualize, produce, and disseminate scientific knowledge? What can we learn about medieval Islamic civilizations from the way they examined and studied the universe? In answering these fundamental questions, Mohammad Sadegh Ansari provides a unique perspective for the study of both musicology and intellectual history. Widely considered to be an art today, music in the medieval Islamic world was categorized as one of the four branches of the mathematical sciences, alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy; indeed, some philosophers and scholars of music went as far as linking music with medicine and astrology as part of an interconnected web of cosmological knowledge. This innovative book raises fascinating questions about how designating music a 'science' rather than an 'art' impacts our understanding of truth and reconstructs a richly holistic medieval system of knowledge in the process.

The Art of Counterpoint from Du Fay to Josquin
  • Jesse Rodin
  • Published online:
    05 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024
  • This book transforms our understanding of a fifteenth-century musical revolution. Renaissance composers developed fresh ways of handling musical flow in pursuit of intensifications, unexpected explosions, dramatic pauses, and sudden evaporations. A new esthetics of opposition, as this study calls it, can be contrasted with smoother and less goal-oriented approaches in music from before – and after – the period ca. 1425–1520. Casting wide evidentiary and repertorial nets, the book reinterprets central genres, theoretical concepts, historical documents, famous pieces, and periodizations; a provocative concluding chapter suggests that we moderns have tended to conceal the period's musical poetics by neglecting central evidence. Above all the book introduces an analytical approach sensitive to musical flow and invites new ways of hearing, performing, and thinking about music from Du Fay to Josquin.

Music and the Making of Medieval Venice
  • Jamie L. Reuland
  • Published online:
    12 October 2023
    Print publication:
    26 October 2023
  • Music played an essential part in raising the city of Venice and in founding the empire on which its fortunes would depend. This book focuses on a set of musical projects - played out in liturgy and civic ritual - that formed the city's history and framed and interpreted its unique material culture as it was in the process of taking shape. Jamie L. Reuland shows the state's most imaginative musical endeavors bound up with legal culture, stemming from the chancery's engines of historiography, or situated within the rich material environment of relics and reliquaries, mosaics and wall paintings, icons and statues. Arguing for music's technical ability to fabricate a sense of place and give form to history, Reuland recovers Venice's fascinating early propensity for a statecraft of the imagination, the consequences of which would be the better-known history of its material decay.

Monteverdi and the Marvellous
  • Poetry, Sound, and Representation
  • Roseen Giles
  • Published online:
    10 October 2023
    Print publication:
    28 September 2023
  • The marvellous, a key concept in literary debates at the turn of the seventeenth century, involved sensory and perspectival transformation, a rhetoric built on the unexpected, contradictory, and thought-provoking. The composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) created a new practice in which the expressive materials of music and poetry were placed in concert. This innovative new study of Monteverdi's literary personality integrates musical and poetic analysis to create an approach to text-music relations that addresses scholars of both literature and music. It illuminates how experiments in language and perception at the turn of the seventeenth century were influenced and informed by the work of musicians of that era. Giles provides a new perspective on the music and poetry of Monteverdi's madrigals through the poetics of the marvellous. In his madrigals, Monteverdi created a reciprocity between poetry and music which encouraged audiences to contemplate their interactions, and, consequently, to listen differently.

Medieval Polyphony and Song
  • Helen Deeming, Frieda van der Heijden
  • Published online:
    27 April 2023
    Print publication:
    11 May 2023
  • What characterises medieval polyphony and song? Who composed this music, sang it, and wrote it down? Where and when did the different genres originate, and under what circumstances were they created and performed? This book gives a comprehensive introduction to the rich variety of polyphonic practices and song traditions during the Middle Ages. It explores song from across Europe, in Latin and vernacular languages (precursors to modern Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish); and polyphony from early improvised organum to rhythmically and harmonically complex late medieval motets. Each chapter focuses on a particular geographical location, setting out the specific local contexts of the music created there. Guiding the reader through the musical techniques of melody, harmony, rhythm, and notation that distinguish the different genres of polyphony and song, the authors also consider the factors that make modern performances of this music sound so different from one another.

Understanding the Old Hispanic Office
  • Texts, Melodies, and Devotion in Early Medieval Iberia
  • Emma Hornby, Kati Ihnat, Rebecca Maloy, Raquel Rojo Carrillo
  • Published online:
    07 January 2023
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022
  • Based on highly original archival and palaeographical research, this is the first methodological and factual primer in English on the distinctive liturgical tradition of early medieval Spain. It provides clear and approachable blueprints for future work on the description and analysis (musical, theological and cultural) of this and other liturgies. For non-specialists, the authors introduce the main features of Old Hispanic liturgy, its manuscripts, its services and its liturgical genres. For specialists, they model a variety of ways to work with the Old Hispanic materials in depth, incorporating notational, musical, theological and historical perspectives. For those interested in musical notation, the book lays out a method for working with unpitched neumes, with illustrative results, that will inspire and challenge others working on monophonic chant. For historians and liturgists, the texts and melodies are analysed in combination with the theological context that informed their creation.

Devotional Refrains in Medieval Latin Song
  • Mary Channen Caldwell
  • Published online:
    24 March 2022
    Print publication:
    31 March 2022
  • Throughout medieval Europe, male and female religious communities attached to churches, abbeys, and schools participated in devotional music making outside of the chanted liturgy. Newly collating over 400 songs from primary sources, this book reveals the role of Latin refrains and refrain songs in the musical lives of religious communities by employing novel interdisciplinary and analytical approaches to the study of medieval song. Through interpretive frameworks focused on time and temporality, performance, memory, inscription, and language, each chapter offers an original perspective on how refrains were created, transmitted, and performed. Arguing for the Latin refrain's significance as a marker of form and meaning, this book identifies it as a tool that communities used to negotiate their lived experiences of liturgical and calendrical time; to confirm their communal identity and belonging to song communities; and to navigate relationships between Latin and vernacular song and dance that emerge within their multilingual contexts.

Music and Liturgy in Medieval Britain and Ireland
  • Edited by Ann Buckley, Lisa Colton
  • Published online:
    23 December 2021
    Print publication:
    06 January 2022
  • From music written in praise of Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and English saints to the selection of Gospel readings by the Dominicans, this book introduces readers to the richness of medieval liturgical culture from across Britain and Ireland. Each of its three main sections opens with a chapter that offers a contextual frame for its key themes. With contributions from leading experts in pre-Reformation music and its sources, the book's focus on Insular liturgy – rather than that of only one part of Britain or Ireland – allows readers to learn about the devotional, political and creative networks at play in shaping liturgical practices: personal, secular, monastic, lay, and professional. The opening part includes broader discussions of Uses, including that of Salisbury, and case studies explore Insular witnesses to devotional activities in honour of both local cults and widely known figures, including St Columba, St Margaret, St Katherine, and the Magi.

Staging 'Euridice'
  • Theatre, Sets, and Music in Late Renaissance Florence
  • Tim Carter, Francesca Fantappiè
  • Published online:
    11 November 2021
    Print publication:
    02 December 2021
  • Euridice was one of several music-theatrical works commissioned to celebrate the wedding of Maria de' Medici and King Henri IV of France in Florence in October 1600. As the first 'opera' to survive complete, it has been viewed as a landmark work, but its libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini and music by Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini have tended to be studied in the abstract rather than as something to be performed in a specific time and place. Staging “Euridice” explores how newly-discovered documents can be used to precisely reconstruct every aspect of its original stage and sets in the room for which it was intended in the Palazzo Pitti. By also taking into account what the singers and instrumentalists did, what the audience saw and heard, and how things changed from creation through rehearsals to performance, this book brings new aspects of Euridice to light in startling ways.

The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen
  • Edited by Jennifer Bain
  • Published online:
    28 October 2021
    Print publication:
    04 November 2021
  • This specially commissioned collection of thirteen essays explores the life and works of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), monastic founder, leader of a community of nuns, composer, active correspondent, and writer of religious visions, theological treatises, sermons, and scientific and medical texts. Aimed at advanced university students and new Hildegard researchers, the essays provide a broad context for Hildegard's life and monastic setting, and offer comprehensive discussions on each of the main areas of her output. Engagingly written by experts in medieval history, theology, German literature, musicology, and the history of medicine, the essays are grounded in Hildegard's twelfth-century context, and investigate her output within its monastic and liturgical environments, her reputation during and after her life, and the materiality of the transmission of her works, considering aspects of manuscript layout, illumination, and scribal practices at her Rupertsberg monastery.

Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds
  • Edited by Lauren Curtis, Naomi Weiss
  • Published online:
    14 October 2021
    Print publication:
    28 October 2021
  • In Greek mythology, the Muses are Memory's daughters. Their genealogy suggests a deep connection between music and memory in Graeco-Roman culture, but how was this connection understood and experienced by ancient authors, artists, performers, and audiences? How is music remembered and how does it memorialize in a world before recording technology, where sound accumulated differently than it does today? This volume explores music's role in the discourses of cultural memory, communication, and commemoration in ancient Greek and Roman societies. It reveals the many and varied ways in which musical memory formed a fundamental part of social, cultural, ritual, and political life in ancient Greek- and Latin-speaking communities, from classical Athens to Ptolemaic Alexandria and ancient Rome. Drawing on the contributors' interdisciplinary expertise in art history, philology, performance studies, history, and ethnomusicology, eleven original chapters and the editors' Introduction offer new approaches for the study of Graeco-Roman music and musical culture.

Musical Notation in the West
  • James Grier
  • Published online:
    28 January 2021
    Print publication:
    18 February 2021
  • Musical notation is a powerful system of communication between musicians, using sophisticated symbolic, primarily non-verbal means to express musical events in visual symbols. Many musicians take the system for granted, having internalized it and their strategies for reading it and translating it into sound over long years of study and practice. This book traces the development of that system by combining chronological and thematic approaches to show the historical and musical context in which these developments took place. Simultaneously, the book considers the way in which this symbolic language communicates to those literate in it, discussing how its features facilitate or hinder fluent comprehension in the real-time environment of performance. Moreover, the topic of musical as opposed to notational innovation forms another thread of the treatment, as the author investigates instances where musical developments stimulated notational attributes, or notational innovations made practicable advances in musical style.

Music and Musicians at the Collegiate Church of St Omer
  • Crucible of Song, 1350–1550
  • Andrew Kirkman
  • Published online:
    31 August 2020
    Print publication:
    17 September 2020
  • Music played an exceptionally important role in the late Middle Ages - articulating people's social, psychological and eschatological needs. The process began with the training of choirboys whose skill was key to institutional identity. That skill was closely cultivated and directly sought by kings and emperors, who intervened directly in recruitment of choirboys and older singers in order to build and articulate their self-image and perceived status. Using the documentation of an exceptionally well preserved archive, this book focuses on music's functioning in an important church in late Medieval Northern France. It explores a period when musicians from this region set the agenda across Europe, developing what is still some of the most sophisticated music in the Western musical tradition. The book allows a close focus not on the great achievements of those who cultivated this music, but on the personal motivations that shaped their life and work.

Renaissance Polyphony
  • Fabrice Fitch
  • Published online:
    13 August 2020
    Print publication:
    27 August 2020
  • This engaging study introduces Renaissance polyphony to a modern audience. It helps readers of all ages and levels of experience make sense of what they are hearing. How does Renaissance music work? How is a piece typical of its style and type; or, if it is exceptional, what makes it so? The makers of polyphony were keenly aware of the specialized nature of their craft. How is this reflected in the music they wrote, and how were they regarded by their patrons and audiences? Through a combination of detailed, nuanced appreciation of musical style and a lucid overview of current debates, this book offers a glimpse of meanings behind and beyond the notes, be they playful or profound. It will enhance the listening experience of students, performers and music lovers alike.

Singing to the Lyre in Renaissance Italy
  • Memory, Performance, and Oral Poetry
  • Blake Wilson
  • Published online:
    31 October 2019
    Print publication:
    21 November 2019
  • A primary mode for the creation and dissemination of poetry in Renaissance Italy was the oral practice of singing and improvising verse to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. Singing to the Lyre is the first comprehensive study of this ubiquitous practice, which was cultivated by performers ranging from popes, princes, and many artists, to professionals of both mercantile and humanist background. Common to all was a strong degree of mixed orality based on a synergy between writing and the oral operations of memory, improvisation, and performance. As a cultural practice deeply rooted in language and supported by ancient precedent, cantare ad lyram (singing to the lyre) is also a reflection of Renaissance cultural priorities, including the status of vernacular poetry, the study and practice of rhetoric, the oral foundations of humanist education, and the performative culture of the courts reflected in theatrical presentations and Castiglione's Il cortegiano.

Guillaume Du Fay
  • The Life and Works
  • Alejandro Enrique Planchart
  • Published online:
    06 July 2019
    Print publication:
    06 September 2018
  • This volume explores the work of one of medieval music's most important figures, and in so doing presents an extended panorama of musical life in Europe at the end of the middle ages. Guillaume Du Fay rose from obscure beginnings to become the most significant composer of the fifteenth century, a man courted by kings and popes, and this study of his life and career provides a detailed examination of his entire output, including a number of newly discovered works. As well as offering musical analysis, this volume investigates his close association with the Cathedral of Cambrai, and explores how, at a time when music was becoming increasingly professionalised, Du Fay forged his own identity as 'a composer'. This detailed biography will be highly valuable for those interested in the history of medieval and church music, as well as for scholars of Du Fay's musical legacy.

Composing Community in Late Medieval Music
  • Self-Reference, Pedagogy, and Practice
  • Jane D. Hatter
  • Published online:
    02 May 2019
    Print publication:
    02 May 2019
  • When we sing lines in which a fifteenth-century musician uses ethereal polyphony to complain mundanely about money or hoarseness, more than half a millennium melts away. Equally intriguing are moments in which we experience solmization puns. These familiar worries and surprising jests break down temporal distances, humanizing the lives and endeavors of our musical forebears. Yet many instances of self-reference occur within otherwise serious pieces. Are these simply in-jokes, or are there more meaningful messages we risk neglecting if we dismiss them as comic relief? Music historian Jane D. Hatter takes seriously the pervasiveness of these features. Divided into two sections, this study considers pieces with self-referential features in the texts separately from discussions of pieces based on musical self-referential elements. Examining connections between self-referential repertoire from the years 1450–1530 and similar self-referential creations for painters' guilds, reveals musicians' agency in forming the first communities of early modern composers.

The Requiem of Tomás Luis de Victoria (1603)
  • Owen Rees
  • Published online:
    13 March 2019
    Print publication:
    28 March 2019
  • Victoria's Requiem is among the best-loved and most-performed musical works of the Renaissance, and is often held to be 'a Requiem for an age', representing the summation of golden-age Spanish polyphony. Yet it has been the focus of surprisingly little research. Owen Rees's multifaceted study brings together the historical and ritual contexts for the work's genesis, the first detailed musical analysis of the Requiem itself, and the long story of its circulation and reception. Victoria composed this music in 1603 for the exequies of María of Austria, and oversaw its publication two years later. A rich variety of contemporary documentation allows these events - and the nature of music in Habsburg exequies - to be reconstructed vividly. Rees then locates Victoria's music within the context of a vast international repertory of Requiems, much of it previously unstudied, and identifies the techniques which render this work so powerfully distinctive and coherent.

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