Bøker i Music in Medieval Europe-serien

The writing down of music is one of the triumphant technologies of the West. Without writing, the performance of music involves some combination of memory and improvisation. This volume deals with the materials of chant from the point of view of transmission.

Plainchant is the music that underpins essentially all other music of the middle ages, and is the music that is most abundantly preserved. It is a subject that has engaged a great deal of research and debate over the years. This title explores the nature of the complex issues that have arisen in research on chant.

The ars antiqua began to be mentioned in writings about music in the early decades of the fourteenth century, where it was cited along with references to a more modern 'art', an ars nova. This title features essays that address one or more of the issues regarding ars antiqua polyphony-questions relating to the nature and definition of genre.

The French polyphonic tradition of the fourteenth century blossomed earlier than the Italian, perhaps because of its long tradition of polyphony in previous centuries, many sources of which were being copied in the 1300s. This work brings together 27 articles that reflect a broad methodological and chronological span of analysis on the ars nova.

A collection of twenty-nine of the most influential articles and papers about medieval musical instruments and their repertory. It discusses the construction of the instruments, their playing technique, the occasions for which they performed, and their repertory. It paints a broad picture of instrumental performance during the medieval period.

The tropes, together with the sequences, represent the main creative activity of European musicians in the nineth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. This volume provides an introduction to the study of tropes in the form of an extensive anthology of major studies and a comprehensive bibliography.

Offers an overview of the best scholarship in the study of medieval music. This series introduces readers to an enormous swathe of musical history. It is suitable for scholars and students.

Extant manuscripts are the principal medieval testimony to the art of monophonic song. Literary texts and archival materials, a few theoretical works, and numerous visual representations provide helpful perspective, but our path to the poets and singers lies through the efforts of scribes, and the myriad problems in interpreting what they tell us cast a long shadow over all research on monophonic song. The essays gathered here represent the principal themes and issues that have occupied scholars of late medieval monophonic songs over the last half century: their place in history and society, the role of women as composers and performers, poetic and musical structures, styles, and genres, relationships between poems and melodies, written and oral transmission, and performance practices. Studying how each of these themes is played out across repertoires, cultures, decades, and locations offers a rich and variegated panorama of the practice of song in late medieval Europe.