Richard Crocker – författare

This is a completely revised edition of the second volume of the New Oxford History of Music. In the last three decades there has been intense interest in the music of the Middle Ages and great advances in research have been made in facts as well as interpretation. Drawing on the work of leading British and American scholars, this volume presents an informed, up-to-date picture of a broad spectrum of music from the fourth century AD to 1300. Beginning with Christian chant in the Mediterranean, it continues through Latin (`Gregorian') chant, liturgical drama, medieval song, instrumental music, and early polyphony down to the monumental organa composed at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in the twelfth century. Over 200 musical examples help to illustrate the discussion of 1,000 years of rich and complex musical development.Contributors:John Stevens, Miloś Velimirović, Kenneth Levy, Richard Crocker, Susan Rankin, Christopher Page, Sarah Fuller, and Janet Knapp.

This book was published in 2003. One of the most important but least studied of medieval chant repertories is that of the Kyrie. With their Latin texts, Kyrie melodies represented musical ambitions manifested alongside of and subsequent to Gregorian chant - ambitions which achieved stylistic and formal distinction. This study illuminates those features of the early Kyrie that give it its distinctive character and set it apart not only from Gregorian chant but also from other types of medieval chant. The repertory focused on in this book is a group of 22 West Frankish sources which are believed to have originated in several Aquitanian locations. The tradition represented by these manuscripts and their repertory of Kyrie melodies can be followed across a century and a half, from 950 to 1100. The Aquitanian manuscript tradition is significant because these sources represent by far the largest group of closely inter-related musical sources from the period, and the musical notation gives reliable indication of pitch up to a century earlier than other manuscripts of the time.