Isham Library Papers – serie

This collection of nineteen essays presents a broad spectrum of current research that will interest students of medieval music, history, or culture. Topics include a comparison of early chant transmission in Rome and Jerusalem; the relationship between the earliest chant notation and prosodic accents; conceptualizing rhythm in medieval music and poetry; the persistence of Guidonian organum in the later Middle Ages; a connection between Dante and St. Cecilia; and the development of the trecento madrigal. The essays, written by distinguished scholars, stem from a conference in honor of David G. Hughes, professor of medieval music at Harvard University and noted specialist of chant.

For most music historians, the modernism of the twentieth century was until recently the only appearance of the "modern" in music. The widely perceived recent decline of musical modernism makes it now possible to see the modernism of the twentieth century as a chapter in a much longer story, the story of musical modernity. The principal purpose of the present book is to encourage a debate over musical modernity; a debate that would consider the question whether, and to what extent, an examination of the history of European art music may enrich our picture of modernity and whether our understanding of music's development may be transformed by insights into the nature of modernity provided by other historical disciplines. This book had its origin in a conference that took place at the Music Department of Harvard University on November 9-11, 2001 to honor Professor Reinhold Brinkmann.

For many today Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stand as towering representatives of European music of the eighteenth century, composers whose works reflect intellectual, religious, and aesthetic trends of the period. Research on their compositions continues in many ways to shape our broader understanding of eighteenth-century musical thought and its contexts. This collection of essays by leading authorities in the field offers a variety of new perspectives on the two composers, as well as some of their important contemporaries, Haydn in particular. Addressing topics as diverse as the historiography of eighteenth-century music, concepts of time and musical form, the idea of the musical work and its relation to publishing practices, compositional process, and performance practice, these essays together constitute a major contribution to eighteenth-century studies.This book had its origin in a conference that took place at the Music Department of Harvard University on September 23–25, 2005, to honor Professor Christoph Wolff, Adams University Research Professor at Harvard University.

Music exists in time. All musicians know this fundamental truth—but what does it actually mean? Thirteen scholars probe the temporality of music from a great variety of perspectives, in response to challenges that Christopher F. Hasty, Walter Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University, laid out in his groundbreaking Meter as Rhythm.The essays included here bridge the conventional divides between theory, history, ethnomusicology, aesthetics, performance practice, cognitive psychology, and dance studies. In these investigations, music emerges as an art form that has an important lesson to teach. Not only can music be understood as sounds shaped in time but—more radically—as time shaped in sounds.