Music in Medieval Europe – serie

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. Isidore of Seville famously wrote that "unless sounds are remembered by man, they perish, for they cannot be written down". This volume deals with the materials of chant from the point of view of transmission. The early history of chant is a history of orality, of transmission by mouth to ear, and yet we can study it only through the use of written documents. Scholars of medieval music have taken up the ideas and techniques of scholars of folklore, of oral transmission, of ethnomusicology; for the chant is, in fact, an ancient music transmitted for a time in oral culture; and we study a culture not our own, whose informants are not people but manuscripts. All depends, ironically, on deducing oral issues from written documents.

The Latin liturgical music of the medieval church is the earliest body of Western music to survive in a more or less complete form. It is a body of thousands of individual pieces, of striking beauty and aesthetic appeal, which has the special quality of embodying, of giving voice to, the words of the liturgy itself. Plainchant is the music that underpins essentially all other music of the middle ages (and far beyond), and is the music that is most abundantly preserved. It is a subject that has engaged a great deal of research and debate in the last fifty years and the nature of the complex issues that have recently arisen in research on chant are explored here in an overview of current issues and problems.

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. It was understood by those who coined the notion to be rooted in the musical practices outlined in the Ars musica of Lambertus and, especially, the Ars cantus mensurabilis of Franco of Cologne. Directly or indirectly the essays collected in this volume all address one or more of the issues regarding ars antiqua polyphony-questions relating to the nature and definition of genre; the evolution of the polyphonic idiom; the workings of the creative process including the role of oral process and notation and the continuum between these extremes; questions about how this music was used and understood; and of how it fits into the intellectual life of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Some of the essays ask new questions or approach long-standing ones from fresh perspectives. All, however, are rooted in a line of scholarship that produced a body of writing of continuing relevance.

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.

In the early fourteenth century, musicians in France and later Italy established new traditions of secular and sacred polyphony. This ars nova, or "new art," popularized by theorists such as Philippe de Vitry and Johannes de Muris was the among the first of many later movements to establish the music of the present as a clean break from the past. The rich music of this period, by composers such as Guillaume de Machaut and Francesco Landini, is not only beautiful, but also rewards deep study and analysis. Yet contradictions and gaps abound in the ars nova of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries-how do we read this music? how do we perform this music? what was the cultural context of these performances? These problems are well met by the ingenuity of approaches and solutions found by scholars in this volume. The twenty-seven articles brought together reflect the broad methodological and chronological range of scholarly inquiry on the ars nova.

This is a collection of twenty-nine of the most influential articles and papers about medieval musical instruments and their repertory. The authors discuss the construction of the instruments, their playing technique, the occasions for which they performed and their repertory. Taken as a whole, they paint a very broad, as well as detailed, picture of instrumental performance during the medieval period.

After the imposition of Gregorian chant upon most of Europe by the authority of the Carolingian kings and emperors in the eighth and ninth centuries, a large number of repertories arose in connection with the new chant and its liturgy. Of these repertories, the tropes, together with the sequences, represent the main creative activity of European musicians in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. Because they were not an absolutely official part of the liturgy, as was Gregorian chant, they reflect local traditions, particularly in terms of melody, and more so than the new pieces that were composed at the time. In addition, the earlier layers of tropes represent, in many cases, a survival of the pre local pre Gregorian melodic traditions. This volume provides an introduction to the study of tropes in the form of an extensive anthology of major studies and a comprehensive bibliography and constitutes a classic reference resource for the study of one of the most important musico-liturgical genres of the central middle ages.

This series of seven volumes provides an overview of the best current scholarship in the study of medieval music. Each volume is edited by a ranking expert, and each presents a selection of writings, mostly in English which, taken together, sketch a picture of the shape of the field and of the nature of current inquiry. The volumes are organized in such a way that readers may go directly to an area that interests them, or they may provide themselves a substantial introduction to the wider field by reading through the entire volume. The editors introduce readers to an enormous swathe of musical history and style, and present the best of recent musical scholarship. Taken together, they will increase access to a rich body of music and provide scholars and students with an authoritative guide to the best of current thinking about the music of the middle ages.