Secular Renaissance Music

Secular music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encompasses an extraordinarily wide range of works and practices: courtly love songs, music for civic festivities, instrumental music, entertainments provided by minstrels, the unwritten traditions of solo singing, and much else. This collection of essays addresses many of these practices, with a focus on polyphonic settings of vernacular texts, examining their historical and stylistic contexts, their transmission in written and printed sources, questions of performance, and composers approaches to text setting. Essays have been selected to reflect the wide range of topics that have occupied scholars in recent decades, and taken together, they point to the more general significance of secular music within a broad complex of cultural practices and institutions.

Music moves through time; it is not static. In order to appreciate music wemust remember what sounds happened, and anticipate what sounds might comenext. This book takes you on a journey of music from past to present, from the Middle Ages to the Baroque Period to the 20th century and beyond!

In spite of their widely disparate uses, Marian prayers and courtly love songs from the Middle Ages and Renaissance often show a stylistic similarity. This book examines the convergence of these two styles in polyphonic music and its broader poetic, artistic, and devotional context from c.1200-c.1500.

Secular music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encompasses an extraordinarily wide range of works and practices: courtly love songs, music for civic festivities, instrumental music, entertainments provided by minstrels, the unwritten traditions of solo singing, and much else. This collection of essays addresses many of these practices, with a focus on polyphonic settings of vernacular texts, examining their historical and stylistic contexts, their transmission in written and printed sources, questions of performance, and composers? approaches to text setting. Essays have been selected to reflect the wide range of topics that have occupied scholars in recent decades, and taken together, they point to the more general significance of secular music within a broad complex of cultural practices and institutions.

The author examines the secular music of the late Renaissance period primarily through families of varying importance.

This book brings a new perspective to secular music sources from the Middle Ages and early modernity by viewing them as media communication tools, whose particular features shape the meaning of their contents. Ranging from the eleventh to seventeenth centuries, and across countries and genres, the chapters offer innovative insights into the historical relationship between music and its presentation in a wide variety of media. The lens of media enables contributors to expand music history beyond notated music manuscripts and instruments to include images, furniture, luxury items, and other objects, and to address uniquely visual and material aspects of music sources in books and literature. Drawing together an international group of contributors, the volume pays close attention to the medial and material dimensions of musical sources, considering them as multifaceted objects that not only contain but also determine the nature of the music they transmit. Transforming our understanding of musical media, this volume will be of interest to scholars of musicology, art history, and medieval and early modern cultures.

The Musical Repertories of the Liturgy of Southern Italy and Beneventan Sources, Alleluia Melodies after 1100, and the change in transmission of instrumental music in Fifteenth-Century Europe are provided. John McCaughey's concert programme of medieval troped chants for Pentecost juxtaposed with traditional monophonic work songs from Vietnam, Thailand and Western Java as well as various contemporary compositions are also included. Songs of the Dove and the Nightingale provides a comprehensive survey of sacred and secular music within the context of a multilingual and intercultural milieu where influences and exchanges of liturgico-musical materials took place between many different ethnic groups. Structural relations between music and text are explored through the analysis of textual punctuation and the structured repetition of the refrain.

We know what, say, a Josquin mass looks like but what did it sound like? This is a much more complex and difficult question than it may seem. Kenneth Kreitner has assembled twenty articles, published between 1946 and 2009, by scholars exploring the performance of music from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The collection includes works by David Fallows, Howard Mayer Brown, Christopher Page, Margaret Bent, and others covering the voices-and-instruments debate of the 1980s, the performance of sixteenth-century sacred and secular music, the role of instrumental ensembles, and problems of pitch standards and musica ficta. Together the papers form not just a comprehensive introduction to the issues of renaissance performance practice, but a compendium of clear thinking and elegant writing about a perpetually intriguing period of music history.