This volume brings together twenty original essays by distinguished scholars on the life, works, and cultural context of Antoine Busnoys (c.1430-1492), musician to Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, and one of the most celebrated composers of the fifteenth century. The chapters offer a wealth of new information about musical culture in the late middle ages.
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.
A new kind of songbook emerged in the later fifteenth century: personalized, portable, and lavishly decorated. Five closely related chansonniers, copied in the Loire Valley region of central France c. 1465-c. 1475, are the earliest surviving examples of this new genre. The Loire Valley Chansonniers preserve the music of such renowned composers as Guillaume Du Fay, Johannes Ockeghem, and Antoine Busnoys. But their importance as musical sources has overshadowed the significance of these manuscripts as artifacts in their own right. This book places the physical objects at center, investigating the means by which they were produced and the broader culture in which they circulated. Jane Alden performs a codicological autopsy upon the manuscripts and reveals the hitherto unrecognized role of scribes in shaping the transmission and reception of the chanson repertory. Alden also challenges the long-held belief that the Loire Valley Chansonniers were intended for royal or noble patrons. Instead, she argues that a rising class of bureaucrats--notaries, secretaries, and other court officials--commissioned these exquisite objects. Active as writers and participants in poetry competitions, these individuals may even have written some of the chansons' texts. The unique integration of image, text, and music found in chansonniers extends their appeal to a broad readership. But for the nineteenth-century scholars who rediscovered these manuscripts, the larger literary and visual resonances were not of primary interest. Alden documents the tangle of motivations--national identity, populist politics, and the rise of the musical masterwork--that informed the earliest writings on these books. Only now is their multifaceted structure the inspiration for a new generation of readers.
Through forty-five creative and concise essays by an international team of authors, this Cambridge History brings the fifteenth century to life for both specialists and general readers. Combining the best qualities of survey texts and scholarly literature, the book offers authoritative overviews of central composers, genres, and musical institutions as well as new and provocative reassessments of the work concept, the boundaries between improvisation and composition, the practice of listening, humanism, musical borrowing, and other topics. Multidisciplinary studies of music and architecture, feasting, poetry, politics, liturgy, and religious devotion rub shoulders with studies of compositional techniques, musical notation, music manuscripts, and reception history. Generously illustrated with figures and examples, this volume paints a vibrant picture of musical life in a period characterized by extraordinary innovation and artistic achievement.
New articles on du Fay and Desprez, on sacred and secular music, and reception history, form a fitting tribute to one of the field's foremost scholars. This volume celebrates the work of David Fallows, one of the most influential scholars in the field of medieval and Renaissance music. It draws together articles by scholars from around the world, focusing on key topics to which Fallows has contributed significantly: the life and works of Guillaume Du Fay and of Josquin Desprez, archival studies and biography, sacred and secular music of the late mediaeval and Renaissance period, and reception history. Studies include major archival discoveries concerning the identity of the composer Fremin Caron; a reconsideration of the authorship of works within the Josquin canon, notably Mille regretz and Absalon fili mi; a freshlook at key works from Du Fay's youth and early maturity; accounts of newly discovered sources and works; and an appraisal of David Fallows' contribution to the early music performance movement by Christopher Page, former directorof Gothic Voices. The collection also includes two newly published compositions dedicated to the honorand. Fabrice Fitch teaches at the Royal Northern College of Music; Jacobijn Kiel is an independent scholar. Contributors: Rob C. Wegman, Jane Alden, Bonnie J. Blackburn, Honey Meconi, Gianluca D'Agostino, Andrew Kirkman, Jaap van Benthem, Margaret Bent, James Haar, Alenjandro Enrique Planchart, Jesse Rodin, Lorenz Welker, Kinuho Endo, Joshua Rifkin, Thomas Schmidt-Beste, Richard Sherr, Peter Wright, Fabrice Fitch, Tess Knighton, Warwick Edwards, Adam Knight Gilbert, Markus Jans, Oliver Neighbour, Anthony Rooley, Keith Polk, John Milsom, Jeffrey J. Dean, EricJas, Peter Gülke, Iain Fenlon, Barbara Haggh, Dagmar Hoffmann-Axthelm, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl, Esperanza Rodríguez-García, Eugeen Schreurs, Reinhard Strohm
This Companion presents the most complete discussion ever published in English on the music of the greatest composer of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A collaborative effort by a team of distinguished scholars, the volume provides a basic survey of Josquin's music and the many problems that attend it. Taking account of the most recent research, the book also includes a sampler CD of Josquin's works specially recorded by The Clerk's Group.
Early Music History is devoted to the study of music from the early Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century. It demands the highest standards of scholarship from its contributors, all of whom are leading academics in their fields. It gives preference to studies pursuing interdisciplinary approaches and to those developing novel methodological ideas. The scope is exceptionally broad and includes manuscript studies, textual criticism, iconography, studies of the relationship between words and music and the relationship between music and society. Articles in volume ten include: Machaut's motet 15 and the Roman de la Rose: the literary context of Amours qui a le pouoir/Faus Samblant m' a deceii/Vidi Dominum; Giulo de' Medici's music books; Parisian nobles, a Scottish princess and the woman's voice in late medieval song.
Matters of authenticity. Chopin's Polish rhapsody / Ferdinand Gajewski -- Matters folkloric. L'emprunt, facteur de renouvellement musical dans les pays celtiques / Yves Defrance ; Gibbons in the Budapest Zoo : reflections on Hungarian folksong / Virginia James Kidd ; Folklore and reminiscence in Claude Debussy / Virginia Raad -- Matters instrumental. Frédéric Triebert (1813-1878), designer of the modern oboe : newly found archival documents featuring the inventory and auction of his musical instrument enterprise / Tula Giannini ; Marking the accord of instrument and style, 1709-1768 / Sally C. Park -- Matters naval. Jean Cras, the scientist : an explication of his navigational ruler ; Compass, la règle-rapporteur cras / Allan P. Archer -- Matters novel. Album-leaf : for piano 109 / John Davison -- Matters operatic. Naturaliste et dreyfusard : Alfred Bruneau, compositeur engagé / Jean-Max Guieu -- Deconstructive melodrama in the Hamlet of Ambroise Thomas / John Harrison ; Judith Gautier et les traductions de Parsifal / Danièle Pistone ; Gawain in opera 159 / Jerome V. Reel -- Matters operettic. The border territory between classical and broadway : a voyage ; Around and about Four saints in three acts and West Side story / Ralph P. Locke ; Manuel de Falla's early works for the theater / Elizabeth Seitz -- Matters of perception. Point-counter-point : Schoenberg meets Bach / John Daverio ; The problems of musical hermeneutics / Edward Lippman -- Matters of reception. From Haus to Konzerthaus : orchestrations of Schubert's : Erlkönig and other liede.
The culture of the enigmatic from Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance -- Devising musical riddles in the Renaissance -- The reception of the enigmatic in music theory -- Riddles visualised.
In the late fifteenth century the newly built Sistine Chapel was home to a vigorous culture of musical composition and performance. Josquin des Prez stood at its center, singing and composing for the pope's private choir. Josquin's Rome offers a new reading of the composer's work in light of the repertory he and his fellow papal singers performed from the chapel's singers' box. Comprising the single largest surviving corpus of late fifteenth-century sacred music, these pieces served as a backdrop for elaborately choreographed liturgical ceremonies--a sonic analogue to the frescoes by Botticelli, Perugino, and their contemporaries that adorn the chapel's walls. Jesse Rodin uses a comparative approach to uncover this aesthetically and intellectually rich musical tradition. He confronts longstanding problems concerning the authenticity and chronology of Josquin's music while offering nuanced readings of scandalously understudied works by the composer's contemporaries. The book further contextualizes Josquin by locating intersections between his music and the wider soundscape of the Cappella Sistina. Central to Rodin's argument is the idea that these pieces lived in performance. The author puts his interpretations into practice through a series of exquisite recordings by his ensemble, Cut Circle (available both on the companion website and as a CD from Musique en Wallonie). Josquin's Rome is an essential resource for musicologists, scholars of the Italian Renaissance, and enthusiasts of early music.
