Originally published in 1966, the Reeseschrift remains one of the most significant collections of musicological writings ever assembled. Its fifty-six essays, written by some of the greatest scholars of our time, range chronologically from antiquity to the 17thcentury and geographically from Byzantium to the British Isles. They deal with questions of history, style, form, texture, notation, and performance practice.
..". extremely useful... In MacClintock's selections, even when the source is primarily theoretical, she chooses passages that give a lively insight into actual music-making."A -- Continuo Readings on the performance of Western music from the late middle ages to the early nineteenth century describe the accepted conventions and actual practices of former times.
In the writings of Nicola Vicentino (1555) and Gioseffo Zarlino (1558) is found, for the first time, a systematic means of explaining music's expressive power based upon the specific melodic and harmonic intervals from which it is constructed. This "theory of interval affect" originates not with these theorists, however, but with their teacher, influential Venetian composer Adrian Willaert (1490-1562). Because Willaert left no theoretical writings of his own, Timothy McKinney uses Willaert's music to reconstruct his innovative theories concerning how music might communicate extramusical ideas. For Willaert, the appellations "major" and "minor" no longer signified merely the larger and smaller of a pair of like-numbered intervals; rather, they became categories of sonic character, the members of which are related by a shared sounding property of "majorness" or "minorness" that could be manipulated for expressive purposes. This book engages with the madrigals of Willaert's landmark Musica nova collection and demonstrates that they articulate a theory of musical affect more complex and forward-looking than recognized currently. The book also traces the origins of one of the most widespread musical associations in Western culture: the notion that major intervals, chords and scales are suitable for the expression of happy affections, and minor for sad ones. McKinney concludes by discussing the influence of Willaert's theory on the madrigals of composers such as Vicentino, Zarlino, Cipriano de Rore, Girolamo Parabosco, Perissone Cambio, Francesco dalla Viola, and Baldassare Donato, and describes the eventual transformation of the theory of interval affect from the Renaissance view based upon individual intervals measured from the bass, to the Baroque view based upon invertible triadic entities.
The Madrigal: A Research and Information Guide is the first comprehensive annotated bibliography of scholarship on virtually all aspects of madrigal composition, production, and consumption. It contains 1,237 entries for items in English, French, German, and Italian. Scholars, students, teachers, librarians, and performers now have access to this rich literature in a single volume.
This volume unites a collection of articles which illustrate brilliantly the complexity of European cultural history in the Renaissance. On the one hand, scholars of this period were inspired by classical narratives on the sublime effects of music and, on the other hand, were affected by the profound religious upheavals which destroyed the unity of Western Christianity and, in so doing, opened up new avenues in the world of music. These articles offer as broad a vision as possible of the ways of thinking about music which developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Exploring the nexus of music and religious education involves fundamental questions regarding music itself, its nature, its interpretation, and its importance in relation to both education and the religious practices into which it is integrated. This cross-disciplinary volume of essays offers the first comprehensive set of studies to examine the role of music in educational and religious reform and the underlying notions of music in early modern Europe. It elucidates the context and manner in which music served as a means of religious teaching and learning during that time, thereby identifying the religio-cultural and intellectual foundations of early modern European musical phenomena and their significance for exploring the interplay of music and religious education today.
