Understanding Medieval Liturgy
Understanding Medieval Liturgy

Author: Helen Gittos

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1134797672

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This book provides an introduction to current work and new directions in the study of medieval liturgy. It focuses primarily on so-called occasional rituals such as burial, church consecration, exorcism and excommunication rather than on the Mass and Office. Recent research on such rites challenges many established ideas, especially about the extent to which they differed from place to place and over time, and how the surviving evidence should be interpreted. These essays are designed to offer guidance about current thinking, especially for those who are new to the subject, want to know more about it, or wish to conduct research on liturgical topics. Bringing together scholars working in different disciplines (history, literature, architectural history, musicology and theology), time periods (from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries) and intellectual traditions, this collection demonstrates the great potential that liturgical evidence offers for understanding many aspects of the Middle Ages. It includes essays that discuss the practicalities of researching liturgical rituals; show through case studies the problems caused by over-reliance on modern editions; explore the range of sources for particular ceremonies and the sort of questions which can be asked of them; and go beyond the rites themselves to investigate how liturgy was practised and understood in the medieval period.

Renewal and Resistance
Renewal and Resistance

Author: Paul Collins

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9783039113811

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The Roman Catholic Church has always been concerned with the quality of the music used in the liturgy, and the essays in this volume trace the church's efforts, during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, to cultivate a more appropriate liturgical music for its Latin Rite. The task of restoration - expressed, for example, in the chant revival associated with the monks of Solesmes, the efforts of the Cecilian movement, and Pius X's determination to reform sacred music in the universal church - is a recurring theme in the book. Meanwhile resistance, particularly to the reforms decreed by the pope's 1903 motu proprio, also finds a voice in the volume. The essays collected here describe selected scenes and episodes from the unending story of imperfect human beings trying to express in their music the perfection of God.

Debussy's Critics
Debussy's Critics

Author: Alexandra Kieffer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-06-04

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0190847263

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Debussy's Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism explores the music of Claude Debussy and its early reception in light of the rise of the empirical human sciences in Western Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. In the midst of a sea change in conceptions of the human person, the critics who wrote about Debussy's music in the Parisian press-continually returning to this music's nebulous relationship to sensation and sensibilité-attempted to articulate a music aesthetic appropriate to the fully embodied, material self of psychological modernism. While scholarship on French music in this period has often emphasized its affinities with other art forms, such as Impressionist painting and Symbolist poetry, Debussy's Critics demonstrates that a preoccupation with the specifically sonic materiality of Debussy's music, informed by late nineteenth-century scientific discourses on affect, perception, and cognition, was central to this music's historical intervention. Foregrounding the dynamic exchange between sounds and ideas, this book reveals the disorienting and bewildering experience of listening to Debussy's music, which compelled its early audiences to reimagine the most fundamental premises of the European art-music tradition.

The Lost Paradise
The Lost Paradise

Author: Jonathan Glasser

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 022632723X

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The urban centers of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia are home to performance traditions whose practitioners trace them to al-Andalus, or medieval Muslim Spain. According to its devotees, the repertoire was passed down over the centuries from master to disciple. Today it is ubiquitous in the Maghreb and its diaspora, and is held up as a quasi-official classical music that expresses an abiding link to a prestigious precolonial past. Despite its deep roots, Andalusi music has also profoundly changed in the past one hundred years, and it is now considered a threatened art. In "The Lost Paradise," Jonathan Glasser accounts for the longevity of Andalusi music s revivalist project through ethnographic and archival research carried out in Algeria, Morocco, and France. He treats Andalusi music as a circulatory practice that privileges the transmission of embodied knowledge from master to disciple. The genealogical model embeds Andalusi music in social relations, closely linking it to the cultivation of old urban identities that reach across North Africa and into al-Andalus. At the same time, it is precisely the genealogical model that makes the repertoire so elusive as a social practice, giving rise to both the longstanding claim that some masters withhold valuable songs and the efforts to counteract alleged hoarding via the printed word. By looking to the performative, textual, institutional, and emotive practices surrounding Andalusi music, Glasser evokes a tradition animated by subtle tensions between secrecy and publicness, keeping and giving, embodiment and detachment."

Writing Sounds in Carolingian Europe
Writing Sounds in Carolingian Europe

Author: Susan Rankin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-11-08

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 1108421407

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This comprehensive study of musical notation from early medieval Europe provides a crucial new foundational model for understanding later Western notations.

Visions of Amen
Visions of Amen

Author: Stephen Schloesser

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2014-07-10

Total Pages: 594

ISBN-13: 0802807623

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French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908 1992) is probably best known for his Quartet for the End of Time, premiered in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1941. However, Messiaen was a remarkably complex, intelligent person with a sometimes tragic domestic life who composed a wide range of music. This book explores the enormous web of influences in the early part of Messiaen's long life. The first section of the book provides an intellectual biography of Messiaen's early life in order to make his (difficult) music more accessible to the general listener. The second section offers an analysis of and thematic commentaries on Messiaen's pivotal work for two pianos, Visions of Amen, composed in 1943. Schloesser's analysis includes timing indications corresponding to a downloadable performance of the work by accomplished pianists Stphane Lemelin and Hyesook Kim.

Performing Orthodox Ritual in Byzantium
Performing Orthodox Ritual in Byzantium

Author: Andrew Walker White

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-10-08

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 131643222X

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In this groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study, Andrew Walker White explores the origins of Byzantine ritual - the rites of the early Greek Orthodox Church - and its unique relationship with traditional theatre. Tracing the secularization of pagan theatre, the rise of rhetoric as an alternative to acting, as well as the transmission of ancient methods of musical composition into the Byzantine era, White demonstrates how Christian ritual was in effect a post-theatrical performing art, created by intellectuals who were fully aware of traditional theatre but who endeavoured to avoid it. The book explores how Orthodox rites avoid the aesthetic appreciation associated with secular art, and conducts an in-depth study (and reconstruction) of the late Byzantine Service of the Furnace. Often treated as a liturgical drama, White translates and delineates the features of five extant versions, to show how and why it generated widely diverse audience reactions in both medieval times and our own.

Ina Lohr (1903–1983)
Ina Lohr (1903–1983)

Author: Anne Smith

Publisher: Schwabe Verlag (Basel)

Published: 2020-06-10

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 3796541542

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Although almost forgotten today, Ina Lohr played a significant role in Basel's 20th-century musical world. In 1930, she became Paul Sacher's musical assistant, helping in the preparations for performances of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, of which he was the director. Just three years later, she was one of the courageous pioneers who under the direction of Paul Sacher founded the now internationally renowned Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. As Ina Lohr was instrumental in creating its program, her work indirectly had an enormous impact on the Early Music Movement. Through her biography, we learn to see Early Music within the complex cultural and religious matrix of her time, forcing ourselves to transcend our own boundaries to understand her life.

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism
The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism

Author: Stephen C. Meyer

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 844

ISBN-13: 0190658444

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The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism brings together international scholars from a wide range of disciplines to provide a snapshot of the diverse ways in which medievalism--the retrospective immersion in the images, sounds, narratives, and ideologies of the European Middle Ages--powerfully transforms many of the varied musical traditions of the last two centuries.

The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music
The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music

Author: Jim Samson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-12-03

Total Pages: 796

ISBN-13: 9780521590174

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The most informed reference book on nineteenth-century music currently available, this comprehensive overview of music in the nineteenth century draws on the most recent scholarship in the field. Essays investigate the intellectual and socio-political history of the time, and examine topics such as nations and nationalism, the emergent concept of an avant garde, and musical styles and languages at the turn of the century. It contains a detailed chronology, and extensive glossaries.