Music In The Renaissance

A history of Renaissance music focused on the music itself and the social and institutional contexts that shaped musical genres and performance. This book provides a complete overview of music in the 15th and 16th Centuries. It explains the most significant features of the music and the distinguishing characteristics of Renaissance composers (in Europe and the New World). It includes a large integrated anthology of 94 musical examples, as well as illustrations of musical instruments, notation, and ensembles.

With contributions from a range of internationally known early music scholars and performers, Tess Knighton and David Fallows provide a lively new survey of music and culture in Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to 1600. Fifty essays comment on the social, historical, theoretical, and performance contexts of the music and musicians of the period to offer fresh perspectives on musical styles, research sources, and performance practices of the medieval and Renaissance periods.

This 1994 collection explores the musical culture of the German-speaking realm in the age of Gutenberg, Dürer and Luther.

This is a complete revision of the second edition, designed as a guide and resource in the study of music from the earliest times through the Renaissance period. The authors have completely revised and updated the bibliographies; in general they are limited to English language sources. In order to facilitate study of this period and to use materials efficiently, references to facsimiles, monumental editions, complete composers' works and specialized anthologies are given. The authors present this systematic organization in this volume in the hope that students, teachers, and performers may find in it a ready tool for developing a comprehensive understanding of the music of this period.

What were the methods and educational philosophies of music teachers in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance? What did students study? What were the motivations of teacher and student? Contributors to this volume address these topics and other -- including gender, social status, and the role of the Church -- to better understand the identities of music teachers and students from 650 to 1650 in Western Europe. This volume provides an expansive view of the beginnings of music pedagogy, and shows how the act of learning was embedded in the broader context of the early Western art music tradition.

Based on extensive documentary and archival research, Music in Renaissance Ferrara is a documentary history of music for one of the most important city-states of the Italian Renaissance. Lockwood shows how patrons and musicians created a musical center over the course of the fifteenth-century, tracing the growth of music and musical life in rich detail. It also sheds new light on the careers of such important composers as Dufay, Martini, Obrecht, and Josquin Desprez. This paperback edition features a new preface that re-introduces the book and reflects on its contribution to our modern knowledge of music in the culture of the Italian Renaissance.

This book offers a survey of how female and male characters in English Renaissance theatre participated and interacted in musical activities, both inside and outside the contemporary societal decorum. Wong’s analysis broadens our understanding of the general theatrical representation of music, or musical dramaturgy, and complicates the current discussion of musical portrayal and construction of gender during this period. Wong discusses dramaturgical meanings of music and its association with gender, love, and erotomania in Renaissance plays. The negotiation between the dichotomous qualities of the heavenly and the demonic finds extensive application in recent studies of music in early modern English plays. However, while ideological dualities identified in music in traditional Renaissance thinking may seem unequivocal, various musical representations of characters and situations in early modern drama would prove otherwise. Wong, building upon the conventional model of binarism, explores how playwrights created their musical characters and scenarios according to the received cultural use and perception of music, and, at the same time, experimented with the multivalent meanings and significance embodied in theatrical music.

In early modern Europe, music – particularly singing – was the arena where body and soul came together, embodied in the notion of musica humana. Kim uses this concept to examine the framework within which music and song were used to promote moral education and addresses Renaissance ideas of religion, education and music.

Vocal/choral issues. The solo voice in the Renaissance / Ellen Hargis ; On singing and the vocal ensemble I / Alexander Blachly ; On singing and the vocal ensemble II / Alejandro Planchart ; Practical matters of vocal performance / Anthony Rooley -- Wind, string, and percussion instruments. Recorder ; Renaissance flute / Herbert Myers ; Capped double reeds : crumhorn--Kortholt--Schreierpfeif / Jeffery Kite-Powell ; Shawm and curtal / Ross Duffin ; Racket : rackett, Rankett (Ger.), cervelas (Fr.), cervello (It.) / Jeffery Kite-Powell ; Bagpipe / Adam Knight Gilbert ; Cornett / Douglas Kirk ; Sackbut / Stewart Carter -- Bowed instruments / Wendy Gillespie -- The violin / David Douglass -- Plucked instruments / Paul O'Dette -- The harp / Herbert Myers -- Early percussion / Benjamin Harms -- Keyboard instruments / Jack Ashworth -- Practical considerations/instrumentation. Proto-continuo / Jack Ashworth and Paul O'Dette ; Mixed ensembles / James Tyler ; Large ensembles / Jeffery Kite-Powell ; Rehearsal tips for directors / Adam Knight Gilbert ; Performance editions / Frederick Gable -- Performance practice. Tuning and temperament / Ross Duffin ; Pitch and transposition / Herbert Myers ; Ornamentation in sixteenth-century music / Bruce Dickey ; Pronunciation guides / Ross Duffin -- Aspects of theory. Eight brief rules for composing a si placet altus, ca. 1470-1510 / Adam Knight Gilbert ; Renaissance theory / Sarah Mead -- Introduction to Renaissance dance. Early Renaissance dance, 1450-1520 / Yvonne Kendall -- For the early music director. Starting from scratch / Jeffery Kite-Powell.

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.

"Like the other volumes in the series, Music in the Renaissance brings a fresh perspective to the study of music by emphasizing social, cultural, intellectual, and political contexts of the music. Richard Freedman looks far beyond the notes on the page or the details of composers’ lives to embrace audiences, performers, institutions, and social settings. For example, the text shows how new technologies of music printing in the Renaissance permitted composers to align notation with sound, causing audiences accustomed to aural transmission to rethink the concept of a musical work."--Résumé du site web de l'éditeur.

Music and society / Iain Fenlon -- Rome : a city of rich contrast / Christopher Reynolds -- North Italian courts, 1560-1540 / William F. Prizer -- Aragonese Naples / Allan W. Atlas -- Paris and the French court under Francois I / Richard Freedman -- Lyons : commercial and cultural metropolis / Frank Dobbins -- The Habsburg courts in the Netherlands and Austria, 1477-1530 / Martin Picker -- Munich at the time of Orlande de Lassus / James Haar -- The Lutheran reformation / Robin A. Leaver -- 16th-century Nuremberg / Susan Gattuso -- Elizabethan London / Craig Monson -- The Spanish court of Ferdinand and Isabella / Tess Knighton -- 16th-century Antwerp / Kristine K. Forney.

"An elegant anthology. The specialist will not miss the quiet sophistication with which the music has been selected and prepared. Some of it is printed here for the first time, and much of it has been edited anew." "Notes" This treasury of 47 vocal works edited by Noah Greenberg, founder and former director of the New York Pro Musica Antiqua will delight all lovers of medieval and Renaissance music. Containing a wealth of both religious and secular music from the 12th to the 17th centuries, the collection covers a broad range of moods, from the hearty "Blow Thy Horne Thou Jolly Hunter" by William Cornysh to the reflective and elegiac "Cease Mine Eyes" by Thomas Morley. Of the religious works, nine were written for church services, including "Sanctus" by Henry IV and "Angus Dei" from a beautiful four-part mass by Thomas Tallis. Other religious songs in the collection come from England's rich tradition of popular religious lyric poetry, and include William Byrd's "Susanna Farye," the anonymously written "Deo Gracias Anglia" (The Agincort Carol), and Thomas Ravenscroft's "O Lord, Turne Now Away Thy Face" and "Remember O Thou Man." Approximately half of the songs are secular, some from the popular tradition and others from the courtly poets and musicians surrounding such musically inclined monarchs as Henry VIII who himself is represented in this collection with two charming songs, "With Owt Dyscorde" and "O My Hart." Among the notable composers of Tudor and Elizabethan England represented here are Orlando Gibbons, John Dowland, and Thomas Weelkes. "

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

These essays illuminate the changing nature of text-music relationships from the time of Petrarch to Guarini and, in music, from the madrigals of Giovanni da Cascia to those of Gesualdo da Venosa. Haar traces a line of development from the stylized rhetoric of Trecento song through the popularizing trends of Quattrocento music and on to the union of verbal and musical cadence that marked the high Renaissance in sixteenth-century Italian music.