Where the Middle Ages Begin
A fascinating musical instrument Saadat Abdullayeva IRS Heritage: No.9 (2012) Abstract Among the Eastern musical instruments, the UD has a very interesting history of many centuries, which is proved by archeological finds and manuscripts. Thus, according to terra cottas (9-10 cm fired statuettes with a flat back and embossed face, most of which date back […]
Did you know that the famous actor Sir Christopher Lee is also a heavy metal singer? And his songs are based on the life and times of Charlemagne?
Apparently early carols could be quite lewd, and they were originally associated with dance as well as song.
There are some songs and rhymes that are so well-known in our culture that we often wonder where we learned them.
Barbarians and Literature – Viking Metal and its Links to Old Norse Mythology By Imke von Helden The Metal Void: First Gatherings, edited by Niall W. R. Scott and Imke Von Helden (Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010) Introduction: Viking Metal originated in the late 1980s in Scandinavian countries, pioneered by the Swedish Death Metal Band Bathory. It was further developed and […]
A book by Robert Mullally is answering a part of this question, detailing one of the most popular dances of the Middle Ages.
To the musician, approaching this material for the first time, it may come as a shock to find how vital to English life and thought, how integral a part of English society were secular music and musicians in the Middle Ages.
In the fifteenth-century Passion d’Auvergne, the rounding up of martyrs for persecution inspires torturer Maulbec to teach his cronies the words of a hunting song which imitates the cries of wounded animals.
Johannes von Soest (also referred to as Steinwart or Steinwert) was a German singer, composer and poet. He is the author of a vernacular autobiography in couplets which is not only one of the few examples of late medieval German autobiography but also one of the very few surviving autobiographical documents written by a musician in this period.
Toward the end of the twelfth century, moral conflict was rampant in the Catholic Church regarding the conduct (and misconduct) of all levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, though especially at the two extremes on the scale of power. Music and literature from the period have immortalized the mischievous and impious escapades of certain members of the lower orders of clergy, termed satirically the ordo vagorum.
Since we have melodies for both songs, the question of what “feminine” voices we are hearing is a musi- cal as well as a poetic issue.
Profile of the Toronto-based quartet Sine Nomine, with two videos from a recent performance.
One of the most interesting manuscripts of the late Middle Ages is now available online – The Geese Book, a lavishly and whimsically illuminated, two-volume liturgical book, can now be accessed through a project from the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
It’s obvious that the Byzantine female hymnography was not flourished especially in Byzantium.
He was born a peasant. Yet, through intelligence, political skill and uncommon good luck he came to be one of the most influential people in the Europe of his time…Pope Sylvester II.
The phenomenon of the castrati enters the history of Western music in the latter half of the 16th century, becoming a dominant factor in Italian music through most of the 17th and 18th centuries, and then gradually fading during the 19th century.
The six anonymous L’Homme arme masses in naples MS VI E 40, of the Biblioteca Nazionale, have prompted heated debate concerning their genesis since Dragan Plamenac discovered them in 1925.
This study asks: how did jongleurs professionalize over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and incorporate themselves into society as legitimate, productive members?
In this dissertation I delve into the songs of the late twelfth-century troubadour Folquet de Marseille whose thirteen songs surviving with their melodies provide a varied collection of a suitable size to permit intensive analysis of poetic and musical compositional practices and the interactions between the two.
Were there orchestras, and which was their place in the life of the Catholic or Byzantine Churches? On the other hand, to what extent was the organ used in the liturgical space and by whom?
The architectural metaphor used throughout Hildegard’s Symphonia is not an isolated or independent occurrence; rather it is deeply rooted in her theology.
The office of the dead has become a familiar portion of the divine office to anyone who studies chant, but this is the limit of most research. Although Cluny maintained a reputation for its frequent celebration of the office of the dead, the Cluniac office of the dead has only been mentioned in passing in many chant studies.
What does a hero do when he finds himself in an impossible situation where customary tactics are useless; magic is not in the cards, and divine intervention unlikely? He could give up. Or he could use cunning. In both King Horn and Sir Orfeo, the hero wiggles out of just such a squeeze by using a minstrel disguise entrance trick—a sort of musical Trojan horse for which the enemy’s closely guarded gates swing open in welcome.
Filippino belongs to that stream of later Quattrocento Florentine painting in which topographical accuracy and careful attention to detail was particularly valued.4 He included musical images, mostly instruments, in a number of his works: some are clearly realistic representations of contemporary instruments, others are obviously intended to be symbolic; occasionally the two types are found in a single work.
Are there discernible historical roots or clearly perceived analogies that explicitly relate Bach’s music to the Middle Ages?
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