Five recently published books about medieval music.
Angel song: Medieval English music in history
By Lisa Colton
Routledge
ISBN: 978-1-315-56706-8
Excerpt: This book is stimulated by a desire to explore the ways that the stories of English medieval music has been constructed, received and transformed, to reveal the mythologies of Merrie England that continue to pervade recent discourse. My aim is to reappraise medieval English musical history, challenging assumptions, authorities, champions and legacies. There can be no single, authoritative chronology in English music; there remains many histories of English music waiting to be told. Instead, I will reveal common trajectories within music-historical writing in the distant and more recent pasts, identify contradictions and open historical avenues for future scholarship.
Click here to visit the publisher’s website
Click here to buy this book from Amazon.com
The Musica of Hermmannus Contractus
Edited and translated by Leonard Ellindwood, revised by John L. Snyder
University of Rochester Press
ISBN: 978-1-58046-390-4
Publisher’s Overview: A polymath and monk, Hermannus Contractus (1013-54) contributed to the important advancements made in European arts and sciences in the first half of the eleventh century, writing on history, astronomy, and time-keeping devices, among other topics, and composing several chants. His music theory, founded on a systematic treatment of traditional concepts and terminology dating back to the ancient Greeks, is concerned largely with the organization of pitch in Gregorian chant. Hermann’s approach stems from Germanic species-based thought, and is marked by a distinction between aspects of form and aspects of position, privileging the latter. He expresses this in terms imported from then-new developments in Italian music theory, thus acting as a nexus for the two traditions. Numerology and number symbolism play significant roles in Hermann’s theories, and his critiques of other theorists offer insights into medieval intellectual life. Hermann also uses chant citations and exercises to help his readers apply theory to practice.
Click here to visit the publisher’s website
Click here to buy this book from Amazon.com
Guy of Saint-Denis, Tractatus De Tonis
Edited and and translated by Constant J. Mews, Carol J. Williams, John N. Crossley, and Catherine Jeffreys
Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN: 9781580442541
Excerpt: The writing of Guy of Saint-Dens about plainchant is not widely known. Sometime in the early fourteenth century, this monk from Saint-Denis, one of the oldest Benedictine abbeys in France, composed a treatise about the eight tones or melodic types into which all plainchant was conventionally classified. While it had often been monastic practice to list chant in this way in a Tonale (tonary), Guy offers an unusually sophisticated analysis in his Tractanus de tonis. He divides his work into two parts: the first providing a theoretical basis for understanding the tones into which all chant is divided; the second, particular examples of chants with their tones.
Click here to visit the publisher’s website
Click here to buy this book from Amazon.com
Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos
By Andrew Hicks
Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780190658205
Publisher’s Overview: Composing the World charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and expressive modalities embedded within a late-ancient and medieval cosmological discourse: that of a cosmos animated and choreographed according to a specifically musical aesthetic. The specific historical terrain of Hicks’ discussion centers upon the world of twelfth-century philosophy, and from there he offers a new intellectual history of the role of harmony in medieval cosmological discourse, a discourse which itself focused on the reception and development of Platonism.
Click here to visit the publisher’s website
Click here to buy this book from Amazon.com
Sources of Identity: Makes, Owners and Users of Music Sources Before 1600
Edited by Lisa Colton and Tim Shephard
Brepols
ISBN: 978-2-503-56778-5
Except: The papers included in this volume were presented, in much shorter form, at a conference entitled ‘Sources of Identity: Makers, Owners and Users of Music Sources Before 1600’ held a the University of Sheffield in 2013. The stated aim of the event was to leave aside the traditionally dominant view of early music sources as a means of access to medieval and Renaissance repertories, focussing instead on the people who commissioned, made, owned and used music books, and on their reasons for so doing. In the terms proposed by a recent study of art patronage in the period, what was the ‘payoff’ enjoyed by individuals and groups who created and deployed such objects?
Click here to visit the publisher’s website
Click here to buy this book from Amazon.com
Five recently published books about medieval music.
By Lisa Colton
Routledge
ISBN: 978-1-315-56706-8
Excerpt: This book is stimulated by a desire to explore the ways that the stories of English medieval music has been constructed, received and transformed, to reveal the mythologies of Merrie England that continue to pervade recent discourse. My aim is to reappraise medieval English musical history, challenging assumptions, authorities, champions and legacies. There can be no single, authoritative chronology in English music; there remains many histories of English music waiting to be told. Instead, I will reveal common trajectories within music-historical writing in the distant and more recent pasts, identify contradictions and open historical avenues for future scholarship.
Click here to visit the publisher’s website
Click here to buy this book from Amazon.com
Edited and translated by Leonard Ellindwood, revised by John L. Snyder
University of Rochester Press
ISBN: 978-1-58046-390-4
Publisher’s Overview: A polymath and monk, Hermannus Contractus (1013-54) contributed to the important advancements made in European arts and sciences in the first half of the eleventh century, writing on history, astronomy, and time-keeping devices, among other topics, and composing several chants. His music theory, founded on a systematic treatment of traditional concepts and terminology dating back to the ancient Greeks, is concerned largely with the organization of pitch in Gregorian chant. Hermann’s approach stems from Germanic species-based thought, and is marked by a distinction between aspects of form and aspects of position, privileging the latter. He expresses this in terms imported from then-new developments in Italian music theory, thus acting as a nexus for the two traditions. Numerology and number symbolism play significant roles in Hermann’s theories, and his critiques of other theorists offer insights into medieval intellectual life. Hermann also uses chant citations and exercises to help his readers apply theory to practice.
Click here to visit the publisher’s website
Click here to buy this book from Amazon.com
Edited and and translated by Constant J. Mews, Carol J. Williams, John N. Crossley, and Catherine Jeffreys
Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN: 9781580442541
Excerpt: The writing of Guy of Saint-Dens about plainchant is not widely known. Sometime in the early fourteenth century, this monk from Saint-Denis, one of the oldest Benedictine abbeys in France, composed a treatise about the eight tones or melodic types into which all plainchant was conventionally classified. While it had often been monastic practice to list chant in this way in a Tonale (tonary), Guy offers an unusually sophisticated analysis in his Tractanus de tonis. He divides his work into two parts: the first providing a theoretical basis for understanding the tones into which all chant is divided; the second, particular examples of chants with their tones.
Click here to visit the publisher’s website
Click here to buy this book from Amazon.com
By Andrew Hicks
Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780190658205
Publisher’s Overview: Composing the World charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and expressive modalities embedded within a late-ancient and medieval cosmological discourse: that of a cosmos animated and choreographed according to a specifically musical aesthetic. The specific historical terrain of Hicks’ discussion centers upon the world of twelfth-century philosophy, and from there he offers a new intellectual history of the role of harmony in medieval cosmological discourse, a discourse which itself focused on the reception and development of Platonism.
Click here to visit the publisher’s website
Click here to buy this book from Amazon.com
Edited by Lisa Colton and Tim Shephard
Brepols
ISBN: 978-2-503-56778-5
Except: The papers included in this volume were presented, in much shorter form, at a conference entitled ‘Sources of Identity: Makers, Owners and Users of Music Sources Before 1600’ held a the University of Sheffield in 2013. The stated aim of the event was to leave aside the traditionally dominant view of early music sources as a means of access to medieval and Renaissance repertories, focussing instead on the people who commissioned, made, owned and used music books, and on their reasons for so doing. In the terms proposed by a recent study of art patronage in the period, what was the ‘payoff’ enjoyed by individuals and groups who created and deployed such objects?
Click here to visit the publisher’s website
Click here to buy this book from Amazon.com
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