Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame stands as an enduring monument of medieval musical art. As such it is one of the most widely studied and performed works of music written before 1600. The Mass itself, however, is surrounded by uncertainty; its date of composition is unknown, its purpose is unclear, and its construction yields much ambiguity. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has now prepared a much-needed modern performing edition of this work, published by OUP's music department. This companion volume defines his editorial methods in the context of the minefield of controversies surrounding the principles of editing music of this period, and indeed of the many different interpretations of the compositional structure and function of the music. Relating the Mass to other works of the period, he provides the student and performer with an invaluable guide to its intricacies, while his approach will be welcomed by scholars as both controversial and stimulating.

One of the most widely studied and performed works of music written before 1600, Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame stands as an enduring monument of medieval musical art. The mass itself, however, is surrounded by uncertainty; its date of composition remains unknown, its purpose is unclear, and its construction yields much ambiguity. A controversial new approach to Machaut's composition technique, this volume provides a case study in the application of music ficta and a detailed introduction to performance. Relating the Mass to other works of the period, this introduction is an invaluable guide to its intricacies.

Guillaume de Machaut was the foremost poet-composer of his time. Studies look at all aspects of his prodigious output.

Table of contents

Offering comprehensive coverage of classical music, this guide surveys more than eleven thousand albums and presents biographies of five hundred composers and eight hundred performers, as well as twenty-three essays on forms, eras, and genres of classical music. Original.

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

England in the fifteenth century was the cradle of much that would have a profound impact on European music for the next several hundred years. Perhaps the greatest such development was the cyclic cantus firmus Mass, and scholarly attention has therefore often been drawn to identifying potentially English examples within the many anonymous Mass cycles that survive in continental sources. Nonetheless, to understand English music in this period is to understand it within a changing nexus of two-way cultural exchange with the continent, and the genre of the Mass cycle is very much at the forefront of this. Indeed, the question of ‘what is English’ cannot truly be answered without also answering the question of ‘what is continental’. This book seeks, initially, to answer both of these questions. Perhaps more importantly, it argues that a number of the works that have induced the most scholarly debate are best seen through the lens of intensive and long-term cultural exchange and that the great binary divide of provenance can, in many cases, productively be broken down. A great many of these works, though often written on the continent, can, it seems, only be understood in relation to English practice – a practice which has had, and will continue to have, major importance in the ongoing history of European Art Music.