First Published in 2002. This guide introduces students and scholars to the literature on Palestrina as well as the complicated history of the publication of his works. This bibliography is divided into four primary sections: historical background on musical, social, and cultural life; biographical literature; studies of sources, music, and style; and reception history. They are divided roughly into the periods dating from Palestrina's lifetime to about 1750; from about 1750 to about 1914; from 1914 to the present. This title also contains historical research on performance conditions and practices as they would have applied in Palestrina's time.

We know what, say, a Josquin mass looks like but what did it sound like? This is a much more complex and difficult question than it may seem. Kenneth Kreitner has assembled twenty articles, published between 1946 and 2009, by scholars exploring the performance of music from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The collection includes works by David Fallows, Howard Mayer Brown, Christopher Page, Margaret Bent, and others covering the voices-and-instruments debate of the 1980s, the performance of sixteenth-century sacred and secular music, the role of instrumental ensembles, and problems of pitch standards and musica ficta. Together the papers form not just a comprehensive introduction to the issues of renaissance performance practice, but a compendium of clear thinking and elegant writing about a perpetually intriguing period of music history.

The Song of Songs is a fascinating text. Read as an allegory of God’s love for Israel, the Church, or individual believers, it became one of the most influential texts from the Bible. This volume includes twenty-three essays that cover the Song’s reception history from antiquity to the present. They illuminate the richness of this reception history, paying attention to diverse interpretations in commentaries, sermons, and other literature, as well as the Song’s impact on spirituality, theological and intellectual debates, and the arts.