The introit is the entrance song to the eucharistic celebration of the Catholic Church, sung to a prescribed text that is thematically linked to the season or the particular celebration and belongs to the category of antiphonal Mass chants. The introit chant is the last of the Mass propers to be researched in detail. In this groundbreaking study, Christoph Tietze presents the history and development of the introit through the ages. He has also composed congregational settings of the proper parts of the Mass for the liturgical year. This book shows how to make these texts practical for parish use. It will help pastors, music directors, and seminarians better understand the texts for use in today's liturgies. Book jacket.

Venetian music print culture of the mid-sixteenth century is presented here through a study of the Scotto press, one of the foremost dynastic music publishers of the Renaissance. For over a century, the house of Scotto played a pivotal role in the international book trade, publishing in a variety of fields including philosophy, medicine, religion, and music. This book examines the mercantile activities of the firm through both a historical study, which illuminates the wide world of the Venetian music printing industry, and a catalog, which details the music editions brought out by the firm during its most productive period. A valuable reference work, this book not only enhances our understanding of the socioeconomic and cultural history of Renaissance Venice, it also helps to preserve our knowledge of a vast musical repertory.

One of the most remarkable tales of recent resurrections in the field of early keyboard music concerns the music of Heinrich Scheidemann (c. 1595-1663). Long considered a minor master overshadowed by such figures as his teacher Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck or his fellow student Samuel Scheidt, a number of major source discoveries made in the second half of the twentieth century - the most important one being the discovery of the Zellerfield tablatures - have gradually raised his stature towards what it should now be, namely that of the paramount figure in North German organ music of the first half of the seventeenth century, equalled only by Buxtehude in the second half. Pieter Dirksen, one of the leading scholars on early German keyboard music, shows how Scheidemann was a central personality in the rich musical life of Hamburg and stood on friendly terms with colleagues such as Jacob and Johannes Praetorius, Ulrich Cernitz, Thomas Selle, Johann Schop and Johann Rist. The sources for Scheidemann are for the most part contemporary and stem from all periods of his career, and beyond that until one or two decades after his death. His keyboard music was never published in his lifetime but circulated widely within professional circles. Dirksen considers the transmission of Scheidemann's music as a whole in Part One, where each source is analyzed individually, and the repertoire itself is examined in Part Two. A number of specialized studies, including a detailed investigation into the background of one of the sources as well as adressing questions of organology (an account of the famous Catharinen organ as it was during Scheidemann's era) and performance practice (a study of the fingering indications and observations on registration practice) form Part Three. A wealth of appendices also detail a relative chronology of the music; a geographic overview of the transmission and two hitherto unpublished, fragmentarily transmitted Scheidemann pieces. The book will therefore a

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Mapping the Motet in the Post-Tridentine Era provides new dimensions to the discussion of the immense corpus of polyphonic motets produced and performed in the decades following the end of the Council of Trent in 1563. Beyond the genre’s rich connections with contemporary spiritual life and religious experience, the motet is understood here as having a multifaceted life in transmission, performance and reception. By analysing the repertoire itself, but also by studying its material life in books and accounts, in physical places and concrete sonic environments, and by investigating the ways in which the motet was listened to and talked about by contemporaries, the eleven chapters in this book redefine the cultural role of the genre. The motet, thanks to its own protean nature, not bound to any given textual, functional or compositional constraint, was able to convey cultural meanings powerfully, give voice to individual and collective identities, cross linguistic and confessional divides, and incarnate a model of learned and highly expressive musical composition. Case studies include considerations of composers (Palestrina, Victoria, Lasso), cities (Seville and Granada, Milan), books (calendrically ordered collections, non-liturgical music books) and special portions of the repertoire (motets pro defunctis, instrumental intabulations).

Pagination: vii + 106 pp.