After the Mass Ordinary, the Magnificat was the liturgical text most frequently set by Renaissance composers, and Orlando di Lasso's 101 polyphonic settings form the largest and most varied repertory of Magnificats in the history of European music. In the first detailed investigation of this repertory, David Crook focuses on the forty parody or imitation Magnificats, which Lasso based on motets, madrigals, and chansons written by such composers as Josquin and Rore. By examining these Magnificats in their social, historical, and liturgical contexts and in terms of composition theory, Crook opens a new window on the breadth and subtlety of an important composer often harshly judged on his use of preexistent music. Crook places Lasso amidst the Counter-Reformation reforms at the Bavarian court where he composed the Magnificats, and where there emerged a fanatical Marian cult that favored this genre. In a section on compositional procedure, Crook explains that Lasso abandoned the traditional eight psalm-tone melodies in his imitation Magnificats, considers the new ways he found to represent the tones, and describes how Lasso's experimentation reflected the complex relationship between mode and tone in Renaissance theory and practice. Arguing that Lasso's varied uses of preexistent music defy current definitions of parody technique, Crook, in his final chapter, reveals the imitation Magnificats as vastly more imaginative and innovative than previous characterizations suggest. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

By the late-sixteenth century, Augsburg was one of the largest cities of the Holy Roman Empire, boasting an active musical life involving the contributions of musicians like Jacobus de Kerle, Hans Leo Hassler, and Gregor Aichinger. This musical culture, however, unfolded against a backdrop of looming religious schism. From the mid-sixteenth century onward, Augsburg was the largest 'biconfessional' city in the Empire, housing a Protestant majority and a Catholic minority, ruled by a city government divided between the two faiths. The period 1580-1630 saw a gradual widening of the divide between these groups. The arrival of the Jesuits in the 1580s polarized the religious atmosphere and fueled the assertion of a Catholic identity, expressed in public devotional services, spectacular processions, and pilgrimages to local shrines. The Catholic music produced for these occasions both reflected and contributed to the religious divide. This book explores the relationship between music and religious identity in Augsburg during this period. How did 'Catholic' and 'Protestant' repertories diverge from one another? What was the impetus for this differentiation, and what effect did the circulation and performance of this music have on Augsburg's religious culture? These questions call for a new, cross-disciplinary approach to the music history of this era, one which moves beyond traditional accounts of the lives and works of composers, or histories of polyphonic genres. Using a wide variety of archival and musical documents, Alexander Fisher offers a holistic view of this musical landscape, examining aspects of composition, circulation, performance, and cultural meaning.

The Reader's Guide to Music is designed to provide a useful single-volume guide to the ever-increasing number of English language book-length studies in music. Each entry consists of a bibliography of some 3-20 titles and an essay in which these titles are evaluated, by an expert in the field, in light of the history of writing and scholarship on the given topic. The more than 500 entries include not just writings on major composers in music history but also the genres in which they worked (from early chant to rock and roll) and topics important to the various disciplines of music scholarship (from aesthetics to gay/lesbian musicology).

Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria explores the nature of sound as a powerful yet ambivalent force in the religious struggles that permeated Germany during the Counter-Reformation. Author Alexander J. Fisher goes beyond a musicological treatment of composers, styles, and genres to examine how music, and more broadly sound itself, shaped the aural landscape of Bavaria as the duchy emerged as a militant Catholic bulwark. Fisher focuses particularly on the ways in which sound—including bell-ringing, gunfire, and popular song, as well as cultivated polyphony—not only was deployed by Catholic secular and clerical elites to shape the religious identities of Bavarian subjects, but also carried the potential to challenge and undermine confessional boundaries. Surviving literature, archival documents, and music illustrate the ways in which Bavarian authorities and their allies in the Catholic clergy and orders deployed sound to underline crucial theological differences with their Protestant antagonists, notably the cults of the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, and the saints. Official and popular rituals like divine worship, processions, and pilgrimages all featured distinctive sounds and music that shaped and reflected an emerging Catholic identity. Although officials imposed a severe regime of religious surveillance, the Catholic state's dominance of the soundscape was hardly assured. Fisher traces archival sources that show the resilience of Protestant vernacular song in Bavaria, the dissemination and performance of forbidden, anti-Catholic songs, the presence of Lutheran chorales in nominally Catholic church services into the late 16th century, and the persistence of popular "noise" more generally. Music, Piety, and Propaganda thus reveals historical, theological, and cultural issues of the period through the piercing dimension of its sounds, bringing into focus the import of sound as a strategic cultural tool with significant impact on the flow of history.

During the early modern period, visual imagery was put to ever new uses as many disciplines adopted visual criteria for testing truth claims, representing knowledge, or conveying information. Religious propagandists, political writers, satirists, cartographers, the scientific community, and others experimented with new uses of visual images. Artists, writers, preachers, musicians, and performers, among others, often employed visual images or conjured mental images to connect with their audiences. Contributors to this interdisciplinary collection creatively explore how the exponential growth in images, especially prints, impacted the intellectual horizons and the visual awareness of viewers in early modern Germany. Each of the chapters serves as a case study for one or more of the volume?s sub-themes: art, visual literacy, and strategies of presentation; audience and the art of persuasion; the art of envisioning; the ephemeral arts and theatricality; the built environment and spatial settings; and the history of the visual.

Exploring the relationship between Latin and music during the early modern era, this volume focuses on the link between Latin and music in the educational system of the time, and the development and influence of musical humanism, especially in settings of classical and Neo-Latin texts.

Early Music History is devoted to the study of music from the early Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century and includes manuscript studies, textual criticism, iconography, studies of the relationship between words and music, and the relationship between music and society. Articles in volume 21 include: Aaron's interpretation of Isidore and an illustrated copy of the Toscanello; Musica mundana, Aristotelian natural philosophy and ptolemaic astronomy; The Triodia Sacra as a key source for late-Renaissance music in southern Germany; The debate over song in the Accademia Fiorentina.