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.

This book examines the relation of words and music in England and France during the three centuries following the Norman Conquest. The basic material of the study includes the chansons of the troubadours and trouvères and the varied Latin songs of the period. In addition to these 'lyric' forms, the author discusses the relations of music and poetry in dance-song, in narrative and in the ecclesiastical drama. Professor Stevens examines the ready-made, often unconscious, and misleading assumptions we bring to the study and performance of early music. In particular he affirms the importance of Number, in more than one sense, as a clue to the 'aesthetic' of the greater part of repertoire, to the relation of words and melody. and to the baffling problem of their rhythmic interpretation. This is the first wide-ranging study of words and music in this period in any language. It will be essential reading for scholars of the music and the literature of medieval Europe and will provide a basic and comprehensive introduction to the repertoire for students.

This study explores the composition and performance of liturgical music in El Escorial, from its founding by Philip II in 1563 to the death of Charles II in 1700. Philip II promoted within his monastery-palace a musical foundation whose dual function as royal chapel and as monastery in the service of a Counter-Reformation monarch was unique. The study traces the ways in which music styles and practices responded to the changing functions of the institution. Perceived notions about Spanish royal musical patronage are challenged, musical manuscripts are scrutinized, biographical details of hundreds of musicians are uncovered, and musical practices are examined. Additionally, two important choral pieces are printed here for the first time.

In the great tradition of the German Festschrift, this book brings together articles by Professor Bernstein's colleagues, friends and students to honor him on his 70th birthday. Ranging in subject from the trouv e song through esoteric aspects of Renaissance studies and authenticity in 18th-century musical sources to a lively and irreverent attack on performance practices today, the twenty essays by many of America's most distinguished scholars reflect the breadth and variety of Martin Bernstein's far-reaching interests and demonstrates the vitality and relevance of what is best in musicology today.

This is a collection of twenty-nine of the most influential articles and papers about medieval musical instruments and their repertory. The authors discuss the construction of the instruments, their playing technique, the occasions for which they performed and their repertory. Taken as a whole, they paint a very broad, as well as detailed, picture of instrumental performance during the medieval period.