An urgently needed guide to understanding medieval music to be used as a text for the university undergraduate, graduate students in music and interdisciplinary medieval studies, and for the professional musicologist and medievalist. This book will also be appreciated by everyone interested in early music. Nancy van Deusen's The Cultural Context of Medieval Music addresses the mental landscape surrounding music that, especially, was sung and experienced in the Middle Ages. Largely anonymous in its composition, and apparently lacking the motivation of fame and commerce, music within a well thought-out system of education served a purpose that goes far beyond casual entertainment or personal professional advancement. Offering experience through performance, music exemplified the basic principles not only of the material and possible measurements of the visible world—such as of objects, relationships, and movement—but also of the invisible materials of sound and time, making it an ideal medium for working with unseen substances such as concepts, imaginations, and ideas. St. Augustine in the late fourth century reinforced the importance of music for the process of learning when he wrote that nothing could be truly understood without music. This book shows how this, in fact, is the case—a message of great relevance today.

Music was crucial to the learning process itself in the Middle Ages-and beyond. One learned basic concepts by doing them, and learned them well because music was "delicious" to the taste-a medieval insight that should be reclaimed

Spanning a millennium of musical history, this monumental volume brings together nearly forty leading authorities to survey the music of Western Europe in the Middle Ages. All of the major aspects of medieval music are considered, making use of the latest research and thinking to discuss everything from the earliest genres of chant, through the music of the liturgy, to the riches of the vernacular song of the trouvères and troubadours. Alongside this account of the core repertory of monophony, The Cambridge History of Medieval Music tells the story of the birth of polyphonic music, and studies the genres of organum, conductus, motet and polyphonic song. Key composers of the period are introduced, such as Leoninus, Perotinus, Adam de la Halle, Philippe de Vitry and Guillaume de Machaut, and other chapters examine topics ranging from musical theory and performance to institutions, culture and collections.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Music is rooted in the heart of Western culture. The absence of music from the usual publications of medieval history and history of art of the Middle Ages is understandable, considering the rarity of sources. And yet, throughout the last decades, an intense activity of historico-musicological research has been carried out internationally by a select group of specialized scholars. The ambitious goal of this work is to set medieval music within its historical and cultural context and to provide readers interested in different disciplines with an overall picture of music in the Middle Ages; multi-faceted, enjoyable, yet scientifically rigorous. To achieve this goal, the most prominent scholars of medieval musicology were invited to participate, along with archaeologists, experts of acoustics and architecture, historians and philosophers of medieval thought. The volume offers exceptional iconography and several maps, to accompany the reader in a fascinating journey through a network of places, cultural influences, rituals and themes.

Winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and Society of Music Theory's Wallace Berry Award This bold challenge to conventional notions about medieval music disputes the assumption of pure literacy and replaces it with a more complex picture of a world in which literacy and orality interacted. Asking such fundamental questions as how singers managed to memorize such an enormous amount of music and how music composed in the mind rather than in writing affected musical style, Anna Maria Busse Berger explores the impact of the art of memory on the composition and transmission of medieval music. Her fresh, innovative study shows that although writing allowed composers to work out pieces in the mind, it did not make memorization redundant but allowed for new ways to commit material to memory. Since some of the polyphonic music from the twelfth century and later was written down, scholars have long assumed that it was all composed and transmitted in written form. Our understanding of medieval music has been profoundly shaped by German philologists from the beginning of the last century who approached medieval music as if it were no different from music of the nineteenth century. But Medieval Music and the Art of Memory deftly demonstrates that the fact that a piece was written down does not necessarily mean that it was conceived and transmitted in writing. Busse Berger's new model, one that emphasizes the interplay of literate and oral composition and transmission, deepens and enriches current understandings of medieval music and opens the field for fresh interpretations.

From the emergence of plainsong to the end of the fourteenth century, this Companion covers all the key aspects of medieval music. Divided into three main sections, the book first of all discusses repertory, styles and techniques - the key areas of traditional music histories; next taking a topographical view of the subject - from Italy, German-speaking lands, and the Iberian Peninsula; and concludes with chapters on such issues as liturgy, vernacular poetry and reception. Rather than presenting merely a chronological view of the history of medieval music, the volume instead focuses on technical and cultural aspects of the subject. Over nineteen informative chapters, fifteen world-leading scholars give a perspective on the music of the Middle Ages that will serve as a point of orientation for the informed listener and reader, and is a must-have guide for anyone with an interest in listening to and understanding medieval music.