A detailed study of the sight-singing method introduced by the 11th-century monk Guido of Arezzo, in its intellectual context.

This volume of essays draws together recent work on historical music theory of the Renaissance. The collection spans the major themes addressed by Renaissance writers on music and highlights the differing approaches to this body of work by modern scholars, including: historical and theoretical perspectives; consideration of the broader cultural context for writing about music in the Renaissance; and the dissemination of such work. Selected from a variety of sources ranging from journals, monographs and specialist edited volumes, to critical editions, translations and facsimiles, these previously published articles reflect a broad chronological and geographical span, and consider Renaissance sources that range from the overtly pedagogical to the highly speculative. Taken together, this collection enables consideration of key essays side by side aided by the editor‘s introductory essay which highlights ongoing debates and offers a general framework for interpreting past and future directions in the study of historical music theory from the Renaissance.

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.

Enth. u.a. "The polyphony of Heinrich Glarean's 'Dodecachordon'" (S. 115-176).

This volume unites a collection of articles which illustrate brilliantly the complexity of European cultural history in the Renaissance. On the one hand, scholars of this period were inspired by classical narratives on the sublime effects of music and, on the other hand, were affected by the profound religious upheavals which destroyed the unity of Western Christianity and, in so doing, opened up new avenues in the world of music. These articles offer as broad a vision as possible of the ways of thinking about music which developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.