Studies in the Performance of Late Medieval Music

by Stanley Boorman (Editor)

Overview

This volume presents a series of important essays by American and European scholars on some of the problems involved in attempting to perform music of the late Middle ages. The essays are based on papers read at a conference held at the New York University Center for Early Music in 1981 and they concern a varied selection of aspects of the subject; behind many lies an interest in the reopened question of how far instruments had a role in performing secular or sacred music. Among the questions tackled are: the types of harps found in fourteenth-century Italy, and their probable uses; the numbers of singers needed (with their ranges) for fourteenth-century English music; evidence for the use of instruments in the thirteenth century and for wind articulation in the late fourteenth; specific performing ensembles of the fifteenth century, and what they may have sung in a polyphonic Mass.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521088312
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/30/2008
Pages:	324
Product dimensions:	5.94(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

1. Fifteenth-century northern book painting and the a cappella question: an essay in iconographic method James W. McKinnon; 2. The visualisation of music through pictorial imagery and notation in late mediaeval France Tilman Seebass; 3. The trecento harp Howard Mayer Brown; 4. The 'reconstruction' of instrumental music: the interpretation of the earliest practical sources Wulf Arlt; 5. Mimesis and woodwind articulation in the fourteenth century Margaret Paine Hasselman and David McGown; 6. Specific information on the ensembles for composed polyphony, 1400–1474 David Fallows; 7. The performing ensemble for English church polyphony, c. 1320–c. 1390 Roger Bowers; 8. Some evidence for French influence in northern Italy, c. 1400 Anne Hallmark; 9. Parts with words and without words: the evidence for multiple texts in fifteenth-century Masses Alejandro Enrique Planchart; 10. Fourteenth-century music with texts revealing performance practice Ursula Gunther.