Reading Renaissance Music Theory
Hearing with the Eyes

Explores fundamental questions about how music examples were read in Renaissance theory books.

Cristle Collins Judd (Author)

9780521028196, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 November 2006

364 pages, 87 b/w illus. 23 tables 22 music examples
24.5 x 17 x 2 cm, 0.54 kg

'Judd's book is a significant contribution to the history of music theory and … the history of music theorists … this is a valuable book that looks at familiar material in an original way. It received the Society of Music Theory's Wallace Berry Award in November 2001, deservedly so in my opinion, and it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of music theory and of writing about music in general.' American Musicological Society

This book examines a central group of music theory treatises that have formed the background to the study of Renaissance music. Taking theorists' music examples as a point of departure, it explores fundamental questions about how music was read, and by whom, situating the reading in specific cultural contexts. Numerous broader issues are addressed in the process: the relationship of theory and praxis; access to, and use of, printed musical sources; stated and unstated agendas of theorists; orality and literacy as it was represented via music print culture; the evaluation of anonymous repertories; and the analysis of repertories delineated by boundaries other than the usual ones of composer and genre. In particular this study illuminates the ways in which Renaissance theorists' choices have shaped later interpretation of earlier practice, and reflexively the ways in which modern theory has been mapped on to that practice.

List of illustrations
Foreward Ian Bent
Preface
Part I. Beginnings: 1. Prologue: Exempli gratia …
2. Music theory incunabula: printed books, printed music
Part II. 1520–1540: Pietro Aron and Seybald Heyden: 3. Pietro Aron and Petrucci's prints
4. Music anthologies, theory treatises, and the Reformation: Nuremberg in the 1530s and 1540s
Part III. The Polyphony of Heinrich Glarean's Dodecachordon (1547): 5. Exempla, commonplace books, and writing theory
6. The polyphony of the Dodecachordon
Part IV. Gioseffo Zarlino's Le Istitutioni Harmoniche (1558): 7. Composition and theory mediated by print culture
8. 'On the modes': the citations of Le Istitutioni Harmoniche part IV
Part V. Readings Past and Present: 9. Exempli gratia: a reception history of Magnus es tu Domine/Tu pauperum refugium
10. Epilogue: reading theorists reading (music)
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Music [AV]