Studies in the Performance of Late Medieval Music

This volume presents a series of important essays on some of the problems involved in attempting to perform music of the late Middle Ages.

Stanley Boorman (Edited by)

9780521088312, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 October 2008

324 pages
21 x 15.1 x 1.7 cm, 0.52 kg

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Music [AV]