Tractatus Figurarum

Tractatus Figurarum PDF Author: Philip Evan Schreur
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803242036
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Notational complexity, or subtilitas, was engendered in the late fourteenth century by a thorough probing of all the rhythmic possibilities within the accepted mensurations. As French and Italian notational practices began to diverge at the beginning of the Ars nova, composers invented new rhythmic symbols?figurae?asøtheir innovations required, and this resulted in a variety of notations that were as confusing to the musician of the day as they are to the modern scholar. In the third quarter of the fourteenth century, a notational system combining elements of the French and Italian systems was put forth in the Tractatus figurarum. This system proposed a standard of set of figurae for simultaneous combinations of any two of the four prolations of the French mensural system. Edmond Coussemaker?s 1869 edition of the Tractatus figurarum, which attributes the treatise to Philippus de Caserta, was based on his knowledge of only four of the fourteen surviving manuscripts. A critical study of all the sources, including the important Newberry Library manuscript, leads to a corrected version of the text and allows the entire system to be resurrected. The critical edition is joined with fully annotated translation on facing pages. An Introduction discusses the authorship and theory of the treatise, as well as placing it within the context of the music theory of the fourteenth century. Full descriptions of all the manuscript sources and four full-color plates of the Newberry Library manuscript are included. The system of the Tractatus figurarum was beautifully creative, but it did not meet with success. Nevertheless, the treatise proves itself invaluable to the study of the Ars subtilior in revealing certain basic notational principles that may be applied to surviving musical compositions, illuminating the notational subtleties in which the music delighted.

Tractatus Figurarum

Tractatus Figurarum PDF Author: Philip Evan Schreur
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803242036
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Notational complexity, or subtilitas, was engendered in the late fourteenth century by a thorough probing of all the rhythmic possibilities within the accepted mensurations. As French and Italian notational practices began to diverge at the beginning of the Ars nova, composers invented new rhythmic symbols?figurae?asøtheir innovations required, and this resulted in a variety of notations that were as confusing to the musician of the day as they are to the modern scholar. In the third quarter of the fourteenth century, a notational system combining elements of the French and Italian systems was put forth in the Tractatus figurarum. This system proposed a standard of set of figurae for simultaneous combinations of any two of the four prolations of the French mensural system. Edmond Coussemaker?s 1869 edition of the Tractatus figurarum, which attributes the treatise to Philippus de Caserta, was based on his knowledge of only four of the fourteen surviving manuscripts. A critical study of all the sources, including the important Newberry Library manuscript, leads to a corrected version of the text and allows the entire system to be resurrected. The critical edition is joined with fully annotated translation on facing pages. An Introduction discusses the authorship and theory of the treatise, as well as placing it within the context of the music theory of the fourteenth century. Full descriptions of all the manuscript sources and four full-color plates of the Newberry Library manuscript are included. The system of the Tractatus figurarum was beautifully creative, but it did not meet with success. Nevertheless, the treatise proves itself invaluable to the study of the Ars subtilior in revealing certain basic notational principles that may be applied to surviving musical compositions, illuminating the notational subtleties in which the music delighted.

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages

The Motet in the Late Middle Ages PDF Author: Margaret Bent
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190063807
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 777

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Book Description
A unique capacity of measured polyphony is to give precisely fixed places not only to musical notes, but also to individual words in relation to them and each other. The Motet in the Late Middle Ages offers innovative approaches to the equal partnership of music and texts in motets of the fourteenth century and beyond, showcasing the imaginative opportunities afforded by this literal kind of intertextuality, and yielding a very different narrative from the common complaint that different simultaneous texts make motets incomprehensible. As leading musicologist Margaret Bent asserts, they simply require a different approach to preparation and listening. In this book, Bent examines the words and music of motets from many different angles: foundational verbal quotations and pre-existent chant excerpts and their contexts, citations both of words and music from other compositions, function, dating, structure, theory, and number symbolism. Individual studies of these original creations tease out a range of strategies, ingenuity, playfulness, striking juxtapositions, and even subversion. Half of the thirty-two chapters consist of new material; the other half are substantially revised and updated versions of previously published articles and chapters, organized into seven Parts. With new analyses of text and music together, new datings, new attributions, and new hypotheses about origins and interrelationships, Bent uncovers little-explored dimensions, provides a window into the craft and thought processes of medieval composers, and opens up many directions for future work.

De Proportionibus

De Proportionibus PDF Author: Johannes Ciconia
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803214651
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
Johannes Ciconia (ca. 1370?1412) is well known today as a composer both of sacred and secular music, but his theoretical works, probably written in Padua during the first decade of the fifteenth century, have until now been available only in manuscript form. This is the first complete edition of both of Ciconia?s theoretical works: the Nova musica, with its attendant De tribus generibus melorum, and the shorter De proportionibus, itself a revision of the third book of the Nova musica. ø The Nova musica is unique as the only only large-scale speculative work of the period known to have been written by an accomplished composer. The purpose of the work, clearly stated by Ciconia in the prologue, is to return to the writings of earlier authors (through the eleventh century) and, with their material as a basis, to redefine the scope of the discipline of music so that is may be classified and may function as one of the literary arts, in addition to its usual standing as a mathematical discipline. ø The first three books consist largely of quotations from earlier authors, covering the topics of consonance (intervals and the scale), species (modes), and proportions. Much of this material parallels large sections of the famous Lucidarium of Marchetto of Padua. ø In the fourth and final book, Ciconia demonstrated how, by means of the material already presented, chants can be classified and declined or parsed according to the principles of grammar. This new view of music can be regarded as a clear indication of the new humanistic approach to the arts. ø Two plates and more than one hundred figures illustrate the edition. The plates provide representative and contrasting examples of the handwriting and format of the illustrations in two of the principal sources.

Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum

Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum PDF Author: Thomas J. Mathiesen
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803235311
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
The Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum is a full-text database of music theory written in Latin, extending from Augustine?s De musica through treatises of the sixteenth century. This new edition of the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum: Canon of Data Files includes full instructions on the various ways in which users can access the database, as well as the ?Principles of Orthography? and ?Table of Codes for Noteshapes, Rests, Ligatures, Mensuration Signs, Clefs, and Miscellaneous Figures,? both of which provide essential explanations of the special ways in which the texts have been encoded to facilitate searching and maximize use within various computer environments. Also included is a table of contents for the major series of texts found in the TML. The Canon provides for each separate edition a bibliographic record of the name of the author; title of the treatise; incipit; source of the text; the names of the individuals responsible for entering, checking, and approving the data; the name and location of the data file as it appears within the TML; the size of the file; and annotations identifying accompanying graphics and various other types of pertinent data. The Canon is followed by a full alphabetical index of incipits, keyed to both the Canon itself through author and title and to the database through the name of the data file as it appears within the TML.

"La la la maistre Henri ..."

Author: Musée Condé. Bibliothèque
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Most of the essays collected in this volume had their origins in a conference entitled Nouveaux regards sur le manuscript 564 de Chantilly/New Perspectives on the Chantilly Codex held on 13-15 September 2001 in Tours, under the auspices of the Centre d'Etudes Superieures de la Renaissance (Universite Francois Rabelais/Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique). The conference was the last in a series of meetings held that week marking the tenth anniversary of the musical research branch, Programme Ricercar. The idea to hold the conference had emerged in 1999 as we ourselves embarked on a collaborative project on this most fascinating of music sources from the late Middle Ages. Our own extended scrutiny of the codex and its contents, which has culminated in the publication of a detailed study and the first colour reproduction of the manuscript made us keenly aware of the significance of this source and its repertory to our understanding of the history of music before 1600. The Chantilly codex is beyond doubt one of the most important sources for late medieval secular polyphony.

Music and the moderni

Music and the moderni PDF Author: Karen Desmond
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107167094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Challenges current accounts of the French ars nova, a musical art that was both criticised and heralded for its modernity.

Regule

Regule PDF Author: Robertus de Handlo
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803279346
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
The Regule of Robertus de Handlo and the Summa of Johannes Hanboys are among the few major texts of medieval English music theory. The first directly influenced the latter, and both deal with unique notational practices found in English music of the fourteenth century. These two texts were edited by Edmon de Coussemaker in the nineteenth century in editions that have come to be recognized as seriously deficient. Now Peter M. Lefferts has paired them in a new critical edition that is far superior in its accuracy and scholarly underpinnings. The Regule of 1326 provides one of the two most comprehensive views of late ars antiqua notational developments. Handlo takes as his point of departure the first part, on notation, of one of those widely circulated, abbreviated versions of the teachings of Franco of Cologne that begin in most sources with the motto, "Gaudent brevitate moderni." The Summa of Hanboys, written around 1375, takes Handlo as a point of departure and incorporates an abbreviated redaction of the Regule, along with citations of other later English authorities, into an exhaustively systematic survey of ars nova forms and rests. Building on a line of development in English theory, Hanboys expanded the mensural system to a total of eight figures. For this edition, Lefferts has thoroughly reexamined, edited, and appraised the single extant source of each treatise. Full descriptions of these sources are provided and the documents are illustrated with a plate from each. Each treatise is presented in its original Latin, with a fully annotated translation on facing pages. Leffert's introduction discusses the authors, places the treatise in the context of the theoretical traditions of fourteenth-century France and England, and reviews their contents in detail. Indexes of terms, names, and subjects are included. Appendixes provide a concordance to the music examples from the Regule that recur in the Summa and transcriptions of two English motet fragments that exhibit insular notational practices discussed in the treatises. Leffert's work will be seen as a major contribution to our understanding of medieval English music.

The friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

The friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance PDF Author: Susan E. Myers
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004113983
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Historians--some specializing in the Middle Ages, some in religion, and some in a particular European country--describe the major areas scholars are working in with regard to the friars' preaching to and writing about the Jews from the early days of the mendicant order about the turn of the 13th century to the 16th century. Their topics include the.

The Rise of European Music, 1380-1500

The Rise of European Music, 1380-1500 PDF Author: Reinhard Strohm
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521619349
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 744

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Book Description
This is a detailed and comprehensive survey of music in the late middle ages and early Renaissance. By limiting its scope to the 120 years which witnessed perhaps the most dramatic expansion of our musical heritage, the book responds, in the 1990s, to the tremendous increase in specialised research and public awareness of that period. Three of the four main Parts (I, II, IV) describe the development of polyphony and its cultural contexts in many European countries, from the successors of Machaut (d. 1377) to the achievements of Josquin des Prez and his contemporaries working in Renaissance Italy around 1500. Part III, by contrast, illustrates the musical life of the institutions, and musical practices outside the realm of composed polyphony that were traditional and common all over Europe. The book proposes fresh views in each chapter, discussing dozens of musical examples adducing well-known and hitherto unknown documents, and referring to and evaluating the most recent scholarship in the field.

The Cambridge History of Medieval Music

The Cambridge History of Medieval Music PDF Author: Mark Everist
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108577075
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
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.