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In the motets of Philippe de Vitry, Guillaume de Machaut, and their contemporaries, tenors have often been characterized as the primary shaping forces, prior in conception as well as in construction to the upper voices. Tenors are shaped by the interaction of talea and color, medieval terms now used to refer to the independent repetition of rhythms and pitches, respectively. The presence in the upper voices of the periodically repeating rhythmic patterns, often referred to as "isorhythm," has been characterized as an amplification of tenor structure. But a fresh look at the medieval treatises suggests a revised analytical vocabulary: for many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writers, both color and talea involved rhythmic repetition, the latter in the upper voices specifically. And attention to upper-voice taleae independently of tenor structures brings renewed emphasis to the significant portion of the repertory in which upper voices evince formal schemes that differ from those in the tenors. These structures in turn suggest a revision of the presumed compositional process for motets, implying that in some cases upper-voice text and forms may have preceded the selection and organization of tenors. Such revisions have implications for hermeneutic endeavors, since not only the forms of motet voices but the meanings of their texts change, depending on whether analysis proceeds from the tenor up, or from the top down. Where the presumed compositional and structural primacy afforded to tenors has encouraged a strand of interpretation that reads the upper-voice poetry as conforming to, and amplifying, the tenor text snippets and their liturgical contexts, a "bottom-down" view casts tenors in a supporting role and reveals the poetic impulse of the upper voices as the organizing principle of motets.
Late medieval motet texts are brimming with chimeras, centaurs and other strange creatures. In The Monstrous New Art, Anna Zayaruznaya explores the musical ramifications of this menagerie in the works of composers Guillaume de Machaut, Philippe de Vitry, and their contemporaries. Aligning the larger forms of motets with the broad sacred and secular themes of their texts, Zayaruznaya shows how monstrous or hybrid exempla are musically sculpted by rhythmic and textural means. These divisive musical procedures point to the contradictory aspects not only of explicitly monstrous bodies, but of such apparently unified entities as the body politic, the courtly lady, and the Holy Trinity. Zayaruznaya casts a new light on medieval modes of musical representation, with profound implications for broader disciplinary narratives about the history of text-music relations, the emergence of musical unity, and the ontology of the musical work.
Essays on important topics in early music.
First full comprehensive guide to one of the most important genres of music in the Middle Ages.
"The main function of western musical notation is incidental: it prescribes and records sound. But during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, notation began to take on an aesthetic life all its own. Composers sometimes asked singers to read the music in unusual ways-backwards, upside-down, or at a reduced speed-to produce sounds whose relationship to the written notes is anything but obvious. This book explores innovations in late-medieval music writing as well as how modern scholarship on notation has informed-sometimes erroneously-ideas about the premodern era. By viewing notation as a complex technology that did more than record sound, the book revolutionizes the way we think about music's literate traditions"--
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.
"This work provides an interdisciplinary and historical exploration of various techniques leveraging writing in order to capture sound. Collectively, the essays in this work focus on questions of language and expression as much as the method and theory of both sound and writing"--
Music Theory has a lot of ground to cover. Especially in introductory classes a whole range of fundamental concepts are introduced at fast pace that can never be explored in depth or detail, as other new topics become more pressing. The short time we spend with them in the classroom belies the complexity (and, in many cases, the contradictions) underlying these concepts. This book takes the time to tarry over these complexities, probe the philosophical assumptions on which these concepts rest, and shine a light on all their iridescent facets. This book presents music-theoretical concepts as a register of key terms progressing outwards from smallest detail to discussions of the music-theoretical project on the largest scale. The approaches individual authors take range from philosophical, historical, or analytical to systematic, cognitive, and critical-theorical-covering the whole diverse spectrum of contemporary music theory. In some cases authors explore concepts that have not yet been widely added to the theorist's toolkit but deserve to be included; in other cases concepts are expanded beyond their core repertory of application. This collection does not shy away from controversy. Taken in their entirety, the essays underline that music theory is on the move, exploring new questions, new repertories, and new approaches. This collection is an invitation to take stock of music theory in the early twenty-first century, to look back and to encourage discussion about its future directions. Its chapters open up a panoramic view of the contemporary music-theoretical landscape with its expanding repertories and changing guiding questions, and offers suggestions as to where music theory is headed in years to come.
The manuscript Seville, Biblioteca Colombina y Capitular 5-2-25, a composite of dozens of theoretical treatises, is one of the primary witnesses to late medieval music theory. Its numerous copies of significant texts have been the focus of substantial scholarly attention to date, but the shorter, unattributed, or fragmentary works have not yet received the same scrutiny. In this monograph, Cook demonstrates that a small group of such works, linked to the otherwise unknown Magister Johannes Pipudi, is in fact much more noteworthy than previous scholarship has observed. The not one but two copies of De arte cantus are in fact one of the earliest known sources for the Libellus cantus mensurabilis, purportedly by Jean des Murs and the most widely copied music theory treatise of its day, while Regulae contrapunctus, Nota quod novem sunt species contrapunctus, and a concluding set of notes in Catalan are early witnesses to the popular Ars contrapuncti treatises also attributed to des Murs. Disclosing newly discovered biographical information, it is revealed that Pipudi is most likely one Johannes Pipardi, familiar to Cardinal Jean de Blauzac, Vicar-General of Avignon. Cook provides the first biographical assessment for him and shows that late fourteenth-century Avignon was a plausible chronological and geographical milieu for the Seville treatises, hinting provocatively at a possible route of transmission for the Libellus from Paris to Italy. The monograph concludes with new transcriptions and the first English translations of the treatises.
England in the fifteenth century was the cradle of much that would have a profound impact on European music for the next several hundred years. Perhaps the greatest such development was the cyclic cantus firmus Mass, and scholarly attention has therefore often been drawn to identifying potentially English examples within the many anonymous Mass cycles that survive in continental sources. Nonetheless, to understand English music in this period is to understand it within a changing nexus of two-way cultural exchange with the continent, and the genre of the Mass cycle is very much at the forefront of this. Indeed, the question of ‘what is English’ cannot truly be answered without also answering the question of ‘what is continental’. This book seeks, initially, to answer both of these questions. Perhaps more importantly, it argues that a number of the works that have induced the most scholarly debate are best seen through the lens of intensive and long-term cultural exchange and that the great binary divide of provenance can, in many cases, productively be broken down. A great many of these works, though often written on the continent, can, it seems, only be understood in relation to English practice – a practice which has had, and will continue to have, major importance in the ongoing history of European Art Music.