Books in the Music in Medieval Europe series

The writing down of music is one of the triumphant technologies of the West. Without writing, the performance of music involves some combination of memory and improvisation. This volume deals with the materials of chant from the point of view of transmission.

Plainchant is the music that underpins essentially all other music of the middle ages, and is the music that is most abundantly preserved. It is a subject that has engaged a great deal of research and debate over the years. This title explores the nature of the complex issues that have arisen in research on chant.

A collection of twenty-nine of the most influential articles and papers about medieval musical instruments and their repertory. It discusses the construction of the instruments, their playing technique, the occasions for which they performed, and their repertory. It paints a broad picture of instrumental performance during the medieval period.

Offers an overview of the best scholarship in the study of medieval music. This series introduces readers to an enormous swathe of musical history. It is suitable for scholars and students.

Extant manuscripts are the principal medieval testimony to the art of monophonic song. Literary texts and archival materials, a few theoretical works, and numerous visual representations provide helpful perspective, but our path to the poets and singers lies through the efforts of scribes, and the myriad problems in interpreting what they tell us cast a long shadow over all research on monophonic song. The essays gathered here represent the principal themes and issues that have occupied scholars of late medieval monophonic songs over the last half century: their place in history and society, the role of women as composers and performers, poetic and musical structures, styles, and genres, relationships between poems and melodies, written and oral transmission, and performance practices. Studying how each of these themes is played out across repertoires, cultures, decades, and locations offers a rich and variegated panorama of the practice of song in late medieval Europe.