Although, according to the author, much sound research, has been done in the Dufay era in recent years," Charles Hamm's book marks the first time an attempt has been made at a comprehensive chronology of the works of this composer. Professor Hamm approaches all Dufay’s compositions from the point of view of mensural practice, and has been able to date each piece more precisely than would have been possible in a chronology based on manuscript studies or stylistic analyses. He has divided the works into nine groups, according to details of mensural usage, and on the basis of datable works and other evidence has suggested dates within which the pieces of each group were written. Based on his study of Dufay’s mensural practice, the author suggests that the Missa Sancti Antoni and several other works attributed to Dufay may not have been written by him. Originally published in 1964. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This volume explores the work of one of medieval music's most important figures, and in so doing presents an extended panorama of musical life in Europe at the end of the middle ages. Guillaume Du Fay rose from obscure beginnings to become the most significant composer of the fifteenth century, a man courted by kings and popes, and this study of his life and career provides a detailed examination of his entire output, including a number of newly discovered works. As well as offering musical analysis, this volume investigates his close association with the Cathedral of Cambrai, and explores how, at a time when music was becoming increasingly professionalised, Du Fay forged his own identity as 'a composer'. This detailed biography will be highly valuable for those interested in the history of medieval and church music, as well as for scholars of Du Fay's musical legacy.

Ruth I. DeFord offers new insights on Renaissance theories of rhythm and their application to the analysis and performance of music.

The relationship between text and music is a central issue in fifteenth-century music studies. Decades of research and performance have failed to provide clear answers to the most basic questions, such as which notes go with which syllables and why. Patterns in Play focuses on the early French songs of Guillaume Dufay and proposes a basis for determining some rules of common procedure for interpreting both underlay and style. Graeme M. Boone examines questions of rhythm and declamation, considering mensuration, linguistic and poetic prosody, and prosody in song. The first three chapters comprise a set of discussions preliminary to close rhythmic analysis of Dufay?s texted song melodies. Beginning with mensural rhythm and proceeding to poetics and the relationship between Dufay?s poetic and musical rhythms and musical declamation, Boone examines the musical features of rhythm, melody, tonal organization, counterpoint, text setting, and text expression. Offering fresh insight into the issues he raises, Boone clarifies the relationship between underlay and style and provides a better understanding of the technical and aesthetic issues that Dufay and other composers faced in weaving their patterns of song.

Through forty-five creative and concise essays by an international team of authors, this Cambridge History brings the fifteenth century to life for both specialists and general readers. Combining the best qualities of survey texts and scholarly literature, the book offers authoritative overviews of central composers, genres, and musical institutions as well as new and provocative reassessments of the work concept, the boundaries between improvisation and composition, the practice of listening, humanism, musical borrowing, and other topics. Multidisciplinary studies of music and architecture, feasting, poetry, politics, liturgy, and religious devotion rub shoulders with studies of compositional techniques, musical notation, music manuscripts, and reception history. Generously illustrated with figures and examples, this volume paints a vibrant picture of musical life in a period characterized by extraordinary innovation and artistic achievement.

Includes Part 1, Number 1: Books and Pamphlets, Including Serials and Contributions to Periodicals (January - June)

The first articles here focus on Johannes Tinctoris, the prominent late 15th-century music theorist. They deal with the discovery of his lost pedagogical motet, and his treatise on counterpoint; this forms the basis of a wide-ranging investigation of contemporary practices of improvisation and composition (singing super librum and writing res facta), in which the question of ’successive’ and ’simultaneous’ composition is reconsidered. Tinctoris's sometimes sharp rebukes to famous composers are also investigated in the context of works by Ockeghem. Ottaviano Petrucci's first publication of music, the ’Odhecaton’ of 1501, is the subject of another three articles. These identify the editor of the work, and make new proposals on the provenance and editing of this repertory. The last article presents an edition of a treatise of ca. 1600 in the form of a letter from the virtuoso cornettist Luigi Zenobi to an unknown prince, which offers new insights on the change in performance practice at the end of the Renaissance.

This book presents together a number of path-breaking essays on different aspects of medieval music in France written by Manuel Pedro Ferreira, who is well known for his work on the medieval cantigas and Iberian liturgical sources. The first essay is a tour-de-force of detective work: an odd E-flat in two 16th-century antiphoners leads to the identification of a Gregorian responsory as a Gallican version of a seventh-century Hispanic melody. The second rediscovers a long-forgotten hypothesis concerning the microtonal character of some French 11th-century neumes. In the paper "Is it polyphony?" an even riskier hypothesis is arrived at: Do the origins of Aquitanian free organum lie on the instrumental accompaniment of newly composed devotional versus? The Cistercian attitude towards polyphonic singing, mirrored in musical sources kept in peripheral nunneries, is the subject of the following essay. The intellectual and sociological nature of the Parisian motet is the central concern of the following two essays, which, after a survey of concepts of temporality in the trouvère and polyphonic repertories, establish it as the conceptual foundation of subsequent European schools of composition. It is possible then to assess the real originality of Philippe de Vitry and his Ars nova, which is dealt with in the following chapter. A century later, the role of Guillaume Dufay in establishing a chord-based alternative to contrapuntal writing is laboriously put into evidence. Finally, an informative synthesis is offered concerning the mathematical underpinnings of musical composition in the Middle Ages.

Early Music History is devoted to the study of music from the early Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century. It demands the highest standards of scholarship from its contributors, all of whom are leading academics in their fields. It gives preference to studies pursuing interdisciplinary approaches and to those developing novel methodological ideas. The scope is exceptionally broad and includes manuscript studies, textual criticism, iconography, studies of the relationship between words and music and the relationship between music and society. Articles in volume one include: A lost guide to Tinctoris's teachings recovered; two English motets on Simon de Montfort; the Mary Magdalene scene in the Visitatio sepulchri ceremonies; and European politics and the distribution of music in the early fifteenth century.