The culture of the enigmatic from Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance -- Devising musical riddles in the Renaissance -- The reception of the enigmatic in music theory -- Riddles visualised.

The complex relationship between myths and music is here investigated.

Material Cultures of Music Notation brings together a collection of essays that explore a fundamental question in the current landscape of musicology: how can writing and reading music be understood as concrete, material practices in a wider cultural context? Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from musicology, media studies, performance studies, and more, the chapters in this volume offer a wide array of new perspectives that foreground the materiality of music notation. From digital scores to the transmission of manuscripts in the Middle Ages, the volume deliberately disrupts boundaries of discipline, historical period, genre, and tradition, by approaching notation's materiality through four key interrelated themes: knowledge, the body, social relations, and technology. Together, the chapters capture vital new work in an essential emerging area of scholarship.

This book presents a varied and nuanced analysis of the dynamics of the printing, publication, and trade of music in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries across Western and Northern Europe. Chapters consider dimensions of music printing in Britain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, France, Spain and Italy, showing how this area of inquiry can engage a wide range of cultural, historical and theoretical issues. From the economic consequences of the international book trade to the history of women music printers, the contributors explore the nuances of the interrelation between the materiality of print music and cultural, aesthetic, religious, legal, gender and economic history. Engaging with the theoretical turns in the humanities towards material culture, mobility studies and digital research, this book offers a wealth of new insights that will be relevant to researchers of early modern music and early print culture alike.

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

This book offers an overview of all facets of musical life in sixteenth-century Venice. It addresses the city’s institutions (churches, confraternities, and academies) against the background of public and private occasions of music making. Supported by a generous collection of archival, literary, and iconographical sources, it treats both ceremonial life in the Serenissima and private forms of patronage. The Companion also addresses the dense web of musical activity (from chapel masters and singers to instrumentalists and instrument makers to music printers and theorists) and the rich variety of styles and musical genres (the frottola, the madrigal, motets and masses, instrumental music, polychoral music, Venetian-language polyphony), broadening the geographical perspective beyond the Veneto to Istria and Dalmatia. Contributors are Rodolfo Baroncini, Sherri Bishop, Bonnie J. Blackburn, David Bryant, Ivano Cavallini, Paolo Da Col, Daniel Donnelly, Rebecca Edwards, Iain Fenlon, Jonathan Glixon, Don Harrán (†), Jeffrey Kurtzman, Giulio M. Ongaro, Francesco Passadore, Elena Quaranta, Katelijne Schiltz, Eleanor Selfridge-Field, and Giovanni Zanovello.

The notion of the individual creator, a product in part of the Western romantic ideal, is now troubled by accounts and explanations of creativity as a social construct. While in collectivist cultures the assimilation (but not the denial) of individual authorship into the complexities of group production and benefit has been a feature, the notion of the lone individual creator has been persistent. Systems theories acknowledge the role of others, yet at heart these are still individual views of creativity - focusing on the creative individual drawing upon the work of others rather than recognizing the mutually constitutive elements of social interactions across time and space. Focusing on the domain of music, the approach taken in this book falls into three sections: investigations of the people, processes, products, and places of collaborative creativity in compositional thought and practice; explorations of the ways in which creative collaboration provides a means of crossing boundaries between disciplines such as music performance and musicology; and studies of the emergence of creative thought and practice in educational contexts including that of the composer and the classroom. The volume concludes with an extended chapter that reflects on the ways in which the studies reported advance understandings of creative thought and practice. The book provides new perspectives to our understandings of the role of collaborative thought and processes in creative work across the domain of music including: composition, musicology, performance, music education and music psychology.

An exploration of what self-referential compositions reveal about late medieval musical networks, linking choirboys to canons and performers to theorists.

Exploring the relationship between Latin and music during the early modern era, this volume focuses on the link between Latin and music in the educational system of the time, and the development and influence of musical humanism, especially in settings of classical and Neo-Latin texts.