In the late fifteenth century the newly built Sistine Chapel was home to a vigorous culture of musical composition and performance. Josquin des Prez stood at its center, singing and composing for the pope's private choir. Josquin's Rome offers a new reading of the composer's work in light of the repertory he and his fellow papal singers performed from the chapel's singers' box. Comprising the single largest surviving corpus of late fifteenth-century sacred music, these pieces served as a backdrop for elaborately choreographed liturgical ceremonies--a sonic analogue to the frescoes by Botticelli, Perugino, and their contemporaries that adorn the chapel's walls. Jesse Rodin uses a comparative approach to uncover this aesthetically and intellectually rich musical tradition. He confronts longstanding problems concerning the authenticity and chronology of Josquin's music while offering nuanced readings of scandalously understudied works by the composer's contemporaries. The book further contextualizes Josquin by locating intersections between his music and the wider soundscape of the Cappella Sistina. Central to Rodin's argument is the idea that these pieces lived in performance. The author puts his interpretations into practice through a series of exquisite recordings by his ensemble, Cut Circle (available both on the companion website and as a CD from Musique en Wallonie). Josquin's Rome is an essential resource for musicologists, scholars of the Italian Renaissance, and enthusiasts of early music.

This Companion presents the most complete discussion ever published in English on the music of the greatest composer of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A collaborative effort by a team of distinguished scholars, the volume provides a basic survey of Josquin's music and the many problems that attend it. Taking account of the most recent research, the book also includes a sampler CD of Josquin's works specially recorded by The Clerk's Group.

The most up-to-date contribution to the research on one of the most important and internationally famous composers of the Renaissance.

The innovative work in design, typography, and content of music printer and publisher Ottaviano Petrucci (1446-1539) became the standard by which all following printers measured themselves. He created the defining moment when Italy took the lead in book printing in the Renaissance.This book is a bibliographic study of the output of the Petrucci presses, laying emphasis on the professional career of Petrucci. It includes a detailed study of technique and house-style, examining the market forces that drove Petrucci's publishing decisions, and provides a detailed catalogue of editions and copies.Stanley Boorman has made a study of the output of Petrucci's presses for 25 years. This long-awaited contribution to the field of bibliography will have an audience both in music and in rare book bibliography.

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.

This second selection of essays by David Fallows draws the focus towards individual composers of the 'long' fifteenth century and what we can learn about their songs. In twenty-one essays on the secular works of composers from Ciconia and Oswald von Wolkenstein via Binchois, Ockeghem, Busnoys and Regis to Josquin, Henry VIII and Petrus Alamire, one repeated theme is how a consideration of the songs can help the way to a broader understanding of a composer's output. Since there are more song sources and more individual pieces now available for study, there are more handles for dating, for geographical location and for social alignment. Another theme concerns the various different ways in which particular songs have their impact on the next generations. Yet another concerns the authorshop of poems that were set to music by Binchois and Ciconia in particular. A group of essays on Josquin were parerga to the author's edition of his four-voice secular music for the New Josquin Edition (2005) and to his monograph on the composer (2009).

Chronological surveys of national musical cultures (in Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany, England, and Spain), genre studies (Mass, motet, madrigal, chanson, instrumental music, opera), as well as essays on intellectual and cultural developments and concepts relevant to music (music theory, printing, the Protestant Reformation and the corresponding Catholic movement, humanism, the concepts of "Renaissance" and "Baroque").

Nearly all religious traditions have reserved a special place for sacred music. Whether it is music accompanying a ritual or purely for devotional purposes, music composed for entire congregations or for the trained soloist, or music set to holy words or purely instrumental, in some form or another, music is present. In fact, in some traditions the relation between the music and the ritual is so intimate that to distinguish between them would be inaccurate. The A to Z of Sacred Music covers the most important aspects of the sacred music of Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and other smaller religious groups. It provides useful information on all the significant traditions of this music through the use of a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, appendixes, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on major types of music, composers, key religious figures, specialized positions, genres of composition, technical terms, instruments, fundamental documents and sources, significant places, and important musical compositions.

Uncovering Music of Early European Women (1250 – 1750) brings together nine chapters that investigate aspects of female music-making and musical experience in the medieval and early modern periods. Part I, "Notes from the Underground," treats the spirituality of women in solitude and in community. Parts II and III, "Interlude" and "Music for Royal Rivals," respond to Joan Kelly’s famous feminist question and suggest that women of a certain stature did have a Renaissance. Part IV, "Serenissime Sirene," plays with the notion of the allure of music and its risks in Venice during the Baroque. The process of uncovering requires close listening to women’s creative endeavors in an ongoing effort to piece together equitably the terrain of early music. Contributors include: Cynthia J. Cyrus, Claire Fontijn, Catherine E. Gordon, Laura Jeppesen, Eva Kuhn, Anne MacNeil, Jason Stoessel, Elizabeth Randell Upton, and Laurence Wuidar. An invaluable book for college students and scholars interested in the social and cultural meanings of women in early music.