Perotin (Latin Perotinus) was a most gifted composer of the Notre Dame school, which, during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, was the first school to produce polyphony of international acclaim. Four of the works included in this collection are organa. A Perotin organum consists of a liturgical chant melody and text, which forms the tenor or cantus firmus. Its rhythm is altered. In approximately the same vocal range, the composer added one, two or three other voices, the duplum, triplum and quadruplum, all of them in one of the six rhythmic patterns known as modi. Seven of the works included in this collection are motets. These originated throug the tradition of troping, which consisted of the addition of a text to a melismatic piece of music. In motets, it was the duplum of an organum or clausula which was troped. When this happend the duplum was called motetus, and this name was adapted for the entire composition.

In God and Mystery in Words David Brown uses the way in which poetry and drama have in the past opened people to the possibility of religious experience as a launch pad for advocating less wooden approaches to Christian worship today. So far from encouraging imagination and exploration, hymns and sermons now more commonly merely consolidate belief. Again, contemporary liturgy in both its music and its ceremonial fails to take seriously either current dramatic theory or the sociology of ritual. Yet this was not always so. Imagery and hymns mattered, liturgial msic encouraged a sense of drama, sermons required rhetoric. In a characteristically stimulatling and inspiringly expansive study, that ranges from ancient Greek drama to modern poetry, from the meaning of the Logos to the history of vestments, David Brown pleads for a much wider focus on the kind of factors that aid experience of God.

Thresholds of Listening addresses recent and historical changes in the ways listening has been conceived. Listening, having been emancipated from the passive, subjected position of reception, has come to be asserted as an active force in culture and in collective and individual politics. The contributors to this volume show that the exteriorization of listening— brought into relief by recent historical studies of technologies of listening—involves a re-negotiation of the theoretical and pragmatic distinctions that underpin the notion of listening. Focusing on the manifold borderlines between listening and its erstwhile others, such as speaking, reading, touching, seeing, or hearing, the book maps new frontiers in the history of aurality. They suggest that listening’s finitude— defined in some of the essays as its death or deadliness—should be considered as a heuristic instrument rather than as a mere descriptor. Listening emerges where it appears to end or to run up against thresholds and limits—or when it takes unexpected turns. Listening’s recent emergence on the cultural and theoretical scene may therefore be productively read against contemporary recurrences of the motifs of elusiveness, finitude, and resistance to open up new politics, discourses, and technologies of aurality.

Here at last is a listener's guide to the hidden meanings of western classical music, expressed in accessible, jargon-free language and drawing on universal listening experiences and skills. The Way of Music is six booklets in one volume; it is a study guide in attention training, listening skills, and music appreciation for students, teachers, and the general reader. Each book is complete in itself, to be read and used as part of a multilayered database of musical meaning. Alternating aphorism and explanation, Books 1 and 2 inquire into hearing and communication processes using the example of a barking dog, while Books 3 and 4 extend the range of inquiry into the acoustics and performance of ethnic and classical music. Book 5 offers a substantial survey of over 100 examples of recorded music, providing a history of western music and culture, and incorporating discussion and assignment topics. The final book presents the range of class, gender, and cultural perspectives found in 101 adult student responses to the slow movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4. Drawing on Robin Maconie's earlier work, The Second Sense: Language Music and Hearing (2002), The Way of Music presents many of the same insights in highly encapsulated form for readers in the text message age, taking the discussion of classical music out of music departments and returning it to a broader public and educational arena. Student Observations: "You learn logic, reason, and a sort of sensitivity to the passage of time from listening to classical music." "Music, when one is trained to listen, helps to improve your senses. Your sense of hearing is heightened; you become more alert, because you are concentrating on many different instruments and sounds simultaneously." "Music reaches beyond the improvement of academic performance to a realm of improvement of the human condition."

Perotin (Latin Perotinus) was a most gifted composer of the Notre Dame school, which, during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, was the first school to produce polyphony of international acclaim. Four of the works included in this collection are organa. A Perotin organum consists of a liturgical chant melody and text, which forms the tenor or cantus firmus. Its rhythm is altered. In approximately the same vocal range, the composer added one, two or three other voices, the duplum, triplum and quadruplum, all of them in one of the six rhythmic patterns known as modi. Seven of the works included in this collection are motets. These originated throug the tradition of troping, which consisted of the addition of a text to a melismatic piece of music. In motets, it was the duplum of an organum or clausula which was troped. When this happend the duplum was called motetus, and this name was adapted for the entire composition.

This book presents the most recent findings of twenty of the foremost European and North American researchers into the music of the Middle Ages. The chronological scope of their topics is wide, from the ninth to the fifteenth century. Wide too is the range of the subject matter: included are essays on ecclesiastical chant, early and late (and on the earliest and latest of its supernumerary tropes, monophonic and polyphonic); on the innovative and seminal polyphony of Notre-Dame de Paris, and the Latin poetry associated with the great cathedral; on the liturgy of Paris, Rome and Milan; on musical theory; on the emotional reception of music near the end of the medieval period and the emergence of modern sensibilities; even on methods of encoding the melodies that survive from the Middle Ages, encoding that makes it practical to apply computer-assisted analysis to their vast number. The findings presented in this book will be of interest to those engaged by music and the liturgy, active researchers and students. All the papers are carefully and extensively documented by references to medieval sources.

This book is a history of the early musical life of the Parisian cathedral of Notre Dame. All aspects of the musical establishment of Notre Dame are covered, from Merovingian times to the period of the wars of religion in France. Nine discrete essays discuss the history of Parisian chant and liturgy and the pattern and structure of the cathedral services in the late Middle Ages; Notre Dame polyphony and the composers most closely associated with the cathedral, among them Leoninus, Perotinus and Philippe de Vitry; the organ and its repertoire; the choir, the musical education and performing traditions; and the relationship of the cathedral to the court.

The Rough Guide to Classical Music is the ideal handbook, spanning a thousand years of music from Gregorian chant via Bach and Beethoven to contemporaries such as Thomas Adès and Kaija Saariaho. Both a CD buyer's guide and a who's who, the guide includes concise biographical profiles of more than 200 composers and informative summaries of the major compositions in all genres, from chamber works to operatic epics. For novices and experts alike, the fully updated fifth edition features contemporary composer Helmut Lachenmann and Widor, the 19th century organ composer of 'Toccata' wedding fame, as well as dozens more works added for existing composers. You'll find an new 'Top 10's' section with accessible introductory listings including the Top 10 operas and the Top 10 symphonies plus new essay boxes on topics such as "Baroque - a style or a period?" and "The clarinet comes of age". The Rough Guide to Classical Music features fresh and incisive reviews of hundreds of CDs, selecting the very best of the latest recordings and reissues as well as more than 150 illustrations of composers and performers, including a rare archive of photos.

Articles on masterpieces of European religious music, from the middle ages to Stravinsky and Tavener. The late Wilfrid Mellers, who occupies a special place among music critics, described himself as a non-believer; but his preference for music that "displays a sense of the numinous" (in his words) will strike a chord with many wholisten to religious music nowadays, and who share his view that music that confronts first and last things is likely to offer more than music that evades them. The essays form five groups, which together offer a survey of religious music from around the first millennium to the beginning of the second, in the context of the difficult issues of what religious music is, and, for good measure, what is religion? The parts are: The Ages of Christian Faith; The Re-birth of a Re-birth: From Renaissance to High Baroque; From Enlightenment to Doubt; From "the Death of God" to "the Unanswered Question"; and The Ancient Law and the Modern Mind. Musical discussion, with copious examples, is conducted throughout the book in a context that is also religious - and indeed philosophical, social, and political, with the open-endedness that such an approach demands in the presentation of ideas aboutmusic's most fundamental nature and purposes. COMPOSERS: Hildegard of Bingen; Perotin; Machaut; Dunstable, Dufay; William Corniyshes father and son; Tallis; Byrd; Monteverdi; Schutz; J.S. Bach; Couperin; Handel; Haydn;Mozart; Beethoven; Schubert; Bruckner; Berlioz, Faure; Verdi, Brahms; Elgar, Delius; Holst, Vaughan Williams, Howells; Britten; Janacek; Messiaen, Poulenc; Rachmaninov; Stravinsky; Part, Tavener, Gorecki, Macmillan, Finnissy; Copland.

A resource on classical music provides coverage of composers, works, musical terminology, and performers, along with recommended recordings and access to an interactive Web site that allows readers to listen to sample works, techniques, and performers discussed in the reference.