Clément Janequin's spectacular entertainment chansons jump-started French music printing, spread his fame across sixteenth-century Europe, and earned him lasting success with vocal ensembles and audiences around the world. Clément Janequin was the musical posterboy for the Valois kings of France, a best-seller for the fledgling 16th century music-printing industry and, notwithstanding his status as ordained priest, a major supplier of hymn-style harmonizations of Huegenot melodies. Ever since the sixteen century, vocal ensembles have embraced his barking dogs, chirping birds, and thundering horse hoofs, and then moved beyond the bird and battle songs to a repertory rich in lyric beauty and Rabelasian wit. This first in-depth biography looks at Janequin's revolutionary approach to entertainment music, his pioneer status in the developing music-printing industry, and his contributions to sacred music in the turmoil that followed the Reformation (including the first known hymn-style harmonization of what became known as Old One Hundred.) It traces his early life in Bordeaux, Luçon, Auch, and Angers during the period when Pierre Attaingnant made Janequin a central name in early French music publishing, and subsequently the composer's transition to Paris, where, as the first composer to make the attempt, he put his revenues from music printing (from the firms of Nicolas Du Chemin and Le Roy & Ballard) at the core of his economic-survival strategy. Recounted with both scholarly detail and a portion Janequinian humor, the volume includes an extensive selection of musical examples.

The Oxford History of Western Music is a magisterial survey of the traditions of Western music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time. This text illuminates, through a representative sampling of masterworks, those themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to each musical age. Taking a critical perspective, this text sets the details of music, the chronological sweep of figures, works, and musical ideas, within the larger context of world affairs and cultural history. Written by an authoritative, opinionated, and controversial figure in musicology, The Oxford History of Western Music provides a critical aesthetic position with respect to individual works, a context in which each composition may be evaluated and remembered. Taruskin combines an emphasis on structure and form with a discussion of relevant theoretical concepts in each age, to illustrate how the music itself works, and how contemporaries heard and understood it. It also describes how the c

In this groundbreaking new study, Kate van Orden examines noble education in the arts to show how music contributed to cultural and social transformation in early modern French society. She constructs a fresh account of music's importance in promoting the absolutism that the French monarchy would fully embrace under Louis XIV, uncovering many hitherto unpublished ballets and royal ceremonial performances. The great pressure on French noblemen to take up the life of the warrior gave rise to bellicose art forms such as sword dances and equestrian ballets. Far from being construed as effeminizing, such combinations of music and the martial arts were at once refined and masculine-a perfect way to display military prowess. The incursion of music into riding schools and infantry drills contributed materially to disciplinary order, enabling the larger and more effective armies of the seventeenth century. This book is a history of the development of these musical spheres and how they brought forth new cultural priorities of civility, military discipline, and political harmony. Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France effectively illustrates the seminal role music played in mediating between the cultural spheres of letters and arms.

In 1588 Anthony Munday published A Banquet of Daintie Conceits, containing twenty-two new moral poems in various verse forms. Ranked with the best comic playwrights of his day, including Shakespeare, he was also a travel-writer, religious spy, actor, translator, royal messenger, deviser of civic entertainments, and historian. Munday confessed that he was not knowledgeable in music, yet he named a tune for singing each poem. Intriguingly, unlike typical broadside ballad tunes, most of Munday’s tunes are dances, and of the twenty-two named, fourteen are known from solo instrumental arrangements. Despite that survival, despite the poet’s fame, and despite an 1812 edition of the poems from the unique extant copy, this is the first attempt to set Munday’s Banquet lyrics to their respective music. Poems with unidentified melodies are set to period tunes that fit their versifications, making all the lyrics singable for the first time in over 400 years.

The confluence between music and literature, long hymned as sister arts, is a newly burgeoning field of critical inquiry. This innovative collection of interdisciplinary essays provides a valuable introduction to the field, mapping the contours of recent research and investigating the mutual aesthetic influence of the two arts and their common historical ground. The examination of literary works using music as an analogy for literary composition and agent of cultural value, and the consideration of musical works whose structure is derived from literary models will excite the interest of both professional scholars and students in the fields of musicology, literary studies and modern European languages. (Legenda 2006) Delia da Sousa Correa is Lecturer in Literature at The Open University. She is the author of George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (2002) and editor of

Did the 16th-century Reformation influence French language and culture? This book, the fullest available bibliography of religious printing in French during the early Reformation, provides the materials to answer this question. It assembles information on all known printed editions in French on religious subjects during the crucial period 1511-51 (up to the Edict of Chateaubriant), giving full bibliographical details, library locations and references in secondary literature. An alphabetical list is complemented by a chronological list, and by an analysis of editions by printers and publishers. The work provides the fullest checklist available of works and editions produced from all parts of the religious spectrum, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. It reveals who were the most active and influential writers, which were the most popular texts, and which were the most active printing centres in the field of religious printing in French. The chronological survey shows the immense growth in publications triggered by the Reformation movement, and reveals the radical change in religious sensibility during the period, from contemplative meditation to polemical debate.

First study of Juan Esquivel, a highly significant figure in Spanish musical life in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Juan Esquivel was a cathedral choirmaster and composer, active in Spain during the period c.1580-c .1623 in which all aspects of the arts flourished, and one of the few peninsular composers of his generation to see his works published. He is known to have produced three large volumes of sacred polyphony - masses, motets, hymns, psalms, magnificats, and Marian antiphons - under the titles Liber primus missarum, Motecta festorum([both published 1608)and Tomus secondus, psalmorum, hymnorum... et missarum (published 1613); they reveal him to be a highly skilled craftsman. This first full-length study of his life and works presents a critical assessment of the man and his music, setting him within the social and religious context of the so-called Counter-Reformation. Beginning by outlining the facts of his life, the book goes on to offer an analysis and assessment of his output. Clive Walkley was until his retirement a lecturer in music and music education at Lancaster University.