Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

One of the most widely studied and performed works of music written before 1600, Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame stands as an enduring monument of medieval musical art. The mass itself, however, is surrounded by uncertainty; its date of composition remains unknown, its purpose is unclear, and its construction yields much ambiguity. A controversial new approach to Machaut's composition technique, this volume provides a case study in the application of music ficta and a detailed introduction to performance. Relating the Mass to other works of the period, this introduction is an invaluable guide to its intricacies.

An Introduction

Machaut's Mass

A challenging book which questions how much is really known about the way medieval music sounded.

Scholarship, Ideology, Performance

The Modern Invention of Medieval Music

Compositional Techniques in the Four-part Isorythmic Motets of Philippe de Vitry and His Contemporaries

Helen M. Prior

Shape is a concept widely used in talk about music. Musicians in classical, popular, jazz and world musics use it to help them rehearse, teach and think about what they do. Yet why is a word that seems to require something to see or to touch so useful to describe something that sounds? Music and Shape examines numerous aspects of this surprisingly close relationship, with contributions from scholars and musicians, artists, dancers, filmmakers, and synaesthetes. The main chapters are provided by leading scholars from music psychology, music analysis, music therapy, dance, classical, jazz and popular music who examine how shape makes sense in music from their varied points of view. Here we see shape providing a key notion for the teaching and practice of performance nuance or prosody; as a way of making relationships between sound and body movement; as a link between improvisational as well as compositional design and listener response, and between notation, sound and cognition; and as a unimodal quality linked to vitality affects. Reflections from practitioners, between the chapters, offer complementary insights, embracing musical form, performance and composition styles, body movement, rhythm, harmony, timbre, narrative, emotions and feelings, and beginnings and endings. Music and Shape opens up new perspectives on musical performance, music psychology and music analysis, making explicit and open to investigation a vital factor in musical thinking and experience previously viewed merely as a metaphor.

Music and Shape

R. Barton Palmer

Guillaume (de Machaut)

This is the first complete edition and the first English translation of one of the most fascinating poems of the late Middle Ages. Machaut's narrative tells "the true story" of the aged poet's romance with a young admirer, constructed around the letters and lyric poems they exchanged, and offers unique insights into the making of poetry, music and manuscripts. Introductory essays survey Machaut's biography, reevaluate the autobiographical content of the poem, explore the literary context, and discuss the miniatures, which are reproduced within the text. Also included is a full listing of variant readings, a commentary on references to contemporary events and the writing of the poem, an outline chronology, indices of lyrics, and a table to convert line numbers between this edition and the incomplete 1875 edition of P. Paris.

Book of the True Poem

Nicholas Cook

Eric Clarke

John Rink

From the cylinder to the download, the practice of music has been radically transformed by the development of recording and playback technologies. This Companion provides a detailed overview of the transformation, encompassing both classical and popular music. Topics covered include the history of recording technology and the businesses built on it; the impact of recording on performance styles; studio practices, viewed from the perspectives of performer, producer and engineer; and approaches to the study of recordings. The main chapters are interspersed by 'short takes' - short contributions by different practitioners, ranging from classical or pop producers and performers to record collectors. Combining basic information with a variety of perspectives on records and recordings, this book will appeal not only to students in a range of subjects from music to the media, but also to general readers interested in a fundamental yet insufficiently understood dimension of musical culture.

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

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