First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A Performer's Guide to Medieval Music is an essential compilation of essays on all aspects of medieval music performance, with 40 essays by experts on everything from repertoire, voices, and instruments to basic theory. This concise, readable guide has proven indispensable to performers and scholars of medieval music.

This classic reference work, the best one-volume music dictionary available, has been brought completely up to date in this new edition. Combining authoritative scholarship and lucid, lively prose, the Fourth Edition of The Harvard Dictionary of Music is the essential guide for musicians, students, and everyone who appreciates music. The Harvard Dictionary of Music has long been admired for its wide range as well as its reliability. This treasure trove includes entries on all the styles and forms in Western music; comprehensive articles on the music of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Near East; descriptions of instruments enriched by historical background; and articles that reflect today’s beat, including popular music, jazz, and rock. Throughout this Fourth Edition, existing articles have been fine-tuned and new entries added so that the dictionary fully reflects current music scholarship and recent developments in musical culture. Encyclopedia-length articles by notable experts alternate with short entries for quick reference, including definitions and identifications of works and instruments. More than 220 drawings and 250 musical examples enhance the text. This is an invaluable book that no music lover can afford to be without.

Contains nearly 1000 pages of precise and accessible information on all musical subjects.

This book examines the relation of words and music in England and France during the three centuries following the Norman Conquest. The basic material of the study includes the chansons of the troubadours and trouvères and the varied Latin songs of the period. In addition to these 'lyric' forms, the author discusses the relations of music and poetry in dance-song, in narrative and in the ecclesiastical drama. Professor Stevens examines the ready-made, often unconscious, and misleading assumptions we bring to the study and performance of early music. In particular he affirms the importance of Number, in more than one sense, as a clue to the 'aesthetic' of the greater part of repertoire, to the relation of words and melody. and to the baffling problem of their rhythmic interpretation. This is the first wide-ranging study of words and music in this period in any language. It will be essential reading for scholars of the music and the literature of medieval Europe and will provide a basic and comprehensive introduction to the repertoire for students.

"In his song, Lanqan li jorn, the early-twelfth-century troubadour Jaufre Rudel expresses a sense of wonder and uncertainty about the future, one that he maps onto his perception of geography as complex, interwoven, and often unknowable. The song proclaims Jaufre's intention to travel eastward to the Crusade front as a Christian pilgrim, and to unite there with his beloved Lady (generally understood as the Countess of Tripoli), the object of his amor de loing [love from afar]. Jaufre expresses both ambivalence and a sense of possibility as he prepares to depart outremar. In Jaufre's ideology, distance suggests the multivalent difficulties inherent in this effort--the challenges of geographical travels and unknown roads; the emotional separation between lovers and uncertain pathways; and the subjective distances between the ideals of French courtliness, Christian values, and his imagining of the land of Saracens. Because the pathways that lie before him--the ports and roads--are so many and so unfathomable, Jaufre cannot prophesy the outcome of this journey. As Jaufre contemplated the unknown East, he could not have predicted the impact of the Crusade efforts or the song-making traditions in which he participated. According to his vida, or biographical sketch (although these were often fictionalized), Jaufre would die in the East while on the Crusade venture; having often imagined the Countess of Tripoli, he would become ill on the journey, arriving in the Syrian county only just in time to be embraced his beloved and die in her arms. Jaufre was one of many creators of the Crusade period to contemplate a new world, one marked by Crusading, through song. In doing so, he employed geographical rhetoric in ways that engaged his belief systems about love, politics, religion, and space. In this book, I locate ideologies of early Crusade culture as expressed in the Occitanian song (in the south of modern-day France), particularly in Latin devotional song and troubadour lyric. Such songs engage their Crusading context through text and melody, through metaphors of travel, distance, and geography. I argue that these songs reflect Crusade perspectives, articulate regional beliefs and local identities, and demonstrate the rhetorical and expressive possibilities of music and poetry in combination. Today, in keeping with the concepts of mouvance and re-invention, as articulated by Paul Zumthor and Amelia Van Vleck among others, we understand troubadour song as a site of re-creation rather than fixity. Troubadour songs circulated abundantly in oral transmission, long before they were committed to writing; each performance of a given song was subject to change and reinvention, with performance acting not as repetition, but as an act of re-composition, improvisation, or variation, aided, but not dictated, by memory. Troubadour songs may exist in multiple variant copies across multiple manuscripts, or they may survive today without any written record of their melodies at all, perhaps once so well known that their notation was not needed. Zumthor thus explained, "the 'work' floats, offering not a fixed shape of firm boundaries but a constantly shifting nimbus . . . Although the production of an individual, it [a song] is characterized by the sense of potential incompleteness is caries within itself." As he looked forward uncertainly into his own travels and his future, Jaufre understood his songs as fluid, as templates for further composition, and as sites of communal, rather than individual, creation. Indeed, among the troubadours, Jaufre can be considered an "extremist" (in the words of Amelia Van Vleck) with regard to transmission and re-composition, as he was particularly explicit about inviting others to change and improve upon his song, placing the singer on par with the composer as a creative agent, and rejecting the idea of single or original author with respect to his work. For Jaufre, the audience too played a role in defining the song; the experience of reception essentially contributed to the process of re-creation. Thus Rupert Pickens wrote, regarding his edition of Jaufre's poems: "It soon became apparent . . . that not only can 'authentic' texts not be discovered, much less 'established' . . . but that, given the condition of the manuscripts and the esthetic principles involving textual integrity affirmed by Jaufre himself . . . the question of 'authenticity' . . . was largely irrelevant.""--

From one of our most innovative singers, a vibrant history of song stretching from Hildegard von Bingen and Benjamin Britten to Björk "Songs can be intensely personal (whether you hear them or sing them) and none of us would choose the same twelve songs as anyone else. My choices are based on decades of performing experience in many different genres, but I hope they will reveal aspects of our common humanity as the story evolves from the Middle Ages to the present." In this celebratory account, author and singer John Potter tells the European story of song. The form has captivated audiences and excited performers for centuries, from the music of the troubadours and the Christian liturgy through classical composers such as Bach and Schumann up to Britten, Berio, and the rise of popular music. Choosing twelve key works, Potter offers a personal tour through this vital tradition, from John Dowland's "Flow My Tears" to George Gershwin's "Summertime." Throughout, he reveals who wrote and sang these joyful masterpieces--and what they mean to singers and audiences today.

This is a complete revision of the second edition, designed as a guide and resource in the study of music from the earliest times through the Renaissance period. The authors have completely revised and updated the bibliographies; in general they are limited to English language sources. In order to facilitate study of this period and to use materials efficiently, references to facsimiles, monumental editions, complete composers' works and specialized anthologies are given. The authors present this systematic organization in this volume in the hope that students, teachers, and performers may find in it a ready tool for developing a comprehensive understanding of the music of this period.