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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music
  • Cited by 3
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
July 2015
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781139057813
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139057813
Subjects:
Medieval and Renaissance Music, Music, History, Music: General Interest, Music Performance
Series:
The Cambridge History of Music
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Music
Information

Book description

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.

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Contents

Page 3 of 3

Contents
  • 40 - Plainsong in the age of polyphony
    pp 771-784
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Matters of solmization, mode, mensural rhythm and notation, and counterpoint received many theoretical treatments over the course of the fifteenth century, often as part of ardent polemics. The evolution of the music treatise is the objective of this chapter. Several subgenres of the music theory treatise emerged: One can find encyclopedic approaches as well as topic-by-topic organization, and summaries of and commentaries on earlier theoretical traditions as well as cutting edge responses to modern musical practice. Johannes Tinctoris certainly participated in a widespread fifteenth-century tradition of prescriptive responses to current musical practice. The chapter explores how this spectrum of subgenres impacted the treatment of a common set of music-theoretical subjects. To consider this question, the chapter surveys several Italian treatise subgenres, including the encyclopedic summa, the notebook and compendium, the dialogue, the laus musicae, and the focused treatment of notation, counterpoint, and mode. Finally, the chapter concludes by pondering the readership of these theoretical writings.
  • 41 - The most popular songs of the fifteenth century
    pp 787-801
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The cultivation of high-art polyphony has always been the preserve of a cultured elite minority who could write, read, and sing it. In the early fifteenth century, the number of surviving books significantly increases, facilitating insights into the geographical spread and longevity of the repertory, how and for whom books of music were made, even matters of authorship and performance. English music has many threads linking it to other collections within England and on the Continent. After centuries of only fragmentary survivals, the fifteenth century brings several more or less complete English manuscripts along with a rich harvest of fragments. Fourteenth-century notation uses filled black notes, with mensural or proportional differences shown as void or red notes towards 1400. The distinction between institutional or commissioned manuscripts and personal compilations corresponds closely to dimensions, discounting different sizes of writing block within a manuscript.
  • 42 - The nineteenth-century reception of fifteenth-century sacred music
    pp 802-810
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The great paradigm shift in the written transmission of polyphonic music in the early modern era remains the "revolution of the printing press": the invention of printing from movable type pioneered by Ottaviano Petrucci in 1501. The context of the institutional music book is usually that of the chapel, which increasingly implied an ensemble of singers charged with the performance of polyphony, and the sacred ritual. The repertory is consequently associated with the local liturgy. The main focus in German-speaking lands is on the Trent codices, containing about 1,300 pieces, by far the richest source of polyphonic music from the period. The largest category of songbooks is French chansonniers. Like the poetry on which they are based, chansonniers are widespread not only in France and the Low Countries, but across Europe, particularly in Italy. The most important source of polyphonic presentation codices was the workshop of Petrus Alamire at the Habsburg-Burgundian court of Margaret of Austria.
  • 44 - Recordings of fifteenth-century music
    pp 823-832
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on the cantus-firmus mass, the genre's predominant type, embodied and expressed the key needs of its patrons, in terms of both spiritual welfare and public show, personal and political. The polyphonic setting, dating back to the earliest stages of polyphony, of liturgical chants continues throughout the fifteenth century. The structural principle of the "cyclic" mass based on a given cantus firmus clearly grew out of the motet-based practice of isorhythm. The tenor line, monolithically repeating in contour and rhythm from movement to movement, provides melodic material for the other voices and a rhythmic check on their progress in fully-scored sections. L'homme arme song was by far the most popular and probably the most ingeniously adapted cantus firmus of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. A seemingly gentler spirit in comparison to the more Dionysiac Antoine Busnoys, Johannes Ockeghem seems to have reinvented his approach to the Ordinary of the Mass with each setting.
  • 45 - Solidarity with the long-departed: fifteenth-century echoes in twentieth-century music
    pp 833-847
  • View abstract

    Summary

    A new theoretical clarity for the motet arose not from its musical-compositional features, but rather from its textual dimension. In the early fifteenth century, an author of probably German origin attempted to define the motet as a "cantus ecclesiasticus" based solely on the status of its texts. A motet's "function" is largely determined by the circumstances of its commissioning: the institution, occasion, performance conditions, ritual context, and compositional standards. These factors comprise the so-called "complex of expectations" of a particular work. The compositional pluralization of the motet in the fifteenth century was initially focused on this complex of expectations. The early fifteenth century saw a late flourishing of the isorhythmic motet. The growing number of collections that combine Ordinary cycles and motets in the second half of the century testifies to an increasing sacralization of the genre. Psalm composition is inextricably tied to the antiphon, even though this tradition derives from non-psalmic Marian antiphons of the mid-fifteenth century.

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