Where Sight Meets Sound

The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing

Emily Zazulia (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

340 Seiten

2022
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-755191-2 (ISBN)

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The main function of western musical notation is incidental: it prescribes and records sound. But during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, notation began to take on an aesthetic life all its own. In the early fifteenth century, a musician might be asked to sing a line slower, faster, or starting on a different pitch than what is written. By the end of the century composers had begun tasking singers with solving elaborate puzzles to produce sounds whose relationship to the written notes is anything but obvious. These instructions, which appear by turns unnecessary and confounding, challenge traditional conceptions of music writing that understand notation as an incidental consequence of the desire to record sound. This book explores innovations in late-medieval music writing as well as how modern scholarship on notation has informed—sometimes erroneously—ideas about the premodern era. Drawing on both musical and music-theoretical evidence, this book reframes our understanding of late-medieval musical notation as a system that was innovative, cutting-edge, and dynamic—one that could be used to generate music, not just preserve it.

Emily Zazulia is Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she holds the Shirley Shenker Chair in the Arts and Humanities. She has published widely on medieval and Renaissance music, particularly concerning the intersection of complex notation, musical style, and intellectual history. Her research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Musicological Society, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Hellman Foundation.

List of Figures
List of Musical Examples
List of Tables
Abbreviations
Sigla of Manuscripts and Early Printed Music
Acknowledgments
Introduction Metaphors of Music Writing
Chapter 1: Shrinking Songs: Condensing Motet Tenors
Chapter 2: Before There Was Rhythm
Chapter 3: The Danger of False Exceptionalism
Chapter 4: Signs and Metasigns
Chapter 5: The Same, but Different
Chapter 6: Small Songs Made Big
Chapter 7: The Aesthetics of Transformation
Conclusion
Appendix 1 1 Kings 6, New King James Version (NKJV)
Appendix 2 Masses with Notationally Fixed Tenors
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	06.09.2021
Reihe/Serie	AMS Studies in Music
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	164 x 239 mm
Gewicht	708 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Klassik / Oper / Musical
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Musikgeschichte
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Musiktheorie / Musiklehre
ISBN-10	0-19-755191-2 / 0197551912
ISBN-13	978-0-19-755191-2 / 9780197551912
Zustand	Neuware