This is the first full-length study of the vernacular motet in thirteenth-century France. The motet was the most prestigious type of music of that period, filling a gap between the music of the so-called Notre-Dame School and the Ars Nova of the early fourteenth century. This book takes the music and the poetry of the motet as its starting-point and attempts to come to grips with the ways in which musicians and poets treated pre-existing material, creating new artefacts. The book reviews the processes of texting and retexting, and the procedures for imparting structure to the works; it...

How did the organ become a church instrument? How did it develop from an outdoor, Mediterranean noisemaker to an instrument which has become the embodiment of western music and responsible for many of that music's characteristics? In this fascinating, investigation, Peter Williams speculates on these questions and suggests some likely answers. He considers where the organ was placed and why; what the instrument was like in 800, 1000, 1200 and 1400; what music was played, and how. He re-examines known references before 1300, covering such areas as the history of technology; music-theory art...