Among the most memorable innovations of music and poetry in thirteenth-century France was a genre that seemed to privilege sound over sense. The polytextual motet is especially well-known to scholars of the Middle Ages for its tendency to conceal complex allegorical meaning in a texture that, in performance, made words less, rather than more, audible. It is with such musical sound that this book is concerned. What did it mean to create a musical effect so potentially independent from the meaning of words? Is it possible such supermusical effects themselves had significance? The Sense...
Among the most memorable innovations of music and poetry in thirteenth-century France was a genre that seemed to privilege sound over sense. The polyt...
Lynn Ransom, Emma Dillon, Emma Dillon, Susan Rankin, Anne Stone
This volume gathers six essays from papers presented at the 3rd Annual Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on November 19-20, 2010. The essays explore both the technology of inscribed musical expression in the Middle Ages—especially in regard to notation—and the role that modern digital technologies play in facilitating the study of music manuscripts today. As the manuscript evidence shows, medieval music as written text was both expressive and prescriptive in shaping music-making practices, performance, and reception.
This volume gathers six essays from papers presented at the 3rd Annual Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on November 19-20, 2010. The essays explore b...