Plainsong in the Age of Polyphony

by Edited by Thomas Forrest Kelly

• ISBN13: 9780521106894
• ISBN10: 0521106893
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-04-02
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

From at least the eighth century and for about a thousand years the repertory of music known as Georgian chant, or plainsong, formed the largest body of written music AND was the most frequently performed and the most assiduously studied in Western civilisation. But plainsong did not follow rigid conventions. It seems increasingly clear that, whatever may have been intended with respect to uniformity and tradition, the practice of plainsong varied considerably within time and place. It is just this variation, this living quality of plainsong, that these essays address. The contributors have sought information from a wide variety of areas: liturgy, architecture, art history, secular and ecclesiastical history and hagiography, as a step towards reassembling the tesserae of cultural history into the rich mosaic from which they came.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Plainsong and polyphony 250ndash;1550

Notated performance practices in Parisian chant manuscripts of the thirteenth century

The geography of the liturgy at Notre-Dame of Paris

The Feast of Fools and Danielis Iudus: popular tradition in a medieval cathedral play

The Mass of Guillaume de Machaut in the cathedral of Reims

Sacred polyphony and local traditions of liturgy and plainsong: reflections on music

The performance of chant in the Renaissance and its interactions with polyphony

Patronage, music and liturgy in Renaissance

Index

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