Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

playing itself out. Espousing a particular position in the debate is no business of the historian. (Some re ...

adduce what I consider to be an example of each (and leave it to the reader to decide which, if any, ...

This sort of thinking has long been seen through—except, it seems, by musicologists. A scurrilous littl ...

relationship that obtains between powerful agents and mediating factors: institutions and their gatekeepers, ...

16 July 2008 ...

CHAPTER 1 The Curtain Goes Up “GREGORIAN” CHANT, THE FIRST LITERATE REPERTORY, AND HOW IT GOT THAT WAY LITE ...

“chant”—was singled out for preservation in written form had nothing to do with musical primacy, or even with ...

FIG. 1-1 Europe in the eighth century, shortly before the earliest notations of Christian chant. Thus, when ...

son and successor Louis I (known as Louis the Pious, reigned 814–840), was devoted to the consolidation of centra ...

one does not “call upon God” in the kind of voice one uses to converse with one’s neighbor). The ...

FIG. 1-2 Two Carolingian manuscript illustrations showing divinely inspired authors at work. (a) In this illu ...

course that the origins of Christian liturgical music went back, like the rest of Christian practice ...

wrote, “all the doors of the church are opened and all the monks and nuns come down, and not only they, bu ...

FIG. 1-3 Early Christian monastic centers. It was in such a communal context that the psalmodic practic ...

could be sung to two, three, four, or more notes, even whole cascades called melismas. Melismatic si ...

after Pentecost (on the other) to take up the slack. The church calendar also came to include a cycle o ...

NEUMES It is this special body of psalmodic chants for the Mass, consisting of about five hundred antiphons ...

The contour-based Carolingian neumes follow an entirely different principle of representation. It is the only s ...

FIG. 1-5 Passage from the Book of Genesis showing ta’amim, ecphonetic neumes entered above or below each ...

anyone seen the need for it. After a thousand years of diastematic notation, five hundred years of prin ...