Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

We may as well admit that the term serves no purpose for music history except to keep music in an
artificial lockstep with the other arts—a lockstep for which there is a need only insofar as one needs to
construct a Zeitgeist, an “essential spirit of the age.” So as far as this book is concerned, then, the answer
is no: there was no musical Renaissance, and therefore no “Renaissance music.” The latter term will only
appear in this book surrounded by ironic quotation marks (“scare quotes”) as if to say that although one
may use it occasionally for convenience to designate music of a certain age, one should not take it as
really descriptive of anything in particular.