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32 results

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  • 12 - In Search of Medieval Music in Non-Western Countries

  • Edited by Tess Knighton, David Skinner
  • Book:
    Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 November 2020
    Print publication:
    16 October 2020, pp 325-344

  • Summary

    At the beginning of the last century no one really knew what medieval music might have sounded like, or had a clear overview of its sources, let alone the ability to decipher them. After 1900, two groups of German scholars began systematically to explore music of the Middle Ages, but they used completely different methods. The results of the first group are well-known: they were historical musicologists trained by the great medievalist Friedrich Ludwig (1872–1930). Ludwig came from the nineteenth-century Palestrina revival. He set out to explore medieval polyphony in order to find where his favourite composers –Palestrina, Orlando di Lasso and Heinrich Schütz – came from. First a professor in Strasbourg, then, after World War I, in Göttingen, he published his Repertorium organorum recentioris et motetorum vetustissimi stili in 1910; to this day, over a century later, it is still the most authoritative catalogue of, and book on, thirteenth-century organa and motets. He gave the first detailed account of modal notation, listed all concordances in the thirteenth-century repertory, ordered them chronologically, and tried to establish which version was the original and which a copy.

    Ludwig was able to identify isorhythm and published three volumes of the works of Guillaume de Machaut. The fourth volume, of Machaut's Mass of Notre Dame, was edited by his student Heinrich Besseler (1900–69) from Ludwig's notes in 1954. In addition, in 1924 Ludwig published a synthesis of all of his previous work in Guido Adler's Handbuch der Musikgeschichte (updated in 1929 and reprinted in 1961). Finally, his papers – which are now kept at Niedersächsische Staats- und Landesbibliothek in Göttingen – include diplomatic and modern transcriptions of most known manuscripts of the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries.

    Why did Ludwig publish so little material from his Nachlass? At the beginning of his career he did not believe that it would be worthwhile to publish transcriptions of these pieces; he studied them mainly in order to understand how the history of polyphony came about. All this changed in the 1920s. The closely related German youth movements Wandervogel and Jugendmusik- and Singbewegung all shared a passionate interest in the Middle Ages; they reconstructed the medieval castle Burg Ludwigstein, roughly located between Göttingen and Kassel, went on long hikes, and were eager to sing early music and folk music.

  • 10 - How did Oswald von Wolkenstein make his contrafacta?

  • from Part II - Improvisation and composition
  • Edited by Anna Maria Busse Berger, University of California, Davis, Jesse Rodin, Stanford University, California
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music
    Published online:
    05 July 2015
    Print publication:
    16 July 2015, pp 164-182

  • Summary

    By the early fourteenth century, at the latest, most of the polyphonic music became the territory of specialists who underwent rigorous training inmensural notation. All fourteenth- and fifteenth-century composers of polyphony were literate, and they knew their mensural notation well. There is one exception, however the last great Minnesinger, Oswald von Wolkenstein. Oswald was born around 1376 and died in 1445 in Meran in South Tyrol. To be sure, it took scholars a long time to identify the models of Oswald's songs. All the same, given that so many of his compositions are contrafacta, one has to ask to what extent Oswald was an original composer of polyphonic music. There is general agreement among Oswald scholars that he was introduced to many of the models from which he made contrafacta at the Councils of Constance and Basel. Oswald's song is completely dominated by the text and the tenor melody.

  • 8 - Oral composition in fifteenth-century music

  • from Part II - Improvisation and composition
  • Edited by Anna Maria Busse Berger, University of California, Davis, Jesse Rodin, Stanford University, California
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music
    Published online:
    05 July 2015
    Print publication:
    16 July 2015, pp 139-148

  • Summary

    Joseph Kerman's Contemplating Music and the new-musicological positions it catalyzed and nourished in the 1980s and 1990s posed a particular challenge to scholars of fifteenth-century music. Hearing was a metaphor for close reading in the absence of sound. Josquin's mass represents an expression and articulation of many musical practices that must have fundamentally informed musical hearing and listening around 1500, and even before. The metaphorical language brought to bear on this musical entity since the middle of the last century offers a meaningful snapshot of stasis and change in early music historiography. Busnoys's tenor connects the piece to the cantus firmi of other late medieval musicians' motets, and to the kinds of musical communities in which they circulated. The sounds of musical teaching and learning embody the unending cyclic repetitions comprising music history. Busnoys, Josquin, and the drums of Techiman realize the wholeness of community and the wholeness of history as moments of sounding as did the organ of Reims.

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