The Piazza San Marco, one of the most famous and instantly recognizable townscapes in the West, if not the world, has been described as a stage set, as Europe’s drawing room, as a painter’s canvas. This book traces the changing shape and function of the piazza, from its beginnings in the ninth century to its present day ubiquity in the Venetian, European, as well as global imagination. Through its long history, the Piazza San Marco has functioned as civic space that was used for such varied activities as public meetings; animal-baiting; executions; state processions; meat and produce markets; a performance venue for rock concerts; as well as, more recently, a cafe to enjoy a leisurely Campari. Constantly alert to the question of function, this book recreates not only rituals of the past but also activities of the present, from the coronation of the doge to the legendary Pink Floyd concert of 1989, with much fanfare in between. Iain Fenlon recreates the dynamic, colorful, and noisy history of the piazza—a history that is also the history of Venice and, indeed, of Europe.

This volume marks the exhibition 'Cambridge Music Manuscripts, 900-1700', mounted in the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1982. It draws together fifty-three manuscripts of polyphony and monophony from the college and university libraries of Cambridge, all selected for their textual and historical importance. A full technical description of each source is followed by a critical appraisal, and in most cases at least one illustration is provided. Many of these manuscripts have never been adequately described in print, and this book will be a valuable work of reference for musicologists, historians and paleographers. Its plates will also provide a varied selection of transcription exercises for students of notation.

This volume consists of original papers first read at King's College, Cambridge, in 1979 at an international conference on medieval and Renaissance music. The contributors are distinguished in a wide variety of musicological interests but all are concerned in one way or another with pursuing the most urgent and promising directions for research in early music history. The result, far from being merely a further collection of essays applying well-tried approaches to familiar material, constantly seeks to expand the scope of musicology itself, and many of the contributions arc inter-disciplinary in method. The four main topics of the conference were carefully chosen, with some editorial control exercised for each session. This is reflected in four sections of closely related papers in the book. Two of these are concerned with the patronage of music: by the Church in fifteenth-century England, Italy and France, and in a broader context in Italy from 1450 to 1550. A group of essays on sixteenth-century instrumental music separates these, and the book concludes with five papers on theories of filiation as applied to music sources from the tenth to the sixteenth century.

This book is a companion volume to Music and Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Mantua I. The relationship between the volumes is not direct in the sense that specific references are made in volume I to specific features of the works in volume II. Rather, the present volume stands on its own as an anthology of compositions which could all be described as products of the system of patronage discussed in volume I. In various ways these ceremonial and domestic compositions illuminate the environment that brought them into being and that enabled them to survive. At the same time, the selection illustrates the variety of styles employed by composers in the Gonzaga service from Jacques of Mantua to Claudio Monteverdi. The collection includes works both by little-known Mantuan musicians and by some of the most important composers of the sixteenth century.

Early Music History is devoted to the study of music from the early Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century. It demands the highest standards of scholarship from its contributors, all of whom are leading academics in their fields. It gives preference to studies pursuing interdisciplinary approaches and to those developing novel methodological ideas. The scope is exceptionally broad and includes manuscript studies, textual criticism, iconography, studies of the relationship between words and music and the relationship between music and society. Articles in volume seventeen include: Tropis semper variantibus: Compositional strategies in the offertories of Old Roman chant; Music, identity and the Inquisition in fifteenth-century Spain; Musical aspects of Old Testament canticles in their biblical setting.

Product Description: La recente identification aux Archives communales de Novellara d'un ensemble de trente-huit lettres inedites redigees par Giaches de Wert est a l'origine de ce livre. Ajoutees aux lettres deja connues des Archives de l'Etat a Mantoue, elles forment un corpus consequent et inhabituel...read more

Product Description: During the early years of the sixteenth century, the reproduction of music of all kinds began to move from the copyist's desk to the printer's workshop. As Francis Bacon, viewing the development from the safe distance of the early seventeenth century, memorably observed in a more general context, the arrival of the printed book had altered 'the appearance and state of the whole world...read more