Sound and Sense in Franco-Flemish Music of the Renaissance
Sharps, Flats, and the Problem of 'Musica ficta'
By (author) P. Urquhart
Hardback (Published)
(December 2021)
ISBN: 9789042945968
Price: $169.00
On back order
Accidentals in Renaissance music have long been a problem for performers and editors, for they are often not fully prescribed in Franco-Flemish music. In the 20th century, a set of ‘rules of musica ficta’ were assembled to describe performers’ practice in the 15th and 16th centuries, but the three primary rules contradict each other when applied to the repertory. The conflict forces one or more rules to be set aside in certain passages. Typically, modern editors sacrifice the linear rule in favor of harmonic aspects. The modern preference relies on a medieval conceptthe exclusion of mi contra fawhich the author challenges.
Accidentals in Renaissance music have long been a problem for performers and editors, for they are often not fully prescribed in Franco-Flemish music. In the 20th century, a set of ‘rules of musica ficta’ were assembled to describe performers’ practice in the 15th and 16th centuries, but the three primary rules contradict each other when applied to the repertory. The conflict forces one or more rules to be set aside in certain passages. Typically, modern editors sacrifice the linear rule in favor of harmonic aspects. The modern preference relies on a medieval concept-the exclusion of mi contra fa-which the author challenges. When the prohibition against mi contra fa is removed from singers’ concerns, and understood as a rule aimed at composers-one they took delight in breaking at times-a proper balance between the three rules is regained, and an incisive and expanded harmonic world is revealed.
- By (author) P. Urquhart
Other Titles in this Series
Canons and Canonic Techniques, 14th-16th Centuries: Theory, Practice, and Reception History
Proceedings of the International Conference, Leuven, 4-6 October 2005
Volume 1
Similar Books
Balthasar Caymox of Nuremberg
Early Modern German Print Publishers: Popular Prints of the Seventeenth Century
Beyond Sovereign Courts
Agents and Practices in Early Modern Spanish and Habsburg Diplomacy
Volume 3
Circulation, Use, Impact
The Consumption of Architectural Books in the Early Modern Eastern Adriatic
Volume 1
Councils, Conflicts, Correspondence
Urban Diplomacy in Reval (Tallinn) and Lübeck (c. 1470–1570)
Volume 67
Innovationes Lovanienses: Arts, Law and Theology at the University of Louvain (1425–1797)
Studium Lovaniense: Learning across Borders, 2
Volume 18
John Dunstaple Reading Boethius
John Dunstaple’s Annotations to Boethius’s “De institutione musica” in the Manuscript Oxford, Corpus Christi College Library, MS 118
Legal Visuality
Exegesis, Ambiguity, and Dissimulation of the Donation of Constantine in the Early Modern Period
Music and Colonialism in Fascist Italy
Identity, Propaganda, and Ethnographic Representation
Volume 13
Naples as Laboratory / Laboratorium Neapel
Style Options, Artistic Rivalry and Self Fashioning in Neapolitan Baroque Painting / Plurale Stilbildung, Kunstlerkonkurrenz und Self Fashioning in der neapolitanischen Barockmalerei
Power and Women in Southeast and Central Europe in Late Medieval and Early Modern Period (1300-1600)
Volume 10
Staging the Spectacle of Majesty
Ceremonial, Courtly Space, and Collecting under the Spanish Habsburgs
Volume 9