This is our third Saturday post that includes quotes from and offers an outsider’s perspective on the thrust of the book, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (MIMM). At this point, the reader is probably wondering why the writer of this blog is devoting so much time and energy […]
We wanted to influence the performers, the record-buying public and through them the record companies, and…we spared none of the instrument-based groups whose records came our way The tone may be scornful or patronisingly sorrowful, lofty or irritated, but the message was unmistakable: buy Gothic Voices, the Taverner Consort, the Hilliard Ensemble, and leave the […]
Today’s post revisits the performance of fifteenth-century chansons, a form particularly suited to Mignarda’s format of solo voice and lute. As depicted above, chansons from the period were mainly composed in three parts; usually a shapely and melodic cantus line supported by a tuneful tenor line (often a cantus firmus), with the addition of a […]
Change thy minde since she doth change, Let not Fancy still abuse thee: Thy vntruth cannot seeme strange, When her falshood doth excuse thee… – The Right Honourable Robert Earle of Essex: Earle Marshall of England. The poem “Change thy minde” was given a simple musical setting by Richard Martin, and was published as the […]
As we sift through the (very general and absolutely not personal) information that summarizes visits to our blog, we see an interesting pattern. The greatest number of our readers are not Americans. This same pattern emerges in reports of our CD and mp3 sales. Again, US sales are outstripped by our friends and listeners across […]
This is the final installment of a very personal view on the text, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson. We have bothered to offer commentary on this book in reaction to an underlying theme woven throughout the text, an air of establishing just who’s who and what’s what. This […]
“Nothing endures but change.” – Heraclitus of Ephesus (c.535 BC – 475 BC), from Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius (fl. c. 3rd century AD). Embracing and interpreting music that was commonly known, heard on a daily basis, and used functionally some 500 – 600 years ago seems a silly enterprise for so many […]
Keeping up with our blog posts can be a challenge at times, sharing what we hope to be worthwhile tidbits of information and fitting the writing and posting of it into a busy schedule. Today, we find it a particular challenge after performing a sacred concert for Epiphany last evening and being separated from our […]
“Chansons, polyphonic settings of elegant but highly formalized and stereotyped French poems, constituted the principal sort of secular music in western Europe during the fifteenth century…Some of the later fifteenth-century composers began to control and manipulate their free-flowing melodic lines by means of a network of motives and by imitation among all the voices, but […]
