Ars Antiqua: Music and Culture in Europe, c. 1150–1330. Ed.Gregorio Bevilacqua and Thomas B. Payne.

Abstract

In the long thirteenth century, 1150–1330, western Europe witnessed an extraordinary flourishing of musical practices, including the development of new genres such as the motet and conductus, the gathering of songs and polyphony into deluxe manuscripts, liturgical innovations, and new ventures in the combination of music and poetry in both Latin and vernacular languages. Some of these achievements are the subject of Ars Antiqua: Music and Culture in Europe, a collection of essays that marks the third iteration of the Ars Antiqua conference, held in Lucca in December 2018. I was fortunate enough to attend the conference, which was a very stimulating and enjoyable—if chilly—gathering of experts on music of the ars antiqua. It is exciting to see eleven of the contributions we heard there represented in this volume, with essays on a range of topics. Proceedings from the first Ars Antiqua conference in 2011 (published in Musica...