Fourteenth-Century English Music, A Review of Three Recent Publications

Abstract

This is a particularly problematic circumstance, because all published accounts of the polyphonic music which survives from the fourteenth century are at best extremely limited in scope. Most present brief musical excerpts and no general assessment of the extent or makeup of the surviving polyphonic repertoire. See the following: Frank LI. Harrison, Music in Medieval Britain, (London, 1958), pp. 144-53; John Caldwell, Medieval Music, (Bloomington, 1978), pp. 208-15; Richard Hoppin, Medieval Music, (New York, 1978), pp. 5o6-16; Schirmer History of Music, Leonie Rosenstiel, et al., eds. (New York, 1982), pp. 156-57, 162-63. The worst treatment of all can be found in the 1988 edition of the New Grout, which not only does not discuss the surviving polyphony from the thirteenth century at all, but completely misstates all of the facts concerning fourteenth-century English music. See Donald J. Grout and Claude Palisca, eds., A History of Western Music, (New York, 1988), 4th ed., pp. 172-77. The one account which stands as an exception to all of those mentioned is by Ernest Sanders, England: From the Beginnings to c. 1540, in Music from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, F. W. Sternfeld, ed., (London, 1973), pp. 279-99. i ,