Christopher Page Research Articles

Music and Instruments of the Elizabethan Age: The Eglantine Table Michael Fleming and Christopher Page

Renaissance woodwork, both decorative and functional, offers intriguing evidence for music history. Notable examples include the c.1480 studiolo from the ducal palace of Gubbio, its design attributed to Francesco di Giorgio Martini, executed by Giuliano da Majano, and now installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the study’s intricate intarsia walls show a variety of instruments in remarkable detail, together with books, scientific and mathematical devices, and other furnishings redolent of high aesthetic sensibility. Equally fascinating, an anonymous Venetian spinet also at the Metropolitan Museum, dated 1540 and commissioned by Eleonora della Rovere, bears exquisite carvings and marquetry along with a humanistic inscription testifying to the fraught relationship between instrument and player: translated, it reads, roughly: ‘I’m rich in gold and rich in tone; if you lack goodness (del buono), leave me alone.’ Here, ‘goodness’ implies personal virtue, virtuosity, and a good tune; the rhyming couplet warns the player, who must come close to the keyboard to read the inscription, that she is about to engage in intimate dialogue with an instrument possessing riches and integrity in its own right, not to be violated.

The Guitar and the Musical Canon (Webinar)

For much of the twentieth century, classical guitarists suffered from an inferiority complex. Could their idiosyncratic instrument ever be taken seriously by the classical establishment? Andrés Segovia devoted his life to “four essential tasks” that would help the guitar sit shoulder to shoulder with the more established instruments of the classical canon: a separation from “mindless folkloric entertainment,” a newly commissioned repertoire of original pieces and arrangements (a new canon—a reinvented tradition), the introduction of the instrument to the wider general public, and the initiation of guitar programs in conservatoires and universities. And yet the guitar’s place in the classical canon has always remained that of an outsider, an exotic novelty. The classical “club” is exclusive; it has quite particular rules. More recently, the cultural barriers between different styles of music have become more fluid, while repertoires have become more plural and inclusive. Consequently, the guitar has been able to draw on its rich connection with many global music cultures. Perhaps now the guitar is better placed to take a more integrated role in the way that the canon develops. This webinar brings together a panel of experts with complementary perspectives on the guitar’s canon. Christopher Page’s writings contain various discussions of the construction of the canon in the nineteenth century and the exclusion of the guitar. Kathy Acosta Zavala brings the perspective of the rise of the guitar canon in the USA through the work of Vahdah Olcott-Bickford and others. Lorenzo Micheli is a major performer who engages with a wide range of repertories. Michael O’Toole has written about how figures such as John Williams refused to engage with the canon, instead treating the guitar as an instrument with a rich and unique cultural history and its own musical integrity. The conversation is chaired by Stephen Goss.

“An Attractive and Varied Repertoire”: Full-Data List

This document presents the complete set of data analyzed in Christopher Page, “‘An Attractive and Varied Repertoire’: The Guitar Revival of 1860–1900 and Victorian Song,” Soundboard Scholar, no. 8 (2022), https://digitalcommons.du.edu/sbs/vol8/iss1/3.

‘[A] single, true, certain authenticity’: The authenticity wars in English twentieth-century folk and medieval music revivals

At intervals throughout the twentieth century, serious disputes about authentic musical values arose amongst performers, collectors, scholars, directors, reviewers, and audiences in the folk and medieval music spheres. Analysis of these controversies offers insights into the deep emotions, fantasies, and desires in arguments around authenticity in medievalism. This essay considers two examples of English musical revivalism, one exemplified by the folk song collector Cecil Sharp, the other by Christopher Page, the medieval literature and music scholar and director of music group Gothic Voices. In the writings of both men, emotional concerns about the purity of English musical traditions reveal the role music is given in the maintenance of English nationalism, and more generally in defending notions of identity and social order against feared sources of contamination.

Chant, Liturgy, and the Inheritance of Rome: Essays in Honour of Joseph Dyer ed. by Daniel J. DiCenso and Rebecca Maloy

Reviewed by: Chant, Liturgy, and the Inheritance of Rome: Essays in Honour of Joseph Dyer ed. by Daniel J. DiCenso and Rebecca Maloy Uwe Michael Lang Daniel J. DiCenso and Rebecca Maloy, ed. Chant, Liturgy, and the Inheritance of Rome: Essays in Honour of Joseph Dyer Henry Bradshaw Society, Subsidia VIII Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017 xxiv + 572 pages. Hardbound. £60.00. This substantial collection of scholarly essays honors Joseph Dyer, an eminent musicologist (and distinguished organist) whose publications on chant and musical practice are widely recognized as landmarks in the study of the history of Roman liturgy. Dyer's work is distinguished for placing the foundational musical traditions of early medieval Rome into their ritual and spatial contexts, for instance, in his seminal papers on the processions for Candlemas and the Major Litany (litaniae maiores). Following in the steps of Dyer's scholarship, this volume focuses on the city of Rome and highlights its wider impact on Western liturgy. A brief review cannot offer a complete appreciation of this impressive book, and I shall limit myself to those contributions that have caught my particular attention. The first and longest section, "Medieval Rome and Ancient Rites," offers studies on the ritual performance of the Mass and the Divine Office in their urban settings. Charles M. Atkinson illuminates the history of the Doxa en ipsisis Theo (Gloria in excelsis Deo) in the Roman Ordinary of the Mass sung in Greek, which had an enduring presence in the abbey of Saint Denis near Paris well into the twelfth century. The historical role of Old Saint [End Page 302] Peter's as an expression of papal authority in the late ancient and early medieval period are analyzed by Charles B. McClendon. The articles on specific aspects of the Roman liturgy exemplify the complexity of the extant sources that call for a multi-disciplinary inquiry, including architecture, topography and social history. The second section, "The Liturgies of Italy," considers Rome's interaction with, an influence on, other liturgical traditions on the Italian peninsula. The third section "Books, Sources, and Reform in the Wake of Rome," explores the adaptation and transformation of Roman liturgy and chant in the Carolingian reform. The final section, "Roman Foundations: Later Liturgical Developments," widens the scope and takes us beyond the city of Rome. Susan Boynton reads Cluniac identity as mirrored in liturgical practice: the important abbey understood itself as an anticipation of the heavenly Jerusalem. In a spirited essay, Christopher Page reflects on how liturgical chant brings Scripture to life and has a profound spiritual effect on singers and listeners alike. Though different in tone, William Mahrt complements Page by showing how Gregorian chants interpret their biblical text through a supple use of melodic tropes. The editors, Daniel J. DiCenso and Rebecca Maloy, are to be commended for their thorough labors. Individual articles contain illustrations, tables, and music examples. The volume is well provided with an index of chant incipits, an index of manuscripts, and a general index. The depth of the scholarly contributions assembled in tribute to Joseph Dyer appeals above all to specialists in musicology, but any researcher in the broad field of medieval history will gather precious insights into the varied and enduring legacy of the Roman liturgy. [End Page 303] Uwe Michael Lang St Mary's University Twickenham, London, UK Copyright © 2018 Society for Catholic Liturgy

The Guitar in Tudor England: A Social and Musical History by Christopher Page

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS The Guitar in Tudor England: A Social and Musical History. By Christopher Page. (Musical Performance and Reception.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [xix, 248 p. ISBN 9781107108363 (hardcover), $99.99; ISBN 9781316257975 (e-book, Cambridge Books Online).] Music examples, figures, tables, appendices, bibliography, index.Although the four-course Renaissance guitar flourished above all in France, where several publications for the instrument appeared in the 1550s, it was played by men and women of varied social and musical backgrounds throughout Europe. The English were no exception. But unlike the cittern, a related four- or six-course wirestrung instrument popular in England and elsewhere, the Renaissance guitar (or in the English of the time) has received little attention from scholars interested in Tudor musical life. The surviving sources, moreover, offer limited and often obscure evidence of repertoire, development, or social meaning. The purpose of Christopher Page's book is to frame a social and musical history of the guitar in Tudor England by gathering the relevant literary, archival and pictorial documents in a more comprehensive manner than has yet been attempted (p. 7). Indeed, by complementing the known print and manuscript sources with a number of new archival documents, Page is able to offer credible accounts, for the first time, of many of this instrument's basic social and musical characteristics.The book is divided into two parts. The first examines extramusical evidence of the guitar's role in sixteenth- and earlyseventeenth-century England. Chapter 1 reproduces and reviews the six known images of the guitar produced in Tudor England, with special attention paid to the Eglantine Table, a decorative panel inlaid with designs of several musical instruments. The six images are often vague in what they represent, but Page draws from them a number of inferences: that by 1568 the guitar was considered a fitting appurtenance for English nobility, since in that year one appears in the decorative border of Robert Dudley's engraved portrait; that fourcourse guitars may have come in various sizes or even sets; and that the instrument may have held antique associations in England as it did elsewhere in Europe. A drawing included in a 1604 publication also seems to depict a guitarist playing in consort, but Page stresses that this last implication is uncertain and corroborated nowhere else in the historical record. The next two chapters showcase the author's gift for archival sleuthing. In chapter 2, Page examines books of accounts, royal and estate inventories, and various university documents to establish who specifically owned guitars in Tudor England. He finds evidence of possible ownership by more than two dozen individuals spanning the social gamut from royalty to yeoman. How these and other English guitarists came into possession of their instruments, few of which appear to have been manufactured in England, is the subject of chapter 3, a fascinating introduction to the gittern trade. The few surviving sixteenth-century London Port Books, i.e., records of imported commodities compiled by customs officials, attest to an international trade in instruments and strings. Grocers, haberdashers, goldsmiths, and other small businessmen dominated the trade in the 1560s, while one John White, a draper, appears alone to have specialized in the importation of guitars. By tracing the affairs of these individuals in other documents, Page throws into relief a small but active community of London merchants with capital to invest in their city's musical activities.Page turns to the guitar's music and performance in the final four chapters of the study. First up is James Rowbothum's An instruction to the Gitterne, ca. 1569, the only tutor for the four-course guitar published in England and the sole instruction for the instrument to survive, albeit partially. Eight test-pulls, or prepublication review pages, remain of the work, which appears to be a translation of a lost French original by Adrian Le Roy. …

The Guitar in Tudor England: A Social and Musical History, by Christopher Page

Long reviews The Guitar in Tudor England: A Social and Musical History by Christopher Page.

Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music ed. by C. Stephen Jaeger (review)

Reviewed by: Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music ed. by C. Stephen Jaeger Tara Williams C. Stephen Jaeger, ed., Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. pp. 320; 40 illustrations. ISBN: 978–0–230–61898–5. $90 This collection, which includes an introduction and eleven essays, developed from a 2008 conference on the medieval aesthetics of grandeur. It explores how and where concepts of the magnificent and sublime operated in the Middle Ages, and puts them into conversation with more widely known treatments by writers like Longinus, Immanuel Kant, and Theodor Adorno. In doing so, the volume challenges earlier assessments of the medieval sublime, particularly those by E.R. Curtius and Erich Auerbach, as well as an ‘overarching conception of medieval culture’ that C. Stephen Jaeger calls ‘the diminutive Middle Ages (DMA).’ Although the DMA may be a bit of a straw man—or at least may be a stronger paradigm in some disciplines than others—the contributors effectively undercut any idea that ‘the Middle Ages is a period of small, quaint things and people’ (p. 5). The arrangement of the essays highlights their variety, but several clusters also emerge. Readers who are most interested in the ontological categories at stake might begin with Jaeger’s introduction and ‘Richard of St. Victor and the Medieval Sublime,’ which argues for defining the sublime through its effects rather than any specific [End Page 116] qualities and takes Richard of St. Victor’s description of ‘ecstatic contemplative experience’ as the central case study (p. 163). In ‘How Magnificent Was Medieval Art?,’ Beth Williamson suggests that medieval and modern ideas of the magnificent and sublime have some general similarities but that medieval art encouraged the reader to connect with God rather than to remain disinterested, as required by the Kantian sublime. Architecture and art lend themselves perhaps most naturally to considerations of grandeur, and several essays explore those connections from different angles. Areli Marina’s ‘Magnificent Architecture in Late Medieval Italy’ examines both buildings and texts to demonstrate that ‘the sophisticated visual architectural language of magnificence was well-defined and clearly understood’ much earlier than previously recognized (p. 194). In ‘Reflections on the “Wonderful Height and Size” of Gothic Great Churches and the Medieval Sublime,’ Paul Binski considers how structures might inspire wonder at their colossal size or complex variety. Adam S. Cohen’s ‘Magnificence in Miniature: The Case of Early Medieval Manuscripts’ persuasively demonstrates that books, despite their smaller size, could evoke similar responses; they depicted their patrons as magnificent in addition to functioning as magnificent objects in their own right. Whereas Cohen approaches manuscripts from a visual culture perspective, other writers focus on textual representations of the magnificent and sublime. Martino Rossi Monti’s ‘“Opus es magnificum”: The Image of God and the Aesthetics of Grace’ shows how philosophers and theologians constructed grace as ‘something sublime and grandiose’ (p. 28). Danuta Shanzer considers the problems posed by biblical style’s apparent lack of magnificence in ‘“Incessu humilem, successu excelsam”: Augustine, Sermo humilis, and Scriptural ὕψος.’ In ‘“Error Left Me and Fear Came in Its Place”: The Arrested Sublime of the Giants in Divine Comedy, Canto XXXI,’ Eleanora Stoppino confirms that the sublime was a literary as well as a theological concern; she recognizes ‘disoriented perception’ as ‘a key element for the analysis of the gigantic Sublime’ in Dante p. (181). Proving that the sublime and magnificent were not restricted to what one could see or read, a subset of essays explores how sound also participated in those discourses. Christopher Page studies the writings of and about liturgical singer Mamertus Claudianus in ‘The Magnificence of a Singer in Fifth-Century Gaul.’ Margot E. Fassler’s ‘Helgaud of Fleury and the Liturgical Arts: The Magnification of Robert the Pious’ reflects on ‘the ways that music and musicians helped to make events and persons—both living and dead—worthy of praise’ (p. 103). Emma Dillon’s marvelous essay, ‘Listening to Magnificence in Medieval Paris,’ contends that civic sound, with its unpredictable, unruly, and ephemeral nature, ‘connot[es] the magnificence’ of that city (p. 216). The strengths of this...

Review: The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years by Christopher Page

Review: The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years by Christopher Page

The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260-1330

This groundbreaking book develops medieval musicology from the perspective of historical cultural studies. Plucking medieval song from its traditional disciplinary shrine, Emma Dillon inserts it into a medieval soundscape reconstructed from literary and art-historical sources. Music is situated rather than haloed; and while its sonority may be intensified in the process, it can also be complicated and contested by dissonant or distracting noises. Indeed, song becomes its own source of dissonance and distraction as the sense of the sung text(s) is subordinated to the sonority of a pre- or non-linguistic surge of sound. Characteristic of the musical period on which Dillon focuses is the polyphonic motet, instances of which are discussed regularly throughout her exposition. Motets have been the object of exquisite dissection, but (following the work of Christopher Page) Dillon encourages us to see them not only as complexly performed texts, or sets of texts in meaningful tension, but also as soundscapes that make competing and sometimes incompatible claims on the listener's ear. This superabundance of musical sound into which individual melody and text both fold she felicitously calls ‘supermusicality’, a term that is reiterated and refined as her study advances from vernacular works that evoke the sounds of the city or court (Chapters 1–4) through to works of private devotion and prayer (5–9). One of the strengths of this book is the way it shows how complex sonorities bind together realms traditionally thought of as distinct. In the main her listening is guided by a kind of homespun phenomenology (‘Let's walk’, ‘Let's listen’, ‘Imagine … ’) and by faith in the many ‘witnesses’ that the past provides to its practices, but a theoretical steer to the resources of supermusicality is imparted by Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia, or ‘the primacy of context over text’ (p. 46). The exuberance of Bakhtinian discursivity readily translates into the hubbub of medieval street cries, the ruckus of charivari, or the ravings of the dervé in Adam de la Halle's Jeu de la feuillée, and helps capture the subversive energy of marginal images in devotional books. Despite this being an illuminating study of an important period of French culture, the book's main weakness is its French. Although Dillon references some francophone critical writings, she is much more reliant on anglophone scholarship, and, except when the medieval texts she quotes have been reliably translated by others, her renderings are at best approximate, at worst plain wrong. Especially in Chapters 2 and 3, Middle French verb forms are translated seemingly at random, and expressions are misconstrued to an extent that is hair-raising in a work that OUP has presumably subjected to rigorous external and internal vetting. Dillon's engaging subordination of sense to sound is impressive; her book's cavalier treatment of the sense of French texts is not.

Essays on Renaissance Music in Honour of David Fallows: Bon jour, bon mois et bonne estrenne (review)

(MOSTLY) EARLY MUSICS Essays on Renaissance Music in Honour of David Fallows: Bon jour, bon mois et bonne estrenne. Edited by Fabrice Fitch and Jacobijn Kiel. (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music, 11.) Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 2011. [xx, 424 p. ISBN 9781843836193. $95.] Music examples, scores, facsimiles, illustrations, inventories, tables, bibliography, indexes. To celebrate prodigious, indispensable achievements of consummate British scholar, musicologist, and teacher David Fallows on occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday in 2010, three generations of colleagues, friends, mentees, and former students have assembled sterling offering of thirty-eight significant essays on of fifteenth through early seventeenth centuries (and tad beyond). Lauded by Bonnie J. Blackburn, Jane Alden, and Christopher Page as the doyen of fifteenthcentury English secular (p. 44), a continuing source of inspiration and guidance (p. 33), and one for whom music has always been about life of others, as well as his own (p. 8), Fallows can bask in well-deserved admiration, gratitude, and affection radiating throughout this Festschrift. Good cheer (mixed with occasional mild spice of disputes between friends) resonates throughout this volume as well, from subtitle paraphrasing Guillaume Du Fay's rondeau for New Year's, Bon jour, bon mois, bon an et bonne estraine, evoking holiday best wishes (conveniently close to honoree's December 20 birthday) that include good gift (although why this special festive present hearkening back to medieval times has later French spelling estrenne, modern etrenne, goes unexplained) to subtle allusions in article titles and elsewhere (e.g., Alden's Ung Petit cadeau, Dagmar Hoffmann-Axthelm's David musicus, and fortuitous number of sixtyfive titles in Warwick Edwards's hand-list, pp. 202-6), direct addresses to Fallows, and photo graphs ranging from boyhood to seasoned professional still happily reveling in his pursuits. The volume's list of Fallows's principle publications dating from 1973 to 2010 presents formidable array of stellar monographs, critical and facsimile editions, catalogs, articles, and reviews, attesting to magnitude, scope, and lasting importance of his work, much of it stemming from his long career since 1976 on faculty of University of Manchester (now as emeritus). Absent are his 1978 dissertation under Philip Brett from University of Cali - fornia, Berkeley (Robert Morton's Songs: A Study of Styles in Mid-Fifteenth Century) and projects yet to come. Among these is an edition in Musica Britannica, Secular Polyphony, 1380-1480, cited by Black burn (p. 47) as appearing in 2011; although pretty much ready, . . . definitely forthcoming and labour of many years, it will not actually be in press, according to series editor Julian Rushton, until probably . . . 2014 or even 2015 (e-mail to author dated 11 May 2012; see also http://www .musicabritannica.org.uk/volumes.html [accessed 2 June 2012]). Experts and tyros alike can readily grasp Fallows's core scholarship issued in thirty-five journal and book articles between 1976 and 2009 by consulting Ashgate's two retrospective compilations issued in its Vari orum Collected Studies series: Songs and Musicians in Fifteenth Century (Aldershot, U.K., 1996); and Composers and Their Songs, 1400-1521 (Farnham, U.K., 2010). Quite fittingly, magisterial command of repertory and its sources in Fallows's award-winning A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415-1480 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; supplemented by his ongoing list of corrections, adjustments, and additions through 3 March 2010 at http://personalpages .manchester.ac.uk/staff/david.fallows /appendix.pdf [accessed 2 June 2012]) casts its readily acknowledged, pervasive authority over entire proceedings. By broadly organizing volume's contents around sources and archives, of Du Fay (1397? …

The Christian west and its singers. The first thousand years. By Christopher Page. Pp. xxiv+692 incl. 3 frontispieces and 96 plates. New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 2010. £30. 978 0 300 11257 3

The Christian west and its singers. The first thousand years. By Christopher Page. Pp. xxiv+692 incl. 3 frontispieces and 96 plates. New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 2010. £30. 978 0 300 11257 3

The Christian West and its singers: the first thousand years

A renowned scholar and musician presents a new and innovative exploration of the beginnings of Western musical art. Beginning in the time of the New Testament, when Christians began to develop an art of ritual singing with an African and Asian background, Christopher Page traces the history of music in Europe through the development of Gregorian chant-a music that has profoundly influenced the way Westerners hear-to the invention of the musical staff, regarded as the fundamental technology of Western music. Page places the history of the singers who performed this music against the social, political and economic life of a Western Europe slowly being remade after the collapse of Roman power. His book will be of interest to historians, musicologists, performing musicians, and general readers who are keen to explore the beginnings of Western musical art.

Clavichordium floreat

The revival of old instrument-making craft skills in the early 20th century led to an extraordinary worldwide output of historically influenced musical instruments, some based on real and some on conjectural examples. It took until the 1970s and 80s for most of the lessons of the Renaissance and Baroque originals to be learnt, just in time for Christopher Page's ‘a cappella heresy’—the idea that medieval music in particular did not require instrumental ‘orchestration’—to put some of the early instrument makers out of business. For music of the 16th century onwards, amateurs enthusiastically carried on buying crumhorns, cornetts, recorders, viols, harpsichords and the like in great quantity, but alas many of these were not much played. Of the more than 4,000 cornetts produced by the Christopher Monk workshops in the past four decades, perhaps only a few hundred are in regular amateur use. For instruments less taxing than the cornett, the...

Reconsidering “High Style” and “Low Style” in Medieval Song

Using the concept of “style” in analysis runs the risk of circularity, where features of individual works are identified as belonging to a style whose definition itself is derived from those features. This pitfall undermines studies of the songs of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century troubadours and trouvères that delineate a “high style,” including chansons, and a “low style,” including dances and pastourelles. The dichotomy originated in the nineteenth century with Gaston Paris's concept of amour courtois, from which Roger Dragonetti later derived the term grand chant courtois, now a common label for “high-style” songs. Other literary scholars, notably Paul Zumthor and Pierre Bec, have discussed problems in classifying styles and genres. References to genres in medieval texts are ambiguous, and manuscripts rarely group songs by genre. Theorists such as Raimon Vidal, Jofre de Foixà, and Johannes de Grocheio do not present a clear-cut or consistent stratification of genres. John Stevens, Christopher Page, and others have proposed features of “high style” and “low style” that do not entirely agree. An examination of their examples and additional ones demonstrates that a perception of “style” can be subjective and circular, and that the notion of “high style” and “low style” is an oversimplification.

Classical Compact Disc Review Sources on the Web

In recent years, many critics have lamented the decline in coverage of classical music in the mainstream press (see, for example, James M. Keller, Endangered Species: Are Informed Music Critics a Dying Breed? Opera News 63, no. 1 (July 1998): 8-10). Perhaps in response to this trend, coverage of classical music on the Internet has grown markedly. Some critics who are active in print media also maintain a blog, such as the New Yorker's Alex Ross (http://www.therestisnoise.com). Reviews of recordings are also increasingly available on the Web. Some of them provide an online presence for a print resource, others are independent, though sometimes allied with similar sites in other countries, while still others reflect primarily the more specialized interests of their authors. The following review evaluates several Web sites from these categories for content, ease of searching, and usefulness to librarians. It should be emphasized that most of them include resources beyond reviews: feature articles on various topics, news items, editorials, and so forth. The focus here, however, will be on the reviews. All of these sites are accessible free of charge, although the first two do require registration. Gramofile. Gramophone. http://www.gramophone.co.uk/cdreviews.asp (Accessed June 2007) [Requires a Web browser and an Internet connection.] Gramofile is the online database of the magazine Gramophone, one of the oldest and most respected sources for reviews, and claims to offer access to over 30,000 reviews. Approximately 100 reviews are added each month. After registration, Gramofile is available by logging in with e-mail address and password. Searching is possible by Composer, Recording Name/Title Of Work, Artist, Group, Conductor, Company/Label, Keyword, and Format (limited to CD and DVD), or any combination thereof; to find a specific recording, search boxes are also provided for Catalogue Number and Barcode. On the help page, users are advised that Boolean operators do not work with this search engine. Despite this drawback, the number of searching options generally produces satisfactory results. Each review gives full details of the works and performers on the recording, the reviewer's name, and the month and year when it originally appeared in the magazine. Recordings that have now been deleted are helpfully identified as such in the results list. Although no time frame is provided for the Web site, it appears to encompass most of the compact disc era: the earliest review I could find, a recording by Gothic Voices and Christopher Page of works by Machaut (Hyperion CDA 66087), is dated January 1984. The most recent reviews were from May 2007, approximately a month behind the time of writing. But some reviews from April 2007 had not yet been added: a collection of orchestral works by Carl Nielsen performed by Thomas Dausgaard and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra (Dacapo 6220518), featured as the Disc of the Month, was not yet available in the database. The fact that reviews have been taken out of their original context results in occasional confusion for the reader. In his review of a recording of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg from August 1994, Alan Blyth refers to a list of other recordings that was presumably attached to the review in print, but is lacking in the Web version. Gramophone's reputation for providing knowledgeable reviews by prominent critics and scholars is well deserved. The consistently high quality of writing and the availability of more than twenty years of reviews ensure that librarians will want to consult Gramofile frequently. BBC Music Magazine. BBC Magazines. http://www.bbcmusicmagazine.co.uk/search.asp (Accessed June 2007) [Requires a Web browser and an Internet connection.] Like Gramophone, the periodical BBC Music Magazine maintains a Web site that includes access to reviews. Registration is accomplished by submitting an e-mail address. …

The earliest songbook in England

Anyone interested in learning more about music cultivated in medieval England will be delighted that this impressive edition has now become available. A major work of scholarship, John Stevens's project to produce a critical edition of the later Cambridge songs (Cambridge, University Library, Ms. Ff.i.17 (1)) lay unfinished at his death; the task of completion was undertaken by a host of academics too numerous to mention here, but each of whose particular expertise—palaeography, poetry, translation, bibliography, performance—is palpable in this carefully compiled volume. Their individual contributions are outlined in Christopher Page's foreword. Many readers will already be familiar with the music of the later Cambridge songs through editions of concordant manuscripts (such as the Carmina Burana, the Moosburg Gradual and sources of Notre Dame polyphony), earlier published references to the source, or from Gothic Voices' recording of Stevens's editions (The earliest songbook in England, Hyperion, cda67177, rec 1999). The later Cambridge songs are found in a manuscript dating from 1180–c.1230, reproduced in full at the end of this publication; the source should not be confused with the collection of 11th-century lyrics known as the Cambridge songs, which originated at Canterbury (see the facsimile edited by Karl Breul (Cambridge, 1915) or Jan. M. Ziolkowski's edition (New York, 1994)). Stevens makes a case in his introduction for a West Midlands provenance, somewhere in the area of Leicester, and perhaps Leicester Abbey itself. The introductory material is accessible, detailed and illuminating, and each song is then presented in manuscript order, complete with lengthy criticism relating to matters of subject, textual translation, editorial amendments, concordant sources, presentation, poetic metre, bibliography, and a wider commentary that deals with liturgical function or other matters specific to the song in question. The attention paid to each item is painstaking, and it is particularly useful to be able to compare each transcription with the monochrome facsimile. For those learning or teaching aspects of medieval notation there can be no better tool.

Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey, eds. Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 146. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. xix, 666 pp. ISBN 0-19-816579-X (hardcover)

Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey, eds. Fauvel Studies: Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France, MS francais 146. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. xix, 666 pp. ISBN 0-19-816579-X (hardcover). This enormous collection of essays combines the work of 27 authors, including ten musicologists, seven literary scholars, and ten historians, four of whom specialize in the history of art and architecture. Few musical manuscripts would warrant the breadth of attention and scholarly scrutiny found here, but Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, MS francais 146 (henceforth Fauvel) is an indisputable exception. Dating from the first decades of the fourteenth century, this is the oldest and largest (93 folia, measuring 33 ? 46 cm) of the thirteen extant manuscripts containing an interpolated version of the Roman de Fauvel, written by Gerves du Bus. A satirical allegory, the Roman encapsulates the last decades of the reign of the French king, Philip the Fair (d. 1314), and the downfall of his finance minister, Enguerran de Marigny, using the mocking image of a horse called Fauvel, whose name (an acrostic) and nature is representative of the vices ijlaterie, avarice, vilanie, variete, envie, and laschete. This grand literary creation, written in Old French and intended for a sophisticated audience, is richly decorated with both highly detailed illuminations and interpolated music. It includes settings of both French and Latin poetry, in the form of motets, conductus, and monophonie songs, early examples of the formes fixes. Also included in the manuscript are the complete works of an otherwise obscure composer, Jehannot de Lescurel, a verse chronicle of French history (1300-1316), and several French and Latin narrative dits (moralizing poems) by Geffroy de Paris. A modern edition of the Latin examples, by Leofranc Holford-Strevens, appears for the first time in the present volume (The Latin Dits of Geffroy de Paris: An Editto Princeps); this article alone is an unquestionably valuable contribution to the existing literature. Any musical scholar approaching this extremely complex manuscript for the first time would do well to begin with a detailed reading of this volume, which not only handily summarizes all relevant scholarship to date (and provides a valuable introduction to the source by the volume editors) but also considerably advances our knowledge of compositional technique and manuscript organization in early Ars nova France. Several articles are essential reading for an analytical understanding of the music of this period. Wulf Arit (Jehannot de Lescurel and the Function of Musical Language in the Roman de Fauvel as Presented in BN fr. 146) shows Fauvel not only as a substantial early source of the separate genres of rondeaux, ballade, and virelai, but also as a previously unrecognized exemplar of new compositional methods in these monophonie songs. Joseph C. Morin (Jehannot de Lescurel's Chansons, Geffroy de Paris's Dits, and the Process of Design in BN fr. 146) posits a credible theory that the works of Geffroy and Lescurel, like the Roman, were manipulated carefully by the compilers of the manuscript in order to best reflect its political focus. Included as evidence is a useful appendix of column widths and ruling markings, showing the careful design of the copyists. Christopher Page shows the manuscript as an early source for an innovative new genre, the ballade, which had only recently appeared on the scene in Paris, some time between the writing of the treatise of Johannes de Grocheio (c. 1300) and the compiling oi Fauvel (Tradition and Innovation in BN fr. 146: The Background to the Ballades). This volume also provides a new catalogue, by Susan Rankin, for all the short plainchants of the manuscript (The 1AUeIUyS, antenes, respons, ygnes et verssez' in BN fr. 146: A Catalogue Raisonne). Anne Walters Robinson (Local Chant Readings and the Roman de FauveF), contributes a comprehensive study of variants for several Fauvel chants in thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury French manuscripts (most of which are Parisian). …

Review: Latin Poetry and Conductus Rhythm in Medieval France by Christopher Page; The Sound of Medieval Song: Ornamentation and Vocal Style According to the Treatises by Timothy J. McGee, Randall A. Rosenfeld

Review: Latin Poetry and Conductus Rhythm in Medieval France by Christopher Page; The Sound of Medieval Song: Ornamentation and Vocal Style According to the Treatises by Timothy J. McGee, Randall A. Rosenfeld

Latin Poetry and Conductus Rhythm in Medieval France . Christopher Page . The Sound of Medieval Song: Ornamentation and Vocal Style According to the Treatises . Timothy J. McGee , Randall A. Rosenfeld .

Latin Poetry and Conductus Rhythm in Medieval France . Christopher Page . The Sound of Medieval Song: Ornamentation and Vocal Style According to the Treatises . Timothy J. McGee , Randall A. Rosenfeld .