scholarly journals ‘With sound of lute and pleasing words’: The Lute Song and Voice Types in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century England

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 1-62
Author(s):  
Richard Robinson

AbstractThe Elizabethan and Jacobean lute song (1597–1622) represents one of the most iconic genres of all early music. Although much literature has been dedicated to this repertory, the issue of the voices for which this music was probably intended still remains surprisingly underexplored. This subject has, moreover, acquired greater significance in light of research undertaken by Simon Ravens (2014) and Andrew Parrott (2015), which has challenged the plausibility of the falsetto voice in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, particularly in sacred music.This paper explores the issue of the types of voices that most likely performed the Elizabethan and Jacobean lute song in three ways. Firstly, contemporary English evidence for lutes and viols is analyzed together with information regarding tuning and transposition. Secondly, the music itself is investigated, including the part names and clefs used alongside the tessitura of the melodic line. Finally, a detailed examination of evidence for the tenor and falsetto voice is presented, including a critical examination of the word ‘faine’ (usually assumed to mean ‘falsetto’). The collective results are then brought together to refine current ideas regarding the voices used in the Elizabethan and Jacobean lute song.

Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.


2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Wright

This study reconstructs the connected history of socio-economic and intellectual practices related to property in seventeenth-century Bengal. From the perspective of socio-economic practices, this study is concerned with the legal transfer of immovable property between individuals. From the perspective of intellectual practice, this study is concerned with how property was understood as an analytical category that stood in a particular relation to an individual. Their connected history is examined by analysing socio-economic practices exemplified in a number of documents detailing the sale and donation of land and then situating these practices within the scholarly analysis of property undertaken by authors within the discipline of nyāya—the Sanskrit discipline dealing primarily with ontology and epistemology. In the first section of the essay, I undertake a detailed examination of available land documents in order to highlight particular conceptions of property. In the second section of the essay, I draw out theoretical issues examined in nyāya texts that relate directly to the concepts expressed in the land documents. In the third and final section of the essay, I discuss the shared language and shared concepts between the documents and nyāya texts. This last section also addresses how the nyāya analysis of property facilitates a better understanding of claims in the documents and what nyāya authors may have been doing in writing about property.


1988 ◽  
Vol 113 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-305
Author(s):  
Jerome Roche

It is perhaps still true that research into sacred types of music in early seventeenth-century Italy lags behind that into madrigal, monody and opera; it is certainly the case that the textual aspects of sacred music, themselves closely bound up with liturgical questions, have not so far received the kind of study that has been taken for granted with regard to the literary texts of opera and of secular vocal music. This is hardly to be wondered at: unlike great madrigal poetry or the work of the best librettists, sacred texts do not include much that can be valued as art in its own right. Nevertheless, if we are to understand better the context of the motet – as distinct from the musical setting of liturgical entities such as Mass, Vespers or Compline – we need a clearer view of the types of text that were set, the way in which composers exercised their choice, and the way such taste was itself changing in relation to the development of musical styles. For the motet was the one form of sacred music in which an Italian composer of the early decades of the seventeenth century could combine a certain freedom of textual choice with an adventurousness of musical idiom.


2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 436-478
Author(s):  
Kimberly Beck Hieb

This article interrogates sacred repertoire produced in late seventeenth-century Salzburg as a reflection of a local Catholic piety that centered on sacrifice, especially the ultimate sacrifice of martyrdom. As an individual principality that was subject to both the Papal court in Rome and the Holy Roman Emperor, Salzburg provides a meaningful case study in the heterogeneous regional post-Tridentine Catholic practices that musicologists and historians alike have only begun to explore. Compositions by Andreas Hofer (1629–84) and Heinrich Biber (1644–1704) present a prime example of sacred music’s ability to manifest a region’s distinct piety. Supported by their patron Prince-Archbishop Maximilian Gandolph von Kuenburg (r. 1668–87), Hofer and Biber left behind musical evidence of this exceptional Catholicism in the feasts they elaborated with substantial concerted compositions as well as the distinct texts they set, which do not align with prescribed liturgies and likely reflect persistent local practices that resonated with the prince-archbishop’s Counter-Reformation agenda. Printed liturgical books and emblems celebrating Maximilian Gandolph further support the claim that throughout the seventeenth century liturgical practice and sacred music in Salzburg maintained a local flavor that concentrated on themes of sacrifice and martyrdom.


2017 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 33-68
Author(s):  
Mary E. Frandsen

Elector Johann Georg II of Saxony (r. 1656-1680) is primarily remembered today for his cultivation of elaborate court festivals and a lavish musical life at the Dresden court throughout his twenty-four-year reign. He played an important role in the development of sacred music in seventeenth-century Germany and privileged music in the modern Italian style. This article tells about the efforts of Saxon Prince Johann Georg II in establishing a musical ensemble between 1637 and 1651, hampered by the 30 Years‘ War (1618-1648).


2019 ◽  
pp. 12-18
Author(s):  
Коденко И. И.

The article is devoted to the study of the authentic performance periods formation and the definition of their specifics. The evolution of the origin and formation of ancient ensembles, both instrumental and vocal, and their rapid growth around the world are analyzed. The works of many researchers are devoted to the study of ancient music: V. P. Kachmarchik, R. Taruskin, N. V. Sikorskaya, etc. but the lack of musicians attention and theoretical studies to the issues of specificity and authentic performance development are emphasized. As a result of work the review of the most known ensembles and ancient music performers of Western Europe, Russia and Ukraine of the second half of the XX-XXI centuries is made and also specificity of each ensemble is defined. The staging of «Dido and Aeneas» by I. Korol and «Boris Godunov» by A. Reshetin operas and their performing versions are compared. By the beginning of the XXI century, the phenomenon of Early Music has firmly taken its place among the other musical directions of our cultural life. The prospect of further research is in a detailed examination of each period of authentic performance.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Miller

This article presents findings and conclusions from a recently completed Ph.D. project which researched the use of recorders in performing sacred music in Spanish cathedrals and churches during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This study also examined interactions of the historical findings with artistic questions arising in twenty-first-century performance of sacred music repertoire. Paradoxically, while numerous sets of recorders were purchased by ecclesiastic institutions during the sixteenth century, most contemporary compositions did not specifically call for their use. As well, surviving sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century documentation is highly fragmentary regarding the participatory role of recorders in sacred repertoire of this period. Scholarly research and writing had not addressed this issue, and many questions persisted regarding any role of recorders in this repertoire. Sacred music of this era offers the modern musician an extensive and rich potential repertoire of supreme quality and beauty. Therefore, in seeking an historically informed basis for performance, this project asked if recorders were used in such works in Spanish ecclesiastic institutions during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and, if so, how.


1982 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Gaukroger

In this paper I want to examine in some detail one eighteenth-century attempt to restructure the foundations of mechanics, that of Leonhard Euler. It is now generally recognized that the idea, due to Mach, that all that happened in the eighteenth century was the elaboration of a deductive and mathematical mechanics on the basis of Newton's Laws is misleading at best. Newton's Principia needed much more than a reformulation in analytic terms if it was to provide the basis for the comprehensive mechanics that was developed in the eighteenth century. Book II of the Principia, in particular, where the problem of the resistance offered to the motion of a finite body by a fluid medium was raised, was generally (and rightly) thought to be in large part mistaken and confused. There were also a number of areas crucial to the unification of mechanics which Newton did not deal with at all in the Principia: particularly the dynamics of rigid, flexible and elastic bodies, and the dynamics of several bodies with mutual interactions. Although a start had been made on some of these topics in the seventeenth century (notably by Galileo, Beeckman, Mersenne, Huygens, Pardies, Hooke, and Leibniz), it was only in the eighteenth century that they were subjected to detailed examination, and Euler's contribution to the development of these topics, and hence to the unification of mechanics, was immense.


1990 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-347
Author(s):  
Russell K. Skowronek ◽  
Max M. Houck

During the past 20 years a growing number of archaeologists have focused their investigations on contact and early historic-era sites in the New World. Frequently the most difficult aspect of these studies is the accurate identification of a site's age, function, and cultural affiliation from recovered material remains. Concurrent with this research has been an increasing concern for the conservation and preservation of the fragile objects recovered from these sites. One of the most important classes of artifacts for the dating and cultural identification of sites are coins. In this study we review a variety of nondestructive surface-enhancement techniques that were undertaken for the detailed examination of worn coins recovered from the seventeenth-century Marquette Mission site in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.


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