Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 345-350
Author(s):  
Paul Walker
Keyword(s):  
Structural Foundation ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Art Music ◽  
The Body ◽  
Gregorian Chant ◽  
Fundamental Level ◽  
Western Art ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Long Time

Western art music developed at the most fundamental level out of the desire to elaborate on and heighten the body of Gregorian Chant that lay at its heart. As this development unfolded, musicians settled on a scheme to slow the chant down, place it at the bottom of, or later within, a polyphonic texture, and adorn it with their own musical ideas and inventions. Such a long-note cantus firmus served as the foundation of sophisticated composition for an astonishingly long time; indeed, thanks to Johann Joseph Fux, one could say that it has never entirely disappeared from compositional engagement. By the end of the fifteenth century, musicians had been laying out their most sophisticated music, whether improvised or composed, on top of and surrounding such a cantus firmus since at least the high Middle Ages, and this music thus had its structural foundation largely determined for it at the pre-compositional stage. The musicians’ goal, then, was to adorn this foundation with all of the variety they could provide....

Prayers

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 137-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bossy
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Latin Text ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Excellent Opportunity ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Corporate Worship ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Low Mass

In 1945, which is beginning to seem a long time ago, Dom Gregory Dix published The Shape of the Liturgy. In the last two chapters of the book he expressed a view about the devotional and liturgical practice of the late Middle Ages which will provide a convenient starting-point for my subject. He said that the trouble about the medieval Mass was its separation of the ‘corporate offering’ assumed to have occurred in the primitive liturgy from the ‘priesthood of the priest’; the notion of worship it expressed, like the doctrine of the eucharist it exemplified, was ‘inorganic’. The effect of this was to let in, especially during the fifteenth century, non-liturgical, individualist forms of devotion which were unparticipatory and obsessed with historical facts about the life of Christ, notably with the facts of his Passion. ‘The quiet of low mass afforded the devout an excellent opportunity for using mentally the vernacular prayers which they substituted for the Latin text of the liturgy as their personal worship … The old corporate worship of the Eucharist is declining into a mere focus for the subjective devotion of each separate worshipper in the isolation of his own mind.’ Liturgical doing had subsided into inactive seeing and hearing, on the way to being engulfed in a miasma of private thinking and feeling. The Protestant reform of the liturgy amounted to pickling this pre-Reformation devotional tradition while dropping the ritual performance to which it had been loosely attached.

The Emergence of an Urban Ideology at Florence c. 1250–1450

1973 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 111-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
City Culture ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Industry And Commerce ◽  
The City

Every city must in a sense have a city culture. Florence, however, was the only place in which there arose at the end of the Middle Ages what one might call a city ideology, that is to say a set of developed ideas as distinct from a way of living, which was particularly designed by and for city-dwellers. Much of the modern historical interest in Florence has centred around these ideas which emerged in the first half of the fifteenth century, the more so because even the innovations in the visual arts introduced at the same time by Donatello and his contemporaries are in part a by-product of them. The theme which I would like to develop in this paper therefore is the relationship between the city society and its ideology. This is of course a very old and well-worn theme. One of the common presuppositions of Renaissance historiography has been the understandable assumption that the ideology fitted the city, and a good deal of historical analysis has been applied to identifying the congruences between them and illustrating the growth of the humanist school out of the circumstances of Florentine life. The ideology, however, was created in the early fifteenth century, at the end of the period which I am going to discuss, when Florence had already been a great centre of industry and commerce and an independent republic for a very long time. Fruitful as it has been, this approach therefore leaves one with the disquieting feeling that a place which has been for so long and so conspicuously a centre of throbbing urban life ought to have had its ideological revolution much earlier, particularly since economic historians have emphasized the elements of commercial contraction rather than expansion in the early Renaissance period. Some historians have found themselves driven into the paradoxical position of regarding the early Renaissance as a symptom of economic decline. I would therefore like to look at the old theme obliquely by deflecting attention from the great innovations themselves and concentrating it on the factors which favoured or hindered ideological innovation in the century and a half before they appeared.

“Singer’s Music”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Malone
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Choral Music ◽  
American South ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Punk Rock ◽  
Gregorian Chant ◽  
Vocal Production ◽  
Sacred Harp ◽  
Western Art ◽  
The American South

With a turbulent musical fabric of open and parallel fifths, high-decibel vocal production, and a grassroots DIY organizational structure, Sacred Harp singing has been described variously as “Gregorian Chant meets Bluegrass” and “Punk Rock Choral Music.” With historical roots in rural singing schools of New England and the American South, singing from The Sacred Harp tunebook remains a living, growing, and vital musical multinational subculture that operates without auditions, rehearsals, or performances. This chapter discusses participatory and social factors of music outside the presentational frame, the ideas of serious leisure, and philosophical notions of musicking and musical praxis to illuminate ways in which Sacred Harp singing stands apart from the concertizing traditions of Western art music and choral performance.

scholarly journals Bergen’s role in the medieval North Atlantic trade

AmS-Skrifter ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 43-51
Author(s):  
Knut Helle
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Total Trade ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
The North ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
The North Atlantic

North Atlantic trade in the high Middle Ages was centred on Bergen. The Bergen connection was important to the North Atlantic islanders and townsmen who specialized in trading with them, but up to the early fourteenth century did not count for much in Bergen’s total trade. This changed when larger assignments of Icelandic stockfish were sent to Bergen from the 1340s and reexported via the town’s Hanseatic settlement, the later Kontor. During the fifteenth century fish exports from the North Atlantic to Bergen declined sharply as the English increasingly fetched their fish directly from Iceland, and Hanseatic merchants from Hamburg and Lübeck followed in their wake to Iceland and the more southerly islands. Yet, in the author’s opinion, Hanseatic trade with the North Atlantic from Bergen was not reduced to the degree that has often been assumed. And it should not be overlooked that Bergen had economic relations with the North Atlantic islands outside the Hanse.

Music after the Fall

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

By the start of the 21st century many of the foundations of postwar culture had disappeared: Europe had been rebuilt and, as the EU, had become one of the world’s largest economies; the United States’ claim to global dominance was threatened; and the postwar social democratic consensus was being replaced by market-led neoliberalism. Most importantly of all, the Cold War was over, and the World Wide Web had been born. Music After The Fall considers contemporary musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing on theories from the other arts, in particular art and architecture, it expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Each chapter considers a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions are considered critically to build up a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from South American electroacoustic studios to pianos in the Australian outback. A new approach to the study of contemporary music is developed that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique, and more on the comparison of different responses to common themes, among them permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.

Putting the Madhyamaka Trick in Context: A Contextualist Reading of Huntington’s Interpretation of Madhyamaka

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-124
Author(s):  
Michael Dorfman
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Correspondence Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Rational Analysis ◽  
At Command ◽  
Rational Argumentation ◽  
Logical Fallacies ◽  
Key Terms

In a series of works published over a period of twenty five years, C.W. Huntington, Jr. has developed a provocative and radical reading of Madhyamaka (particularly Early Indian Madhyamaka) inspired by ‘the insights of post- Wittgensteinian pragmatism and deconstruction’ (1993, 9). This article examines the body of Huntington’s work through the filter of his seminal 2007 publication, ‘The Nature of the M?dhyamika Trick’, a polemic aimed at a quartet of other recent commentators on Madhyamaka (Robinson, Hayes, Tillemans and Garfield) who attempt ‘to read N?g?rjuna through the lens of modern symbolic logic’ (2007, 103), a project which is the ‘end result of a long and complex scholastic enterprise … [which] can be traced backwards from contemporary academic discourse to fifteenth century Tibet, and from there into India’ (2007, 111) and which Huntington sees as distorting the Madhyamaka project which was not aimed at ‘command[ing] assent to a set of rationally grounded doctrines, tenets, or true conclusions’ (2007, 129). This article begins by explicating some disparate strands found in Huntington’s work, which I connect under a radicalized notion of ‘context’. These strands consist of a contextualist/pragmatic theory of truth (as opposed to a correspondence theory of truth), a contextualist epistemology (as opposed to one relying on foundationalist epistemic warrants), and a contextualist ontology where entities are viewed as necessarily relational (as opposed to possessing a context-independent essence.) I then use these linked theories to find fault with Huntington’s own readings of Candrak?rti and N?g?rjuna, arguing that Huntington misreads the semantic context of certain key terms (tarka, d???i, pak?a and pratijñ?) and fails to follow the implications of N?g?rjuna and Candrak?rti’s reliance on the role of the pram??as in constituting conventional reality. Thus, I find that Huntington’s imputation of a rejection of logic and rational argumentation to N?g?rjuna and Candrak?rti is unwarranted. Finally, I offer alternate readings of the four contemporary commentators selected by Huntington, using the conceptual apparatus developed earlier to dismiss Robinson’s and Hayes’s view of N?g?rjuna as a charlatan relying on logical fallacies, and to find common ground between Huntington’s project and the view of N?g?rjuna developed by Tillemans and Garfield as a thinker committed using reason to reach, through rational analysis, ‘the limits of thought.’

Anna Russakoff, Imagining the Miraculous: Miraculous Images of the Virgin Mary in French Illuminated Manuscripts, ca. 1250-ca. 1450. Studies and Texts, 215; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination, 7. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2019, xviii, 194 pp., ill.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 541-544
Author(s):  
Juan Carlos Bayo
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old French ◽  
Illuminated Manuscripts ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Medieval Manuscript ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Image Context ◽  
Panel Paintings

This monograph deals with illuminated manuscripts created in French-speaking regions from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century, i.e., from the earliest narratives of Marian miracles written in <?page nr="542"?>Old French to the codices produced at the Burgundian court at the waning of the Middle Ages. Its focus, however, is very specific: it is a systematic analysis of the miniatures depicting both material representations of the Virgin (mainly sculptures, but also icons, panel paintings, altarpieces or reliquaries) and the miracles performed by them, usually as Mary’s reaction to a prayer (or an insult) to one of Her images.

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