Music was a subject of considerable debate during the Renaissance. The notion that music could be interpreted in a meaningful way clashed regularly with evidence that music was in fact profoundly promiscuous in its application and effects. Subsequently, much writing in the period reflects a desire to ward off music’s illegibility rather than come to terms with its actual effects. In Broken Harmony Joseph M. Ortiz revises our understanding of music’s relationship to language in Renaissance England. In the process he shows the degree to which discussions of music were ideologically and politically charged. Offering a historically nuanced account of the early modern debate over music, along with close readings of several of Shakespeare’s plays (including Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale) and Milton’s A Maske, Ortiz challenges the consensus that music’s affinity with poetry was widely accepted, or even desired, by Renaissance poets. Shakespeare more than any other early modern poet exposed the fault lines in the debate about music’s function in art, repeatedly staging disruptive scenes of music that expose an underlying struggle between textual and sensuous authorities. Such musical interventions in textual experiences highlight the significance of sound as an aesthetic and sensory experience independent of any narrative function.

Published in 1944, this book considers musical theory and music history to create a short but comprehensive guide to the history of harmony and thus a discourse on what we understand harmony to be in the modern era. Referencing composers such as Beethoven and his contemporaries, the book is illustrated throughout with visual aids.

An Expanded, Interpretative Paraphrase of a Chronological Harmony of the Four Gospels, with Cross References, Supplementary Notes, and Indexes

In Staging Harmony, Katherine Steele Brokaw reveals how the relationship between drama, music, and religious change across England's long sixteenth century moved religious discourse to more moderate positions. It did so by reproducing the complex personal attachments, nostalgic overtones, and bodily effects that allow performed music to evoke the feeling, if not always the reality, of social harmony. Brokaw demonstrates how theatrical music from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries contributed to contemporary discourses on the power and morality of music and its proper role in religious life, shaping the changes made to church music as well as people’s reception of those changes. In representing social, affective, and religious life in all its intricacy, and in unifying auditors in shared acoustic experiences, staged musical moments suggested the value of complexity, resolution, and compromise rather than oversimplified, absolutist binaries worth killing or dying for.The theater represented the music of the church’s present and past. By bringing medieval and early Tudor drama into conversation with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Brokaw uncovers connections and continuities across diverse dramatic forms and demonstrates the staying power of musical performance traditions. In analyzing musical practices and discourses, theological debates, devotional practices, and early staging conditions, Brokaw offers new readings of well-known plays (Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale) as well as Tudor dramas by playwrights including John Bale, Nicholas Udall, and William Wager.

In a world that seems increasingly fragmented, J. Philip Newell calls us to a vision of life′s essential oneness. He invites us to listen for the heartbeat of God and to be part of a new harmony. A New Harmony is based on a Christianity more integrated with the earth and with the rest of humanity and we are taken on a pathway towards transformation in our lives. A New Harmony communicates across the boundaries of religion and race that have separated us and honours our distinct inheritances by serving what is deeper still—the oneness of our origins and the oneness of Earth′s destiny.