Tonal consciousness, in the sense of a clear intuition about which note or chord a piece of music will finish on, is as much a part of our everyday experience of music as it is of contemporary music theory. This book asks to what extent such tonal consciousness might have operated in the minds of musicians of the Middle Ages, given the different tone world found in the modes of Gregorian chant, in troubadour and trouvère music, in Minnesang and in the early polyphony based upon chant. The author's approach is analytical, focusing on modality and balancing up-to-date concepts and methods of music analysis with those insights into their own compositional needs and processes that the people of the Middle Ages provided themselves through their writings about music. The book examines a range of both music sources and theoretical sources from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. This is a ground-breaking contribution both to the study of medieval music and to music analysis.

The Roman Catholic Good Friday liturgy includes a series of chants known today as the Improperia ("Reproaches") beginning with the following text: Popule meus, quid feci tibi? aut in quo contristavi te? responde mihi. Quia eduxi te de terra Egypti, parasti crucem Salvatori tuo ("My people, what have I done to you, or in what have I grieved you? Answer me. Because I led you out of the land of Egypt, you prepared a cross for your Savior"). The earliest witness to the chants is a Carolingian liturgical book from around 880, but it is agreed among scholars that their history extends back farther than this. Employing comparative analysis of Biblical exegesis, chant texts, and chant melodies, this study suggests that the initial chant verse, Micah 6:3-4a plus a Christianizing addendum ("My people... you prepared..."), originated in northwestern Italy between the end of the 4th century and the end of the 7th century and carried associations of the Last Judgment, the Passion, and Christian works, penitence, and forgiveness. Although previous scholarship has sometimes pointed to the Reproaches as a key text of Christian anti-Jewish history, it is clear that the initial three verses, the Popule meus verses, originally held allegorical rather than literal meanings. The fact that there are several preserved Popule meus chants across various liturgical repertoires and, moreover, several sets of Popule meus verses in a smaller subset of these repertoires--in northern Italy, southern France, and the Spanish March--bespeaks the pre-Carolingian origins of the Popule meus verses and raises the question of why the verses appear in the Carolingian liturgy when they do. This study proposes that the Popule meus verses were incorporated into the Carolingian liturgy at the Abbey of Saint-Denis under the abbacy of Charles the Bald (867-77). In the Adoration of the Cross ceremony adopted from Rome, paired with the Greek Trisagion, and carrying Gallican melody and meaning, the Carolingian Popule meus verses would have been an ecumenical declaration, as they spread, of the expediency of the crucified Christ and a penitent people, even in the face of impending political disintegration.

The first detailed study of Schenker's pathbreaking 1906 treatise, showing how it reflected 2500 years of thinking about harmony and presented a vigorous reaction to Austro-Germanic music theory ca. 1900.

Over two hundred items are catalogued in Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in New Zealand Collections (1989). Most are in institutional collections and were donated by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century book collectors, notably Sir George Grey (1812–98), Governor and later Premier of New Zealand. Having been transported across the globe, the manuscripts have remained, for the most part, beyond the purview of northern hemisphere scholars. The contributors to this interdisciplinary collection of essays include international experts such as Christopher de Hamel, Richard Gameson, Margaret Manion and Michael Orr, curators of New Zealand manuscript collections, New Zealand academics, and a PhD student. Migrations has two main aims: to lodge the Early European manuscripts in New Zealand within the international discourse of postcolonial heritage; and to place them within the mainstream of manuscript studies by drawing attention to their intrinsic significance and their relationship with manuscripts held in overseas collections. Part One focuses on the motives and historical circumstances underlying the formation of the principal collections and the subsequent changes in the ways that this heritage has been regarded. Three of the essays centre upon the bibliophiles who donated their manuscripts to public libraries. Others consider specific manuscripts as indices of changing attitudes to European, particulary British, cultural heritage. National identity, pedagogy, and curatorial practices are among the issues canvassed. Part Two consists of new scholarly studies of particular manuscripts, which examine them in relation to the cultural and documentary context in which they were produced or transmitted. Manuscripts studied include: a twelfth-century copy of music treatises by Boethius and Guido of Arezzo, probably from Christ Church, Canterbury; a Perugian breviary owned by an Augustinian friar, Antonio da Macerata; a book of hours adapted for Scottish use (the Rossdhu Hours); and a fragment of an early fifteenth-century book of hours produced by a London workshop and added to the Hours of Margery Fitzherbert. “Migrations is an imaginative and ambitious contribution to twenty-first-century manuscript studies. Most notably, the editors have invited manuscript scholars to address the issues raised by the manuscripts' location: New Zealand itself and its colonial history become tools for thinking with - about dispersal, about cultural memory, about access, about the meanings ascribed to artefacts. The editors have assembled a distinguished group of scholars in order to produce a collection of essays that is a coherent whole and at the same time individually driven by the intellectual curiosity that is the true sign of distinction. The book is a triumph.” Professor Felicity Riddy, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor of English, University of York “This excellent book makes a major contribution to the study of medieval manuscript collections in New Zealand, and will open up a little known area of extremely important material to an international audience. The quality of the scholarship throughout the book is very high, and the essays on the individual manuscripts present the material in the context of recent new approaches in the study of medieval and Early Modern manuscripts.” Nigel Morgan, Hon. Professor of Art History, University of Cambridge, Head of Research, Parker Library MSS Project, Corpus Christi College

Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis explores the concept of musical tonality through the writings of the Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1867), who was singularly responsible for theorizing and popularizing the term in the nineteenth century. Thomas Christensen weaves a rich story in which tonality emerges as a theoretical construct born of anxiety and alterity for Europeans during this time as they learned more about “other” musics and alternative tonal systems. Tonality became a central vortex in which French musicians thought—and argued—about a variety of musical repertoires, be they contemporary European musics of the stage, concert hall, or church, folk songs from the provinces, microtonal scale systems of Arabic and Indian music, or the medieval and Renaissance music whose notational traces were just beginning to be deciphered by scholars. Fétis’s influential writings offer insight into how tonality ingrained itself within nineteenth-century music discourse, and why it has continued to resonate with uncanny prescience throughout the musical upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Heiner Ruland charts a practical path towards a deepened musical understanding, illuminating the panorama of humanity's musical past. Indicating what may happen - and needs to happen - to music in the immediate and more distant future, the implications of this book for composition, musical education and therapy are immense. The author shows how the fundamental elements of music embody distinctive modes of consciousness. He examines the musical systems of ancient humanity and goes on to draw a vivid picture of our contemporary musical situation. This seminal work is more than a theoretical treatise on the nature of music, but a book to be understood and experienced through musical practice.