The greatest Renaissance creator of liturgical music, the revered sixteenth-century composer known as Palestrina wrote works that served for centuries as models of counterpoint. Until The Style of Palestrina and the Dissonance, theoreticians seldom closely analyzed the composer's work to discover its fundamental elements, including the handling of rhythm, line, and harmony. Beginning chapters discuss the standard use of rhythm and mensuration in Palestrina's...

The Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music is a fascinating new survey of the music and culture of Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to 1600. With almost 50 essays on the social, historical, theoretical, and performance contexts of the music and musicians of the period, prepared by 45 contributors, including such internationally known scholars and performers as Reinhold Strohm, Christopher Page, Margaret Bent, Bruno Turner, Thomas...

Music permeates Shakespeare's plays. This comprehensive study explores the variety of its theatrical functions, situating them in the context of the Early Modern period's understanding of music. From the trumpet calls which animate the battle scenes of the histories and tragedies to the songs which inflect the moods of the comedies and romances, Shakespeare experiments throughout his career with music's potential to contribute to the effect of his...

Shakespeare is a cultural icon whose works are steeped in music, but the revered Royal Shakespeare Company is located in Stratford-upon-Avon, far from the hustle and bustle of London's theatre scene. Yet it is here, in the Midlands, that an exciting laboratory has been developing the practice of theatre music composition and sound design since 1961. Musical practices have evolved as composers and musical directors inherited from the past and innovated...

Presents a history and criticism of music and how to listen and appreciate it.

"As a distinguished scholar of Renaissance music, James Haar has had an abiding influence on how musicology is undertaken, owing in great measure to a substantial body of articles published over the past three decades. Collected here for the first time are representative pieces from those years, covering diverse themes of continuing interest to him and his readers: music in Renaissance culture, problems of theory as well as the Italian madrigal in...