WEMSK3: Music



None of these "guides" is very thorough.  If you are in the field of medieval music, you will find nothing to interest you.  If, on the other hand, you are not, this may help you or a student out. All of them date from before 1978, though I occasionally add things. This bib. is a salute to Rick Wright, who asked for it.


A.  For general musical bibliography:  Vincent Duckles, Music Reference and Research Materials.  5th ed. (NY: Schirmer Books, 1997). Note that the problems with the 4th edition have been ironed out.  You might use this as your first port of call.

B.  For the Middle Ages:  Andrew Hughes, Medieval Music.  The Sixth Liberal Art. Toronto Medieval Bibliographies 4 Rev. ed. (Toronto: TUP, 1980).  See also the bibliography on Liturgy.

See also: Margaret Louise Switten,  Music and Poetry in the Middle Ages: A  Guide to Research on French and Occitan Song, 1100-1400 (New York : Garland, 1995)   Garland medieval bibliographies ; vol. 19 Garland reference library of the humanities ; vol. 1102 Includes discography (p. 323-393) and indexes.


                                  Topic - Medieval Music



I.   Bibliography:

1. For a short survey:
Albert Seay, Music in the Medieval World, Prentice Hall History of Music Series (Englewood  Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965).

2. For the serious student:
Gustave Reese, Music in the Middle Ages (NY: Norton & Co.  1940) (The standard work).
Particularly good are the thumbnail sketches of sources, e.g.  that on pp. 125-127.

3. The various articles in Willi Apel's Harvard Dictionary  of Music (Cambridge: HUP, 1967) are good, if short; it is now replaced by Don M. Randel, Ed., The New Harvard Dictionary of Music,  (Cambridge: HUP, 1986).
For a more  thorough treatment with bibliography see
Stanley Sadie, Ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,  20 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1995).
It is also available in paperback; if you can get an old Grove, it's not bad for our purposes.

Another excellent port of call is
Ludwig Finscher, Ed., Die Musik in Geschichte und  Gegenwart, 2d ed. 17 vols.(Kassel: Baerenreiter, 1994-99).

Percy  A. Scholes, Ed., The Oxford Companon to Musicis also good. It is now replaced by
Denis Arnold, Ed., The New Oxford Companion to Music, 2 vols. (Oxford: OUP, 1983).A good desktop work.
A good one volume work is Geoffrey Hindley, The  Larousse Encyclopedia of Music, ed.  (London: Hamlyn, 1971).

4. For the student who is not familiar with music, there are good programmed introductions to essentials and notation in the Norton Series. I recommend:
Robert Lilienfeld, Learning to Read Music (NY: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), and
Howard Shanet, Learn to Read Music, (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1956).
Note, BTW, that there are computer programs which can read and reproduce music, and can even scan those old scores.

5. Discography.  We are fortunate in having available on record many examples of medieval music.
Alec Robertson and Denis Stevens, Eds.,The Pelican History of Music, Vol. I,  contains a discogrpahy, particularly to be recommended are the plainchant series by Dom Gajard (Decca), The History of  Music in Sound to accompany the New Oxford History of Music, and Masterpieces of Music before 1750.
Discographies abound, as you can find out by looking at Tennessee Bob's listing.

6. The Sources: The standard works are Martin Gerbert, Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica, 3 vols., San Blasianis,
1784 and its continuation in C. E. H. Coussemaker, Scriptorum de medii aevi nova series, 4 vols.  Paris, 1864-76.  Both are
available in  reprint, on microfiche, and on the net (Indiana site; cf.  Tennessee Bob's listing). The sources, with bibliography, are mentioned in Reese, 125 f. and passim.
A somewhat deficient translation of many of the sources is found in
Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History: Antiquity and the Middle  Ages, (NY: Norton, 1965).
It might just be a good idea to browse quickly through these, to get your feet on the ground.

7. For a more up-to-date, thorough discussion, see
Anselm Hughes, Ed., New Oxford History of Music, vol. II (Early Medieval Music up to 1300), ed. rev. ed., Oxford, 1955.

8. Plainsong: Willi Apel, Gregorian Chant (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1958).

9. Notation: Carl Parish, The Notation of Mediaeval Music, Faber and Faber, 1958.
                    Willi Apel, The Notation of Polyphonic Music, Mediaeval Academy, 5th ed., 1953 (has been severely criticized).

10. Aesthetics: Edgar de Bruyne, L'esthetique au moyen âge, 3 vols. (Brugge: De Tempel, 1946).  This ought to suffice.  There is a one volume version, De Middeleuwen, Geschiedenis van de Aestitica.  (Antwerp: Standard-Boekhandel, 1955), but stay away from it. (See bibliography on philosophy in MA for other works).

11.  The Liturgy: Liber Usualis, Graduale Romanum, Antiphonale Romanum.
The directions at the beginning of the Liber usualis (in English) are quite good.
For practical applications, the student will find some such elementary book as that by
Rev. Dominic Johner, A New School of Gregorian Chant, transl. from H. Erpf and M. Ferrars, 3d. ed.(Regensburg: Frederick Pustet, 1925), quite useful.

Several of the medieval sources contain directions for using the monochord to learn to sing.

l2.  The Organum (early polyphony): Musica Enchiriadis and Guido in Strunk.  The article in Apel's Dictionary is good,
cf. also Reese and Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, The New Oxford History.

13.  Musical instruments: Curt Sachs, The History of Musical Instruments (New York: Norton), 1940; and

Anthony Baines, Ed., Musical Instruments Through the Ages, Pelican: printed with revisions 1966, copyright, 196l.

See also  A Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Instruments. (Musica Antiqua, Iowa State University)

There is also a commented recordings by  Christopher Page "New Arts for Old: Medieval Music 1100-1480," A History of Music of the Western World 1100-1980 (Guilford, CT : Audio-Forum, 1996) 12 Tape Series, this one is Tape 1.

14.  Troubadours:

H. J. Chaytor, The Troubadours, Cambridge; 1912;

Fernando Liuzzi, La lauda e i primordi della melodia italiana, Rome, 1935;

Higini Angles, La musica de las cantigas de Santa Maria, Barcelona, 1943;

R. J. Taylor, Die Melodien der weltlichen Lieder des Mittelalters Metzler, 2 vols, 1964;

Frank Harrison, Music in Medieval Britain, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958.

There are many facsimiles of medieval music mostly edited by Beck, Aubry, Gennrich.
The Wege der Forschung series has collections of articles on

German Minnesang:

Hans Fromm, Ed., Der deutsche Minnesang, Wege der Forschung 15 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963)

and Provencal lyric

Rudolf Baehr, Ed.,  Der provenzalische Minnesang, Wege der Forschung 6 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967).

You might also want to look at the collection of articles in:
Medieval Music, 2 vols. Garland Library of the History of Western Music 1, 2 (NY: Garland, 1985).

There are bibliographies of individual movements and national poetries, such as

Tervooren, Bibliographie zum Minnesang (Berlin: Schmidt, 1969),

and small introductions, such as

B. Gagnepain, La Musique francais du moyen age (Que sais-je series).



Consult the larger bibliographies.  WEMSK will include bibliographies on each area, e. g. Minnesang, Old Occitan, Catalan (Ausias March), etc.