Resources

• Introduction
• Music Editions
• Doctoral Dissertations
  • Bowers, R.
  • Clark, A.
  • Cuthbert, M.
  • Lefferts, P.M.
  • Peck Leverett, A.
  • Rico, G.
  • Sandon, N.
  • Stoessel, J.
  • Widaman, J.
  • Williamson, M.

Roger Bowers, Choral Institutions within the English Church:- Their constitution and development 1340 - 1500 (PhD, University of East Anglia, 1975)

[Taken from Introductory:] This thesis deals with the history of English liturgical choirs between the years 1340 and 1500. It seeks to enlighten the history of pre-Reformation English church music by relating to it the history of the personnel to whom its performance was entrusted.

Five PDF files, downloadable

Alice V. Clark, Concordare cum Materia: The Tenor in the Fourteenth-century Motet (PhD, Princeton University, 1996)

This study takes as its starting point the description of motet composition by Egidius de Murino, who says that the tenor should "concord with the matter" of the motet to be written. The repertory under consideration at this stage is the French tradition of the mid-fourteenth century, mostly transmitted in the complete-work manuscripts of Guillaume de Machaut...

One PDF file, downloadable

Michael Scott Cuthbert, Trecento Fragments and Polyphony Beyond the Codex (PhD, Harvard University, 2006)

This thesis seeks to understand how music sounded and functioned in the Italian trecento based on the examination of all the surviving sources, rather than only the most complete. A majority of surviving sources of Italian polyphonic music from the period 1330-1420 are fragments; most, the remnants of lost manuscripts. Despite their numerical dominance, music scholarship has viewed these sources as secondary...

Many PDF files, in different formats and resolutions, downloadable from Dr Cuthbert's website

Peter Martin Lefferts, The Motet in England in the Fourteenth Century (PhD, Columbia University, 1983)

The history of polyphonic music in late medieval England is difficult to reconstruct on account of the paucity of intact sources, the concomitant lack of a substantial number of complete pieces, and the difficulty with which the surviving repertoire can be associated with any specific institutions or social milieu. Nonetheless, there are significant scattered remains, and this study endeavors to examine in detail one important genre, the motet...

Two PDF files, downloadable

Adelyn Peck Leverett, A Paleographical and Repertorial Study of the Manuscript Trento, Castello del Buonconsiglio, 91 (1378)(PhD, Princeton University, 1990)

This dissertation is an anaiysis of Trent 91, one of the series of fifteenth-century musical manuscripts known collectively as the Trent Codices. Trent 91 contains a large repertory of sacred music, most of it anonymously and uniquely preserved. The following study defines, for the first time, that repertory's pivotal place in the larger context of musical developments during the Renaissance.

Three PDF files, downloadable

Gilles Rico, Music in the Arts Faculty of Paris in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (DPhil, University of Oxford, 2005)

In the thirteenth-century, the city of Paris witnessed the birth of the University, the gradual penetration of the new philosophical paradigm of Aristotelianism and the emergence of a new theoretical discourse dealing with the measurement and notation of musical time. Scholars have attempted to find correlations between these three distinct phenomena. Focusing on music theory sources and on other indirect testimonies, they have never satisfactorily approached the central question of the teaching of music in the Arts faculty of Paris. The objective of the present study is precisely to explore this terra incognita.

One PDF file, downloadable

Nicholas Sandon, The Henrican Partbooks Belonging to Peterhouse: A Study, with Restorations of the Incomplete Compositions Contained in Them (PhD, University of Exeter, 1983)

This dissertation examines Cambridge, University Library, Peterhouse mss 471–474, four partbooks from a set of five copied late in the reign of Henry VIII, which contain seventy-two pieces of Latin church music.

Two PDF files, downloadable

Jason Stoessel, The Captive Scribe: The context and culture of scribal and notational process in the music of the ars subtilior (PhD, University of New England, 2002)

The extant scribal record of the music of the ars subtilior is considered in terms of the reception of this musical style within particular cultural contexts. The first part of this study re-examines the two principal sources (F-CH!564 and I-MOe5.24) of a partially shared ars subtilior repertoire and concludes that, despite the presence in part of a repertoire ostensibly composed north of the Alps (c. 1380-1395), these manuscripts were compiled in or close to major centres on the Italian peninsula (Florence and Pisa/Bologna/Florence respectively). These conclusions form the background to the second part of this study that identifies cultural tendencies/influences in the notation of musical rhythm in the ars subtilior repertoire.

Two PDF files, downloadable

Jean Widaman, The Mass Ordinary Settings of Arnold de Lantins: A Case Study in the Transmission of Early Fifteenth-century Music (PhD, Brandeis University, 1988)

Arnold de Lantins, a composer widely represented in the musical sources of the 1420s and 1430s and a singer in the papal chapel from 1431 to 1432, stood at the forefront of stylistic developments of the early fifteenth century, yet his music is hardly known among music historians and performers today. Although he was one of the first composers to link the Gloria and Credo by motto beginnings and to write a complete, musically unified Mass cycle, few of his Ordinary settings are available in modern transcription and little has been written about them.

Two PDF files, downloadable

Magnus Williamson, The Eton Choirbook: Its Institutional and Historical Background (DPhil, Oxford, 1997)

The Eton Choirbook (Eton College Library, MS 178) is one of the most important English musical codies surviving from the century before the Reformation. Its significance derives from its size and quality; from its value as a source of unica; and from its unbroken association with its host institution, one of the foremost royal foundations of the late Middle Ages.

Two PDF files, downloadable