Christopher Page

The owl and the nightingale : musical life and ideas in France, 1100-1300

Music and literature enjoyed a renaissance in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. That period witnessed, among other things, the rise of the troubadours and trouveres, the elaboration of Notre Dame polyphony, and the emergence of Romance. Everywhere a new, secular spirit was coming into conflict with the older, more severe view of man and his music. It was the age of the debate between the owl and the nightingale, so called after a Middle English poem that pits the owl (the traditional asceticism of Christianity) against the nightingale (the new, more joyous and humane, social and intellectual trends of the times). Christopher Page, one of the most original music historians, examines this continuing struggle as it was fought by monks, preachers, commentators, and many others in the great and clamorous aviary of the Christian Church. Drawing upon an astonishing range of literary evidence, much of it from rare manuscripts, he enables us to see the musical life as well as the literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in a new light.

Music and instruments of the Middle Ages : studies on texts and performance

The studies assembled in this work include Medieval writings of many kinds - sermons, books of theology, epics and romances, as well as technical treatises on music - containing a wealth of information about the music and instruments of the Middle Ages.

A CATALOGUE AND BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ENGLISH SONG FROM ITS BEGINNINGS TO cl300

ITS BEGINNINGS TO cl300 by Christopher Page This catalogue lists all the twelfthand thirteenth-century songs with English words known to exist, and is designed to be of interest to the transcriber, performer and general student of medieval English music.1 Although there are only nineteen items surviving from the period in question a number have never been published either in facsimile or transcription. A forthcoming appendix to this catalogue will include fac similes of previously unpublished manuscripts to encourage work on new transcriptions and scrutiny of available ones. It is to be hoped that musicians who have already given much attention to the thirteenth-century repertoires of France and Spain will begin to perform these first English songs more frequently. The entries in the catalogue are arranged in chronological order and take the following form: (a) the title of the item is given in the spelling of the manuscript, followed by the number assigned to the text in The Index of Middle English Verse (C. Brown and R.H. Robbins, New York, 1943) and Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse (R.H. Robbins and J.L. Cutler, Lexington, 1965). These works supply an inventory of manuscripts and textual bibliography, (b) The source of the item is specified (location, manuscript, folio(s) and date), and other sources of the same piece referred to by their numbers in this catalogue; (c) the nature of the piece is indicated (syilabic/melismatic, monophonic/polyphonic) and in the case of the monophonic pieces, the compass and musical form is specified; (d) palaeographical problems liable to cause difficulties for the transcriber are noted; (e) bibliographical material is listed comprising facsimiles, transcriptions and critical discussions; (f) the number of the

The Spanish Guitar in the Newspapers, Novels, Drama and Verse of Eighteenth-Century England

For Paul SparksFor the most part, the history of the Spanish guitar in eighteenth-century England seems to be no history at all. There appears to be little to place between Samuel Pepys and the beginning of the nineteenth century when the six-string guitar emerged as a favoured instrument of the parlour musician. Thus it is widely supposed that the gut-strung guitar was little used in England until Fernando Sor and other foreign players made it fashionable in the decades after Waterloo (1815). This article proposes to correct that deeply entrenched view with a chronological checklist of material, much of it presented in this connection for the first time, that illuminates the fortunes of the guitar in eighteenth-century England, principally London.