Posts Tagged ‘inventory’

Ashgate Publishing has available a series (Music in Medieval Europe) that looks to be of interest to musicians with a fair knowledge of early practices and theory. Unfortunately, as you can see from the listed prices, they are expensive. We have a list of books we already want to order from Ashgate; we are wondering if there’s enough interest in these that they should be appended to that order.
While we will not be taking deposits (yet), we would hope that anyone who expresses an interest would carry through on that interest as we do so dislike expensive stock that collects dust rather than orders. Please drop us a line at owner@potboilerpress.com if you are seriously interested, with which books you are interested in and how many. And passing this information along to others would, as always, bring a smile to our lips and a song to our heart (albeit not necessarily one in medieval Occitan or Church Latin).

Series Editor: Thomas Forest Kely, Harvard University.
“This series of … volumes provides an overview of the best current scholarship in the study of medieval music. Each volume is edited by a ranking expert, and each presents a selection of writings, mostly in English which, taken together, sketch a picture of the shape of the field and of the nature of current inquiry. The volumes are organised in such a way that readers may go directly to an area that interests them, or they may provide themselves with a substantial introduction to the wider field by reading through the entire volume. The editors introduce readers to an enormous swathe of musical history and style, and present the best of recent musical scholarship. Taken together, they will increase access to a rich body of music, and provide scholars and students with an authoritative guide to the best of current thinking about the music of the middle ages.”
1. Ars antiqua: Organum, Conductus, Motet. Edited by Edward Roesner, New York University, 2008. Hardback, $275.00 (“The ars antiqua began to be mentioned in writings about music in the early decades of the fourteenth century, where it was cited along with references to a more modern “art,” an ars nova. The essays in this collection address the broad range of issues regarding ars antiqua polyphony: the nature and definition of genre; the evolution of the polyphonic idiom; the workings of the creative process including the role of oral process and notation and the continuum between these extremes; questions about how this music was used and understood; and of how it fits into the intellectual life of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.”)

2. Ars nova: French and Italian Music in the 14th Century. Edited by John L. Nádas, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008. Hardback, $275.00 (“This collection of articles brings together scholarship that reflects a broad methodological and chronological span of analysis of the ars nova, the polyphonic tradition which blossomed in France and Italy in the fourteenth century.”)

3. Chant and its Origins. Edited by Thomas Forrest Kelly, Harvard University, 2008. Hardback, $250.00 (“Plainchant is the music that underpins essentially all other music of the middle ages and is most abundantly preserved. It is a subject that has engaged a great deal of debate in the last fifty years and the complex issues that have arisen in the course of this research form the basis of this collection of articles.”)

4. Embellishing the Liturgy: Tropes and Polyphony. Edited by Alejandro Planchart, University of California at Santa Barbara, 2008 c. 500 pages. Hardback, $250.00 (“The tropes, together with the sequences, represent the main creative activity of European musicians in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries. This volume provides an introduction to the study of tropes in the form of an extensive anthology of major studies and a comprehensive bibliography, and it constitutes a classic reference resource for the study of one of the most important musico-liturgical genres of the central middle ages.”)

5. Instruments and their Music in the Middle Ages. Edited by Timothy J. McGee, 2008 c. 500 pages. Hardback, $250.00 (“This collection of twenty-nine influential articles and papers about medieval musical instruments and their repertory considers the construction of the instruments, their playing technique, the occasions for which they performed and their repertory. Taken as a whole, they paint a broad and detailed picture of instrumental performance during the medieval period.”)

6. Oral and Written Transmission in Chant. Edited by Thomas Forrest Kelly, Harvard University, 2008. Hardback, $250.00. (“The early history of chant is a history of orality. In this volume, scholars of medieval music have taken up the ideas and techniques of scholars of folklore, oral transmission and ethnomusicology—for the chant is, in fact, an ancient music transmitted for a time in oral culture. Ironically, the use of written documents is also vital for the study of chant, involving analysis of oral issues in the writing of music.”)

7. Poets and Singers: On Latin and Vernacular Monophonic Song. Edited by Elizabeth Aubrey, University of Iowa, 2008. Hardback $250.00 (“The essays gathered here represent the principal themes and issues that have occupied scholars of late medieval monophonic songs over the last half century: their place in history and society; the role of women as composers and performers; poetic and musical structures, styles and genres; relationships between poems and melodies; written and oral transmission; and performance practices.”)

We are in the process of becoming an affiliate of Reconstructing History, a supplier of historical clothing patterns and notions. While they carry such from the 15th through late 20th centuries, we shall carry just those patterns for clothing dating from before 1600, and no notions or sundries.