The Cultural Context of Medieval Music

An urgently needed guide to understanding medieval music to be used as a text for the university undergraduate, graduate students in music and interdisciplinary medieval studies, and for the professional musicologist and medievalist. This book will also be appreciated by everyone interested in early music. Nancy van Deusen's The Cultural Context of Medieval Music addresses the mental landscape surrounding music that, especially, was sung and experienced in the Middle Ages. Largely anonymous in its composition, and apparently lacking the motivation of fame and commerce, music within a well thought-out system of education served a purpose that goes far beyond casual entertainment or personal professional advancement. Offering experience through performance, music exemplified the basic principles not only of the material and possible measurements of the visible world-such as of objects, relationships, and movement-but also of the invisible materials of sound and time, making it an ideal medium for working with unseen substances such as concepts, imaginations, and ideas. St. Augustine in the late fourth century reinforced the importance of music for the process of learning when he wrote that nothing could be truly understood without music. This book shows how this, in fact, is the case-a message of great relevance today.

Nancy van Deusen is professor of music at The Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Preface: Music, Devotion, Emotion, and Intellection
1 Introduction: Principles, Vocabulary, Concepts
2 Music in a Culture of the Mind: A Medieval View of Resources, Material, and Composition
3 What Did This Medieval "Forest" Contain? Preexistent Substance, Unlimited Possibilities
4 Music within the Context of Medieval Education
5 Silva: Inner and Outer Substance, Music, and Material Culture
6 "They All Read the Same Books": A Book-Bag from Antiquity
7 Musica disciplina: Analogies and Explanations
8 Music at the Forefront of Science: The Usefulness of Medieval Music
Editions: Music to Sing
Glossary of Terms
Selected Bibliography
Index