Musical Concepts, Genres, and Terms

Guitar notation in which chords are symbolized by letters of the alphabet. See Guitar, §4 and Tablature, §4.

Colonna, Giovanni Ambrosio

Guitar, §4: The five-course guitar

A French 13th-century chante-fable. The only surviving example of the genre, its sole source is F-Pn fr.2168. It tells, in prose, the romantic story of the love of a count’s son for a foreign girl-captive. Interspersed in the narrative are verse sections (laisses) written in lines with equal numbers of syllables, all sung to the same double phrase of melody (a relic of narrative singing; ...

Designation attached to a three-voice Gloria in manuscript F-APT 16bis; the piece is also transmitted in I-IV 115. The Apt manuscript is now thought to contain music from the court of the antipopes at Avignon in the late 14th century. It is not clear whether the word refers to the name of a composer or to something else; it is now known that ‘Bararipton’ was a mnemonic used in medieval logic for one of the categories of syllogisms. However, any possible musical meaning of the word remains a mystery....

Liturgical book of the Western Church containing some chants for the Mass. The term appears in Ordo romanus I (compiled in the late 7th or early 8th century and describing the papal Mass at Rome), where it refers to the book from which the cantor sings the gradual and the alleluia or tract: ‘Postquam legerit cantor cum cantatorio ascendit et dicit responsum. Si fuerit tempus ut dicat alleluia, bene; sin autem, tractum; sin minus, tantummodo responsum’ (see Andrieu, ii, p.86; some of the manuscripts call for another singer to perform the alleluia). Other early references to the cantatorium show that it was a liturgical book, but they are less specific about its contents and use (see Blaise, 128, and ...

The title given by Johann Andreas Schmeller to his complete edition (1847) of the poems in an early 13th-century German manuscript (now D-Mbs Clm 4660) that had come in 1803 from the Benedictine abbey of Benediktbeuern, about 50 km south of Munich. Since then the manuscript has been known by that title even though it is now generally agreed that it probably did not originate in Benediktbeuren and may have come from Seckau in Carinthia or the Tyrol. The manuscript is perhaps the most important source for Latin secular poetry of the 12th century; there are in addition some Latin sacred lyrics, German poems, liturgical plays and a satirical ‘Gamblers' Mass’. Several of the poems have music in unheighted neumes – a style of notation that is relatively rare at so late a date. The melodies must, for the most part, be reconstructed from concordances in the St Martial and Notre Dame repertories. Orff's cantata ...

A manuscript or printed book containing principally chansons (i.e. lyric poetry in French) or monophonic or polyphonic settings of such poetry. The most important medieval chansonniers date from the 13th century and contain the monophonic songs of the troubadours and trouvères (for summary list of principal monophonic chansonniers, and illustration, ...

The preparation of music for publication, performance or study, usually by someone other than the composer. ‘The ideal edition need not have all the answers but should control all the questions so that users can feel themselves in possession of the best available knowledge about this music’, wrote Joel Sheveloff (...

Name given to a genre of book publishing based on photo-mechanical printing techniques that attempts to recreate the appearance of an original handwritten manuscript or printed edition. Facsimile reproductions employ a wide range of photographic methods and materials. The most sophisticated try to be as faithful to the original as possible by replicating its size, colours, paper, binding and, sometimes, physical condition. It is important to note that facsimile editions are not fakes or forgeries. They are produced, conceived and used as tools for study or investigation by scholars, researchers, teachers and others who might not have access to the original material, although they occasionally become collectable in their own right owing to instances of exceptional craftsmanship or rarity....

See Musicology

See Musicology