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Gothic Pillars And Blue Notes: Art As A Reflection Of The Conflict Of Religions, Part Iii, Quentin Faulkner

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

A number of years ago the BBC aired a series of television programs entitled Civilization, produced and narrated by the distinguished historian Kenneth Clark. Clark opened that series with a quote from John Ruskin:
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts: the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only trustworthy one is the last.

The reason our society may find it difficult to understand fully what Ruskin meant may well …

Gothic Pillars And Blue Notes: Art As A Reflection Of The Conflict Of Religions, Part Ii, Quentin Faulkner

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

The existence of an intense and vital artistic activity is the most unmistakable indicator of the new religion, but it is not the only one. Three of the most commonly identified manifestations of religion are cult (public worship), myth (salvation history, doctrine), and ethics (right behavior, morals). Secular culture exhibits each of these aspects of religion.

Cult is in some measure synonymous with public worship. (The modern English- language use of the term "cult" is a distortion that wholly obscures its original meaning.) The difference between the two is one of degree rather than kind. Cult in its fullest sense …

Gothic Pillars And Blue Notes: Art As A Reflection Of The Conflict Of Religions, Part I, Quentin Faulkner

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

Candlelight reflecting off the clutter of wall plaques and massive Baroque monuments makes a feeble attempt to dispel the gloom of a late evening in December 1705. The light, radiating from the multiple galleries surrounding the great organ, reveals a large crowd, elegantly dressed, filling the vast nave and spilling over into the side aisles of St. Mary's Church in Lubeck, Germany. Most of these people have already endured the winter chill during three long hours of worship, but they are now eagerly anticipating the musical feast that will occupy the coming hour. Some 40 musicians, both singers and instrumentalists, …

Review Of Yolanda Plumley, The Grammar Of 14th Century Melody: Tonal Organization And Compositional Process In The Chansons Of Guillaume De Machaut And The Ars Subtilior., Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

This book is a revised and retitled version of a doctoral thesis presented to Exeter University in 1991. It appears in the Garland series, Outstanding Dissertations in Music from British Universities. In reviewing it I must acknowledge that I am not a disinterested party. Work of my own from the mid-1980s, which Dr Plumley first encountered in the form of a conference paper read at Southampton University in 1987, and which in modified guise was only just recently published ('Signature-systems and tonal types in the fourteenth-century French chanson', Plainsong and Medieval Music 4/2 (1995), pp. 117-47), forms a central point …

Agincourt Carol, Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

The best known of all English carols (also called the Agincourt Song), this composition celebrates the victory of Henry V at Agincourt in 1415 and was probably written shortly thereafter. It survives in two of the most important collections of 15th-century carols, the Trinity Roll (Cambridge, Trinity College 0.3.58) and the Egerton Manuscript (BL Egerton 3307). Reference is made to the siege ofHarfleur, success on the field at Agincourt, and the return to London in triumph with hostages. As is often the case, this carol mixes two languages. The burden, or framing refrain, is in Latin ("Deo gratias Anglia, redde …

Alanus, J[Ohannes] (D. 1373), Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

John Aleyn, a musician and administrator in royal service, was from 1363 to 1373 a canon of St. George's Chapel, Windsor, and from 1361 to 1373 a chaplain of the Royal Household Chapel of Edward III. The last decade of his career is well documented, and he enjoyed the frequent and lucrative patronage of Edward and Queen Philippa, holding numerous benefices. Upon his death he bequeathed a book of music to the chapel at Windsor. Though the surname is common, this individual is the strongest candidate for the J. Alanus who wrote the extraordinary musicians' motet Sub arturo plebs and …

Angelas Ad Virginem, Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

A devotional Latin strophic song of the first half of the 13th century in five stanzas on the Annunciation of Mary. There is memorable testimony to its widespread popularity and longevity in England in a passage from the Miller's Tale introducing Chaucer’s poor Oxford scholar “hende Nicholas,” who sings Angelus in his lodging to the accompaniment of his psaltery:

And al above ther lay a gay sautrie,
On which he made a-nyghtes melodie
So swetely that all the chambre rong;
And Angelas ad virginem he song. (MilT 3213-16)

Most sources and references to Angelus ad virginem are insular (complete report …

Chapel Royal (Royal Household Chapel), Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

The household chapel of the English kings, a special group of personnel always in attendance on the ruler whose principal responsibility was to perform the divine service. The Chapel Royal is to be distinguished from two other major royal chapels of fixed abode founded by Edward III, the royal chapels of St. Stephen's at Westminster and St. George's at Windsor; its clerks and their duties are further to be distinguished from the King's Chaplains (a position emerging in the 1390s). There had always been chaplains at court who served the king, holding a variety of administrative responsibilities and functioning in …

Caput Mass, Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

One of the most popular masses of the 15th century, surviving complete or in part in seven known English and continental sources, the Missa Caput is now thought to be the work of an unnamed English composer writing in the later 1430s or early 1440s. It is a cyclic mass whose five movements are unified both by a motto beginning and by the use of the same melody as structural cantus firmus in the tenor voice. Its name is taken from that cantus firmus, which is derived from a lengthy melisma on the word "caput" at the end of the …

Faburden, Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

A distinctive English musical technique in which a simple form of three-voice polyphony is created by the addition of two extemporized voices to a preexistent plainsong. The term may also refer to the whole complex of voices, or simply to the faburden proper, the lowest voice, from which the technique takes its name. In this technique the plainsong voice, or mean (because musically it is in the middle), is doubled at the fourth above by the treble. The bass part, or faburden, proceeds mainly at the third below the chant, singing a fifth beneath at the beginning and end, and …

Harley 978, Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

A well-known manuscript from Reading Abbey (BL Harley 978), compiled sometime in the period 1245–65, probably at the behest of a single individual. Its contents are eclectic and reflective of wide intellectual interests and sources, suggesting a university connection. Famous principally because it contains the canon "Sumer is icumen in," Harley 978 also possesses the unique text of the "Song of Lewes" (Calamo velociter), the best English collection of goliardic verse, the largest surviving collection of the fables and lais of Marie de France, an index to the extensive contents of an otherwise lost book of polyphony, and …

Music For Holy Week And Easter, Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

The later medieval church celebrated Holy Week and Easter with many unique liturgical forms and ceremonies, often of an intrinsically dramatic character. These included major processions on Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday; the singing of the passions during mass as the New Testament Gospel on Palm Sunday (St. Matthew Passion), Wednesday (St. Luke Passion), and Good Friday (St. John Passion); and in many locales in northern France and England, the performance of two Latin liturgical dramas—the Visitatio sepulchre performed at the end of Matins on Easter Sunday morning, and the Officium peregrinorum, performed at Vespers that …

Lady Chapel, Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

A distinctive formal feature of English Gothic church architecture; provision of a Lady Chapel was a central objective of the campaigns of choir remodeling and eastern extension that altered the floorplans of most English cathedrals and abbey churches from the later 12th through the 14th century. The Lady Chapel, a large hall church of roughly the same dimensions as the choir itself, was most frequently located in a rectangular space thrusting eastward from the east end of the choir. In churches laid out like Salisbury this was a low, projecting space emerging from the main mass of the building by …

Canticle, Randall Snyder

Randall Snyder Compositions

For Flute (2).

8 pages

Death Zone, Randall Snyder

Randall Snyder Compositions

For Trombone Solo.

5 pages

Moonsong, Randall Snyder

Randall Snyder Compositions

For Flute, Clarinet, Cello, Marimba, Soprano, and Piano.

I The Moon Feels Smug
II The Scholarly Moon
III The Moon in Winter
IV The Moon Last Night
V Full Moon At Dusk

poems: Marjorie Saiser

22 pages

Territorial Riffs, Randall Snyder

Randall Snyder Compositions

For Alto Sax (2) Tenor Sax (2), Baritone Sax, Trumpet (4), Trombone (4), Guitar, Piano, Bass, and Drums.

29 pages

The Norwegian Idyll, Randall Snyder

Randall Snyder Compositions

for bassoon, viola.violin, narrator, piano written for Robert "Bud" Emile

Granton: A Parable Of Change, Quentin Faulkner

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

The mass media abound with tales of fundamental change in the world of classical music. A New York Times article on the crisis in the classical compact disc (CD) industry reports that, after a transient rise in sales during the 1980s, classical CDs' market share dropped to an all-time low of 2.9 percent. There are also frequent reports of funding woes that have reduced and, in some instances, put an end to entire orchestras. A string of articles in the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers has chronicled the seismic shift from classical to mass-media-oriented music in churches, where a …

Godric's Songs, Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

Three monophonic religious songs of the mid-12th century ("Sainte marie viergene," "Kirieleison: Crist and sainte marie," and "Sainte Nicholas Godes druth") that are the earliest English-language lyrics to survive with their melodies; found in a number of manuscript sources, including three with music, they are also known as Godric's Hymns. Their composer, St. Godric (ca. 1070/80–1170), wrote them some time after he retired to a hermitage at Finchale, north of Durham, following a career as a merchant trader and ship's captain. Godric's life as a hermit was one of ascetic hardship, punctuated by visions in which the songs were taught …

Dunstable, John (Ca. 1395–1453), Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

Composer, mathematician, and astronomer. He is the author of over 70 surviving works, including music for masses, offices, Marian devotions, isorhythmic motets, and secular songs. Dunstable (or Dunstaple) stands at the head of an influential group of English composers whose music, beginning in the later 1420s and 1430s, circulated on the Continent, where it had an immense stylistic impact. Fifteenth-century musical commentators recognized Dunstable's importance, and he held a high posthumous reputation for many subsequent generations.

Of Dunstable's biography we know little. The paucity of documentation seems to be due to a career that kept him out of the records …