Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

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 …

Wiser Than Despair: The Evolution Of Ideas In The Relationship Of Music And The Christian Church, Quentin Faulkner

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

The fact that human beings want to make music, as well as all other forms of art, is a given of human existence. Artistic expressions, however, are not isolated or autonomous. They are conditioned, among other things, by social and cultural factors, and these factors have a powerful influence in shaping any art form.

There is no more compelling example of a culture's power to condition art than the evolution of European art music during the Middle Ages under the influence of the Christian church and its theological stance with regard to the arts. The church's ideas about the purpose …

Die Registrierung Der Orgelwerke J. S. Bachs, Quentin Faulkner

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

"Es versteht sich übrigens von selbst, daß beim Gebrauch die gewählten Verbindungen von Stimmen mit dem Geist und Sinn der vorzutragenden Stücke harmonieren müssen, sonst ist das Ganze nur eine theoretische Spielerei, ohne ailen künstlerischen Wert."

So formulierte Friedrich Konrad Griepenkerl, der erste Herausgeber von Bachs Orgelwerken, zusammenfassend die Bedeutung der angemessenen Registerwahl für das Spiel dieser Kompositionen. Ein erfahrener Organist liest diese Worte jedoch nicht ohne gewisse Bedenken. Wer hilft einem bei der Wahl der passenden Registrierungen? Die verschiedenen Vorschläge Griepenkerls vergrößern eher die Unsicherheit des Organisten; sie sind zwar sinnvoll, aber zu allgemein, um praktischen Wert zu haben. …

Signature-Systems And Tonal Types In The Fourteenth-Century French Chanson, Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

Beyond the standard and familiar theoretical instruction materials on notation and mensuration, on mode and hexachord, and on the rules of two-part counterpoint, information and insight about the techniques of musical composition in the later Middle Ages are hard to come by. From a modern vantage point, medieval music theory leaves many of the questions most interesting to us unanswered. And for our part, too, analysts of chansons and motets have yet to agree on many basic notions about how this music works, and therefore what is most necessary to talk about. It is symptomatic of this state of affairs …

Forks In The Road: Challenges And Rewards, Quentin Faulkner

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

Using music as a focal point, although another of the arts might serve as well, I have discovered that the arts are a kind of camera obscura of society. Like that optical wonder, they reduce the whole of its identity-sanctions and values, sacred and secular beliefs and customs--to a faithful reflection in miniature, in living colors (Mantle Hood, The Ethnomusicologist. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982, p. xviii).

The author of this statement, Mantle Hood, is an ethnomusicologist, one who studies the music of cultures outside those in the western European tradition (his perspective is therefore a global one). If what he …

Information On Organ Registration From A Student Of J.S. Bach, Quentin Faulkner

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

Despite two centuries of research into the life and music of Johann S. Bach, there is little that can be said with certainty about his organ registration practices. Aside from two short passages (quoted below) that merely assert Bach's understanding of and skill at registration, there is only J. F. Agricola's report that Bach liked reed stops. Up until now, it has not been possible to identify sources, either from Bach himself or from his immediate circle, that offer precise instructions on organ registration. The source described and translated here provides such information.

The source is an article found in …

The Organ As A Profession: Facing The Future, Quentin Faulkner

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

A recent issue of the Wall Street Journal features an article about the phenomenal growth of the Assemblies of God: "Heavenly Gifts: Preaching a Gospel of Acquisitiveness, A Showy Sect Prospers."

Eluding the hellfire and smoke surrounding his pulpit, the Reverend Tommy Barnett waves goodbye. With a hearty "Hallelujah," he soars straight toward heaven and out of sight.

The abrupt flight of this Pentecostal Peter Paa in a gray suit brings gasps from many of the 6,500 faithful at Phoenix First Assembly. Joining in the extravaganza are a $500,000 special effects system, 200-member choir and 25-piece orchestra. It's a finale …

Subtilitas In The Tonal Language Of Fumeux Fume, Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

The late 14th-century French repertory contains music characterized by an ingenuity and great subtlety whose terms of reference are entirely derived from within the art itself. One of the best-known French chansons of the period, the rondeau Fumeux fume by Solage, contains a superabundance of artifice, a wide variety of clever and audacious musical techniques. But in contrast to the extravagances of notation and rhythmic language that are the familiar hallmarks of the ars subtilior in music, the most striking feature of Fumeux fume is the proliferation of accidentals, and the bizarre tonal behavior they indicate. In addition to F, …

Griepenkerl On J.S. Bach’S Keyboard Technique: A Translation And Commentary, Quentin Faulkner

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

Although he was not a professional musician, the German scholar and teacher Friedrich Konrad Griepenkerl (1782-1849) studied music theory, organ and piano with Johann N. Forkel, J.S. Bach's first biographer. Throughout his life Griepenkerl actively promoted the performance and study of Bach's keyboard works, and in 1844 he began to issue the first critically corrected complete edition of Bach's organ works, which organists know today as the Peters edition. In the preface to Vol. I of this edition (p. II), Griepenkerl briefly discussed Bach's manner of keyboard performance, and in this regard referred to three sources, each one more detailed …

Schutz And The Organ, Quentin Faulkner

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

The year 1985 marks the anniversaries of four celebrated Baroque musicians. Three of them--Scarlatti, Handel and Bach--belong to the late Baroque and were renowned during their time as keyboard virtuosi. The fourth, Heinrich Schutz (1585-1672), belongs to the early Baroque, and his relation to the keyboard is neither so clear nor so recognized. Although Schutz was never acclaimed as a keyboard virtuoso, he was indeed an accomplished organist and remained in close contact with that instrument throughout his long career.

While it is possible that Schutz had already begun keyboard training as a student in Weissenfels, the early formation of …

The Motet In England In The Fourteenth Century, Peter M. Lefferts

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

The history of polyphonic music in late medieval England is difficult to reconstruct on account of the paucity of intact sources, the concomitant lack of a substantial number of complete pieces, and the difficulty with which the surviving repertoire can be associated with any specific institutions or social milieu. Nonetheless, there are significant scattered remains, and this study endeavors to examine in detail one important genre, the motet, in light of all surviving music, placing a great deal of weight on the analysis of fragments. The evidence suggests that the motet was cultivated for the larger abbeys and monastic cathedrals, …

J. S. Bach’S Keyboard Fingering: New Evidence, Quentin Faulkner

Glenn Korff School of Music: Faculty Publications

There is presently considerable interest among scholars and performers of early music in early keyboard fingering practices and their effect on the music’s articulation and phrasing. This is nowhere more evident than in the current reconsideration of Johann S. Bach’s keyboard music in the light of primary source material on his keyboard fingering. The primary sources available to us up to now are three in number:

1. Applicatio (BWV 994)
2. Praeambulum (BWV 928)
3. Praeludium und Fughetta in C-dur (BWV 870a)

During recent research into Bach’s keyboard fingering practices, I had occasion to examine Johann Philipp Kirnberger’s Clavierübungen mit …