The purpose of this series is to provide critical editions of music theory in Britain (primarily England, but Scotland, Ireland and Wales also) from 1500 to 1700. By 'theory' is meant all sorts of writing about music, from textbooks aimed at the beginner to treatises written for a more sophisticated audience. These foundational texts have immense value in revealing attitudes, ways of thinking and even vocabulary crucial for understanding and analysing music. They reveal beliefs about the power of music, its function in society and its role in education, and they furnish valuable information about performance practice and about the context of performance. They are a window into musical culture every bit as important as the music itself.
The editions in this series present the text in its original form. That is, they retain original spelling, capitalization and punctuation, as well as certain salient features of the type, for example, the choice of font. A textual commentary in each volume offers an explication of difficult or unfamiliar terminology as well as suggested corrections of printing errors; the introduction situates the work and its author in a larger historical context.
Jessie Ann Owens is assisted on the series by Series Assistant Editor, Minji Kim.
Edited
By Denis Collins
August 28, 2007
Elway Bevin's A Briefe and Short Instruction of the Art of Musicke begins with rudimentary instruction on consonance, dissonance and proportions but quickly turns to a presentation of examples of plainsong-based canonic writing of increasing complexity and remarkable diversity. Bevin's book was ...
Edited
By Christopher R. Wilson
September 28, 2003
Regarded as one of the most important English music treatises in the seventeenth century, Thomas Campion's A New Way of Making Fowre Parts in Counterpoint reveals progressive ideas about the latent theory of inversions, the fundamental bass, cadences and tonality, and the major-minor octave scale....