Andrew Kirkman

To PUBLISH a collected edition is to create a monument to an individual, by means of which his entire output becomes viewed as a totality, even a summation. Clearly, the most useful effect of such a summation is to offer, through standardization of editorial procedure, the ...

Contemplating Shostakovich marks an important new stage in the understanding of Shostakovich and his working environment. Each chapter covers aspects of the composer's output in the context of his life and cultural milieu. The contributions uncover 'outside' stimuli behind Shostakovich's works, allowing the reader to perceive the motivations behind his artistic choices; at the same time, the nature of those choices offers insights into the workings of the larger world – cultural, social, political – that he inhabited. Thus his often ostensibly quirky choices are revealed as responses – by turns sentimental, moving, sardonic and angry – to the particular conditions, with all their absurdities and contradictions, that he had to negotiate. Here we see the composer emerging from the role of tortured loner of older narratives into that of the gregarious and engaged member of his society that, for better and worse, characterized the everyday reality of his life. This inval...

The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass: Medieval Context to Modern Revival. By Andrew Kirkman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. [xiv, 383 p. ISBN 9780521114127. $99.] Music examples, illustrations, appendices, bibliography, index. Like few other pre-baroque music genres, the polyphonic mass in the late Middle Ages has attracted a massive amount of scholarly attention ever since the early days of active musicological research in the late eighteenth century. Yet few other genres have been so used and misused in order to prop up various ideological agendas. In his new book Andrew Kirkman, who, beyond his conducting activity (The Binchois Consort) has published extensively on several late medieval mass repertories, and who may thus be regarded as one of the major experts in the field, retraces the historical reception of the so-called "cyclic" mass since Charles Burney but, above all, recontextualizes its rise and cultivation since the mid-fifteenth century, providing a rich cultural tapestry that helps clarify and better grasp its enormous spread and appeal until well into the sixteenth century and beyond. The volume is divided into three main sections, each devoted to illustrating a specific interpretative angle of the polyphonic mass. Part 1 ("The Status of the Early Polyphonic Mass") reassesses the historiography of late-eighteenth to twentiethcentury epistemological reception of the mass, which saw and evaluated it as a major landmark along a teleologically oriented progress chart predestined to lead into the highly individualized works of genius of the classical and romantic eras. Within this intensely ideologically charged perspective those aspects of the mass were emphasized that best served the purpose of highlighting its thematic and structural unity, itself seen as an unquestionable mark of the work of the individualized genius. Given this perspective it is only natural that most of the attention was focused on the cantus firmus mass, regarded as a privileged terrain, where the composer, by "freely" choosing a pre-existing theme, afforded the mass an aesthetically independent unification device that allegedly snatched it away and "liberated" it from the (perceived) shackles of purely liturgical considerations. That such an epistemological viewpoint was to prove durable and almost unassailable is proven by the fact that it most potently surfaces as late as in Manfred Bukofzer's seminal Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), and has been ever since hardly questioned. It is without a doubt that the mass was perceived already as an independent genre since at least the authoritative testimony of Johannes Tinctoris who, in his Terminorum musicae diffinitorium, conceived around 1472-74 although published twenty years later, classifies it as cantus magnus in contradistinction to the cantus mediocris of the motet and the cantus parvus of the chanson, as Kirkman shows in chapter 2 ("Con - tempo rary Witnesses"). It is also clear, however that, rather than being value judgments and thus aesthetic judgments as such, the adjectives magnus, mediocris and parvus refer for Tinctoris on the one hand merely to the format and the duration in time of the attendant genres, and on the other to their function within their own social and ideological contexts. The two other contemporary witnesses considered by Kirkman (Paolo Cortese and Johannes Ott) do not essentially seem to depart from Tinctoris, with their judgments being at the same time less self-conscious and competent than the latter's. In Part 2 ("The Ritual World of the Early Polyphonic Mass") the author considers mass composition within a contemporary theological and philosophical context. The two core chapters (devoted, respectively, to the Caput mass and to masses based on the L'homme arme melody) are framed on the one hand by a contribution on the possible motives behind musical borrowing of (mainly) secular models, with, at the end, a few music examples, and on the other hand by a chapter on the proposed conceptual interactions of secular texts within the sacred context of liturgy. …

Music played an exceptionally important role in the late Middle Ages - articulating people's social, psychological and eschatological needs. The process began with the training of choirboys whose skill was key to institutional identity. That skill was closely cultivated and directly sought by kings and emperors, who intervened directly in recruitment of choirboys and older singers in order to build and articulate their self-image and perceived status. Using the documentation of an exceptionally well preserved archive, this book focuses on music's functioning in an important church in late Medieval Northern France. It explores a period when musicians from this region set the agenda across Europe, developing what is still some of the most sophisticated music in the Western musical tradition. The book allows a close focus not on the great achievements of those who cultivated this music, but on the personal motivations that shaped their life and work.

Image, Music and Lived Reality in Fifteenth-Century Midlands Alabaster 1 ANDREW KIRKMAN I saw His swete face as it was drye and blodeles with pale deyeng, and sithen more pale, dede, langoring, and than turned more dede into blew, and sithen more browne blew, and the flesh turnyd more depe dede. For His passion shewid to me most properly in His blissid face, and namly in His lippis. There I saw these four colowres, tho that were aforn freshe, redy, and liking to my sigte. This was a swemful chonge to sene, this depe deyeng, and also the nose clange and dryed, to my sigte, and the swete body was brown and blak, al turnyd oute of faire lifely colowr of Hymselfe on to drye deyeng. 2 Thus nakyd am I nailid, O man, for thy sake; I love the, then love me; why slepist thou? Awake! Remembir my tendir hart-rote for the brake, With paynys my vaynys constraynyd to crake; Thus toggid to and fro, Thus wrappid all in woo, Whereas never man was so, Entretid, thus in most cruell wise, Was like a lombe offerd in sacrifice, Woffully arayd. 3 (ll. 17-26) The contemplative depth achieved by late-medieval devotional practice needs little introduction per se. My particular concern here is with its propensity, as recorded by surviving physical witnesses, to evoke process: successions of actions and events enacted over time. If temporal unfolding is inherent in the nature of literature and especially music, at least when realised viva voce, it is more striking in its imputations, variously noted, for visual imagery. This essay will consider its contemporary resonances-with or without the admixture of words and music-for the contemplation of late medieval Midlands alabaster statuary. 255 1 This essay is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend Philip Weller who was too ill to present it with me, as had been planned, its public form, and who passed away before it was written as presented here. Its text is nonetheless imbued with his thoughts and spirit. Many of the ideas discussed here expand on topics raised in our article 'English Alabaster Images as Recipients of Music in the Long Fifteenth Century', in English Alabaster Carvings and their Cultural Contexts, ed. Z. Murat (Woodbridge, 2019), 93-126. See ibid. for further contextual studies concerning late-medieval English alabaster. For an important recent study of the materiality of alabaster, its marketing, applications and cultural significance, see K. Woods, Cut in Alabaster: A Material of Sculpture and its European Traditions, 1330-1530 (New York, 2018). The standard surveys of English alabaster carvings remain the studies of F. Cheetham, Alabaster Images of Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2003), a general typology/ gazeteer; and English Medieval Alabasters, with a Catalogue of the Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum, rev. edn (Woodbridge, 2005).

Contents: Introduction Part I The Franco-Flemish Tradition From the 15th to the Early 16th Century: Music for the papal chapel in the early 15th century, Alejandro Enrique Planchart Petrus de Domarto's Missa Spiritus almus and the early history of the 4-voice mass in the 15th century, Rob C. Wegman Agricola and the rhizome: an aesthetic of the late cantatusfirmus mass, Fabrice Fitch Symbol and ritual in Josquin's Missa di Dadi, Michael Long Ludochus de Picardia and Jossequin Lebloitte dit Desprez: the names of the singer(s), Lora Matthews and Paul Merkley The invention of the cyclic mass, Andrew Kirkman. Part II 16th-Century Italy: Competence and incompetence in the papal choir in the age of Palestrina, Richard Sherr Gioseffo Zarlino and the Miserere tradition: a Ferrarese connection?, Katelijne Schiltz Architectural spaces for music: Jacopo Sansovino and Adrian Willaert at St Mark's, Laura Moretti. Part III The German Tradition: 'So loblich, costlich und herlich, da...

The Josquin Research Project . Jesse Rodin, Project Director; Craig Sapp, Technical Director. URL: http://josquin.stanford.edu/ I wish I had had a tool like this twenty years ago. At about that time I was engaged on a stylistic analysis of the three-voice Mass in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as part of my doctoral studies.1 My aims were ambitious: to understand some fundamental changes in the way musical textures operated and were conceived across as broad a sample as possible of pieces with shared scoring and texts. It was painstaking work, involving the close study—aided only by pen and paper—of what I had selected as a corpus of “representative” scores. This produced some useful conclusions about changing approaches to musical texture: I was able to trace a steady if piecemeal shift toward an increasingly stratified and contrapuntally nonhierarchic texture, to plot some important steps in the germination of the imitative style and the conditions that stimulated it, and to witness some intriguing mismatches between empirically observable stylistic change and the lasting influence of the theoretical principle of the discant-tenor duo. My heuristic tools were patterns of ranges, the nature, degree, and frequency of tenor-contratenor part crossing, the incidence of large leaps, and imitation—basic parameters of structure and local compositional building blocks. The same kinds of material, in other words, that form the focus of the Josquin Research Project. But whereas my efforts involved many hours of close observation and counting, and equipment no more sophisticated than an electronic calculator, this resource, at the click of a few buttons, provides researchers with an array of data that can open up a broad and—in its extent and diversity—currently unforeseeable range of research trajectories. If my study was perforce limited by the sheer number of man-hours involved and inevitable repertorial choices, this body of material should, as it continues to expand in its remit, suffer from …

To PUBLISH a collected edition is to create a monument to an individual, by means of which his entire output becomes viewed as a totality, even a summation. Clearly, the most useful effect of such a summation is to offer, through standardization of editorial procedure, the ...

The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass: Medieval Context to Modern Revival. By Andrew Kirkman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. [xiv, 383 p. ISBN 9780521114127. $99.] Music examples, illustrations, appendices, bibliography, index. Like few other pre-baroque music genres, the polyphonic mass in the late Middle Ages has attracted a massive amount of scholarly attention ever since the early days of active musicological research in the late eighteenth century. Yet few other genres have been so used and misused in order to prop up various ideological agendas. In his new book Andrew Kirkman, who, beyond his conducting activity (The Binchois Consort) has published extensively on several late medieval mass repertories, and who may thus be regarded as one of the major experts in the field, retraces the historical reception of the so-called "cyclic" mass since Charles Burney but, above all, recontextualizes its rise and cultivation since the mid-fifteenth century, providing a rich cultural tapestry that helps clarify and better grasp its enormous spread and appeal until well into the sixteenth century and beyond. The volume is divided into three main sections, each devoted to illustrating a specific interpretative angle of the polyphonic mass. Part 1 ("The Status of the Early Polyphonic Mass") reassesses the historiography of late-eighteenth to twentiethcentury epistemological reception of the mass, which saw and evaluated it as a major landmark along a teleologically oriented progress chart predestined to lead into the highly individualized works of genius of the classical and romantic eras. Within this intensely ideologically charged perspective those aspects of the mass were emphasized that best served the purpose of highlighting its thematic and structural unity, itself seen as an unquestionable mark of the work of the individualized genius. Given this perspective it is only natural that most of the attention was focused on the cantus firmus mass, regarded as a privileged terrain, where the composer, by "freely" choosing a pre-existing theme, afforded the mass an aesthetically independent unification device that allegedly snatched it away and "liberated" it from the (perceived) shackles of purely liturgical considerations. That such an epistemological viewpoint was to prove durable and almost unassailable is proven by the fact that it most potently surfaces as late as in Manfred Bukofzer's seminal Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), and has been ever since hardly questioned. It is without a doubt that the mass was perceived already as an independent genre since at least the authoritative testimony of Johannes Tinctoris who, in his Terminorum musicae diffinitorium, conceived around 1472-74 although published twenty years later, classifies it as cantus magnus in contradistinction to the cantus mediocris of the motet and the cantus parvus of the chanson, as Kirkman shows in chapter 2 ("Con - tempo rary Witnesses"). It is also clear, however that, rather than being value judgments and thus aesthetic judgments as such, the adjectives magnus, mediocris and parvus refer for Tinctoris on the one hand merely to the format and the duration in time of the attendant genres, and on the other to their function within their own social and ideological contexts. The two other contemporary witnesses considered by Kirkman (Paolo Cortese and Johannes Ott) do not essentially seem to depart from Tinctoris, with their judgments being at the same time less self-conscious and competent than the latter's. In Part 2 ("The Ritual World of the Early Polyphonic Mass") the author considers mass composition within a contemporary theological and philosophical context. The two core chapters (devoted, respectively, to the Caput mass and to masses based on the L'homme arme melody) are framed on the one hand by a contribution on the possible motives behind musical borrowing of (mainly) secular models, with, at the end, a few music examples, and on the other hand by a chapter on the proposed conceptual interactions of secular texts within the sacred context of liturgy. …

As easily the most recorded piece written before 1500 (at least 15 times by my reckoning), it is tempting to ask whether we need still more recordings of the Machaut Mass. But time goes on and fashions change, and, while one might prefer to see a few other medieval works ...

Image, Music and Lived Reality in Fifteenth-Century Midlands Alabaster 1 ANDREW KIRKMAN I saw His swete face as it was drye and blodeles with pale deyeng, and sithen more pale, dede, langoring, and than turned more dede into blew, and sithen more browne blew, and the flesh turnyd more depe dede. For His passion shewid to me most properly in His blissid face, and namly in His lippis. There I saw these four colowres, tho that were aforn freshe, redy, and liking to my sigte. This was a swemful chonge to sene, this depe deyeng, and also the nose clange and dryed, to my sigte, and the swete body was brown and blak, al turnyd oute of faire lifely colowr of Hymselfe on to drye deyeng. 2 Thus nakyd am I nailid, O man, for thy sake; I love the, then love me; why slepist thou? Awake! Remembir my tendir hart-rote for the brake, With paynys my vaynys constraynyd to crake; Thus toggid to and fro, Thus wrappid all in woo, Whereas never man was so, Entretid, thus in most cruell wise, Was like a lombe offerd in sacrifice, Woffully arayd. 3 (ll. 17-26) The contemplative depth achieved by late-medieval devotional practice needs little introduction per se. My particular concern here is with its propensity, as recorded by surviving physical witnesses, to evoke process: successions of actions and events enacted over time. If temporal unfolding is inherent in the nature of literature and especially music, at least when realised viva voce, it is more striking in its imputations, variously noted, for visual imagery. This essay will consider its contemporary resonances-with or without the admixture of words and music-for the contemplation of late medieval Midlands alabaster statuary. 255 1 This essay is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend Philip Weller who was too ill to present it with me, as had been planned, its public form, and who passed away before it was written as presented here. Its text is nonetheless imbued with his thoughts and spirit. Many of the ideas discussed here expand on topics raised in our article 'English Alabaster Images as Recipients of Music in the Long Fifteenth Century', in English Alabaster Carvings and their Cultural Contexts, ed. Z. Murat (Woodbridge, 2019), 93-126. See ibid. for further contextual studies concerning late-medieval English alabaster. For an important recent study of the materiality of alabaster, its marketing, applications and cultural significance, see K. Woods, Cut in Alabaster: A Material of Sculpture and its European Traditions, 1330-1530 (New York, 2018). The standard surveys of English alabaster carvings remain the studies of F. Cheetham, Alabaster Images of Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2003), a general typology/ gazeteer; and English Medieval Alabasters, with a Catalogue of the Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum, rev. edn (Woodbridge, 2005).

Page 1. The Invention of the Cyclic Mass ANDREW KIRKMAN It takes a very bold and independent mind to conceive the idea that the invari-able parts of the Mass should be composed not as separate items, but as a set of five musically coherent compositions. ...

... (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1962-5), I, go, and Jessie Ann Owens, "How Josquin became Josquin: Reflections on Historiography and Reception," in Jessie Ann Owens and Anthony M. Cummings (eds.), Music in Renais-sance Cities and Courts: Studies in Honor of Lewis ...