Review by Choice Review
European musical culture changed profoundly during the 15th century, thanks in significant measure to the work of composers such as Dufay, who was active in some of the most musical courts and cathedrals of France and Italy. His songs and his settings of the Catholic Mass show an impressive range of innovative ideas, from new sounds to new means of organizing large musical structures. His motets, too, embrace a wide spectrum of musical techniques, as Cumming (McGill Univ.) demonstrates. She first explores what 15th-century musicians understood a motet to be, and how these Latin-texted polyphonic compositions were written for a variety of purposes and used a wide range of techniques. She puts these writings in the context of recent thought about genre and generic change that has appeared in diverse disciplines. The second and third portions of the study turn to the repertories that form the immediate context of Dufay's musical career, in this case the motets found in two central, voluminous manuscript anthologies copied in the mid 15th century. Scholars of Renaissance music will be grateful for the excellent appendix that lists all of the works discussed in the text, and where modern editions of these pieces may be found. Graduate students; researchers; faculty. R. Freedman; Haverford College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
