Where Sight Meets Sound: The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing

English | ISBN: 0197551912 | 2021 | 344 pages | PDF | 31 MB
The main function of western musical notation is incidental: it prescribes and records sound. But during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, notation began to take on an aesthetic life all its own. In the early fifteenth century, a musician might be asked to sing a line slower, faster, or starting on a different pitch than what is written.