Source Readings in Music History : The Renaissance

The Renaissance era saw a significant ferment under the banners of humanism, discovery, and reform, deeply affecting music and the way it was understood.

Writers of the time explored its links with grammar and rhetoric, reported on the music of non-European peoples, and debated the role of music in religious and other spheres. The forty-five readings chosen for this volume by Gary Tomlinson cover a gamut that includes composers, theorists, poets, philosophers, courtiers, scholars, kings, and popes. Through the eyes of Bembo and Byrd, Du fay and Erasmus, Peacham and Palestrina, Charles IX and Gregory XIII, Calvin and Castiglione, Aaron, Tinctoris, Morley, and Zarlino, we see the many worlds of music in the Renaissance.

Leo Treitler, Distinguished Professor of Music at the City University of New York, is the author of Music and the Historical Imagination, as well as other books and articles on music historiography and medieval music.

Gary Tomlinson taught at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to Yale University in 2011, where he is now the John Hay Whitney Professor and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center. A former MacArthur Fellow, he has authored books on Claudio Monteverdi, Renaissance musical culture, the opera, and the singing rituals of the Aztecs and Incas. His latest book, A Million Years in Music, describes the evolutionary emergence of music.

Tomlinson and Kerman worked together on five editions of Listen before Joseph Kerman died in 2014 as this edition went to press, just shy of his ninetieth birthday.

Teaching was at the heart and soul of Kerman's musical career, and it remains so in Tomlinson's. Between them, their wide-ranging course offerings have encompassed harmony and ear-training, opera, world music, popular music, and interdisciplinary studies, including seminars in music history, criticism, anthropology, and―many times over―Introduction to Music for non-majors.