Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music

Manfred F. Bukofzer was born in Germany in 1910. He studied at the Conservatory in Frankfurt, and also at the University of Heidelberg, Berlin, and Basel, obtaining his doctorate in music in 1936. He came to America in 1939 and shortly after joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he became head of the Music Department only a year before his death from leukemia in 1955.

Although Dr. Bukofzer's main field of study was medieval and Renaissance music, he made important contributions in other areas too, such as a monograph on Javanese music, and an edition of the complete works of John Dunstable. His Music in the Baroque Era (Norton, 1947) is the standard work on that period.

The studies in the present volume mainly deal with fifteenth-century music, exploring many compositions whose historical and musical importance have not hitherto been fully understood. Some of the papers treat early English music, others discuss various aspects of Renaissance music, the emergence of choral polyphony, dance music, and the problem of the cyclic Mass. Dr. Bukofzer's scholarly research has enlarged both our understanding of an pleasure in this music, and reveals it as an expression of the very same creative spirit that produced the great cathedrals, paintings, and sculptures of the period. Gustave Reese has called these studies "a major contribution by one of the greatest authorities on medieval and Renaissance music."