The Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music

Iain Fenlon · Richard Wistreich

Jan 2019 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

Part of the seminal Cambridge History of Music series, this volume departs from standard histories of early modern Western music in two important ways. First, it considers music as something primarily experienced by people in their daily lives, whether as musicians or listeners, and as something that happened in particular locations, and different intellectual and ideological contexts, rather than as a story of genres, individual counties, and composers and their works. Second, by constraining discussion within the limits of a 100-year timespan, the music culture of the sixteenth century is freed from its conventional (and tenuous) absorption within the abstraction of 'the Renaissance', and is understood in terms of recent developments in the broader narrative of this turbulent period of European history. Both an original take on a well-known period in early music and a key work of reference for scholars, this volume makes an important contribution to the history of music.

About the author

Iain Fenlon is Emeritus Professor of Historical Musicology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He is the Editor of the journal Early Music History. His most recent books are The Ceremonial City: History, Memory and Myth in Renaissance Venice (2008), Piazza San Marco (2009), and (co-edited with Inga Groote) Heinrich Glarean's Books: The Intellectual World of a Sixteenth-Century Musical Humanist (Cambridge, 2013).

Richard Wistreich is Professor of Music and Director of Research at the Royal College of Music in London. His published work includes The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi (edited, with John Whenham, Cambridge, 2007) and Warrior, Courtier, Singer: Giulio Cesare Brancaccio and the Performance of Identity in the Late Renaissance (2007). He has also had a long career as a professional singer specialising in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music, during which he has made more than 100 commercial recordings, appeared in opera, solo recitals, and as a member of several seminal ensembles of the early music revival.