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Witnesses of insular song

2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/em/cau072

1741-7260

Elizabeth Eva Leach,

Island Studies and Pacific Affairs

This new volume in the sturdy series Musica Britannica represents an exceptional publication, which should revolutionize future perspectives on the insular song repertory of the Middle Ages. Various features of its contents make it a bold and unusual volume for Musica Britannica, a series with many volumes of neglected works by Elizabethan, Jacobean or 18th-century British (and mainly English) composers. Deeming’s volume presents the earliest repertory in the series to date and contains monophonic music, music with French and Latin texts (as well as English ones), and much that is anonymous, in contrast to the usual fare of polyphonic pieces, with English texts (for sung music), and often with named authors. In a further innovation, not only is the volume supplemented by the inclusion of a few manuscript images, but further commentary on notation is also available online via the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (http://www.diamm.ac.uk/resources/sbs). The music in the volume is organized into three roughly chronological sections of 50 years each, although as the introduction makes clear (p.xxix), these are rather approximate. They function mainly to give a sense of change over time, especially in the conditions of transmission: the later periods are more likely to transmit multiple songs in single sources, the earlier single songs; the later period is more likely to contain music with vernacular texts and polyphonic settings (see p.xxx). Within each section, the songs are ordered alphabetically by their source manuscript’s current location. Thus the volume opens with three songs, each from a different manuscript now in Cambridge—at Corpus Christi College, Pembroke College and the University Library respectively. Where a given source has more than one song, the songs are presented in the order that they appear in the manuscript witness.