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Music Theory and Analysis 1450-1650, proceedings of the International Conference, Louvain-la-Neuve, 23-25 September 1999.

Article Excerpt
Edited by Anne-Emmanuelle Ceulemans and Bonnie J. Blackburn. (Publications d' histoire de l'art et d'archeologie de l'UCL, Serie generale, C. Musicologica Neolovaniensia, Studia 9.) Louvain-la-Neuve: Departement d'histoire de l'art et d'archeologie, College Erasme, 2001. [vii, 440 p. ISBN 2-930314-01-X.]

Although early music theory and analysis is alive and well, relatively few collections of essays devoted to the disciplines have appeared in the last dozen years. Recently joining an essential volume of wide-ranging analytical articles, Models of Musical Analysis: Music Before 1600, edited by Mark Everist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), are the more pitch-focused essays found in Modality in the Music of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, edited by Ursula Gunther, Ludwig Finscher, and Jeffrey Dean (Neuhausen-Stuttgart: American Institute of Musicology; Hanssler Verlag, 1996) and those in Tonal Structures in Early Music, edited by Cristle Collins Judd (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), the latter marking the auspicious inauguration of the Garland/ Routledge series Criticism and Analysis of Early Music. A welcome addition to these publications, Music Theory and Analysis 1450-1650 differs from previous collections in offering articles less topically focused, addressing instead selected critical issues that nonetheless reflect how the major scholarly concerns of the last quarter of a century continue to captivate the field.

Like both Modality and Tonal Structures, Music Theory and Analysis 1450-1650 emerges as the result of a scholarly conference. The volume brings together thirteen articles in French and English, six of which are largely devoted to music theory and seven to analyses of early music. The sequence of essays is broadly organized by the date of the compositions or theoretical statements being discussed, the six essays addressing issues of theory dividing into...

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