Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This book is part of the Prentice Hall series, containing one book for each genre of Western Art Music (Medieval, Baroque, Romantic, etc.) as well as some non-Western music.
The book begins quickly with discussion of John Dunstable and the early English composers. Later chapters cover Dufay (and Binchois), Ockeghem (and Busnois). This encompasses the first quarter of the book--the early Renaissance. Later sections focus on Josquin and his contemporaries, the post-Josquin generation (Willaert, national styles and music of the reformation), and the last chapter covers the greats of the late Renaissance (mainly Palestrina, Lasso, Victoria, and Byrd).
Brown's book is designed to be a good undergraduate/graduate text for music majors, and in this respect it is pretty good. Brown's prose is informative and sufficiently analytical. His bibliographies at the end of each chapter can be helpful for those looking for additional information, and he seems to spend the right proportions of pages to those composers of greatest significance (Josquin, Palestrina, Byrd, etc.).
In terms of thoroughness of the information, Allan Atlas' book (part of the Norton series) is clearly better. It's almost twice as long, and its accompanying anthology allows for more thorough study. It's newer than Brown's book, which means that its scholarship is more up to date (for instance, some information we thought we knew about Josquin's history has turned out to be untrue).
Brown's book is not bad. In fact, I prefer Brown's organizational approach, which focuses on the composers one at a time instead of hopping around from genre to genre like Atlas'.
Both books are written with the music scholar in mind--you will be expected to know some of the church modes and the like--but Brown's text is much more accessible to the casual reader. I enjoyed reading it, and find it to be a suitable text.
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A history of Renaissance music focused on the music itself and the social and institutional contexts that shaped musical genres and performance. This book provides a complete overview of music in the 15th and 16th Centuries. It explains the most significant features of the music and the distinguishing characteristics of Renaissance composers (in Europe and the New World). It includes a large integrated anthology of 94 musical examples, as well as illustrations of musical instruments, notation, and ensembles.
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