“Sumer is icumen in” is the incipit of a medieval English round or rota of the mid-13th century; it is also known variously as the Summer Canon and the Cuckoo Song. The line translates approximately to “Summer has come in” or “Summer has arrived”. The song is written in theContinue Reading
Adam de la Halle, also known as Adam le Bossu (Adam the Hunchback), was a French trouvère, poet and musician. Youtube Playlist (click top right icon for songtitles) Adam’s literary and musical works include chansons and jeux-partis (poetic debates) in the style of the trouvères; polyphonic rondel and motets inContinue Reading
Bernart de Ventadorn (also Bernard de Ventadour or Bernat del Ventadorn; 1135–1194) was a prominent troubadour of the classical age of troubadour poetry. Now thought of as “the Master Singer” he developed the cançons into a more formalized style which allowed for sudden turns. Youtube Playlist (click top right iconContinue Reading
Notker the Stammerer, also known as Notker Balbulus, or simply Notker, was a Benedictine monk at the Abbey of Saint Gall, now in Switzerland, where he was a leading literary scholar of the Early Middle Ages. He was active as a poet, scholar and possibly composer, as he is usuallyContinue Reading
The Magic Flute is an opera in two acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. The work is in the form of a Singspiel, a popular form during the time it was written that included both singing and spoken dialogue. The work premiered on 30Continue Reading
On April 30, 1877, French poet, humorous writer and inventor Charles Cros submitted a sealed envelope containing a letter to the Academy of Sciences in Paris fully explaining his proposed method, called the paleophone. Though no trace of a working paleophone was ever found, Cros is remembered by historians asContinue Reading
During the Middle Ages, the Parisian cathedral of Notre Dame was a hotbed of musical innovation. Two of the brightest musical lights of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries worked there: Masters Leonin and Perotin. Leonin’s fame came from his collection of two-voiced organa to be used for bothContinue Reading
The ballata (plural: ballate) is an Italian poetic and musical form in use from the late 13th to the 15th century. It has the musical structure AbbaA, with the first and last stanzas having the same texts. It is thus most similar to the French musical ‘forme fixe’ virelai (andContinue Reading
Church music was not simply about the music—its text was paramount. And having two-, three-, or four-voiced works made a variety of texts possible as well. Remember Notker Balbulus’s idea of the sequence, or trope? The idea of adding new words was spread to organum voices, and words were addedContinue Reading
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