CWRU Faculty Authors

xxiii + 128 pp.

Ross Duffin presents a reasoned expose of musical temperament and its impact on the way in which we experience music. An historical narrative, a music theory lesson, and an impassioned letter to musicians and listeners everywhere, attempts to redefine the very nature of our interactions with music.

Thomas Ravenscroft is best-known as a composer of rounds owing to his three published collections: Pammelia and Deuteromelia (both 1609), and Melismata (1611), in addition to his harmonizations of the Whole Booke of Psalmes (1621) and his original sacred works. A theorist as well as a composer and editor, Ravenscroft wrote two treatises on music theory: the well-known A Briefe Discourse (1614), and 'A Treatise of Practicall Musicke' (c.1607), which remains in manuscript. This is the first book to bring together both theoretical works by this important Jacobean musician and to provide critical studies and transcriptions of these treatises. A Briefe Discourse furthermore introduces an anthology of music by Ravenscroft, John Bennet, and Ravenscroft's mentor, Edward Pearce, illustrating some of the precepts in the treatise. The critical discussion provided by Duffin will help explain Ravenscroft's complicated consideration of mensuration, in particular.

Winner of the Claude V. Palisca Award of the American Musicological Society Shakespeare lovers have long lamented that so few songs in his plays survive with original music; of about sixty song lyrics, only a handful have come down to us with musical settings. For over 150 years, scholars have aspired—without success—to fill that gap. In Shakespeare's Songbook, Ross W. Duffin does just that. Eight years in the making, Shakespeare's Songbook is a meticulously researched collection of 155 songs—ballads and narratives, drinking songs, love songs, and rounds—that appear in, are quoted in, or alluded to in Shakespeare's plays. Drawing substantially on the unmatched resources of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Duffin brings complete lyrics (many newly recovered) and music notation together for the first time, and in the process sheds new light on Shakespeare's dramatic art. With performances by leading early-music singers and instrumentalists, the accompanying audio CD brings the songbook to life. Shakespeare's Songbook is the perfect gift for lovers of Shakespeare and an invaluable reference for singers, actors, directors, and scholars.

English comedy from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century abounds in song lyrics, but most of the original tunes were thought to have been lost--until now. By deducing that playwrights borrowed melodies from songs they already knew, Ross W. Duffin has used the existing English repertory of songs, both popular and composed, to reconstruct hundreds of songs from more than a hundred plays and other stage entertainments. Thanks to Duffin's incredible breakthrough, these plays have been rendered performable with period music for the first time in five hundred years. Some Other Note not only brings these songs back from the dead, but tells a thrilling tale of the investigations that unraveled these centuries-old mysteries.

A reconstruction of Davy's Latin turba choruses from the Eton Choirbook, incorporating the Gospel readings set to Sarum Chant, all sung to William Tyndale's English translation of the Gospel according to Matthew, and closing with an Easter carol by Sheryngam from the Fayrfax Manuscript.