Medieval and Renaissance Music Manuscripts

The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, Published 1953. Wraps, xv 40 pp. plus 12 plates; 23 cm; illustrated with black-and-white facsimile plates of music manuscripts and a plainsong notation reference chart. In Very Good condition. Blue paper wraps with brown lettering on the front show toning and fading to the edges and mild shelf wear. Binding is tight. Pages are lightly toned, otherwise unmarked.Catalog of the January-February 1953 exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art, the first significant American exhibition devoted specifically to medieval and Renaissance music manuscripts. The fifteen-page foreword by A. Beverly Barksdale acknowledges roughly two dozen institutional collaborators including Frederick B. Adams Jr. and Meta Harrsen of the Pierpont Morgan Library, Luther Evans (Librarian of Congress), Frederick Goff (Chief of Rare Books, Library of Congress), William M. Milliken (Director, Cleveland Museum of Art), William A. Jackson (Houghton Library, Harvard), Dorothy Miner (Walters Art Gallery), and Hans David (University of Michigan). A substantial scholarly essay on "The Notations of the Manuscripts" traces neume notation from the St. Gall school through the Bolognese, Beneventan, Nonantolan, and Visigothic regional variants, then follows mensural notation from Vitry's Ars Nova through the Flemish polyphonists (Ockeghem, Obrecht, Isaac, Josquin, Willaert, Gombert) and concludes with French, German, Italian, and Spanish tablature systems for keyboard and lute. A section on "Liturgical Books" identifies the types of service-book represented (Antiphonary, Benedictionale, Breviary, Cantatorium, Gradual, Lectionary, Manuale, and others). The catalog itself describes more than ninety items with full bibliographic apparatus, ranging from a fifth-to-seventh-century Coptic music manuscript through Italian Renaissance graduals attributed to the private chapel of Pope Sixtus IV, lent by collections including the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Cleveland Museum of Art (J.H. Wade Collection), the Library of Congress, the Free Library of Philadelphia (John Frederick Lewis Collection), the Sibley Musical Library, the Walters Art Gallery, the Library of the General Theological Seminary, and the Otto F. Ege collection. Twelve plates include a plainsong notation reference chart and eleven facsimile plates of illuminated music manuscripts. Bibliography draws on the standard references in the field (De Ricci/Wilson Census, Miner's Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Apel's Notation of Polyphonic Music). Title: Medieval and Renaissance Music Manuscripts Author Name: A. Beverly Barksdale (foreword) Location Published: Toledo, Ohio, The Toledo Museum of Art: 1953 Binding: Wrappers Book Condition: Very Good Size: 23 cm Type: Wrappers Categories: Music, Art & Architecture Seller ID: 20260518016 Keywords: gregorian notation, illuminated manuscripts, medieval music manuscripts, renaissance music, toledo museum of art