Where previous accounts of the Renaissance have not fully acknowledged the role that music played in this decisive period of cultural history, Laurenz Lütteken merges historical music analysis with the analysis of the other arts to provide a richer context for the emergence and evolution of creative cultures across civilizations. This fascinating panorama foregrounds music as a substantial component of the era and considers musical works and practices in a wider cultural-historical context. Among the topics surveyed are music's relationship to antiquity, the position of music within systems of the arts, the emergence of the concept of the musical work, as well as music's relationship to the theory and practice of painting, literature, and architecture. What becomes clear is that the Renaissance gave rise to many musical concepts and practices that persist to this day, whether the figure of the composer, musical institutions, and modes of musical writing and memory.
"This brilliant study is centrally concerned with the question of what the term 'Renaissance' means with regard to music history. Laurenz Lütteken approaches this question by examining the emergence of the musical artwork in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His main argument throughout the book is that around 1,400 educated Europeans began to relate to musical compositions in a fundamentally new way. Remarkably interdisciplinary, this book is addressing questions that art historians and literary historians have been asking for a number of decades. It is one of the most exciting studies I have come across in a long time."—Anna Maria Busse Berger, Distinguished Professor of Music, UC Davis
"In this book, Lütteken explores the multiple dimensions of music as a cultural practice in the Renaissance. His panoramic portrait is based on a highly informed view of this vast subject and explores a wide range of important issues. Readers interested in any aspect of Renaissance culture—its music, art, literature, or history—will find this book provocative and valuable."—Lewis Lockwood, Fanny Peabody Research Professor of Music, Harvard University
“Each serious performance of music of late medieval and Renaissance times will benefit enormously from the insights offered by Laurenz Lütteken in this book. Understanding the relationships between the visual arts, literature, society, and music in this period of turbulent cultural development is the only successful way to recreate the conceivable sounding reality of musical artworks, whose depth and significance have for a long time been underestimated or misunderstood.”—Kees Boeke, musician
"Unlike traditional histories of music IN the Renaissance, this stud of music OF the Renaissance eschews the detailed and comprehensive examination of the oeuvres of individual composers, the development of different genres and the identification of musical styles in favour of attempting to understand how musical production and practice "fits" or meshes with general artistic expression and tendencies of the period. . . . Music of the Renaissance is highly recommended reading for anyone with an interest in cultural creativity and activity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries."
