Richard Rastall's two books on music in early English religious drama complement each other. Heaven Singing provides an overview of the evidence for music in the plays, and defines the place, nature and cultural contexts ofmusic in the drama; Minstrels Playing is a discussion of the evidence for every play in that repertory, and is therefore concerned with the place and nature of musical performance in each play individually. Where should there be music in an anonymous English religious play of the fifteenth or sixteenth century? What sort of music should it be, and by what forces should it be performed? This study shows how music was used at the time of the plays' production through a close examination of individual texts and of the place of music in the intellectual and artistic life of the middle ages.
Richard Rastall begins by discussing the internal literary evidence of the play texts, the surviving notated music in the plays, and documentary evidence of productions before turning to the wider cultural context in which the plays were composed and performed. He considers the representational and dynamicfunctions of music in the plays, the relationship between music, drama and liturgy, and the performers themselves -who they were, and what they might be expected to do. Related factors necessary to the discovery of how music wasused in late medieval drama are also considered, from medieval cosmology and the numerical construction of plays to the age and size of boy actors.
Dr RICHARD RASTALL is Reader in Historical Musicology at the Universityof Leeds, and Pro-Dean of the Faculty of Arts.Dr RICHARD RASTALLis Reader in Historical Musicology at the University of Leeds, and Pro-Dean of the Faculty of Arts.
- ISBN10 0859914283
- ISBN13 9780859914284
- Publish Date 24 October 1996
- Publish Status Inactive
- Out of Print 28 May 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Imprint D.S. Brewer
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 452
- Language English