Music of the Renaissance

"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