The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470-1530 - Hardcover

'Sources as disparate as the records of English heresy trials, the treatises of Italian ecclesiastics and scholastic commentaries on Aristotle come together into a whole that reads easily and will be comprehensible to students and scholars of varying specialties and interests.' - Early Music

'Wegman is a serious and thoughtful scholar whose views deserve respectful notice.' - Renaissance Quarterly

'I am most grateful to Rob Wegman for giving the musicological community this very important book. His views are, for the most part, meticulously documented, his sources carefully chosen, his narrative is richly informative, and his opinions are stimulating, at times provocative.' - Music & Letters

In the final decades of the fifteenth century, the European musical world was shaken to its foundations by the onset of a veritable culture war.

At a time when composers like Obrecht, Isaac, and Josquin were bringing the craft of composition to new heights of artistic excellence, critics began to insist that art polyphony was useless, wasteful, immoral, decadent, and effeminizing. They campaigned aggressively to popularize those criticisms, challenging old certainties about music, and threatening its position in contemporary church and society. Their most effective slogans became critical commonplaces, ideas that left their mark in the writings of figures as diverse as Leonardo, Erasmus, Savonarola, Castiglione, and others.

Yet defenders of polyphony struck back with a vicious counter-offensive, and for several decades music would remain a topic of bitter controversy. When the crisis had finally passed, in the 1530s, nothing would ever be the same again.

The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe tells the story of this cultural upheaval, drawing on a wide range of little-known texts and documents, and weaving them together in a narrative that takes the reader on an eventful musical journey through early-modern Europe.