Review of Yolanda Plumley, The Grammar of 14th Century Melody: Tonal Organization and Compositional Process in the Chansons of Guillaume de Machaut and the Ars Subtilior.

Authors

Peter M. Lefferts, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

1998

Citation

Plainsong and Medieval Music, 7, 1, 73-91; DOI: 10.1017/S096113710000142X

Comments

Copyright © 1998 Cambridge University Press. Used by permission.

Abstract

This book is a revised and retitled version of a doctoral thesis presented to Exeter University in 1991. It appears in the Garland series, Outstanding Dissertations in Music from British Universities. In reviewing it I must acknowledge that I am not a disinterested party. Work of my own from the mid-1980s, which Dr Plumley first encountered in the form of a conference paper read at Southampton University in 1987, and which in modified guise was only just recently published ('Signature-systems and tonal types in the fourteenth-century French chanson', Plainsong and Medieval Music 4/2 (1995), pp. 117-47), forms a central point of departure for her work. The resulting volume, which I believe is a highly important contribution to the field, is very much to my taste in terms of the approach to the material, the kinds of questions asked, and the kinds of results that were found. ... Upon its publication this book has become the central work of scholarship in its field.