Perfect Imperfect

Download or read book Where Sight Meets Sound written by Emily Zazulia and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The main function of western musical notation is incidental: it prescribes and records sound. But during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, notation began to take on an aesthetic life all its own. Composers sometimes asked singers to read the music in unusual ways-backwards, upside-down, or at a reduced speed-to produce sounds whose relationship to the written notes is anything but obvious. This book explores innovations in late-medieval music writing as well as how modern scholarship on notation has informed-sometimes erroneously-ideas about the premodern era. By viewing notation as a complex technology that did more than record sound, the book revolutionizes the way we think about music's literate traditions"--