ABSTRACT
The introduction offers a reflection on the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. This book aims to reconsider the sources of secular music from the Middle Ages and early modernity, adopting a medial and material viewpoint, thus widening the very concept of music source. While musicological research has traditionally made use of sources such as music manuscripts or printed music books, this volume shows that other types of documents can offer alternative ways of mediating music and sound. Music sources are investigated as complex and multifaceted objects, not only containing, but also shaping, communicating, and representing the music they transmit. The book explores music books and other physical embodiments of secular music, including the devices used by compilers, scribes, editors, and other historical actors to mediate musical and sound experiences more in general. It also includes investigations of the acts of using, reading, and performing from medieval and early modern books, approached as sensory activities. It discusses the relationship between books and the cultural, social, and ideological context in which and for which they were created. It examines mediations of music and sound in musical sources but also in what are traditionally considered non-musical sources, investigating how the experience of music and sound has been transmitted and, in a broader sense, performed also through images, objects, and verbal texts.
