From at least the eighth century and for about a thousand years the repertory of music known as Georgian chant, or plainsong, formed the largest body of written music AND was the most frequently performed and the most assiduously studied in Western civilisation. But plainsong did not follow rigid conventions. It seems increasingly clear that, whatever may have been intended with respect to uniformity and tradition, the practice of plainsong varied considerably within time and place. It is just this variation, this living quality of plainsong, that these essays address. The contributors have sought information from a wide variety of areas: liturgy, architecture, art history, secular and ecclesiastical history and hagiography, as a step towards reassembling the tesserae of cultural history into the rich mosaic from which they came.

It is the variation in plainsong, its living quality, that these essays address.
Reviews
'I would recommend this book to every academic music library.' Katherine Hogg, Brio



Book Information
ISBN 9780521106894
Author Thomas Forrest Kelly
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 410g
Dimensions(mm) 244mm * 170mm * 14mm