Improvisation and Inventio in the Performance of Medieval Music ─ A Practical Approach

Improvisation and Inventio in the Performance of Medieval Music: A Practical Approach is an innovative and groundbreaking approach to medieval music as living repertoire. The book provides philosophical frameworks, primary-source analysis, and clear, actionable practices and exercises aimed at recovering the improvisatory and inventive aspects of medieval music for contemporary musicians. Aimed at both instrumentalists and vocalists, the book explores the utilization of musical models, the inventive implications of medieval notation, and the ways in which memory, mode, rhetoric, and primary source paradigms inform the improvisatory process in both monophonic and polyphonic music of the Middle Ages. Angela Mariani, an experienced performer of both medieval music and folk and traditional musics, rediscovers and explicates the processes of imagination, invention, and improvisation which historically energized both medieval music in its own period and in its revival in our own time. Based on decades of research, university teaching, ensemble direction, collaboration, and performance, Mariani's impassioned stance that "the elusive element of inventio, as the medieval rhetoricians would have called it, must always be provided by the performer in the present," emphasizes medieval music performance practice as a dynamic and still-vital tradition. Students, teachers, directors, and those interested in the wealth of expressive beauty found in the music of the middle ages will likewise find value and meaning in her clear and accessible prose, and in the practical processes and exercises that make this book unique within the literature of medieval performance practice.

Angela Mariani is Associate Professor of Musicology and director of the Collegium Musicum at the Texas Tech University School of Music. She studied medieval music with Thomas Binkley, Benjamin Bagby, and Barbara Thornton, and was a founding member of Altramar medieval music ensemble, who toured internationally and recorded seven CDs for the Dorian label. Since 1991, she has hosted the nationally-syndicated public radio program Harmonia. In 2017 she was the recipient of Early Music America's Thomas Binkley Award, given for outstanding achievement in performance and scholarship by a university early music ensemble director.