Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance

Over 100 volumes have appeared in the Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance series in the 34 years since it began. Sacred music (Catholic and Protestant) and secular music from the period 1490–1610 are represented and almost exactly balanced. Vocal music is more evident than instrumental collections, and only a portion of the volumes is devoted to tablatures and independent instrumental music. While acknowledging the dominance of vocal music in sixteenth-century art music—and the disappearance of whole repertories of unwritten instrumental music—we hope for a better balance in future volumes: Students of sixteenth-century music take notice. 

Masses and motets, chansons and madrigals, dominate sixteenth-century musical culture and are, of course, well represented in this series. Yet a variety of sacred genres, especially in the field of Reformation music, is present (e.g., Johannes Riedel's edition of German leise settings [R 35] and the Wanley Manuscripts, edited by James Wrightson [R 99–101]). French and Italian may be the dominant languages in collections of secular song, but they share space with other national and linguistic repertories; in the Renaissance series one finds collections of Italian, French, German, Flemish, English, and Spanish music. 

A distinctive feature of this series is its inclusion of multivolume subseries devoted to the collected works of a composer within a chosen genre. Notable here is the 12-volume set of the complete madrigals of Andrea Gabrieli (R 41–R 52), edited by A. Tillman Merritt; the complete chansons of Andrè Pevernage in five volumes, edited by Gerald R. Hoekstra (R 60–R 64); and the 21-volume set of The Complete Motets of Orlando di Lasso, edited by a team of scholars led by Peter Bergquist, of which nine volumes have appeared to date (with several more to appear in the near future). In this last series, based on first editions and authoritative manuscript sources, Lasso's motets will appear for the first time in readily singable form and in the chronological order in which they were first published. Thus, this music, perhaps the most important corpus of motets of the sixteenth century, will be available for study and performance as never before. Proud as I am of the whole of Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, I am perhaps proudest of the Complete Motets of Orlando di Lasso.

To view series by volume number (most recent to earliest) click here.