Syrene Soundes
False Relations in the English Renaissance
- Publisher's listprice GBP 86.00
-
43 524 Ft (41 452 Ft + 5% VAT)
The price is estimated because at the time of ordering we do not know what conversion rates will apply to HUF / product currency when the book arrives. In case HUF is weaker, the price increases slightly, in case HUF is stronger, the price goes lower slightly.
- Discount 10% (cc. 4 352 Ft off)
- Discounted price 39 172 Ft (37 307 Ft + 5% VAT)
Subcribe now and take benefit of a favourable price.
Subscribe
43 524 Ft
Availability
Not yet published.
Why don't you give exact delivery time?
Delivery time is estimated on our previous experiences. We give estimations only, because we order from outside Hungary, and the delivery time mainly depends on how quickly the publisher supplies the book. Faster or slower deliveries both happen, but we do our best to supply as quickly as possible.
Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 30 July 2025
- ISBN 9780197748176
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages432 pages
- Size 221x152x33 mm
- Weight 748 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 26 figures, 10 music examples 700
Categories
Short description:
The visual, material, and literary cultures of the English Renaissance are littered with objects that depict, utilise, or respond to the metaphor of musical harmony--yet harmony in this period relied on a certain amount of carefully mannered dissonance. Using visual and literary sources alongside musical works, author Eleanor Chan explores the rise of the false relation, a variety of dissonance that, despite being officially frowned upon by contemporary theoretical treatises, became characteristic of English vocal music between ca. 1550 and 1630.
MoreLong description:
False relations remain one of the great enigmas of English Renaissance musical culture. Contemporary theoretical treatises explicitly discouraged their use, and yet these deliberate dissonances are hallmarks of English Renaissance music. Over the centuries they have accumulated a surfeit of subsequent connotations that have obscured how they once functioned, yet they have never been fully critically explored or elucidated in an English context. In Syrene Soundes, author Eleanor Chan excavates beneath strata of accumulated meanings to uncover the way that false relations delighted and confounded their original listeners and performers.
The book offers a holistic investigation of the false relations phenomenon, examining the cultural, literary, visual, and material understanding of such dissonances in relation to the broader culture of incongruity, surprise and error, and metaphors of harmony that captured the imagination of the English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chan argues that interdisciplinary angles can galvanise understanding of technical musical theoretical tropes like the false relation. She demonstrates that the false relation and its graphic ephemerality can productively be explored through the lens of English Renaissance visual culture and its idiosyncratic representational strategies. By anchoring it within the milieu of the English Reformation, burgeoning aspirations towards empire, and the increasing need for a self-fashioned collective English identity, Chan reveals that the false relation was key to the mythology of an inherited English tradition of music-making.
Syrene Soundes concerns itself not just with the notes on the page, but with the way that they influenced the broader culture of the time, both as the performable music they represented, as the idea of music, and as the visual, inky marks they are made of. It provides an accessible introduction to false relations which will be of use to musicologists and non-music specialists alike. Ultimately, Chan argues for the value of integrated interdisciplinary analysis in exploring the musical culture of the English Renaissance and embraces the blurring of musical, visual, material, and literary forms of expression that fed contemporary understanding of music, harmony, and falseness.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: The False Note, Descant, String: A History of a Foundling
Section I Thinking
The Rhetoric of Falseness or, How to Talk about a Discord
Painting with Falseness: Wording Your Discord
Visualizing Falseness: Or, How to Look at a Discord
Section II Performing
How to Train Your Discord: Performing Falseness
Una nota supra La/Semper est canendum Fa: A Tale of Two Semitones
