Counterpoint and Compositional Process in the Time of Dufay

The purpose of this book is to present, in English translation, a series of important musicological studies that appeared in German or international journals between the years 1948 and 1967. Each of the twelve selections is introduced by a short editor's preface, whose purpose is to place it into the perspective of the whole, as well as to point out any notable idiosyncrasies. - General preface. As an introduction for anglophone advanced undergraduate or graduate students studying European polyphony of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for the first time, these translations from academic German of the mid-twentieth century may prove valuable, since they not only document a musicological debate but also "frame a dialectic that is useful for testing out our own hypotheses". Although "the articles comprising this volume can hardly be expected to have remained current in every respect", nearly all of the comments necessary to introduce these texts are ably anticipated by Moll in his editorial preface, and as he says, "many topics discussed in them retain a surprising degree of vitality, and some of their findings have never been superseded". Moll also attests repeatedly to a belief that the literature on this subject, especially the work of Ernst Apfel and to a lesser extent Günther Schmidt, has not been properly appreciated by the Anglo-American academic community, which he presumes to be because of its linguistic inaccessibility. Although the articles translated in this volume were first published between 1948 and 1967, Moll is in most cases right to assert their continuing relevance. - Plainsong & Medieval Music, Volume 8, Issue 2 October 1999, p. 184.