Book Review: Hoppin's "Medieval Music"

I confess that I have not read Richard Hoppin's book, Medieval Music, or its accompanying Anthology , cover-to-cover.  I recommend it wholeheartedly, anyway.

When I took it into my head to write a lai or chanson d'amour, I looked in my books of the troubadors and trovéres for details on the verse and musical forms.  Nothing.  I checked the almighty Internet. Not much, and nothing I'd trust.  I looked in the liner notes to the CDs I had of the appropriate music.  Nope.

Finally, I remembered that I had Hoppin, and there it was, a whole chapter for the troubadors and another for their northern cousins.  With plenty of musical examples in the accompanying Anthology, to boot.  He discussed the texts, the music, and the relationship between them.  He discussed the different genres and verse forms and possible modes of performance.

And he does this for just about all of Western music from plainchant up until the start of the Renaissance (early 15th century).  There are ten chapters on church music. Now, you may not be interested in church music per se, but those ten chapters include discussions on reading neumes, modal theory, and organum, all topics of interest to an SCA bardic researcher.  Secular monophony, polyphony, ars nova: it's all in there.  (The Table of Contents can be viewed at Amazon, if you want the whole enchilada.)

It is a textbook and it is 30 years old.  This is  not the most cutting-edge recent scholarship.  However, while our understanding of medieval music has been refined and improved in the last 30 years, I don't know of much that's been entirely overthrown.  This book is still an excellent basic resource.  It provides the documentation you need for so much of that stuff that "everyone knows" about medieval music, and for a good bit of stuff that not everyone knows.  Any chapter, or some sub-headings, could easily be turned into an hour-long class at an event.  If I lost my entire music library and had to rebuild it, this would be one of the first books I would want to replace.