I’m delighted to inform readers that my review article “Editing Early English Music” has recently appeared in Musicology Australia, the journal of the Musicological Society of Australia. In it, I compare two recent editions of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century music with connections to English composers, sources or musical styles: Reinhard Strohm’s Fifteenth-Century Liturgical Music, 6: Mass Settings from the Lucca Choirbook and David Fallows’s Secular Polyphony 1380–1480. I explore some of the difficulties faced by editors assembling a repertoire of musical compositions under the label of “English” and their different approaches to music editing. A complimentary copy of the article is available for the first 50 readers. If you have institutional access Musicology Australia you might like to follow this link instead.

I also authored a short review for the same issue of Musicology Australia on Margaret Bent’s recent book, Magister Jacobus de Ispania, Author of the Speculum Musicae. Bent has put forward in her book a fascinating new hypothesis concerning the origin of one of the most important music theorists of the early fourteenth century, proposing he can be identified with one of the founders of Oriel College, Oxford: James of Spain. My thoughts on Bent’s hypothesis and other interesting aspects of her book can be read in this complimentary copy here or by institutional subscribers to Musicology Australia here.