The sublime - that elusive encounter with overwhelming height, power or limits - has been associated with music from the early-modern rise of interest in the Longinian sublime to its saturation of European culture in the later nineteenth century and beyond. This volume offers a historically situated study of the relationship between music, sound and the sublime. Together, the authors distinguish between the different aesthetics of production, representation and effect, while understanding these as often mutually reinforcing approaches. They demonstrate music's strength in playing out the sublime as transfer, transport and transmission of power, allied to the persistent theme of destruction, deaths and endings. The volume opens up two avenues for further research suggested by the adjective 'sonorous': a wider spectrum of sounds heard as sublime, and (especially for those outside musicology) a more multifaceted idea of music as a cultural practice that shares boundaries with other sounding phenomena.

Louis XIV and his court at Versailles had a profound influence on music in France and throughout Europe. In 1660 Louis visited Aix-en-Provence, a trip that resulted in political and cultural transformations throughout the region. Soon thereafter Aix became an important center of sacred music composition, eventually rivaling Paris for the quality of the composers it produced. John Hajdu Heyer documents the young king's visit and examines how he and his court deployed sacred music to enhance the royal image and secure the loyalty of the populace. Exploring the circle of composers at Aix, Heyer provides the most up-to-date and complete biographies in English of nine key figures, including Guillaume Poitevin, Andre Campra, Jean Gilles, Francois Estienne, and Antoine Blanchard. The book goes on to reveal how the history of political power in the region was reflected through church music, and how musicians were affected by contemporary events."

Janet K. Page explores the interaction of music and piety, court and church, as seen through the relationship between the Habsburg court and Vienna's convents. For a period of some twenty-five years, encompassing the end of the reign of Emperor Leopold I and that of his elder son, Joseph I, the court's emphasis on piety and music meshed perfectly with the musical practices of Viennese convents. This mutually beneficial association disintegrated during the eighteenth century, and the changing relationship of court and convents reveals something of the complex connections among the Habsburg court, the Roman Catholic Church, and Viennese society. Identifying and discussing many musical works performed in convents, including oratorios, plays with music, feste teatrali, sepolcri, and other church music, Page reveals a golden age of convent music in Vienna and sheds light on the convents' surprising engagement with contemporary politics.

* Dismisses traditional, chronological format designed around European western canon to meets needs of today's ethnically diverse students, who identify their heritage as Asian, African, or Central American rather than European * Builds on a series of chapter-long theme-oriented narratives such as ethnicity, gender, spirituality, love, technology, that interweave the musical "here and now" * Focuses on how music creates and reflects social meaning in a variety of cultures and time periods. * Leads the student from music or ideas with which they are familiar to music that is unfamiliar, always through the connecting thread of the original social concept.

The B-minor Mass has always represented a fascinating challenge to musical scholarship. Composed over the course of Johann Sebastian Bach's life, it is considered by many to be the composer's greatest and most complex work. The fourteen essays assembled in this volume originate from the International Symposium 'Understanding Bach's B-minor mass' at which scholars from eighteen countries gathered to debate the latest topics in the field. In revised and updated form, they comprise a thorough and systematic study of Bach's Opus Ultimum, including a wide range of discussions relating to the Mass's historical background and contexts, structure and proportion, sources and editions, and the reception of the work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the light of important new developments in the study of the piece, this collection demonstrates the innovation and rigour for which Bach scholarship has become known.

In 1725 Johann Sebastian Bach wrote two keyboard suites for his wife Anna Magdalena, whom he married in 1721. These became the first entries in a book in which, over the next twenty years, were gathered together both keyboard pieces and vocal works by Johann Sebastian and his two sons Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian as well as such composers as Couperin, Boehm, Petzold and Hasse. An illuminating portrait of domestic music-making in the Bach family during the Leipzig period, this authoritative new edition of the book contains the keyboard pieces only, including the well-known Minuet in G and Prelude in C, from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Part I, and more substantial items such as C. P. E. Bach's Solo per il Cembalo in E flat (early versions of Partitas Nos. 3 and 6 and French Suites Nos. 1 and 2 are excluded). This first-class edition, providing an important and attractive introduction to the Baroque style, also contains invaluable advice on appropriate tempo, phrasing, articulation and ornamentation in accordance with contemporary performance practice.

Cynthia Verba's book explores the story of music's role in the French Enlightenment, focusing on dramatic expression in the musical tragedies of the composer-theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau. She reveals how his music achieves its highly moving effects through an interplay between rational design, especially tonal design, and the portrayal of feeling and how this results in a more nuanced portrayal of the heroine. Offering a new approach to understanding Rameau's role in the Enlightenment, Verba illuminates important aspects of the theory-practice relationship and shows how his music embraced Enlightenment values. At the heart of the study are three scene types that occur in all of Rameau's tragedies: confession of forbidden love, intense conflict and conflict resolution. In tracing changes in Rameau's treatment of these, Verba finds that while he maintained an allegiance to the traditional French operatic model, he constantly adapted it to accommodate his more enlightened views on musical expression.

The Miserere by Italian composer Gregorio Allegri (1582-1652) is one of the most popular, oft performed and recorded choral pieces of late Renaissance/early Baroque music. Yet the piece known today bears little resemblanceto Allegri's original or to the piece as it was performed before 1870. The Miserere attributed to the Italian composer Gregorio Allegri (1582-1652) is one of the most popular, often performed and recorded choral pieces of late Renaissance/early Baroque music. It was composed during the reign of Pope Urban VIII in the 1630s, for the exclusive use of the Papal Choir in the Sistine Chapel during Holy Week, the last of thirteen surviving Misereres sung at the services of Tenebrae since 1514. When the young Mozart visited Rome, so the story goes, he transcribed it from memory, risking excommunication but helping posterity to reclaim the piece. Yet the Miserere known today bears little resemblance to Allegri's original or to its method of performance before 1900. This book is the first detailed account of this iconic work's performance history in the Sistine Chapel, in particular focussing on its heyday in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than looking at the Miserere as a work on paper, the key to its genesis - as this book reveals - can only be found in a performance context. The book includes consideration both of the implications of that context in recreating it for performance, and of the history and practice of the "English Miserere" - the version commonly heard today. Appendices present key source transcriptions and two performance editions.

Music master to Frederick the Great, Quantz was one of the great flute virtuosos of all time. He was also a thorough musician, a fine teacher and an excellent writer. This classic book is ostensibly a flute method, but it goes far beyond that, presenting a complete and detailed picture of musical taste and performance practice in the 18th century. Of special significance is a table relating various tempos to the speed of the pulse, helping modern musicians to solve the difficult question of authentic performance tempos of Baroque music. This reissued edition includes all Quantz's music examples together with an introduction and explanatory notes by the translator, Edward R. Reilly.

More than any other part of Bach's output, his keyboard works conveyed the essence of his inimitable art to generations of admirers. The varied responses to this repertory - in scholarly and popular writing, public lectures, musical composition and transcription, performances and editions - ensured its place in the canon and broadened its creator's appeal. The early reception of Bach's keyboard music also continues to affect how we understand and value it, though we rarely recognize that historical continuity. Here, Matthew Dirst investigates how Bach's music intersects with cultural, social and music history, focusing on a repertory which is often overshadowed in scholarly and popular literature on Bach reception. Organized around the most productive ideas generated by Bach's keyboard works from his own day to the middle of the nineteenth century, this study shows how Bach's remarkable and long-lasting legacy took shape amid critical changes in European musical thought and practice.

Bettina Varwig places the music of the celebrated Dresden composer Heinrich Schutz in a richly detailed tapestry of cultural, political, religious and intellectual contexts. Four key events in Schutz's career - the 1617 Reformation centenary, the performance of his Dafne in 1627, the 1636 funeral composition Musikalische Exequien and the publication of his motet collection Geistliche Chormusik (1648) - are used to explore his music's resonances with broader historical themes, including the effects of the Thirty Years' War, contemporary meanings of classical mythology, Lutheran attitudes to death and the afterlife as well as shifting conceptions of time and history in light of early modern scientific advances. These original seventeenth-century circumstances are treated in counterpoint with Schutz's fascinating later reinvention in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German musical culture, providing a new kind of musicological writing that interweaves layers of historical inquiry from the seventeenth century to the present day.

Using novels and autobiographies from Bach's Germany, Stephen Rose suggests new ways of interpreting the lives and social status of musicians. The study focuses on satirical novels written by musicians that describe the lives of performers and composers, as well as the autobiographies of Bach's contemporaries. These narratives represent musicians variously as picaresque outcasts, honourable craft-workers, foolish bunglers and respected virtuosos. They probe the lives of musicians considered taboo or aberrant in the period, such as street entertainers and Italian castratos. The novels and autobiographies also reveal two major debates that shaped the mindset and social identity of musicians: was music a sensual or rational craft, and should musicians integrate within society or be regarded as outsiders? Quoting from an array of little-known novels, this book shows how an interdisciplinary approach can transform our understanding of Bach and his contemporaries.

Exploring the dynamic yet problematic context of musical drama in Rome, this study probes opera's relationship to modernity during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Opera instigated a range of discourses, most notably among Rome's Academy of Arcadians, whose apprehension towards opera refracted larger aesthetic and cultural debates, and socio-political tensions. Tcharos presents a unique perspective, engaging opera as a historical force that established a sphere of influence across several genres and matrices of culture. The juxtaposition of opera against the prominent forms of the oratorio, serenata and cantata illustrates opera's constitutive role in a trans-genre cultural matrix, where the dialogical connections between musico-dramatic forms vividly capture the historicism, nostalgia, contradiction and cultural reform that opera inspired. By illuminating other genres as reactionary sites of music and drama, Opera's Orbit boldly reconstructs opera's eighteenth-century critical turn.

This 1845 biography of Mozart by the music journalist Edward Holmes was the first to be published in English. Holmes, who numbered the poet Keats and the publisher Vincent Novello amongst his friends, wrote extensively for periodicals including the Musical Times and The Atlas. A lifelong admirer of Mozart's work, Holmes's keen understanding of its significance is evident throughout the biography. It is based on a thorough study of the then available printed and manuscript sources, in particular many of Mozart's letters which Holmes translated and included as he 'endeavoured throughout to let the composer tell his own story'. He was also able to consult Mozart's own catalogue of his works, that compiled by the publisher Johann Andre, and the Mozart autograph manuscripts bought by Andre from Mozart's widow Constanze. The work is written in a very approachable style and will appeal to anyone with an interest in Mozart.

Providing a detailed analysis of Bach's Passions, this 2010 book represents an important contribution to the debate about the culture of 'classical music', its origins, priorities and survival. The angles from which each chapter proceeds differ from those of a traditional music guide, by examining the Passions in the light of the mindsets of modernity, and their interplay with earlier models of thought and belief. While the historical details of Bach's composition, performance and theological context remain crucial, the foremost concern of this study is to relate these works to a historical context that may, in some threads at least, still be relevant today. The central claim of the book is that the interplay of traditional imperatives and those of early modernity renders Bach's Passions particularly fascinating as artefacts that both reflect and constitute some of the priorities and conditions of the western world.

Victor Schoelcher (1804 93) was a French writer chiefly remembered for his part in the fight for the abolition of slavery. In America on business in 1829 30, he was so appalled by the conditions he found that he became an abolitionist campaigner, concentrating his writings on conditions in the French Caribbean islands. He became President of the French commission for abolition and achieved his goal when in 1848 the French government abolished slavery in all its colonies. Schoelcher went into political exile for nearly twenty years after the coup d'etat of Louis Napoleon, and during this time he pursued his other great interest, music. His Life of Handel, translated into English by James Lowe, was published in 1857. It was regarded as one of the finest biographies ever written, and it was ahead of its time in the amount of research into primary sources which the author had undertaken.

Court masques were multi-media entertainments, with song, dance, theater, and changeable scenery, staged annually at the English court to celebrate the Stuart dynasty. They have typically been regarded as frivolous and expensive entertainments. This book dispels this notion, emphasizing instead that they were embedded in the politics of the moment, and spoke in complex ways to the different audiences who viewed them. Covering the whole period from Queen Anne s first masque at Winchester in 1603 to Salmacida Spolia in 1640, Butler looks in depth at the political functions of state festivity. The book contextualizes masque performances in intricate detail, and analyzes how they shaped, managed, and influenced the public face of the Stuart kingship. Butler presents the masques as a vehicle through which we can read the early Stuart court s political aspirations and the changing functions of royal culture in a period of often radical instability.

This anthology to accompany Gateways to Understanding Music is comprised of musical "texts." These broadly defined texts-primarily musical scores-facilitate the integration of score study and music theory into the ethno/musicology curriculum, a necessary focus in the training of the professional musician. As posed by the textbook, the last question in each modular "gateway" is "Where do I go from here?" This resource provides one more opportunity to go beyond the textbook to examine music scores and texts in even greater depth. This anthology is a combination of primary sources for study: musical scores and music transcriptions, along with a few primary source documents and musical exercises.

Henry Lawes (1596-1662) has long been acknowledged as the most important and prolific English songwriter between the death of John Dowland in 1626 and the birth of Henry Purcell in 1659. He is celebrated as Milton's collaborator in Comus (1634). Although he wrote some church music, Lawes' significance as a composer lies in his settings of many of the lyrics by Cavalier poets such as Carew, Herrick, Suckling, and Waller - who, like Lawes himself, belonged to the brilliant court of Charles I. This book combines an account of his life with a study of his development as a songwriter during this period. Following the execution of the King in 1649, Lawes played an important part in establishing concerts in London during the 1650s, and was one of the composers of the first English opera, Davenant's "The Siege of Rhodes" (1656). At the Restoration he set "Zadok the Priest" for the coronation of Charles II, but died the following year.

C. P. E. Bach Studies collects together nine wide-ranging essays by leading scholars of eighteenth-century music. Offering fresh perspectives on one of the towering figures of the period, the authors explore Bach's music in its cultural contexts, and show in diverse and complementary ways the reciprocal relationship between Bach's work and contemporary literary, theological, and aesthetic debates. Topics include Bach's relation to theories of sensibility and the sublime; the free fantasy and concepts of self and being; and Bach's engagement with music history and the legacy of his predecessors. Wider questions of C. P. E. Bach reception also play an important part in the book, which explores not only the interpretation of Bach's music in his time, but also its reception over the two centuries since his death.

Early Music History is devoted to the study of music from the early Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century. It demands the highest standards of scholarship from its contributors, all of whom are leading academics in their fields. It gives preference to studies pursuing interdisciplinary approaches and to those developing novel methodological ideas. The scope is exceptionally broad and includes manuscript studies, textual criticism, iconography, studies of the relationship between words and music and the relationship between music and society. Articles in volume twenty-three include: Guillaume de Machaut and his canonry of Reims 1338-1377; 'Notes as a garland': the chronology and narrative of Byrd's Gradualia; Reading carnival: the creation of a Florentine carnival song; Schein's occasional music and the social order in 1620s Leipzig.

'How refreshing, to read a book about music written for a music lover and not a musicologist. In clear, lucid, entertaining prose, Jane Glover makes those of us who lack musical literacy better understand and appreciate Handel’s divinity.' - Donna Leon, author of Handel's Bestiary and the Inspector Brunetti mysteries.

Handel in London tells the story of a young German composer who in 1712, followed his princely master to London and would remain there for the rest of his life. That master would become King George II and the composer was George Frideric Handel.

Handel, then still only twenty-seven and largely self-taught, would be at the heart of musical activity in London for the next four decades, composing masterpiece after masterpiece, whether the glorious coronation anthem, Zadok the Priest, operas such as Giulio Cesare, Rinaldo and Alcina or the great oratorios, culminating, of course, in Messiah.

Here, Jane Glover, who has conducted Handel’s work in opera houses and concert halls throughout the world, draws on her profound understanding of music and musicians to tell Handel’s story. It is a story of music-making and musicianship, of practices and practicalities, but also of courts and cabals, of theatrical rivalries and of eighteenth-century society. It is also, of course, the story of some of the most remarkable music ever written, music that has been played and sung, and loved, in this country – and throughout the world – for three hundred years.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach provides an indispensable introduction to the Bach research of the past thirty-fifty years. It is not a lexicon providing information on all the major aspects of Bach's life and work, such as the Oxford Composer Companion: J. S. Bach. Nor is it an entry-level research tool aimed at those making a beginning of such studies. The valuable essays presented here are designed for the next level of Bach research and are aimed at masters and doctoral students, as well as others interested in coming to terms with the current state of Bach research. Each author covers three aspects within their specific subject area; firstly, to describe the results of research over the past thirty-fifty years, concentrating on the most significant and controversial, such as: the debate over Smend's NBA edition of the B minor Mass; Blume's conclusions with regard to Bach's religion in the wake of the 'new' chronology; Rifkin's one-to-a-vocal-part interpretation; the rediscovery of the Berlin Singakademie manuscripts in Kiev; the discovery of hitherto unknown manuscripts and documents and the re-evaluation of previously known sources. Secondly, each author provides a critical analysis of current research being undertaken that is exploring new aspects, reinterpreting earlier assumptions, and/or opening-up new methodologies. For example, Martin W. B. Jarvis has suggested that Anna Magdalena Bach composed the cello suites and contributed to other works of her husband - another controversial hypothesis, whose newly proposed forensic methodology requires investigation. On the other hand, research into Bach's knowledge of the Lutheran chorale tradition is currently underway, which is likely to shed more light on the composer's choices and usage of this tradition. Thirdly, each author identifies areas that are still in need of investigation and research.

In 1683 English court musicians and the Musical Society of London joined forces to celebrate St Cecilia's Day (22 November) with a feast and the performance of specially composed music. The most prominent composers and poets of the age wrote for these occasions, including Henry Purcell, John Blow, John Dryden and William Congreve. In 1683 English court musicians and the Musical Society of London joined forces to initiate annual observations of St Cecilia's Day (22 November), celebrating the occasion with a feast and the performance of specially composed musical odes. The most prominent composers and poets of the age wrote for these occasions, including Henry Purcell, John Blow, John Dryden and William Congreve, and the best musicians of the city, primarily drawn from the court music, undertook the performances. After a decade of celebrations, a church service was added before the feast, and elaborate vocal and instrumental music was performed. At the same time, celebrations of St Cecilia's Day began to spread widely throughout the British Isles, where they were held by local music clubs, often with the support of cathedral musicians. Though the annual London celebrations came to an end after 1700 in the face of increasing competition from the city's busy musical and theatrical offerings, Cecilian poetry continued to inspire new musical settings in the eighteenth century, including works by Pepusch, Greene, Boyce and, most notably, Handel. This book examines the social, cultural and religious significance of celebrations of St Cecilia's Day in the British Isles and explores the music and poetry that originated from them. The annual feasts of the Musical Society are analysed in detail, as is the role they played in the development of the ode. The book also considers how advances in musical culture in London were imitated in the provinces and provides a detailed discussion of the variety of Cecilian celebrations held at provincial centres throughout the British Isles.

Ian Spink, a leading authority on 17th-century English music, has carried out a remarkable new investigation of the musical sources of the Restoration period, and of the archives of every cathedral and choral foundation. For the first time, perhaps, the true character and shape of this period of musical history is revealed, taking in the work of the great men of the age, including Purcell, Locke, and Handel, and many lesser masters such as Humfrey, Blow, Clarke, Weldon, and Croft.