This book contains sixteen essays on Venetian music in its last great period, stretching from the second half of the 17th century to the fall of the Republic in 1797. Two essays deal with musical institutions (academies and conservatories), nine with the life and works of Antonio Vivaldi, and five with contemporaries of Vivaldi active in Venice (Albinoni, Marcello, Vinaccesi). A substantial supplementary chapter updates, and where necessary revises, the facts and arguments of the original essays, which collectively date from the years 1973-1995. All the essays are written in English, but many originally appeared in Italian journals and conference proceedings that are hard for English-speaking readers to obtain. The volume is carefully indexed, enabling the reader easily to make connections between the essays.

Evidence indicates that the concertos of Vivaldi, Bach, Haydn etc were performed as chamber music, not the full orchestral works commonly assumed. The concertos of Vivaldi, Bach, Handel and their contemporaries are some of the most popular, and the most frequently performed, pieces of classical music; and the assumption has always been they were full orchestral works. This book takes issue with this orthodox opinion to argue quite the reverse: that contemporaries regarded the concerto as chamber music. The author surveys the evidence, from surviving printed and manuscript performance material, from concerts throughout Europe between 1685 and 1750 (the heyday of the concerto), demonstrating that concertos were nearly always played one-to-a-part at that time. He makes a particularly close study of the scoring of the bass line,discussing the question of what instruments were most appropriate and what was used when. The late Dr RICHARD MAUNDER was Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge.

Series Information:
Giovanni Legrenzi

This volume is part of a series of 25 full-score volumes of 17th-century Italian sacred music, a repertoire that has largely been unavailable for study or performance. It includes a comprehensive historical and biographical introduction, focuses on composers significant in their own time, and offers modern notation for contemporary performers.

Pioneering work on the musical material from the archives of the English court was undertaken by Nagel (1894), Lafontaine (1909) and Stokes (in the Musical Antiquary 1903-1913). Records of English Court Music (a series of seven volumes covering the period 1485-1714) is the first attempt to compile a systematic calendar of such references. It aims to revise these earlier studies where necessary, adding significant details which researchers omitted, clarifying the context of documents and substituting current call-marks for defunct references. Volume V is primarily concerned with the post-Restoration years already partially covered in volumes I and II. The material from the Exchequer and Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber has been revised to include references to trumpeters and drummers. Other sections are devoted to material outside the Lord Chamberlain's papers: the Signet Office Docquet Books, Secret Service accounts and more from the Exchequer; the Corporation of Musick (controlled by the Court musicians) and to the range of music material from accounts of the Receivers General. Samples from the comprehensive records of the Lord Steward's department (including those of the Cofferer of the Household) are also provided. Andrew Ashbee was the winner of the Oldman Prize in 1987 for Volume II in the series of 'Records of English Court Music', awarded by the UK branch of the International Association of Music Libraries for the year's best book on music librarianship, bibliography and reference.

In the 1530s, five Bassano brothers, who were outstanding wind players and instrument makers, emigrated from Venice to England. Dr Lasocki's authoritative new book, the first to be devoted to the family, is a minutely researched account of these brothers, their sons (and a daughter) and their grandsons. The first half of the book discusses the everyday affairs of the family - their relationships, religion, property, law suits, finances, and standing in society. Two chapters, one written by Roger Prior, are devoted to Emilia Bassano, whose identification as the 'dark lady' of Shakespeare's sonnets is supported by a wealth of evidence. The second half of the book discusses the family's musical activities. At the English Court the Bassanos made up a recorder consort that lasted 90 years; they also played in the flute/cornett and shawm/sackbutt consorts. As instrument makers their fame was spread throughout Europe. The book's appendixes present information on the Venetian branch of the family and the musical activities of the English branch since 1665.

The viola da gamba was a central instrument in European music from the late 15th century well into the late 18th. In this comprehensive study, Bettina Hoffmann offers both an introduction to the instrument -- its construction, technique and history -- for the non-specialist, interweaving this information with a wealth of original archival scholarship that experts will relish. The book begins with a description of the instrument, and here Hoffmann grapples with the complexity of various names applied to this and related instruments. Following two chapters on the instrument's construction and ancestry, the core of the book is given to a historical and geographical survey of the instrument from its origins into the classical period. The book closes with a look at the revival of interest in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Demonstrating the range and popularity of Bach piano transcriptions during the early twentieth century, this volume brings together arrangements from notable British musical figures, including Myra Hess, Leonard Borwick, Harriet Cohen, and William H. Harris. The collection includes exuberant fantasias and fugues, gentle transcriptions from instrumental works, and popular chorales such as 'Jesu, joy of man's desiring' and 'Bist du bei mir'. With an introduction by David Owen Norris, Bach Transcriptions for Piano is the perfect resource for all intermediate to advanced pianists wishing to further explore Bach's music.

Pioneering work on the musical material from the archives of the English court was undertaken by Nagel (1894), Lafontaine (1909) and Stokes (in the Musical Antiquary 1903-1913). Records of English Court Music (a series of seven volumes covering the period 1485-1714) is the first attempt to compile a systematic calendar of such references. It aims to revise these earlier studies where necessary, adding significant details which researchers omitted, clarifying the context of documents and substituting current call-marks for defunct references. Volume V is primarily concerned with the post-Restoration years already partially covered in volumes I and II. The material from the Exchequer and Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber has been revised to include references to trumpeters and drummers. Other sections are devoted to material outside the Lord Chamberlain's papers: the Signet Office Docquet Books, Secret Service accounts and more from the Exchequer; the Corporation of Musick (controlled by the Court musicians) and to the range of music material from accounts of the Receivers General. Samples from the comprehensive records of the Lord Steward's department (including those of the Cofferer of the Household) are also provided. Andrew Ashbee was the winner of the Oldman Prize in 1987 for Volume II in the series of 'Records of English Court Music', awarded by the UK branch of the International Association of Music Libraries for the year's best book on music librarianship, bibliography and reference.

Karl Heller's biography of Antonio Vivaldi, originally published in Germany in 1991 in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the composer's death, presents the most important facets of Vivaldi's life, of his works, and of his influence on music history. This new English translation incorporates recent Vivaldi research by the author and others, providing new factual material and fresh insights, including the latest painstaking efforts at dating Vivaldi's compositions. Written for musicians and music students as well as for the many other lovers of Vivaldi's music, the book also offers musicologists little-known material, new information, and new perspectives on the composer.

(Yorktown). A repertory of keyboard works by masters of the 17th and 18th centuries, selected and edited by Denes Agay. Includes biographical sketches of the composers and a glossary. Suitable for intermediate to advanced pianists. Composers include Brahms, Haydn and Greig. Graded from very easy to moderate level, with recommended fingering.

Lawrence Bennett provides a comprehensive study of the rich repertoire of accompanied vocal chamber music that entertained the imperial family in Vienna and their guests throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries. The cantata became a form of elite entertainment composed to amuse listeners during banquets or pay homage to members of the royal family during special occasions. Concentrating on Baroque cantatas composed in the Habsburg court, Bennett draws extensively on primary source material to explore the stylistic changes that occurred within the genre in the generations before Haydn and Mozart.The cantata became a form of elite entertainment composed to amuse listeners during banquets or pay homage to members of the royal family during special occasions. Concentrating on Baroque cantatas composed in the Habsburg court, Bennett draws extensively on primary source material to explore the stylistic changes that occurred within the genre in the generations before Haydn and Mozart.

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.

Sir Henry J. Wood (1869-1944), co-founder and chief conductor of the Proms, is often noted for his championing of the leading composers of the day, including Richard Strauss, Debussy, Rachmaninov, Ravel and Vaughan Williams. He also played pivotal role in advocating and performing the music of J.S. Bach. Sir Henry J. Wood (1869-1944), co-founder and chief conductor of the Proms for nearly half a century, is often noted for his championing of the leading composers of the day, including Richard Strauss, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Ravel,Sibelius, and Vaughan Williams. Less known is the part Wood played in advocating and performing the music of J.S. Bach, much of which, incredibly, was unknown in England at the turn of the twentieth century. This book uncoversWood's pivotal role in the English Bach revival. Wood's performances of works such as the St Matthew Passion and B Minor Mass caused a stir; the Brandenburg Concertos and Orchestral Suites became staple fixtures in the musical calendar; and his orchestral arrangements of Bach's solo works and cantata arias were key to the popularisation of the composer in England. Largely untouched, the hundreds of Bach scores individually marked up by Wood, now preservedin his archive at the Royal Academy of Music, London, reveal the minutiae of his thoughts on performance and offer a fascinating parallel to his available recordings from the period. Illuminating a significant new aspect of the musical life of England before World War II, the book also demonstrates that Wood's advocacy continues to influence perceptions of Bach even today. DR HANNAH FRENCH is an academic, broadcaster, and Baroque flautist based in London. She broadcasts regularly on Radio 3 and has appeared as a TV presenter and commentator for the BBC Proms.

In this penetrating study, Russell Stinson explores how four of the greatest composers of the nineteenth century-Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, and Johannes Brahms-responded to the model of Bach's organ music. The author shows that this quadrumvirate not only borrowed from Bach's organ works in creating their own masterpieces, whether for keyboard, voice, orchestra, or chamber ensemble, but that they also reacted significantly to the music as performers, editors, theorists, and teachers. Furthermore, the book reveals how these four titans influenced one another as "receptors" of this repertory and how their mutual acquaintances-especially Clara Schumann-contributed as well. As the first comprehensive discussion of this topic ever attempted, Stinson's book represents a major step forward in the literature on the so-called Bach revival. He considers biographical as well as musical evidence to arrive at a host of new and sometimes startling conclusions. Filled with fascinating anecdotes, the study also includes detailed observations on how these composers annotated their personal copies of Bach's organ works. Stinson's book is entirely up-to-date and offers much material previously unavailable in English. It is meticulously annotated and indexed, and it features numerous musical examples and facsimile plates as well as an exhaustive bibliography. Included in an appendix is Brahms's hitherto unpublished study score of the Fantasy in G Major, BWV 572. Engagingly written, this study should be read by anyone interested in the music of Bach or the music of the nineteenth century.

Bach and Tuning is strictly concerned with the identification of a historically accurate tuning paradigm that applies to the great majority of Johann Sebastian Bach's music. Once Bach has his personal tuning aesthetic acknowledged, a new dimension of meaning is invoked in performance through the intended interplay of diverse musical intervals. This new narrative lays bare Bach's mental calculations regarding his idealized intonation. Bach, the true chromatic composer of the Baroque, was the scion of a great music family. Likewise, Andreas Werckmeister was the bright star in a neighboring musical family, only a generation earlier. Bach and Tuning connects the valuable tuning contribution made by Werckmeister to Bach's musical masterpieces.

Originally entitled Musicology, in this work musicians are shown how to perform concertos by Vivaldi and his contemporaries in a way that would be recognized and encouraged by their composers. In addition, the key role of Sir Thomas Beecham as a pioneer in early music receives its proper credit and appreciation.

Anthology for Music in the Baroque, part of the Western Music in Context series, is the ideal companion to Music in the Baroque. Twenty-six carefully chosen works including a lute song by John Dowland, a cantata by Barbara Strozzi, and selections from J. S. Bach s Art of Fugue offer representative examples of genres and composers of the period. Commentaries following each score present a careful analysis of the music, and online links to purchase and download recordings make listening easier than ever."

This book surveys North German church music from the period of one of the most well-known of J.S. Bach's immediate German predecessors, Dietrich Buxtehude (c.1637-1707). Particular emphasis is placed on composers whose work has suffered unjust neglect, and on the influence of contemporary Italian church music. As well as providing a detailed study of the music itself, Geoffrey Webber also examines the religious and social background, and aspects of performance practice.

In Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage, author Inna Naroditskaya investigates the musical lives of four female monarchs who ruled Russia for most of the eighteenth century: Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine the Great. Engaging with ethnomusicological, historical, and philological approaches, her study traces the tsarinas' deeply invested interest in musical drama, as each built theaters, established drama schools, commissioned operas and ballets, and themselves wrote and produced musical plays. Naroditskaya examines the creative output of the tsarinas across the contexts in which they worked and lived, revealing significant connections between their personal creative aspirations and contemporary musical-theatrical practices, and the political and state affairs conducted during their reigns. Through contemporary performance theory, she demonstrates how the opportunity for role-playing and costume-changing in performative spaces allowed individuals to cross otherwise rigid boundaries of class and gender. A close look at a series of operas and musical theater productions-from Catherine the Great's fairy tale operas to Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame-illuminates the transition of these royal women from powerful political and cultural figures during their own reigns, to a marginalized and unreal Other under the patriarchal dominance of the subsequent period. These tsarinas successfully fostered the concept of a modern nation and collective national identity, only to then have their power and influence undone in Russian cultural consciousness through the fairy-tales operas of the 19th century that positioned tsarinas as "magical" and dangerous figures rightfully displaced and conquered-by triumphant heroes on the stage, and by the new patriarchal rulers in the state. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the theater served as an experimental space for these imperial women, in which they rehearsed, probed, and formulated gender and class roles, and performed on the musical stage political ambitions and international conquests which they would later enact on the world stage itself.

This is the only thoroughgoing study of the Monteverdi Vespers, vastly expanding on the author's 1978 set of essays on the subject, long since out of print. The volume studies the Vespers from the standpoint of its musical and liturgical origins and context, contains analytical essays on the music, and examines 17th-century performance practice as it pertains to the Vespers. Appendices include bibliographies and an analytical discography.

This survey distils a wide range of documentary and musical evidence relating to a particularly rich period in the city of Oxford's history. Aspects discussed include concert life, the choral tradition, the gradual establishment of an honours school of music, visiting musicians such as Handel and Haydn, Liszt and Joachim, and the role of figures such as William Crotch, Frederick Ouseley and Hubert Parry in raising the status of music and the musical profession.

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the leading figures of the French Enlightenment engaged in a philosophical debate about the nature of music. The principal participants-Rousseau, Diderot, and d'Alembert-were responding to the views of the composer-theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau, who was both a participant and increasingly a subject of controversy. The discussion centered upon three different events occurring roughly simultaneously. The first was Rameau's formulation of the principle of the fundamental bass, which explained the structure of chords and their progression. The second was the writing of the Encyclopedie, edited by Diderot and d'Alembert, with articles on music by Rousseau. The third was the "Querelle des Bouffons," over the relative merits of Italian comic opera and French tragic opera. The philosophes, in the typical manner of Enlightenment thinkers, were able to move freely from the broad issues of philosophy and criticism, to the more technical questions of music theory, considering music as both art and science. Their dialogue was one of extraordinary depth and richness and dealt with some of the most fundamental issues of the French Enlightenment. In the newly revised edition of Music and the French Enlightenment, Cynthia Verba updates this fascinating story with the prolific scholarship that has emerged since the book was first published. Stressing the importance of seeing the philosophes' writings in context of a dynamic dialogue, Verba carefully reconstructs the chain of arguments and rebuttals across which Rousseau, D'Alembert, and Diderot formulated their own evolving positions. A section of key passages in translation presents several texts in English for the first time, recapturing the tenor and tone of the dialogue at hand. In a new epilogue, Verba discusses important trends in new scholarship, tracing how scholars continue to grapple with many of the same fundamental oppositions and competing ideas that were debated by the philosophes in the French Enlightenment.

In 1741, in just 24 days, the German-born, British-naturalized composer George Frideric Handel wrote an oratorio rich in tuneful arias and choruses of robust grandeur. Coolly received in London at first, after Handel's death Messiah enjoyed an extraordinary surge in popularity: it was performed at festivals across England; other composers rushed to rearrange it; it would be commercially recorded on more than 100 occasions. Jonathan Keates tells the story of the composition and musical afterlife of Handel's masterpiece: he considers the first performances and its place in Handel's output; he looks at the oratorio itself and its relationship with spirituality in the age of the Enlightenment; and he examines why Messiah became such an essential element in the national culture of Britain. Illustrated with beautiful images, including the original score of the work, Messiah is a richly informative and affectionate celebration of a high-point of Britain's Georgian golden age.

Georg Philipp Telemann gave us one of the richest legacies of instrumental music from the eighteenth century. Though considered a definitive contribution to the genre during his lifetime, his concertos, sonatas, and suites were then virtually ignored for nearly two centuries following his death. Yet these works are now among the most popular in the baroque repertory. In Music for a Mixed Taste, Steven Zohn considers Telemann's music from stylistic, generic, and cultural perspectives. He investigates the composer's cosmopolitan "mixed taste"-a blending of the French, Italian, English, and Polish national styles-and his imaginative expansion of this concept to embrace mixtures of the old (late baroque) and new (galant) styles. Telemann had an equally remarkable penchant for generic amalgamation, exemplified by his pioneering role in developing hybrid types such as the sonata in concerto style ("Sonate auf Concertenart") and overture-suite with solo instrument ("Concert en ouverture"). Zohn examines the extramusical meanings of Telemann's "characteristic" overture-suites, which bear descriptive texts associating them with literature, medicine, politics, religion, and the natural world, and which acted as vehicles for the composer's keen sense of musical humor. Zohn then explores Telemann's unprecedented self-publishing enterprise at Hamburg, and sheds light on the previously unrecognized borrowing by J.S. Bach from a Telemann concerto. Music for a Mixed Taste further reveals how Telemann's style polonaise generates musical and social meanings through the timeless oppositions of Orient-Occident, urban-rural, and serious-comic.