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.

That Johann Sebastian Bach is a pivotal figure in the history of Western music is hardly news, and the magnitude of his achievement is so immense that it can be difficult to grasp. In "About Bach," fifteen scholars show that Bach's importance extends from choral to orchestral music, from sacred music to musical parodies, and also to his scribes and students, his predecessors and successors. Further, the contributors demonstrate a diversity of musicological approaches, ranging from close studies of Bach's choices of musical form and libretto to wider analyses of the historical and cultural backgrounds that impinged upon his creations and their lasting influence. This volume makes significant contributions to Bach biography, interpretation, pedagogy, and performance.

Contributors are Gregory G. Butler, Jen-Yen Chen, Alexander J. Fisher, Mary Dalton Greer, Robert Hill, Ton Koopman, Daniel R. Melamed, Michael Ochs, Mark Risinger, William H. Scheide, Hans-Joachim Schulze, Douglass Seaton, George B. Stauffer, Andrew Talle, and Kathryn Welter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One evening, journalist Eric Siblin attended a recital of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Cello Suites" and began an epic quest that would unravel three centuries of intrigue, politics, and passion. Winner of the Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction and the McAuslan First Book Prize, "The Cello Suites" weaves together three dramatic narratives: the disappearance of Bach's manuscript in the eighteenth century; Pablo Casals's discovery and popularization of the music in Spain in the late-nineteenth century; and Siblin's infatuation with the suites in the present day. The search led Siblin to Barcelona, where Casals, just thirteen and in possession of his first cello, roamed the backstreets with his father in search of sheet music and found Bach's lost suites tucked in a dark corner of a store. Casals played them every day for twelve years before finally performing them in public. Siblin pursues the mysteries that continue to haunt this music more than 250 years after its composer's death: Why did Bach compose the suites for the cello, then considered a lowly instrument? What happened to the original manuscript? A seamless blend of biography and music history, "The Cello Suites" is a true-life journey of discovery, fueled by the power of these musical masterpieces.

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.

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.

Heinrich Schutz (1585-1672) was the most important and influential German composer of the seventeenth century. Director of music at the electoral Saxon court in Dresden, he was lauded by his German contemporaries as "the father of our modern music", as "the Orpheus of our time." Yet despite the esteem in which his music is still held today, Schutz himself and the rich cultural environment in which he lived continue to be little known or understood beyond the linguistic borders of his native Germany. Drawing on original manuscript and print sources, A Heinrich Schutz Reader brings the composer to life through more than 150 documents by or about Heinrich Schutz, from his earliest studies under Giovanni Gabrieli to accounts of his final hours. Editor and translator Gregory S. Johnston penetrates the archaic script, confronts the haphazard orthography and obsolete vocabulary, and untangles the knotted grammatical constructions and syntax to produce translations that allow English speakers, as never before, to engage the composer directly. Most of the German, Latin and Italian documents included in this volume appear for the first time in English translation. A number of these texts have not even been printed in their original language. Dedications and prefaces of his printed music, letters and memoranda, poetry and petitions, travel passes and contracts, all offer immediate and unabridged access to the composer's life. To habituate the reader ever more in Schutz's world, the entries are richly annotated with biographical detail; clarifications of professional relationships and ancestral lines; information on geographic regions, domains, cities, courts and institutions; and references to biblical, classical and contemporary literary sources. Johnston opens a door for researchers and scholars across a broad range of disciplines, and at the same time provides an historical complement and literary companion for anyone who has come to appreciate the beauty of Schutz's music.

(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.

What is rhetorical music? In The Pathetick Musician, Bruce Haynes and Geoffrey Burgess illustrate the vital place of rhetoric and eloquent expression in the creation and performance of Baroque music. Through engaging explorations of the cantatas of J.S. Bach, the authors explode the conventional notion of historical authenticity in music, proposing adventurous new directions to reinvigorate the performance of early music in the modern setting. Along the way, Haynes and Burgess investigate intersections between music and oratory, dance, gesture, poetry, painting and sculpture, and offer insights into figural elaboration, articulation, nuance and temporality. Aimed primarily at performers of Baroque music, the book situates the study of performance practice in a broader cultural context, and as much as an invaluable resource for advanced study, it contains a wealth of information that pertains directly to anyone working in the field of early music. Based on a draft sketched by celebrated Baroque oboist and early music scholar Bruce Haynes before his death in 2011, The Pathetick Musician is the fruit of the combined wisdom of two musicians renowned equally for their contributions as performers and scholars. Drawing on an impressive array of Classical treatises on oratory, musical autographs and performance accounts, it is an essential companion to Haynes' controversial The End of Early Music. Geoffrey Burgess has taken up the broader claims of Haynes' philosophy to create a practical, accessible text that will be stimulating for all musicians interested in the rediscovery of early music. With copious musical examples, contemporaneous works of art, and a companion website with supplementary audio recordings, The Pathetick Musician is an invaluable resource for all interested in exploring new expressive possibilities in the performance and study of Baroque music.

Johann Sebastian Bach's two surviving passions-St. John and St. Matthew-are an essential part of the modern repertory, performed regularly both by professional ensembles and amateur groups. These large, complex pieces are well loved, but due to our distance from the original context in which they were performed, questions and problems emerge. Bach scholar Daniel Melamed examines the issues we encounter when we hear the passions performed today, and offers unique insight into Bach's passion settings. Rather than providing a movement-by-movement analysis, Melamed uses the Bach repertory to introduce readers to some of the intriguing issues in the study and performance of older music, and explores what it means to listen to this music today. For instance, Bach wrote the passions for a particular liturgical event at a specific time and place; we hear them hundreds of years later, often a world away and usually in concert performances. They were performed with vocal and instrumental forces deployed according to early 18th-century conceptions; we usually hear them now as the pinnacle of the choral/orchestral repertory, adapted to modern forces and conventions. In Bach's time, passion settings were revised, altered, and tampered with both by their composers and by other musicians who used them; today we tend to regard them as having fixed texts to be treated mith respect. Their music was sometimes recycled from other compositions or reused itself for other purposes; we have trouble imagining the familiar material of Bach's passion settings in any other guise. Melamed takes on these issues, exploring everything from the sources that transmit Bach's passion settings today to the issues surrounding performance practice (including the question of the size of Bach's ensemble). He delves into the passions as dramatic music, examines the problem of multiple versions of a work and the reconstruction of lost pieces, explores the other passions in Bach's performing repertory, and sifts through the puzzle of authorship. Highly accessible to the non-specialist, the book assumes no technical musical knowledge and does not rely on printed musical examples. Based on the most recent scholarship and using lucid prose, the book opens up the debates surrounding this repertory to music lovers, choral singers, church musicians, and students of Bach's music.

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.

This is the second of a two-volume study of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Taking into account the vast increase in our knowledge of the composer due to the Bach scholarship of the last sixty years, Richard Jones presents a vivid and in some respects radically new picture of his creative development during the Coethen (1717-23) and Leipzig years (1723-50). The approach is, as far as possible, chronological and analytical, but the author has also tried to make the book readable so that it may be accessible to music lovers and amateur performers as well as to students, scholars, and professional musicians. There are many good biographies of Bach, but this is the first, fully-comprehensive, in-depth study of his music making it indispensable for those who want to study specific pieces or learn how he developed as a composer.

This book gives an account of the individual works of one of the greatest composers. The first volume of a two-volume study of the music of J. S. Bach covers the earlier part of his composing career, 1695-1717. By studying the music chronologically a coherent picture of the composer's creative development emerges, drawing together all the strands of the individual repertoires (e.g. the cantatas, the organ music, the keyboard music). The volume is divided into two parts, covering the early works and the mature Weimar compositions respectively. Each part deals with four categories of composition in turn: large-scale keyboard works; preludes, fantasias, and fugues; organ chorales; and cantatas. Within each category, the discussion is prefaced by a list of the works to be considered, together with details of their original titles, catalogue numbers, and earliest sources. The study is thus usable as a handbook on Bach's works as well as a connected study of his creative development. As indicated by the subtitle Music to Delight the Spirit,, borrowed from Bach's own title-pages, Richard Jones draws attention to another important aspect of the book: not only is it a study of style and technique but a work of criticism, an analytical evaluation of Bach's music and an appreciation of its extraordinary qualities. It also takes account of the remarkable advances in Bach scholarship that have been made over the last 50 years, including the many studies that have appeared relating to various aspects of Bach's early music, such as the varied influences to which he was subjected and the problematic issues of dating and authenticity that arise. In doing so, it attempts to build up a coherent picture of his development as a creative artist, helping us to understand what distinguishes Bach's mature music from his early works and from the music of his predecessors and contemporaries. Hence we learn why it is that his later works are instantly recognizable as 'Bachian'.

This Catalogue provides scholars and performers with a survey of the breadth and variety of the repertoire of the composer whom Christoph Wolff describes as "one of the most seminal and influential musicians of the pre-Bach generation in Germany." Pachelbel composed the majority of his 527 works for keyboard instruments, as well as choral, vocal, and chamber music. The Catalogue presents incipits for each that can be identified. The list of works is intended to determine the totality of the corpus and knowledge about it, to determine the best means of identifying each work, and to settle problems of identity among similarly titled works. An essay on authorities examines the controversies of authenticity of Pachelbel manuscripts. Liberally footnoted and meticulously compiled, the Catalogue is invaluable to those familiar with Pachelbel's compositions and will create new interest.

One of the most fascinating figures of seventeenth-century music, composer and singer Antonia Padoani Bembo (c.1640 - c.1720) was active in both Venice and Paris. Her work provides a unique cross-cultural window into the rich musical cultures of these cities, but owing to her clandestine existence in France, Bembo's life was shrouded in mystery for almost three centures after her death. In this first-ever biography, Claire Fontijn unveils the enthralling and surprising story of a remarkable woman who moved in the musical, literary, and artistic circles of these European cultural centers.

In terms of musical composition, all but the first five of his thirty-five years were astoundingly productive for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 91). A stream of glorious symphonies, piano concertos, chamber music, operas and the sublime but unfinished Requiem poured from his pen. German philologist and archaeologist Otto Jahn (1813 69) was inspired to write a scholarly biography of Mozart following a conversation at Mendelssohn's funeral in 1847. He immersed himself in intensive research on the composer and his music, publishing the first edition of this landmark work in four volumes between 1856 and 1859. A second edition followed in 1867, incorporating new material and making use of Kochel's 1862 catalogue of Mozart's works. It is from this edition that Pauline D. Townsend made her three-volume English translation, first published in 1882. Volume 3 discusses the Mozart Da Ponte operas and the Requiem, and also includes a list of his works."

In terms of musical composition, all but the first five of his thirty-five years were astoundingly productive for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 91). A stream of glorious symphonies, piano concertos, chamber music, operas and the sublime but unfinished Requiem poured from his pen. German philologist and archaeologist Otto Jahn (1813 69) was inspired to write a scholarly biography of Mozart following a conversation at Mendelssohn's funeral in 1847. He immersed himself in intensive research on the composer and his music, publishing the first edition of this landmark work in four volumes between 1856 and 1859. A second edition followed in 1867, incorporating new material and making use of Kochel's 1862 catalogue of Mozart's works. It is from this edition that Pauline D. Townsend made her three-volume English translation, first published in 1882. Volume 1 covers Mozart's life to 1778, including tours with his father and employment under Archbishop Colloredo."

In terms of musical composition, all but the first five of his thirty-five years were astoundingly productive for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 91). A stream of glorious symphonies, piano concertos, chamber music, operas and the sublime but unfinished Requiem poured from his pen. German philologist and archaeologist Otto Jahn (1813 69) was inspired to write a scholarly biography of Mozart following a conversation at Mendelssohn's funeral in 1847. He immersed himself in intensive research on the composer and his music, publishing the first edition of this landmark work in four volumes between 1856 and 1859. A second edition followed in 1867, incorporating new material and making use of Kochel's 1862 catalogue of Mozart's works. It is from this edition that Pauline D. Townsend made her three-volume English translation, first published in 1882. Volume 2 covers Mozart the man, the break with Colloredo, his move to Vienna, marriage, and Freemasonry."

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.

Beloved not only in Britain, George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) is admired as a composer the world over. His inventive and sensitive melodic genius and his exuberant brilliance in depicting the spectacular are best displayed in his Messiah and Zadok the Priest. Larger than life, Handel impressed all who met him and was adept at promoting his works, arranging for their publication and even selling them from his home in London's Brook Street. His dogged determination to triumph over the many reverses of his career and the fickle enthusiasms of the Georgian public is the stuff of three-volume novels. This sympathetic and highly readable biography by the composer and author William Smith Rockstro (1823-95) was first published in 1883. Wherever possible, autograph manuscripts have been consulted and the book contains the first detailed catalogue of Handel's output. Among other works, Rockstro's biography of Mendelssohn is also reissued in this series.