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Books > Music > Western music, periods & styles > Baroque music (c 1600 to c 1750)

The Requiem of Tomas Luis de Victoria (1603) (Paperback): Owen Rees The Requiem of Tomas Luis de Victoria (1603) (Paperback)
Owen Rees
R865 Discovery Miles 8 650 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Victoria's Requiem is among the best-loved and most-performed musical works of the Renaissance, and is often held to be 'a Requiem for an age', representing the summation of golden-age Spanish polyphony. Yet it has been the focus of surprisingly little research. Owen Rees's multifaceted study brings together the historical and ritual contexts for the work's genesis, the first detailed musical analysis of the Requiem itself, and the long story of its circulation and reception. Victoria composed this music in 1603 for the exequies of Maria of Austria, and oversaw its publication two years later. A rich variety of contemporary documentation allows these events - and the nature of music in Habsburg exequies - to be reconstructed vividly. Rees then locates Victoria's music within the context of a vast international repertory of Requiems, much of it previously unstudied, and identifies the techniques which render this work so powerfully distinctive and coherent.

Method for the One-Keyed Flute (Paperback): Janice Dockendorff Boland Method for the One-Keyed Flute (Paperback)
Janice Dockendorff Boland
R934 R827 Discovery Miles 8 270 Save R107 (11%) Ships in 12 - 19 working days

"Boland's clear, accessible text reflects years of professional experience as a performer and teacher of the one-key flute. Her book answers all the practical needs of beginners and offers advanced flutists a wealth of useful information. Even players wedded to the Boehm flute will gain fresh musical insights from Boland's comprehensive method."--Laurence Libin, Department of Musical Instruments, Metropolitan Museum of Art

"This is the best introduction to the one-key (baroque) flute for Boehm system flute players available today. With her comprehensive knowledge of the numerous historical treatises and tutors and her extensive practical experience as a player and teacher, Jan Boland has fashioned a guide that is at the same time informative and enjoyable. I only wish it had been available when I set out to learn the one-key flute. It would have saved me much time and led me directly to the most important sources."--John Thow, composer and Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley

"An easy-to-read format, clear prose, attractive graphics, and well chosen and very legible music make it an ideal beginner's tutor."--Betty Bang Mather, Professor Emeritus, University of Iowa School of Music

Baroque Music in Post-War Cinema - Performance Practice and Musical Style (Paperback): Donald Greig Baroque Music in Post-War Cinema - Performance Practice and Musical Style (Paperback)
Donald Greig
R617 Discovery Miles 6 170 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Studies of pre-existing music in narrative cinema often focus on a single film, composer or director. The approach here adopts a wider perspective, placing a specific musical repertoire - baroque music - in the context of its reception to explore its mobilisation in post-war cinema. It shows how various revivals have shaped musical fashion, and how cinema has drawn on resultant popularity and in turn contributed to it. Close analyses of various films raise issues of baroque musical style and form to question why eighteenth-century music remains an exception to dominant film-music discourses. Account is taken of changing modern performance practice and its manifestation in cinema, particularly in the biopic. This question of the reimagining of baroque repertoire leads to consideration of pastiches and parodies to which cinema has been particularly drawn, and subsequently to the role that neobaroque music has played in more recent films.

Music in the London Theatre from Purcell to Handel (Paperback): Colin Timms, Bruce Wood Music in the London Theatre from Purcell to Handel (Paperback)
Colin Timms, Bruce Wood
R1,039 Discovery Miles 10 390 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

This book is concerned with a hundred years of musical drama in England. It charts the development of the genre from the theatre works of Henry Purcell (and his contemporaries) to the dramatic oratorios of George Frideric Handel (and his). En route it investigates the objections to all-sung drama in English that were articulated in the decades around 1700, various proposed solutions, the importation of Italian opera, and the creation of the dramatic oratorio - English drama, all-sung but not staged. Most of the constituent essays take an in-depth look at a particular aspect of the process, while others draw attention to dramatic qualities in non-dramatic works that also were performed in the theatre. The journey from Purcell to Handel illustrates the vigour and vitality of English theatrical and musical traditions, and Handel's dramatic oratorios and other settings of English words answer questions posed before he was born.

Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara (Paperback): Laurie Stras Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara (Paperback)
Laurie Stras
R970 Discovery Miles 9 700 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

The musica secreta or concerto delle dame of Duke Alfonso II d'Este, an ensemble of virtuoso female musicians that performed behind closed doors at the castello in Ferrara, is well-known to music history. Their story is often told by focussing on the Duke's obsessive patronage and the exclusivity of their music. This book examines the music-making of four generations of princesses, noblewomen and nuns in Ferrara, as performers, creators, and patrons from a new perspective. It rethinks the relationships between polyphony and song, sacred and secular, performer and composer, patron and musician, court and convent. With new archival evidence and analysis of music, people, and events over the course of the century, from the role of the princess nun musician, Leonora d'Este, to the fate of the musica secreta's jealously guarded repertoire, this radical approach will appeal to musicians and scholars alike.

Bach - A Musical Biography (Paperback): Peter Williams Bach - A Musical Biography (Paperback)
Peter Williams
R1,329 R1,136 Discovery Miles 11 360 Save R193 (15%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

J. S. Bach composed some of the best-loved and most moving music in Western culture. Surviving mostly in manuscript collections, his music also exists in special and unique publications that reveal much about his life and thoughts as a composer. In this book, Peter Williams, author of the acclaimed J. S. Bach: A Life in Music, revisits Bach's biography through the lens of his music. Reviewing all of Bach's music chronologically, Williams discusses the music collection by collection to reveal the development of Bach's interests and priorities. While a great deal has been written about the composer's vocal works, Williams gives the keyboard music its proper emphasis, revealing it as crucial to Bach's biography, as a young organist and a mature composer, as a performer in public and teacher in private, and as a profound thinker in the language of music.

The Polyphonic Mass in France, 1600-1780 - The Evidence of the Printed Choirbooks (Paperback): Jean-Paul C. Montagnier The Polyphonic Mass in France, 1600-1780 - The Evidence of the Printed Choirbooks (Paperback)
Jean-Paul C. Montagnier
R1,246 Discovery Miles 12 460 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

This is the first ever book-length study of the a cappella masses which appeared in France in choirbook layout during the baroque era. Though the musical settings of the Ordinarium missae and of the Missa pro defunctis have been the subject of countless studies, the stylistic evolution of the polyphonic masses composed in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been neglected owing to the labor involved in creating scores from the surviving individual parts. Jean-Paul C. Montagnier has examined closely the printed, engraved and stenciled choirbooks containing this repertoire, and his book focuses mainly on the music as it stands in them. After tracing the choirbooks' publishing history, the author places these mass settings in their social, liturgical and musical context. He shows that their style did not all adhere strictly to the stile antico, but could also employ the most up-to-date musical language of the period.

Johann Sebastian Bach - The Learned Musician (Paperback, New Ed): Christoph Wolff Johann Sebastian Bach - The Learned Musician (Paperback, New Ed)
Christoph Wolff
R913 R778 Discovery Miles 7 780 Save R135 (15%) Ships in 9 - 17 working days

Although we have heard of the music of J.S. Bach in countless performances and recordings, the composer himself still comes across only as an enigmatic figure in a single familiar portrait. Written to mark the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, author and Bach scholar, Christoph Wolff presents a picture that brings to life this towering figure of the Baroque era. This biography portrays Bach as the living, breathing, and sometimes imperfect human being that he was, while bringing to bear all the advances of the last half-century of Bach scholarship. Wolff demonstrates the intimate connection between the composer's life and his music, showing how Bach's superb inventiveness pervaded his career as a musician, composer, performer, scholar, and teacher. And throughout, we see Bach in the broader context of his time: its institutions, traditions, and influences.

Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera - A History (Paperback): Rebecca Harris-Warrick Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera - A History (Paperback)
Rebecca Harris-Warrick
R1,422 Discovery Miles 14 220 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Since its inception, French opera has embraced dance, yet all too often operatic dancing is treated as mere decoration. Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera exposes the multiple and meaningful roles that dance has played, starting from Jean-Baptiste Lully's first opera in 1672. It counters prevailing notions in operatic historiography that dance was parenthetical and presents compelling evidence that the divertissement - present in every act of every opera - is essential to understanding the work. The book considers the operas of Lully - his lighter works as well as his tragedies - and the 46-year period between the death of Lully and the arrival of Rameau, when influences from the commedia dell'arte and other theatres began to inflect French operatic practices. It explores the intersections of musical, textual, choreographic and staging practices at a complex institution - the Academie Royale de Musique - which upheld as a fundamental aesthetic principle the integration of dance into opera.

Handel on the Stage (Paperback): David Kimbell Handel on the Stage (Paperback)
David Kimbell
R1,035 Discovery Miles 10 350 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Of all the great composers of the eighteenth century, Handel was the supreme cosmopolitan, an early and extraordinarily successful example of a freelance composer. For thirty years the opera-house was the principal focus of his creative work and he composed more than forty operas over this period. In this book, David Kimbell sets Handel's operas in their biographical and cultural contexts. He explores the circumstances in which they were composed and performed, the librettos that were prepared for Handel, and what they tell us about his and his audience's values and the music he composed for them. Remarkably no Handel operas were staged for a period of 170 years between 1754 and the 1920s. The final chapter in this book reveals the differences and similarities between how Handel's operas were performed in his time and ours.

The Lure and Legacy of Music at Versailles - Louis XIV and the Aix School (Paperback): John Hajdu Heyer The Lure and Legacy of Music at Versailles - Louis XIV and the Aix School (Paperback)
John Hajdu Heyer
R1,043 Discovery Miles 10 430 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

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.

Songs without Words - Keyboard Arrangements of Vocal Music in England, 1560-1760 (Hardcover): Sandra Mangsen Songs without Words - Keyboard Arrangements of Vocal Music in England, 1560-1760 (Hardcover)
Sandra Mangsen
R3,055 Discovery Miles 30 550 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Pathbreaking study of a vast and intriguing repertoire: arrangements for keyboard instruments of songs, arias, and other vocal pieces, from the age William Byrd to that of Handel. Keyboard arrangements of vocal music flourished in England between1560 and 1760. Songs without Words, by noted harpsichordist and early-music authority Sandra Mangsen, is the first in-depth study of this topic, uncovering abody of material that is remarkably varied, musically interesting, and indicative of major trends in musical and social life at the time. Mangsen's Songs without Words argues that the pieces upon which these keyboardarrangements were based constituted a shared repertoire, akin to the jazz standards of the twentieth century. In Restoration England, the ballad tradition saw tunes and texts move between oral, manuscript, and printed transmissionand from street to playhouse and back again. During the eighteenth century, printed keyboard arrangements were aimed particularly at female amateur keyboardists and helped opera to become a widely popular genre. Songs without Words considers a wide range of model pieces, including songs of many kinds and arias and other numbers from operas and oratorios. The resulting keyboard versions range from simple and pedagogically oriented to highly virtuosic. Two central issues -- the relationship between an arrangement and its model and the reception and aesthetics of arrangements -- are explored in the framing chapters. The result is a study that will be of great interest toscholars, performers, and anyone who loves the music of the late Renaissance, Baroque, and early Classic eras. Sandra Mangsen is professor emerita of music at the University of Western Ontario.

Bewitching Russian Opera - The Tsarina from State to Stage (Paperback): Inna Naroditskaya Bewitching Russian Opera - The Tsarina from State to Stage (Paperback)
Inna Naroditskaya
R1,226 Discovery Miles 12 260 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

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.

Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603-1625 (Paperback): Simon Smith Musical Response in the Early Modern Playhouse, 1603-1625 (Paperback)
Simon Smith
R1,031 Discovery Miles 10 310 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Presupposing no specialist musical knowledge, this book offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic role of music in the plays of Shakespeare and his early seventeenth-century contemporaries. Simon Smith argues that many plays used music as a dramatic tool, inviting culturally familiar responses to music from playgoers. Music cues regularly encouraged audiences to listen, look, imagine or remember at dramatically critical moments, shaping meaning in plays from The Winter's Tale to A Game at Chess, and making theatregoers active and playful participants in playhouse performance. Drawing upon sensory studies, theatre history, material texts, musicology and close reading, Smith argues for the importance of music in familiar and less well-known plays including Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Revenger's Tragedy, Sophonisba, The Spanish Gypsy and A Woman Killed With Kindness.

Musical Creativity in Restoration England (Paperback): Rebecca Herissone Musical Creativity in Restoration England (Paperback)
Rebecca Herissone
R1,407 Discovery Miles 14 070 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Musical Creativity in Restoration England is the first comprehensive investigation of approaches to creating music in late seventeenth-century England. Understanding creativity during this period is particularly challenging because many of our basic assumptions about composition - such as concepts of originality, inspiration and genius - were not yet fully developed. In adopting a new methodology that takes into account the historical contexts in which sources were produced, Rebecca Herissone challenges current assumptions about compositional processes and offers new interpretations of the relationships between notation, performance, improvisation and musical memory. She uncovers a creative culture that was predominantly communal, and reveals several distinct approaches to composition, determined not by individuals, but by the practical function of the music. Herissone's new and original interpretations pose a fundamental challenge to our preconceptions about what it meant to be a composer in the seventeenth century and raise broader questions about the interpretation of early modern notation.

J. S. Bach's Johannine Theology - The St. John Passion and the Cantatas for Spring 1725 (Hardcover): Eric Chafe J. S. Bach's Johannine Theology - The St. John Passion and the Cantatas for Spring 1725 (Hardcover)
Eric Chafe
R2,824 Discovery Miles 28 240 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Bach's Johannine Theology: The St. John Passion and the Cantatas for Spring 1725 is a fertile examination of this group of fourteen surviving liturgical works. Renowned Bach scholar Eric Chafe begins his investigation into Bach's theology with the composer's St. John Passion, concentrating on its first and last versions. Beyond providing a uniquely detailed assessment of the passion, Bach's Johannine Theology is the first work to take the work beyond the scope of an isolated study, considering its meaning from a variety of musical and historical standpoints. Chafe thereby uncovers a range of theological implications underlying Bach's creative approach itself.
Building considerably on his previous work, Chafe here expands his methodological approach to Bach's vocal music by arguing for a multi-layered approach to religion in Bach's compositional process. Chafe bases this approach primarily on two aspects of Bach's theology: first, the specific features of Johannine theology, which contrast with the more narrative approach found in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke); and second, contemporary homiletic and devotional writings - material that is not otherwise easily accessible, and less so in English translation. Bach's Johannine Theology provides an unprecedented, enlightening exploration of the theological and liturgical contexts within which this music was first heard.

Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (Paperback): Ralph P. Locke Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart (Paperback)
Ralph P. Locke
R1,411 Discovery Miles 14 110 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

During the years 1500-1800, European performing arts reveled in a kaleidoscope of Otherness: Middle-Eastern harem women, fortune-telling Spanish 'Gypsies', Incan priests, Barbary pirates, moresca dancers, and more. In this prequel to his 2009 book Musical Exoticism, Ralph P. Locke explores how exotic locales and their inhabitants were characterized in musical genres ranging from instrumental pieces and popular songs to oratorios, ballets, and operas. Locke's study offers new insights into much-loved masterworks by composers such as Cavalli, Lully, Purcell, Rameau, Handel, Vivaldi, Gluck, and Mozart. In these works, evocations of ethnic and cultural Otherness often mingle attraction with envy or fear, and some pieces were understood at the time as commenting on conditions in Europe itself. Locke's accessible study, which includes numerous musical examples and rare illustrations, will be of interest to anyone who is intrigued by the relationship between music and cultural history, and by the challenges of cross-cultural (mis)understanding.

Convent Music and Politics in 18th-Century Vienna (Book): Janet K. Page Convent Music and Politics in 18th-Century Vienna (Book)
Janet K. Page
R1,044 Discovery Miles 10 440 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

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.

Music and the French Enlightenment - Rameau and the Philosophes in Dialogue (Paperback, 2nd Revised edition): Cynthia Verba Music and the French Enlightenment - Rameau and the Philosophes in Dialogue (Paperback, 2nd Revised edition)
Cynthia Verba
R1,666 Discovery Miles 16 660 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

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.

Bach'S Numbers - Compositional Proportion and Significance (Book): Ruth Tatlow Bach'S Numbers - Compositional Proportion and Significance (Book)
Ruth Tatlow
R1,057 Discovery Miles 10 570 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

In eighteenth-century Germany the universal harmony of God's creation and the perfection of its proportions still held philosophical, moral and devotional significance. Reproducing proportions close to the unity (1:1) across compositions could render them beautiful, perfect and even eternal. Using the principles of her groundbreaking theory of proportional parallelism and the latest source study research, Ruth Tatlow reveals how Bach used the number of bars to create numerical perfection across his published collections, and explains why he did so. The first part of the book illustrates the wide-ranging application of belief in the unity, showing how planning a well-proportioned structure was a normal compositional procedure in Bach's time. In the second part Tatlow presents practical demonstrations of this in Bach's works, illustrating the layers of proportion that appear within a movement, a work, between two works in a collection, across a collection and between collections.

French Organ Music in the Reign of Louis XIV - Musical Performance and Reception (Book): David Ponsford French Organ Music in the Reign of Louis XIV - Musical Performance and Reception (Book)
David Ponsford
R845 Discovery Miles 8 450 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

Presenting a fresh approach to French organ music, David Ponsford analyses the repertory from the reign of Louis XIV by genre. The colourful French organ was so consistent in design that the very titles of pieces that were constituent parts of organ masses, Magnificats and suites prescribed the registrations: plein jeu, fugue, duo, recit, trio, fond d'orgue and grand jeu. Particular examples from published livres d'orgue and important manuscript collections are analysed chronologically, so that influences from Italian as well as French sacred and secular music can be traced. This analysis reveals the dynamic development of compositional styles in which each composer developed, modified or reacted against the exemplars of his predecessors. Composers discussed include Louis Couperin, Francois Couperin, Raison, Clerambault and Marchand. The reader will gain an enhanced understanding of performance practices such as notes inegales, fingering and ornamentation, and the influence of French composers on J. S. Bach.

A Heinrich Schutz Reader - Letters and Documents in Translation (Paperback, annotated edition): Gregory Johnston A Heinrich Schutz Reader - Letters and Documents in Translation (Paperback, annotated edition)
Gregory Johnston
R1,469 Discovery Miles 14 690 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

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.

Johann Sebastian Bach - A Very Brief History (Hardcover): Andrew Gant Johann Sebastian Bach - A Very Brief History (Hardcover)
Andrew Gant 1
R423 R383 Discovery Miles 3 830 Save R40 (9%) Ships in 9 - 17 working days

Part One: The History (What do we know?) This brief historical introduction to Bach explores the social, political and religious factors that formed the original context of his life and work, and considers how those factors affected the way he was initially received. What was his impact on the world at the time and what were the key ideas and values connected with him? Part Two: The Legacy (Why does it matter?) This second part explores the intellectual and cultural `afterlife' of Bach, and considers the ways in which his impact has lasted and how his music has been interpreted by later generations. Why is he still considered important today? And what aspects of his legacy are likely to continue to influence the world in the future? The book has a brief chronology at the front plus a glossary of key terms and a list of further reading at the back.

The Pathetick Musician - Moving an Audience in the Age of Eloquence (Hardcover): Bruce Haynes, Geoffrey Burgess The Pathetick Musician - Moving an Audience in the Age of Eloquence (Hardcover)
Bruce Haynes, Geoffrey Burgess
R1,693 Discovery Miles 16 930 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

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.

Hearing Bach's Passions (Paperback): Daniel R. Melamed Hearing Bach's Passions (Paperback)
Daniel R. Melamed
R1,074 Discovery Miles 10 740 Ships in 12 - 19 working days

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.

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