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.

In this wide-ranging set of original essays, musicologist and organist Russell Stinson investigates Johann Sebastian Bach's compositions for the organ, opening up a wealth of perspectives on the stylistic orientation and historical context of these timeless masterpieces. With a sweeping hand, Stinson sheds light on the entire corpus of Bach's organ chorales, and considers the reception of particular pieces not only by various luminaries in the classical music world, but also those within such disparate contexts as film, literature, politics, and rock music. Stinson's investigations include a revealing focus on a previously unpublished fugue by Bach pupil J. G. Schubler, unexplored techniques found in over twenty of Bach's chorale preludes, and the diverse ways in which Bach's organ works have been received from the composer's own lifetime to the present day. Individual essays are also devoted to Felix Mendelssohn as a performer; to Robert Schumann as an editor and critic; to Cesar Franck as a performer, pedagogue, and composer; and to Edward Elgar as a performer, critic, and transcriber. Rich in archival data and filled with fascinating anecdotes, J. S. Bach at His Royal Instrument is entirely up-to-date, meticulously annotated and indexed, and eminently readable. This book is essential reading for anyone at all interested in Bach and "the king of instruments."

This stimulating guide will help students and their teachers to achieve stylish performances of music of the Baroque period. Individual chapters from leading experts focus on historical background, notation and interpretation, and sources and editions, presenting the latest thinking on performance in a clear, helpful and practical way. There are also dedicated chapters of specialist advice for keyboard, string and wind players, and singers, plus a recommended playlist of illustrative, authoritative recordings. Fully illustrated throughout with many music examples, facsimiles and pictures, this is a valuable resource for students of the Baroque period which will also add to the knowledge and understanding of amateur and professional musicians.

In the early eighteenth century, the benefit performance became an essential component of commercial music-making in Britain. Benefits, adapted from the spoken theatre, provided a new model from which instrumentalists, singers, and composers could reap financial and professional rewards. Benefits could be given as theatre pieces, concerts, or opera performances for the benefit of individual performers; or in aid of specific organizations. The benefit changed Britain's musico-theatrical landscape during this time and these special performances became a prototype for similar types of events in other European and American cities. Indeed, the charity benefit became a musical phenomenon in its own right, leading, for example, to the lasting success of Handel's Messiah. By examining benefits from a musical perspective - including performers, audiences, and institutions - the twelve chapters in this collection present the first study of the various ways in which music became associated with the benefit system in eighteenth-century Britain.

One of Europe's foremost experts on early guitar music explores this little-known but richly rewarding repertoire. In the seventeenth century, like today, the guitar was often used for chord strumming ("battuto" in Italian) in songs and popular dance genres, such as the ciaccona or sarabanda. In the golden age of the baroque guitar, Italy gave rise to a unique solo repertoire, in which chord strumming and lute-like plucked ("pizzicato") styles were mixed. Italian Guitar Music of the Seventeenth Century: Battuto and Pizzicato explores this little-known repertoire, providing a historical background and examining particular performance issues. The book is accompanied by audio examples on a companion website. Lex Eisenhardt is one of Europe's foremost experts on early guitar. He teaches both classical guitar and historical plucked instruments at the Conservatory of Amsterdam. He has produced a number of highly acclaimed CD recordings, and has given concerts and masterclasses in Europe, the United States, and Australia.

Prominent components of Louis XIV's propaganda, the arts of spectacle also became sources of a potent resistance to the monarchy in late seventeenth-century France. With a particular focus on the court ballet, comedy-ballet, opera, and opera-ballet, Georgia J. Cowart tells the long-neglected story of how the festive arts deployed an intricate network of subversive satire to undermine the rhetoric of sovereign authority.
With bold revisionist strokes, Cowart traces this strain of artistic dissent through the comedy-ballets of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Moliere, the late operatic works of Lully and the operas of his sons, the opera-ballets of Andre Campra and his contemporaries, and the related imagery of Antoine Watteau's well-known painting "The Pilgrimage to Cythera." She contends that through a variety of means, including the parody of old-fashioned court entertainments, these works reclaimed traditional allegories for new ideological aims, setting the tone for the Enlightenment. Exploring these arts from the perspective of spectacle as it emerged from the court into the Parisian public sphere, Cowart ultimately situates the ballet and related genres as the missing link between an imagery of propaganda and an imagery of political protest.

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.

- Emphasis on hearing musical forms is pedagogically effective and unique among form textbooks - Offers a complete course package, with workbook pages included in the Textbook, while the accompanying Anthology makes full scores of pieces covered in the book easily available - Offers clear and accessible explanations that are up to date with current scholarship For the ANTHOLOGY: - Provides full scores to accompany the examples addressed in the text, creating a convenient package for instructors - This edition has been updated with 8 new pieces, bringing in additional composers

Nearly a half century after her death in 1972, Mahalia Jackson remains the most esteemed figure in black gospel music history. Born in the backstreets of New Orleans in 1911, Jackson during the Great Depression joined the Great Migration to Chicago, where she became an highly regarded church singer and, by the mid-fifties, a coveted recording artist for Apollo and Columbia Records, lauded as the "World's Greatest Gospel Singer." This "Louisiana Cinderella" narrative of Jackson's career during the decade following World War II carried important meanings for African Americans, though it remains a story half told. Jackson was gospel's first multi-mediated artist, with a nationally broadcast radio program, a Chicago-based television show, and early recordings that introduced straight-out-of-the-church black gospel to American and European audiences while also tapping the vogue for religious pop in the early Cold War. In some ways, Jackson's successes made her an exceptional case, though she is perhaps best understood as part of broader developments in the black gospel field. Built upon foundations laid by pioneering Chicago organizers in the 1930s, black gospel singing, with Jackson as its most visible representative, began to circulate in novel ways as a form of popular culture in the 1940s and 1950s, its practitioners accruing prestige not only through devout integrity but also from their charismatic artistry, public recognition, and pop-cultural cachet. These years also saw shifting strategies in the black freedom struggle that gave new cultural-political significance to African American vernacular culture. The first book on Jackson in 25 years, Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field draws on a trove of previously unexamined archival sources that illuminate Jackson's childhood in New Orleans and her negotiation of parallel careers as a singing Baptist evangelist and a mass media entertainer, documenting the unfolding material and symbolic influence of Jackson and black gospel music in postwar American society.

Handel is one of the most remarkable figures in the history of western music. His compositions form one of the peaks of creative achievement in the Baroque period, and cover a remarkable range: full-scale Italian operas and English oratorios (including Messiah), but also shorter works such as the Water Music and the Coronation Anthem Zadok the Priest. His compositional processes were often complex, but could result in accessible and memorable 'hit tunes', such as the aria that subsequently became famous as 'Handel's Largo'.
His life and career were as remarkable as his music. Born in Germany to a family that reputedly tried to discourage his initial interest in music, he broke away to seek his fortune in Italian opera, and proceeded to gain first-hand experience of the latest Italian styles in Rome, Florence, Venice and Naples. A series of career moves brought him via Hanover to London, where he eventually settled and dominated the city's musical life for half a century. There he quickly made his mark in English church music as well as Italian opera, and eventually created two new musical genres--English theatre oratorio and the organ concerto.
Handel is important also because, as a musician, he also became a significant public figure. In Rome he attracted the patronage of princes and cardinals; soon after his arrival in London he appeared at the court of Queen Anne, and he subsequently enjoyed substantial support from the "Hanoverian" royal family. He survived turbulent periods in the musical and political life of London, reached a wider public through publications of his music, died a rich man and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
This biography provides a comprehensive and balanced account of both the man and his music, drawing on the unusually rich legacy of documentary and musical sources from Handel's lifetime. This new edition of a book that has been recognized as a 'classic' biography of Handel, reliable on the factual details of the composer's life and comprehensive in the coverage of his music, incorporates a great deal of new material. The last half century has seen a great renewal of research on the circumstances of Handel's life, and a major expansion in performances and recordings of his music. The book brings together the results of this scholarly activity, and is informed by wide experience of modern performances of Handel's music, including the revival of his operas and experimentation with 'authentic' performance practices.

Handel's English church music spans the complete period of his active career in London: his first anthem and the Utrecht Te Deum were composed soon after his arrival in London, and his last works nearly 40 years later. The repertory, which includes the Coronation Anthem Zadok the Priest, forms one of the most impressive and engaging areas of Baroque church music. Most of it was stimulated by Handel's creative contact with the English Chapel Royal, a group of professional singers in a different tradition from the opera stars with whom he worked in the theatre.
Appearing in paperback for the first time, this first full-length study of Handel's English Church music traces the background to the diverse items in the repertory, which relates directly to Handel's constant but changing relationship with the Hanoverian British royal family, and was affected by political and dynastic events. It also examines the circumstances of Handel's performances, the building which (unlike his theatres) still survives in London today.

During the course of the 17th century, the dramatic arts reached a pinnacle of development in France; but despite the volumes devoted to the literature and theatre of the ancien regime, historians have largely neglected the importance of music and dance. This study defines the musical practices of comedy, tragicomedy, tragedy, and mythological and non-mythological pastoral drama, from the arrival of the first repertory companies in Paris until the establishment of the Comedie-Francaise. The dynamic interaction of the performing arts in primarily spoken theatre, cross-fertilized by ballet de cour and imported Italian opera, gave rise to a set of musical conventions that later informed the pastorale en musique and early French pastoral opera. The performance history of four comedies-ballets by Moliere, Lully, and Charpentier leads to a discussion of the musical and balletic performance practices of Moliere's theatre and the interconnections between Moliere's last comedie-ballet, Le Malade imaginaire, and Lully's first opera, Les Festes de l'Amour et de Bacchus.

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.

The eighteenth century arguably boasts a more remarkable group of significant musical figures, and a more engaging combination of genres, styles and aesthetic orientations, than any century before or since, yet huge swathes of its musical activity remain under-appreciated. The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music provides a comprehensive survey, examining little-known repertories, works and musical trends alongside more familiar ones. Rather than relying on temporal, periodic and composer-related phenomena to structure the volume, it is organised by genre; chapters are grouped according to the traditional distinctions of music for the church, music for the theatre and music for the concert room that conditioned so much thinking, activity and output in the eighteenth century. A valuable summation of current research in this area, the volume also encourages readers to think of eighteenth-century music less in terms of overtly teleological developments than of interacting and mutually stimulating musical cultures and practices.

John Sigismond Cousser, as performer and composer, was a pioneering figure in the musical history of the European Baroque era. John Sigismond Cousser - born Johann Sigismund Kusser in Pressburg, Hungary in 1660 - was a pioneering figure in the musical history of the Baroque era. Having worked professionally as a performer and composer across Europe over the span of a fifty-year career, this well-travelled and cosmopolitan musician was subsequently acknowledged by Johann Mattheson as having played a key role in the transmission of both the French and Italian musical styles throughout the German-speaking lands. Following study in Paris, Cousser was employed at a string of German courts, training musicians in the newly fashionable French style. At the court of Duke Anton Ulrich in Wolfenbuttel, he experienced at first hand performances of opera by Italian virtuosos and subsequently introduced countless German musicians and their audiences to the Italian musical style. Yet with the onset of war in 1701, Cousser was forced to seek his fortune elsewhere, moving to London in 1704 before settling permanently in Ireland. The Well-Travelled Musician expands current knowledge of Cousser's early life and professional career significantly, examining his particular role in the dissemination of music and musical styles throughout the German-speaking lands, as well as in early eighteenth-century London and Dublin. Drawing upon a rich body of primary sources, above all the unparalleled evidence contained in Cousser's so-called commonplace book, it reveals the practicalities of early modern musical exchange at a grass-roots level, from Pressburg (now Bratislava) to Paris, Hamburg to Dublin, and beyond. SAMANTHA OWENS is Associate Professor of Musicology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

George Frideric Handel was born and educated in Germany, flourished in Italy, and chose to become British. One of the most cosmopolitan of the great composers, much of Handel's music has remained in the popular repertory since his lifetime, and a broad variety of his music theatre works from Italian operas to English oratorios have experienced a dramatic renaissance since the late twentieth century. A large number of publications devoted to Handel's life and music have appeared from his own time to the present day, but The Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia gathers the full range of present knowledge and leading scholarship into a single volume for convenient and illuminating reference. Packed with well over 700 informative and accessible entries, both long and short, this book is ideal for performers, scholars, students and music lovers who wish to explore the Handelian world.

A one-year course in the principles and practice of classical harmony. Previously published by the Open University Press, this reissue contains a number of minor corrections.

`...an excellent and accessible compendium of harmonic practice...includes ideas for using the keyboard to improvise in the style of a composer.' Music Teacher

This, the fullest edition of Monteverdi's letters yet to appear in any language, makes every known letter available in English translation. The 127 letters date from the last forty-two years of Monteverdi's career, giving an unrivalled picture of the life of a busy composer working Mantua, Venice, and Parma at one of the most exciting and crucial periods in the history of music. The span of the letters (1601-43) coincides with the early flowering of Italian opera and other dramatic entertainments, and Monteverdi has a great deal to say about his patrons, librettists, instrumentalist and singers. There are continual references to his music, the style of its performance, and to its ornamentation and orchestration. Besides correcting the numerous errors of transcription in previous editions, Professor Stevens has taken special care in his translations to be faithful to the rhythms and the arched symmetry of Moteverdi's prose. Additional biographical and historical material is incorporated into the extensive commentaries which introduce each letter. In this new, fully revised edition, certain changes and revisions affecting letters and commentaries have been made in the light of newly published information books, articles, and reviews, and through private communications. Additional letters and support material are included, and the bibliography has been updated. Professor Stevens also introduces new material covering in some detail the events of Monteverdi's early years in Cremona and Mantua, insofar as they were influenced by his family, his studies, travels, friends and patrons.

Although Francesco Geminiani is a relatively well-known composer whose name is frequently cited in studies of baroque music, his biography and works have been relatively little researched. His music was often analysed without due reference to the biographical and historical background, and his multifarious activities as violinist, composer, theorist, and small-scale entrepreneur were never considered in their full interrelationship. The present study represents a first attempt at providing a comprehensive account of a composer who in the first half of the eighteenth century dominated the English musical scene alongside Handel. The first volume traces Geminiani's life and career from his birth in Lucca in December 1687 to his activities in three centres: London, Paris, and Dublin. After analysing the critical reception to Geminiani, both contemporary and modern, Dr Careri examines his compositions by genre, illustrating his remarks with some 39 music examples, some presented in facsimile. The second volume is a complete thematic catalogue with music incipits, containing details of primary sources, reworkings and transcriptions, and modern editions.

"All practising musicians with an interest in the baroque owe it tothemselves to be exposed to the ideas contained in this book." --Continuo

"This is a book from an excellent musician in theearly field who turns out also to be a most persistent scholar... " -- EarlyMusic

..". the book offers a vast quantity of data from awide range of sources.... George Houle is to be congratulated for his honestpresentation of the entire spectrum." -- Music EducatorsJournal

The treatment of meter in performance has evolveddramatically since 1600. Here is a practical guide for the performer, with manyquotations from early manuals and treatises, and abundant examples.

This handbook for flautists addresses all who wish to consider the issues raised when performing music of the past, and experiment with them on old or new instruments. Its aim is to provide an authoritative and practical guide with evidence drawn from a variety of primary sources directly and indirectly associated with the flute. The author provides sound advice on instruments and their care, historical techniques, stylistic issues and historically informed interpretation, with examples drawn from a wide range of case studies, including Bach, Handel, Mozart and Brahms.

This is the first study to recognize the wider picture of opera within early-modern French culture. Downing Thomas considers the place of music within a cultural environment--the employment of music by Louis XIV as a symbol of absolutism; the use of music as a statement against the monarchy; and the long-term development of opera as a reflection of humanism. Thomas examines key works by Lully, Rameau, and Charpentier, among others, and extends his reach from the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth.

This book offers new interpretations of many of Bach's late compositions which include complex musical techniques such as canon. These techniques held great significance for Bach and his contemporaries not only on account of the great skill they demanded but because of the meanings attached to them. Intricate musical devices were crucial to the Lutheran rituals of death and dying, to alchemy, to Enlightenment philosophies of stylistic change and musical progress, to musical representations of political power, and to the legacy of Bach into our own time.

Bach's spectacular Goldberg Variations represent a high point in the repertory of keyboard music, particularly for the harpsichord. This book takes a detailed look at how these variations originated, especially in relation to all Bach's ClavierÜbung volumes and late keyboard works, what their exceptionally intricate plan is, what kind of impact they have had, and how their mysterious beauty has been created. This guide to what was at the time the largest and most carefully conceived single work of keyboard music will appeal to students, performers and listeners.

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.