Kenneth Hamilton's book engagingly and lucidly dissects the oft-invoked myth of a Great Tradition, or Golden Age of Pianism. It is written both for players and for members of their audiences by a pianist who believes that scholarship and readability can go hand-in-hand. Hamilton discusses in meticulous yet lively detail the performance-style of great pianists from Liszt to Paderewski, and delves into the far-from-inevitable development of the piano recital. He entertainingly recounts how classical concerts evolved from exuberant, sometimes riotous events into the formal, funereal trotting out of predictable pieces they can be today, how an often unhistorical "respect for the score" began to replace pianists' improvisations and adaptations, and how the clinical custom arose that an audience should be seen and not heard. Pianists will find food for thought here on their repertoire and the traditions of its performance. Hamilton chronicles why pianists of the past did not always begin a piece with the first note of the score, nor end with the last. He emphasizes that anxiety over wrong notes is a relatively recent psychosis, and playing entirely from memory a relatively recent requirement. Audiences will encounter a vivid account of how drastically different are the recitals they attend compared to concerts of the past, and how their own role has diminished from noisily active participants in the concert experience to passive recipients of artistic benediction from the stage. They will discover when cowed listeners eventually stopped applauding between movements, and why they stopped talking loudly during them. The book's broad message proclaims that there is nothing divinely ordained about our own concert-practices, programming and piano-performance styles. Many aspects of the modern approach are unhistorical-some laudable, some merely ludicrous. They are also far removed from those fondly, if deceptively, remembered as constituting a Golden Age.

This collection presents a selection of varied repertoire by J. S. Bach in new arrangements for the organ. Bringing a wealth of popular pieces under the fingers and feet of intermediate players, the volume caters for all parts of a church service, as well as providing recital repertoire and popular encores. Taking its cue from the Baroque practice of transcription, and with the needs of modern players in mind, this volume presents a set of pieces with wide and varied use and makes a valuable addition to any organist's repertoire.

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.

Reconstructs the socio-political history of the heroic in music through case studies spanning the middle ages to the twenty-first century The first part of this volume reconstructs the various musical strategies that composers of medieval chant, Renaissance madrigals, and Baroque operas, cantatas or oratorios employed when referring to heroic ideas exemplifying their personal moral and political values. A second part investigating the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries expands the previous narrow focus on Beethoven's heroic middle period and the cult of the virtuoso. It demonstrates the wide spectrum of heroic positions - national, ethnic, revolutionary, bourgeois and spiritual - that filtered not only into 'classical' large-scale heroic symphonies and virtuoso solo concerts, but also into chamber music and vernacular dance music. The third part documents the forced heroization of music in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes such as Nazi-Germany and the Soviet Union and its consequences for heroic thinking and musical styles in the time thereafter. Final chapters show how recent rock-folk and avant-garde musicians in North America and Europe feature new heroic models such as the everyday hero and the scientific heroine revealing new confidence in the idea of the heroic.

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

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

In this companion volume to Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, Christoph Wolff contextualises his famous subject by delving deeply into the composer's rich collection of music. Emerging from this complex and massive oeuvre, Bach's Musical Universe is a focused discussion of a meaningful selection of compositions. Unlike any previous study, this book details Bach's creative process across the various instrumental and vocal genres, and centres on what the composer himself judiciously presented in carefully designed benchmark collections and individual works-all consequential to Bach's musical art. Tracing Bach's evolution as a composer, Wolff compellingly illuminates the ideals and legacy of this giant of classical music in a new, refreshing light for everyone, from the amateur to the virtuoso.

Exposes the roots of 18th-century musical cosmopolitanism through an investigation of exchanges and collaborations between musicians and dancers from the two major national musical traditions in the early years of the century. This study stems from discoveries in a trove of documents belonging to Charles-Henri de Lorraine, prince de Vaudemont, who served as governor of Milan under the Spanish crown from 1698 to 1706. These documents, together with a mass of other sources - letters, diaries, treatises, libretti, scores - offer a vivid new picture of musical life in Paris and Milan as well as exchanges between France and Italy. The book is both a patronage study and an examination of the contributions by - and the difficulties facing - musicians and dancers who worked across national and cultural boundaries. Music, Dance, and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange, c.1700 follows the careers of the prince and the French violinist and composer Michel Pignolet de Monteclair. In the context of a renewed fascination with Italian music in the 1690s, Monteclair made a name for himself in Paris as a pedagogue and composer who understood both national styles and blended them in a way that was successful on French terms. Vaudemont hired Monteclair to direct a French violin band and to compose dance music for a series of new operas that observers declared "the best in Italy" but are virtually unknown today. These productions involved collaborations among a mixed company of French and Italian musicians, dancers, composers, and librettists modeled on the practice of Turinese court operas. The book is an account of the contributions of these figures to the cultural life of Paris, Milan, and other northern Italian states, and to the creative mixing of musical styles, operatic conventions, and dance technique in France and Italy through the 1720s and beyond. The connections fostered by Vaudemont thus played a heretofore unrecognized early role in the development of 18th-century cosmopolitanism, and they attest to both the liveliness and the artistic importance of such exchanges in the era before the well-known travels of Handel, Telemann, and Vivaldi.

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

The first book in nearly a century dedicated to a close examination of the musical works of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, first son of Johann Sebastian Bach. The first-born of the four composer sons of Johann Sebastian Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann was often considered the most brilliant. Yet he left relatively few works and died in obscurity. This monograph, the first on the composer in nearly a century, identifies the unique features of Friedemann's music that make it worth studying and performing. It considers how Friedemann's training and upbringing differed from those of his brothers, leading to a style that diverged from that of his contemporaries. Central to the book are detailed discussions of all Friedemann's extant works: the virtuoso sonatas and concertos for keyboard instruments, the extraordinary chamber compositions (especially for flute), and the hitherto-neglected vocal music, including sacred cantatas and a remarkable work in honor of King Frederick the Great of Prussia. Special sections consider performance questions unique to Friedemann's music and provide a handy list of his works and their sources. Numerous musical examples provide glimpses of many little-known compositions, including a concerto ignored by previous students of Friedemann's music, here restored to hislist of works. David Schulenberg, Professor of Music at Wagner College in New York City, has performed much of W. F. Bach's output on harpsichord, clavichord, and fortepiano. His previous writings include The Keyboard Music of J. S. Bach and The Instrumental Music of C. P. E. Bach.

Joachim Burmeister's early seventeenth-century treatise on the making of music is generally acknowledged to be central to the understanding of Baroque musical practice: it was the first systematically to explore the connection between rhetoric and music that became a cornerstone of Baroque musical thought. But until now neither a reliable modern edition nor a full translation of this seminal work has existed. This much-needed edition by Benito V. Rivera contains a critical transcription of the Latin text and an annotated translation on facing pages. In a lengthy introduction to the book, Rivera reviews Burmeister's two earlier treatises on musical composition, analyzes Musical Poetics as a whole, and places it within its historical context. An appendix to the edition reproduces the passages of music cited by Burmeister, greatly facilitating the interpretation of Burmeister's explanations of the rhetorical figures. The book will be of interest to music historians and theorists as well as to scholars of rhetoric.

Following on from James Tyler's The Early Guitar: A History and Handbook(OUP 1980) tthis collaboration with Paul Sparks (their previous book for OUP, The Early Mandolin, appeared in 1989), presents new ideas and research on the history and development of the guitar and its music from the Renaissance to the dawn of the Classical era. Tyler's systematic study of the two main guitar types found between about 1550 and 1750 focuses principally on what the sources of the music (published and manuscript) and the writings of contemporary theorists reveal about the nature of the instruments and their roles in the music making of the period. The annotated lists of primary sources, previously published in The Early Guitar but now revised and expanded, constitute the most comprehensive bibliography of Baroque guitar music to date. His appendices of performance practice information should also prove indispensable to performers and scholars alike. Paul Sparks also breaks new ground, offering an extensive study of a period in the guitar's history-notably c.1759-c.1800-which the standard histories usually dismiss in a few short paragraphs. Far from being a dormant instrument at this time, the guitar is shown to have been central to music-making in France, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and South America. Sparks provides a wealth of information about players, composers, instruments, and surviving compositions from this neglected but important period, and he examines how the five-course guitar gradually gave way to the six-string instrument, a process that occurred in very different ways (and at different times) in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Britain.

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

Shortly after assuming the Saxon throne in 1656, Lutheran Elector Johann Georg II (r. 1656-80) replaced the elder Kapellmeister Heinrich Schutz with younger Italian Catholic composers. Seemingly overnight, sacred music in the most modern Italian style, first by Vincenzo Albrici (1631-90/96) and later by Giuseppe Peranda (ca. 1625-75) supplanted the more traditional Schutzian sacred concerto and Spruchmotette, effecting a change in musical and spiritual life both within the walls of the Dresden court and beyond.
Drawing on extensive research in primary source materials, Frandsen explores the elector's "Italianization" of the Hofkapelle with castrati and other Italian virtuosi, and examines the larger confessional conflict that gripped the city of Dresden and its implications for the Catholic-leaning elector's musical agenda. She then examines the Latin texts set by Albrici and Peranda, a body of works dominated by expressions of mystical devotion typical of the repertoire then heard in Italy. However, drawing upon recent studies of the phenomenon of "new piety" in seventeenth-century Lutheranism, Frandsen locates these texts squarely within the realm of contemporary Lutheran spirituality, and demonstrates their congruity with devotional materials used by Lutherans since the mid-sixteenth century. In her discussion of the sacred concertos of Albrici and Peranda, she takes the concept of musica pathetica as a point of departure, and also explores the formal and stylistic relationships between the Roman motet and the new sacred concerto in Dresden. Finally, with the help of liturgies recorded in court diaries, she reintegrates this music into its original performance environment, anddemonstrates how tightly the works of these Italians were woven into the Gospel-determined thematic fabric of the services celebrated during the church year.
A fascinating account of the uneasy alliance of two confessions at the prominent seventeenth-century court of Dresden, this book provides fresh insights into a neglected but influential repertoire. Frandsen's research will be of interest to scholars and students interested in Baroque music, the intellectual and cultural history of European courts, the history of liturgy and church history, and the Early Modern era in general.

Music, Place, and Identity in Italian Urban Soundscapes circa 1550-1860 presents new perspectives on the role music played in the physical, cultural, and civic spaces of Italian cities from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Across thirteen chapters, contributors explore the complex connections between sound and space within these urban contexts, demonstrating how music and sound were intimately connected to changing social and political practices. The volume offers a critical redefinition of the core concept of soundscape, considering musical practices through the lenses of territory, space, representation, and identity, in five parts: Soundscape, Phonosphere, and Urban History Urban Soundscapes across Time Urban Soundscapes and Acoustic Communities Urban Soundscapes in Literary Sources Reconstructing Urban Soundscapes in the Digital Era Music, Place, and Identity in Italian Urban Soundscapes circa 1550-1860 reframes our understanding of Italian music history beyond models of patronage, investigating how sounds and musics have contributed to the construction of human identities and communities.

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.

This is the story of the orchestra, from 16th-century string bands to the "classical" orchestra of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Spitzer and Zaslaw document orchestral organization, instrumentation, social roles, repertories, and performance practices in Europe and the American colonies, concluding around 1800 with the widespread awareness of the orchestra as a central institution in European life.

The performance and composition of liturgical music at El Escorial re-examined. Philip II of Spain founded the great Spanish monastery and royal palace of El Escorial in 1563, promoting within it a musical foundation whose dual function as royal chapel and monastery in the service of a Counter Reformation monarch was unique; this volume explores the performance and composition of liturgical music there from its beginnings to the death of Charles II in 1700. It traces the ways in which music styles and practices responded to the the changing functions of the institution, challenging notions about Spanish musical patronage, scrutinising musical manuscripts, uncovering the biographical details of hundreds of musicians, and examining musical practices. Michael Noone is Professor of Musicology at the University of Hong Kong.

Following James Tyler's earlier introduction to the history, repertory, and playing techniques of the four- and five-course guitar (The Early Guitar, OUP 1980), which performers and scholars of Renaissance and Baroque guitar and lute music and classical guitarists found valuable and enlightening, this new book, written in collaboration with Paul Sparks and incorporating the latest ideas and research, is an authoritative guide to the history and repertory of the guitar from the Renaissance to the dawn of the Classical era.

Compositional Choices and Meaning in the Vocal Music of J. S. Bach collects seventeen essays by leading Bach scholars. The authors each address in some way such questions of meaning in J. S. Bach's vocal compositions-including his Passions, Masses, Magnificat, and cantatas-with particular attention to how such meaning arises out of the intentionality of Bach's own compositional choices or (in Part IV in particular) how meaning is discovered, and created, through the reception of Bach's vocal works. And the authors do not consider such compositional choices in a vacuum, but rather discuss Bach's artistic intentions within the framework of broader cultural trends-social, historical, theological, musical, etc. Such questions of compositional choice and meaning frame the four primary approaches to Bach's vocal music taken by the authors in this volume, as seen across the book's four parts: Part I: How might the study of historical theology inform our understanding of Bach's compositional choices in his music for the church (cantatas, Passions, masses)? Part II: How can we apply traditional analytical tools to understand better how Bach's compositions were created and how they might have been heard by his contemporaries? Part III: What we can understand anew through the study of Bach's self-borrowing (i.e., parody), which always changed the earlier meaning of a composition through changes in textual content, compositional characteristics, the work's context within a larger composition, and often the performance context (from court to church, for example)? Part IV: What can the study of reception teach us about a work's meaning(s) in Bach's time, during the time of his immediate successors, and at various points since then (including our present)? The chapters in this volume thus reflect the breadth of current Bach research in its attention not only to source study and analysis, but also to meanings and contexts for understanding Bach's compositions.

Dr Peter Martens provides the first complete edited English translation of, and commentary on, Isaac Vossius's De poematum cantu et viribus rythmi, a late seventeenth-century work of Continental musical humanism. plays an important but poorly understood role in the continued development of rhythmopoeia; A full translation and accompanying discussion of Vossius's own sources and musical influences allows English-language students and scholars to access and study this work in the depth and to the degree it deserves.

This study investigates an almost unknown musical culture: that of cloistered nuns in one of the major cities of early modern Europe. These women were the most famous musicians of Milan, and the music composed for them opens up a hitherto unstudied musical repertory, which allows insight into the symbolic world of the city. Even more importantly, the music actually composed by four such nuns, Claudia Scossa, Claudia Rusca, Chiara Margarita Cozzollani, and Rosa Giacinta Badalla - reveals the musical expression of women's devotional life. The two centuries' worth of battles over nuns' singing of polyphony, studies here for the first time on the basis of massive archival documentation, also suggest that the implementation of reform in the major centre of post-Tridentine Catholic renewal was far more varied; incomplete, subject to local political pressure and individual interpretation, and short-lived than any religious historian has ever suggested. Other factors that marked nuns' musical lives and creative output - liturgical traditions of the religious orders, the problems of performance practice attendant upon all-female singing ensembles - are here addressed for the first time in the musicological literature.

The ability to improvise a fugue is considered by many to be the summit of practical musicianship. Such skill, combining harmony, counterpoint, form, and style simultaneously, is best learned through the study of figured-bass fugue. The Langloz Manuscript, originating in the era of J.S. Bach, is the largest extant collection of figured-bass fugues. Published here for the first time, this edition of the manuscript includes detailed explanatory notes and illustrates how the art of extemporised fugue was developed in the eighteenth century.

Jan Dismas Zelenka, the brilliant but elusive contemporary of Bach, musically served the Catholic chapel of the dazzling Dresden court during the first half of the eighteenth century. Research has uncovered biographical information, and reveals the remarkable music of a major figure of the Baroque era.