Roots of the Classical identifies and traces to their sources the patterns that make Western classical music unique, setting out the fundamental laws of melody and harmony, and sketching the development of tonality between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The author then focuses on the years 1770-1910, treating the Western music of this period - folk, popular, and classical - as a single, organically developing, interconnected unit in which the popular idiom was constantly feeding into 'serious' music, showing how the same patterns underlay music of all kinds.

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.

How did castrati manage to amaze their eighteenth-century audiences by singing the same aria several times in completely different ways? And how could composers of the time write operas in a matter of days? The secret lies in the solfeggio tradition, a music education method that was fundamental to the training of European musicians between 1680 and 1830 - a time during which professional musicians belonged to the working class. As disadvantaged children in orphanages learned the musical craft through solfeggio lessons, many were lifted from poverty, and the most successful were propelled to extraordinary heights of fame and fortune. In this first book on the solfeggio tradition, author Nicholas Baragwanath draws on over a thousand manuscript sources to reconstruct how professionals became skilled performers and composers who could invent and modify melodies at will. By introducing some of the simplest exercises in scales, leaps, and cadences that apprentices would have encountered, this book allows readers to retrace the steps of solfeggio training and learn to generate melody by 'speaking' it like an eighteenth-century musician. As it takes readers on a fascinating journey through the fundamentals of music education in the eighteenth century, this book uncovers a forgotten art of melody that revolutionizes our understanding of the history of music pedagogy.

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.

This is the only English translation of this important book by the world's most distinguished Bach scholar. This work is widely regarded as the most authoritative and comprehensive treatment of the Bach cantatas. It begins with a historical survey of the seventeenth-century background to the cantatas, and performance practice issues. The core of the book is a work-by-work study in which each cantata in turn is represented by its libretto, a synopsis of its movements, and a detailed analytical commentary. This format makes it extremely useful as a reference work for anyone listening to, performing in, or studying any of the Bach cantatas. All the cantata librettos are given in German-English parallel text. For the English edition the text has been carefully revised to bring it up to date, taking account of recent Bach scholarship.

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.

This is the only English translation of this important book by the world's most distinguished Bach scholar. This work is widely regarded as the most authoritative and comprehensive treatment of the Bach cantatas. It begins with a historical survey of the seventeenth-century background to the cantatas, and performance practice issues. The core of the book is a work-by-work study in which each cantata in turn is represented by its libretto, a synopsis of its movements, and a detailed analytical commentary. This format makes it extremely useful as a reference work for anyone listening to, performing in, or studying any of the Bach cantatas. In this edition all the cantata librettos are given in German-English parallel text. The most recent (sixth) German edition appeared in 1995. For the English edition the text has been carefully revised to bring it up to date, taking account of Bach scholarship since that date.

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.

Musicians, music lovers and music critics have typically considered Beethoven's overtly political music as an aberration; at best, it is merely notorious, at worst, it is denigrated and ignored. In Political Beethoven, Nicholas Mathew returns to the musical and social contexts of the composer's political music throughout his career - from the early marches and anti-French war songs of the 1790s to the grand orchestral and choral works for the Congress of Vienna - to argue that this marginalized functional art has much to teach us about the lofty Beethovenian sounds that came to define serious music in the nineteenth century. Beethoven's much-maligned political compositions, Mathew shows, lead us into the intricate political and aesthetic contexts that shaped all of his oeuvre, thus revealing the stylistic, ideological and psycho-social mechanisms that gave Beethoven's music such a powerful voice - a voice susceptible to repeated political appropriation, even to the present day.

This volume focuses on the core composers of the 18th-century repertoire. It begins with an overview of the keyboard instruments that were in use during the 18th century and a chapter on performance practice. The book proceeds through each major composer, beginning with Bach, and then progressing through the French masters, Scarlatti, C.P.E. and J.C. Bach, Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven. Each chapter is written by a well-known scholar in the field and includes history, musical examples and analysis.

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.

This book shows how music was used and valued by different types of British people in the 19th century - from London composers, Manchester players, and Belfast concert managers to Welsh choral singers and Calcutta pianists. The essays are arranged chronologically, and demonstrate how particular geographic, social, economic, and political conditions in Britain affected the music that was heard and appreciated.

This book establishes the principles of interpretation that singers active in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - both foreign and English - applied to recitatives, arias, and songs. It is the first single guide to historical performance of one of today's most popular repertoires.

Focusing on music written in the period 1800 1850, Thinking about Harmony traces the responses of observant musicians to the music that was being created in their midst by composers including Beethoven, Schubert, and Chopin. It tells the story of how a separate branch of musical activity - music analysis - evolved out of the desire to make sense of the music, essential both to its enlightened performance and to its appreciation. The book integrates two distinct areas of musical inquiry - the history of music theory and music analysis - and the various notions that shape harmonic theory are put to the test through practical application, creating a unique and intriguing synthesis. Aided by an extensive compilation of carefully selected and clearly annotated music examples, readers can explore a panoramic projection of the era's analytical responses to harmony, thereby developing a more intimate rapport with the period.

The Pianoforte in the Classical Era is an important and radically new history, detailing the nature of the early piano and related instruments during the lifetimes of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. It promises to be a standard reference on the subject for many years to come.

Published to complement Mozart Studies (published in 1991), Mozart Studies 2 offers a forum for the most important trends in recent Mozart scholarship including gender and genre studies, close readings of individual works, textual and contextual research and new directions in analysis, both for the operas and instrumental music.

This book opens a door long closed on an important era in the history of Venice. It presents, for the first time, an introductory, contextual study of three centuries of musical activity at the four eleemosynary foundations of the former Venetian Republic: the ospedali grandi. It provides a comprehensive account of the institutional, social, religious, and civic dimensions of these welfare complexes, with particular reference to their musical subsidiaries, or cori.

Involving over 300 external professional male composers and music teachers and over 800 internal professional women musicians, the history of the cori also incorporates a vast repertory of over 4,000 original works - sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental, solo and choral - little known today but recognized as key elements in the historical evolution of musical genres. Responsible for this phenomenon through their association with the ospedali grandi and the figlie del coro were such figures as Lotti, Legrenzi, Vivaldi, Hasse, Galuppi, and Cimarosa. It is their relationship to the ospedali and the concert series in the churches and music salons annexed to them that Dr Berdes explores. In the process she proves the significance of the cori as reflectors of a range of cross-disciplinary scholarship from the history of art and architecture to the history of culture and social policy, as well as medical care and aspects of women's, children's, and Venetian studies.

Amassing a wealth of information from primary sources, this book constitutes a repository of information and references for a multitude of new investigations. Above all, it will facilitate rediscovery, performance, and analysis of the repertoire commissioned for and first performed by the women musicians of the cori, a repertoire of unique richness which may be seen as the mirror of a lost Venetian civilization.

Many books have been written about Beethoven but it is rare to find one which seeks an alternative to the tendency of academia, on the one hand, to fragmentation, and of popular biographical writing, on the other, to a superficial overview. In this volume, the late Carl Dahlhaus combines the interpretations of individual works with excursions into the musical aesthetics of the period around 1800, an age which was not only a `classical' period in the history of the arts but also one in which aesthetics carved itself a place in the centre of philosophical attention. The theme of the book is the reconstruction of Beethoven's `musical thinking' from the evidence in the works themselves and their context in the history of ideas. A table entitled `Chronicle' places the references to biographical data in their historical context. The selective bibliography includes comments to assist readers to find their way in the labyrinth of the literature about Beethoven.

Mozart's enduring popularity, among music lovers as a composer and among music historians as a subject for continued study, lies at the heart of The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia. This reference book functions both as a starting point for information on specific works, people, places and concepts as well as a summation of current thinking about Mozart. The extended articles on genres reflect the latest in scholarship and new ways of thinking about the works while the articles on people and places provide historical framework, as well as interpretation. It also includes a series of thematic articles that cast a wide net over the eighteenth century and Mozart's relationship to it: these include Austria, Germany, aesthetics, travel, Enlightenment, Mozart as a reader and contemporaneous medicine, among others. The worklist provides the most up-to-date account in English of the authenticity and chronology of Mozart's compositions.

Mozart wrote Idomeneo when he was twenty-four years old, and the opera was described by Albert Einstein as 'one of those works that even a genius like Mozart could write only once in his life'. It is one of most astonishing achievements of an altogether astonishing career. In this newly commissioned guide, Julian Rushton explains the special nature of the music in a detailed analysis of its themes and development, while Nicholas Till places the opera in its context as an expression of the Enlightenment. Gary Kahn explores the performance history of an opera which, although largely ignored for over a hundred and fifty years, has now taken its place as part of the international operatic repertoire. A selection of the unique letters between Mozart and his father written during the opera's composition is also included.

Beethoven's habit of composing by making large numbers of preliminary drafts and sketches was sufficiently unusual to attract attention even during his lifetime, and his creative process has attracted a good deal more attention since. The present book incorporates the findings of recent studies on this fascinating subject as well as providing many additional new insights. It adds considerably to our understanding of one of the greatest figures in the history of our culture.

Pianists will find unlimited fun in this collection of 24 easy piano arrangements of the world's most familiar musical themes from movies and television. Spanning several decades of entertainment history, the 24 selections in this book will delight audiences of all ages. Titles: As Time Goes By (Casablanca) * The Ballad of Gilligan's Island * The Big Bang Theory (Main Title Theme) * Cantina Band (Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) * Concerning Hobbits (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King)* Doctor Who Theme * Downton Abbey - The Suite * Falling Slowly (Once) * Harry's Wondrous World (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) *Hedwig's Theme (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) * The Imperial March (Darth Vader's Theme) * Into the West (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) * James Bond Theme * Let Me Be Your Star (SMASH) * Song from M*A*S*H (Suicide Is Painless) * Misty Mountains (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey) * The Notebook (Main Title) * Over the Rainbow * The Pink Panther * Raiders March * Secondhand White Baby Grand (SMASH) * Star Wars (Main Title) * Theme from Superman * A Very Respectable Hobbit.

Considered by many the world's greatest composer, Ludwig van Beethoven achieved his ambitions against the difficulties of a bullying and drunken father, growing deafness and mounting ill-health. Here, Anne Pimlott Baker tells the story of the German composer's life and work, from his birth in Bonn in 1770 and his early employment as a court musician, to his death in Vienna in 1827. She describes his studies with Haydn in Vienna and his work during the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. His most financially successful period followed the Congress of Vienna in 1815, despite several unhappy love affairs and continuous worry over his nephew, Karl. Beethoven is a concise, illuminating biography of a true virtuoso.

This Companion provides an accessible and up-to-date introduction to the musical work and cultural world of Joseph Haydn. Readers will gain an understanding of the changing social, cultural, and political spheres in which Haydn studied, worked, and nurtured his creative talent. Distinguished contributors provide chapters on Haydn and his contemporaries, his working environments in Eisenstadt and Eszterhaza, his aesthetics, and address humour and exoticism in Haydn's oeuvre. Chapters on the reception of his music explore keyboard performance practices, Haydn's posthumous reputation, and recorded performances and images of his symphonies. The book also surveys the major genres in which Haydn wrote, including symphonies, string quartets, keyboard sonatas and trios, sacred music, miscellaneous vocal genres, and operas composed for Eszterhaza and London.

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.