Much music was written for the two most important dances of the 18th and 19th centuries, the minuet and the waltz. In Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz, Eric McKee argues that to better understand the musical structures and expressive meanings of this dance music, one must be aware of the social contexts and bodily rhythms of the social dances upon which it is based. McKee approaches dance music as a component of a multimedia art form that involves the interaction of physical motion, music, architecture, and dress. Moreover, the activity of attending a ball involves a dynamic network of modalities sight, sound, bodily awareness, touch, and smell, which can be experienced from the perspectives of a dancer, a spectator, or a musician. McKee considers dance music within a larger system of signifiers and points-of-view that opens new avenues of interpretation."

Hannah Smith (1849-1939) was a composer for children and an educator. In 1903 she published the popular Founders of Music, a series of biographical sketches of composers written for children. Written in 1898, when Wagner had been dead for only fifteen years, this is a concise history of music and instruments, aimed at the enthusiast. Covering broad subjects rather than concentrating on a few composers, Smith discusses not just the development of musical styles but also how musical notation developed, how the ear functions and how musical instruments produce the sounds they do. The tastes of the time are evident, particularly in the surprisingly detailed discussion of the Oratorio: however, the book allows us to see how music and its progress were regarded at the turn of the twentieth century, before composers such as Stravinsky and Schoenberg shook the musical establishment.

A posthumous publication, the book is an excursion into the origins and development of Highlife music in West Africa. Although highlife music belongs to the entertainment genre, it is essentially an urban music. Its dynamism does not lie in the aesthetics of its form and style, as a dance music relying almost totally on western musical instruments; it lies more in its song-texts. Critics evaluate it as a popular music genre, but fail to emphasize that its critical song-texts are the major forces guaranteeing its development and interplay with factors which contribute to the search for even political as well as economic, and national growth and stability in Africa. Highlife musicians may be referred to as modern African town-criers whose messages or song-texts, like drama and theatre texts, present not only Africa's culture but her social, economic and political problems. The presence of radicals and Pan-Africanists from the fifties in music has therefore lifted highlife musicians from the status of mere entertainers and nerve therapists to a more serious and responsible one, as African modern town-criers whose song-texts are communal messages, warning and counselling. Even, militant criticisms of the establishment are innovative. The musicians also alert the society on topical issues of significance as the press and the theatre do. There is currently an appreciable transformation and "transfiguration" in highlife music. Its conventional dancers are giving way to audiences; because the highlife musicians preach political and social messages instead of the passion of dance in their audience. Thus, ears and the mind are now becoming more important, intellectually, than the sensual eyes and body ballroom motion.

In its scope and command of primary sources and its generosity of scholarly inquiry, Nikolai Findeizen's monumental work, published in 1928 and 1929 in Soviet Russia, places the origins and development of music in Russia within the context of Russia's cultural and social history.

Volume 2 of Findeizen s landmark study surveys music in court life during the reigns of Elizabeth I and Catherine II, music in Russian domestic and public life in the second half of the 18th century, and the variety and vitality of Russian music at the end of the 18th century."

In its scope and command of primary sources and its generosity of scholarly inquiry, Nikolai Findeizen's monumental work, published in 1928 and 1929 in Soviet Russia, places the origins and development of music in Russia within the context of Russia's cultural and social history.

Volume 2 of Findeizen s landmark study surveys music in court life during the reigns of Elizabeth I and Catherine II, music in Russian domestic and public life in the second half of the 18th century, and the variety and vitality of Russian music at the end of the 18th century."

Engaging, clear and informative, this is the story of western music - of its great composers and also of its performers and listeners, of changing ideas of what music is and what it is for. Paul Griffiths shows how music has evolved through the centuries, and suggests how its evolution has mirrored developments in the human notion of time, from the eternity of heaven to the computer's microsecond. The book provides an enticing introduction for students and beginners, using the minimum of technical terms, all straightforwardly defined in the glossary. Its perspective and its insights will also make it illuminating for teachers, musicians and music lovers. Suggestions for further reading and recommended recordings are given for each of the 24 short chapters.

Italian/English - Paper Score. Edited by Zedda.

The most famous of three settings of the Gloria text by Vivaldi, this one (RV 589) most likely dates from about the same time as its predecessor, during the composer's tenure at the Ospedale della Pieta convent in Venice (1713-40). It's also notable for the borrowing of the "Cum Sancto Spiritu" chorus in the setting by Vivaldi's fellow Venetian - Giovanni Maria Ruggieri.This new vocal score is a digitally enhanced reprint of the one originally prepared by the American musicologist Clayton Westermann in 1967 and includes Westermann's English translation of the original Latin text. Now available in an easy-to-read A4 format, with measure numbers and an improved layout, at an affordable price.

A companion to his The Symphony: A Listener's Guide , Steinberg's new book covers the orchestral concerto repertoire from Bach to the present and featuring all instruments.

"Musica Practica" is a historical investigation into the social practice of Western music which advances an alternative approach to that of established musicology. Citing evidence from Barthes, Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Max Weber and Schoenberg, Michael Chanan explores the communal roots of the musical tradition and the effects of notation on creative and performing practice. He appraises the psychological wellsprings of music using the insights of linguistics, semiotics and psychoanalysis. Tracing the growth of musical printing and the creation of a market for the printed score, he examines the transformation of patronage with the demise of the "ancien regime," and draws on little-known texts by Marx to analyze the formation of the musical economy in the nineteenth century.
Chanan sketches out an unwritten history of musical instruments as technology, from Tutankhamen's trumpets to the piano, the ancient Greek water organ to the digital synthesizer. The book concludes with reflections on the rise of modernism and the dissolution of the European tradition in a sea of postmodernism and "world music."
"Musica Practica" assumes no specialist knowledge of music beyond an ordinary familiarity with common terms and an average acquaintance with the music of different styles and periods. It is a fascinating commentary on the soundtrack of daily life in the metropolis of the late twentieth century.

For most music historians, the modernism of the twentieth century was until recently the only appearance of the "modern" in music. The widely perceived recent decline of musical modernism makes it now possible to see the modernism of the twentieth century as a chapter in a much longer story, the story of musical modernity. The principal purpose of the present book is to encourage a debate over musical modernity; a debate that would consider the question whether, and to what extent, an examination of the history of European art music may enrich our picture of modernity and whether our understanding of music's development may be transformed by insights into the nature of modernity provided by other historical disciplines.

This book had its origin in a conference that took place at the Music Department of Harvard University on November 9-11, 2001 to honor Professor Reinhold Brinkmann.

A musical phrase, or, for that matter, a musical unit of any size or shape, becomes an image whenever we imagine it to be invested with a content whose origins lie outside music. Such a content, according to the theory developed here, constitutes the image's conventional significance; it accounts for whatever strikes us about the image as having a common and familiar ring. That being so, the origins in question must be coincident with the fundamental ideas--the archetypes--that have been traditionally represented as underlying and unifying Western culture. As the theoretical constructs they are, arehctypes are never encountered directly. It is in the form of their local variants that we make contact with the archetypes, and it is at this local level that the present book sets its sights: style, the typical or shared element in the musical imagery of a time and place, is studies as a function of Zeitgeist, the complex of beliefs, values, and ideals of a community. The approach is both thematic and historical, in keeping with a key objective of archetypal criticism. Far from repudiating the popular notion that music expresses the human emotions, this study attempts to recast emotion theory by examining musical images for kinds of behavior from which we may infer not only emotion (pathos, effectus) but also personality (ethos). Ethical and affective distinctions are very sharply drawn, in an effort to clarify and widen the vocabulary of musical commentary, as well as to provide cultural and historical backing for contents long considered the cliches of musical expression.

Preface * Characters * Orchestration * Prelude * First Act: The Broom-Maker's Cottage * Scene 1 * Scene 2 * Scene 3 * The Witchhes' Ride * Second Act: In the Forest * Scene 1 * Scene 2 * Scene 3, Pantomime * Third Act: The Withch's House * Scene 1 * Scene 2 * Scene 3 * Scene 4 * Last Scene * Appendix: Dessau-Finale

'Mrs. Vaughan Williams presents a crowded picture of the composer's ceaseless activity right into extreme old age, his persistent concern with new music and young musicians, his unabated instinct to compose, and, at the end of his life, the new-found pleasure in travel and relaxation that was reflected in the last two symphonies.' In addition to his great prowess as a composer, Vaughan Williams was a man of strong character and unflagging energy, who lived a long, full life. He was at the centre of musical events in England for sixty years, a period which for sustained musical achievements is probably unequalled in the history of this country.