In Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack, Judah M. Cohen demonstrates that Jews constructed a robust religious musical conversation in the United States during the mid- to late-19th century. While previous studies of American Jewish music history have looked to Europe as a source of innovation during this time, Cohen's careful analysis of primary archival sources tells a different story. Far from seeing a fallow musical landscape, Cohen finds that Central European Jews in the United States spearheaded a major revision of the sounds and traditions of synagogue music during this period of rapid liturgical change. Focusing on the influences of both individuals and texts, Cohen demonstrates how American Jewish musicians sought to balance artistry and group singing, rather than "progressing" from solo chant to choir and organ. Congregations shifted between musical genres and practices during this period in response to such factors as finances, personnel, and communal cohesiveness. Cohen concludes that the "soundtrack" of 19th-century Jewish American music heavily shapes how we look at Jewish American music and life in the first part of the 21st-century, arguing that how we see, and especially hear, history plays a key role in our understanding of the contemporary world around us. Supplemented with an interactive website that includes the primary source materials, recordings of the music discussed, and a map that highlights the movement of key individuals, Cohen's research defines more clearly the sound of 19th-century American Jewry.

A new method of music theory education for undergraduate music students, Harmony, Counterpoint, Partimento is grounded in schema theory and partimento, and takes an integrated, hands-on approach to the teaching of harmony and counterpoint in today's classrooms and studios. A textbook in three parts, the package includes: * the hardcopy text, providing essential stylistic and technical information and repertoire discussion; * an online workbook with a full range of exercises, including partimenti by Fenaroli, Sala, and others, along with arrangements of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compositions; * an online instructor's manual providing additional information and realizations of all exercises. Linking theoretical knowledge with aural perception and aesthetic experience, the exercises encompass various activities, such as singing, playing, improvising, and notation, which challenge and develop the student's harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic imagination. Covering the common-practice period (Corelli to Brahms), Harmony, Counterpoint, Partimento is a core component of practice-oriented training of musicianship skills, in conjunction with solfeggio, analysis, and modal or tonal counterpoint.

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.

Assist Our Song combines accessible teaching about the theology and shape of worship with essential information about the forms of music used, including congregational hymns, songs, canticles and psalm chant, and music performed by choirs and musicians. It explores the range of resources available, how to extend repertoire, blending the old with the new, changing patterns of church life, and other practical issues. Its aims are the heightening of the profile of music within the church, increasing the skills and understanding on the part of musicians and choirs, assisting leaders of worship and empowering congregations to see themselves also as 'ministers of music' It offers practical assistance for the 'delivery' of music - choosing music, making the most of choirs and working with musicians. It will be welcomed by all who lead, provide or curate music in worship, as well as clergy and ordinands who lack musical expertise or confidence.

Fiddled out of Reason is a study of several poems spanning the life and career of Joseph Addison, who, along with John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Ambrose Philips, Isaac Watts, and many British poets of the turn of the eighteenth century, helped to cultivate a broad new current of nonliturgical "hymnic" verse that became immensely popular across that century, though it has eluded critical notice until now. The texts the book examines-Addison's St. Cecilia's Day odes (1692, 1699), his libretto for the opera Rosamond (1707), and a sequence of five hymnic works in The Spectator (1712)-precede by twenty-five years John Wesley's publication of the first hymnal for use in the Church of England. The book argues that "secular" hymnic works such as Addison's emerged alongside religio-political controversies and anxieties about British national identity, morality, and expressions of "enthusiastic" passions. Church and Tory interests largely rejected hymnic verse, claiming it would only "fiddle" unwitting readers "out of their reason" and reignite the dangerous fervor of Revolution-era Nonconformity and Dissent. As is evident from his poetry, Addison, a moderate Whig, ardently opposed this view, arguing that the hymnic could in fact be a portal to national and individual amelioration. After an introductory chapter exploring period conceptions of hymnic poetry and the highly contested term "hymn" itself, the argument proceeds through three sections to trace the hymnic's upward trajectory through Addison's early, mid-period, and mature verse. The book devotes the lion's share of its attention to the last of these three, which includes the five-poem Spectator sequence (a poem from the sequence, "The Spacious Firmament on High," will be familiar to many readers). Indeed, in addition to offering new readings of hymnic works by Dryden and Pope, Fiddled out of Reason provides the first extended critical treatment of these five important poems. Publication of the book coincides with the 300th anniversary of Addison's death and with the appearance of a new Oxford edition of Addison's nonperiodical writings.

Christ Church cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in a catholic country. Musical and archival sources (the most extensive for any Irish cathedral) provide a unique perspective on the history of music in Ireland. Christ Church has had a complex and varied history as the cathedral church of Dublin, one of two Anglican cathedrals in the capital of a predominantly Catholic country and the church of the British administration in Ireland before1922. An Irish cathedral within the English tradition, yet through much of its history it was essentially an English cathedral in a foreign land. With close musical links to cathedrals in England, to St Patrick's cathedral in Dublin, and to the city's wider political and cultural life, Christ Church has the longest documented music history of any Irish institution, providing a unique perspective on the history of music in Ireland. Barra Boydell, a leading authority on Irish music history, has written a detailed study drawing on the most extensive musical and archival sources existing for any Irish cathedral. The choir, its composers and musicians, repertoire and organs are discussed within the wider context of city and state, and of the religious and political dynamics which have shaped Anglo-Irish relationships since medieval times. More than just a history of music at one cathedral, this book makesan important contribution to English cathedral music studies as well as to Irish musical and cultural history. BARRA BOYDELL is Senior Lecturer in Music, National University of Ireland, Maynooth.