The definitive collection of 27 of the most popular classics of the wedding repertoire in simplified arrangements for manuals only. All the best-loved processionals, marches, and more reflective pieces are included.

As one of the foremost composers, conductors, and pianists of the nineteenth century, Felix Mendelssohn played a fundamental role in the shaping of modern musical tastes through his contributions to the early music revival and the formation of the Austro-German musical canon. His career allows for a remarkable meeting point for critical engagement with a host of crucial issues in the last two centuries of music history, including the relation between musical meaning and social function, programmatic and absolute music, notions of classicism and Romanticism, modernism and historicism. It also serves as a pertinent case-study of the roles political ideology, racism, and musical ignorance may play in creating and perpetuating a composer's posthumous reception. Fittingly, Rethinking Mendelssohn focuses on critical engagement with the composer's music and aesthetics, and on the interpretation of his works in relation to contemporaneous culture. Building on the renaissance in Mendelssohn scholarship of the last two decades, Rethinking Mendelssohn sets a fresh and exciting tone for research on the composer. Opening new ways of understanding Mendelssohn and setting the future direction of Mendelssohn studies, the contributing scholars pay particular attention to Mendelssohn's contested views on the relationship between art and religion, analysis of Mendelssohn's instrumental music in the wake of recent controversies in Formenlehre, and the burgeoning interest in his previously neglected contribution to the German song.

This project fills a void in medieval musical scholarship in the West by addressing an area that is virtually terra incognita. Based on newly-accessed primary source material and grounded in the most current scholarship, the English-language monograph-length study, Music and Ritual in Medieval Slavia Orthodoxa: The Exaltation of the Holy Cross investigates the sacred music traditions of the Orthodox Slavs (Bulgaria, Serbia and Russia) during a critical period in the cultural history of the region. The approach taken is interdisciplinary, drawing on recent scholarship in liturgical studies, Byzantine and medieval Slavic history, linguistics and musicology. The study traces the dissemination of liturgical and musical performance practices through the disparate centers of the Eastern Christian world (from Southern Italy, Balkan Peninsula to Kiev and Novgorod). It takes into account the physical locus of the chanting practices, whether urban cathedral or monastery. The medieval Slavs are treated as an autonomous cultural body within the Commonwealth of the Eastern Church. Set against the shifting liturgical backdrop of the 13th century with its pending liturgical reform, the study addresses aspects of chant performance practice in the Slavic-speaking world. Select hymnography for the celebration are sought in the rubrics of liturgical sources describing its placement in the services, singing personnel, the style of the hymnody and the manner of its musical execution (antiphonal, responsorial). The Feasts of the Holy Cross, observed during the week of September 14, the Third Sunday of the Lenten Fast and Holy Week (Holy Tuesday and Good Friday), serve as case studies for which there is an abundance of unexplored material to be brought to light. The current study presents this material to the Western audience for the first time.

John Milsom's selection of 17 of Tallis's shorter anthems and motets includes new editions by Alan Brown and Jason Smart as well as many by himself. The collection is designed to give singers and students alike a useful cross-section of Tallis's output, and includes some of his best-known pieces (freshly edited or revised) together with others that are less familiar. All have general-purpose texts. Critical commentaries are included for each piece, and there is an introduction by the editor.

The sweetness of music is something that has puzzled Christian theologians for centuries. In this study, Luther's theology of music is approached from the point of view of pleasure. It examines the significance of joy, beauty and pleasure in relationship with music and Luther's theology. The notion of music as the supreme gift of God requires also a discussion about the idea of 'gift'. Music opens up new perspectives into Luther's thinking. Luther has seldom been reckoned among aesthetic theologians. Nevertheless, Luther has a peculiar view on beauty, understanding faith as a kind of aesthetic contemplation.

This is the only thoroughgoing study of the Monteverdi Vespers, vastly expanding on the author's 1978 set of essays on the subject, long since out of print. The volume studies the Vespers from the standpoint of its musical and liturgical origins and context, contains analytical essays on the music, and examines 17th-century performance practice as it pertains to the Vespers. Appendices include bibliographies and an analytical discography.

Singing God's Words is the first in-depth study of the experience and meaning of chanting or "reading" Torah among contemporary American Jews. This experience has been transformed dramatically in recent years by the impact of digital technology, feminism, the empowerment of lay people and a search for self-fulfillment through involvement with community. At a time when worshippers seek deeper spiritual experience, many Jews have found new meaning in the experience of reading Torah, an act that is broadly accessible to Jewish adults even as it requires intensive immersion with the text of the Bible in Hebrew. This book examines why and how growing numbers of American Jews in all denominations see the public chanting of Biblical texts during the synagogue service as one of the most authentic and personal expressions of their religious identity. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with men and women, both professionals and congregants, Jeffrey A. Summit describes how the reading of Torah embodies their understanding of historical religious practice, even as it is shaped by contemporary views of spiritual experience. Through this act, holiness becomes manifest at the intersection of Biblical chant, sacred text, the individual, and the community.

The lyrics of our favorite hymns are rich in images that can help us in our daily walk with God--they are miniature Bible studies that lead us effortlessly toward worship, testimony, exhortation, prayer, and praise. Bestselling author Robert J. Morgan has gathered 366 hymns, including favorites such as "Amazing Grace" and "Rock of Ages," as well as classic, lesser-known gems. Each devotional begins with Scripture, includes a story about the hymn or its writer, along with the lyrics to the hymn, and ends with a prayer. Includes an index of hymn titles and first lines.

Johann Sebastian Bach's two surviving passions-St. John and St. Matthew-are an essential part of the modern repertory, performed regularly both by professional ensembles and amateur groups. These large, complex pieces are well loved, but due to our distance from the original context in which they were performed, questions and problems emerge. Bach scholar Daniel Melamed examines the issues we encounter when we hear the passions performed today, and offers unique insight into Bach's passion settings. Rather than providing a movement-by-movement analysis, Melamed uses the Bach repertory to introduce readers to some of the intriguing issues in the study and performance of older music, and explores what it means to listen to this music today. For instance, Bach wrote the passions for a particular liturgical event at a specific time and place; we hear them hundreds of years later, often a world away and usually in concert performances. They were performed with vocal and instrumental forces deployed according to early 18th-century conceptions; we usually hear them now as the pinnacle of the choral/orchestral repertory, adapted to modern forces and conventions. In Bach's time, passion settings were revised, altered, and tampered with both by their composers and by other musicians who used them; today we tend to regard them as having fixed texts to be treated mith respect. Their music was sometimes recycled from other compositions or reused itself for other purposes; we have trouble imagining the familiar material of Bach's passion settings in any other guise. Melamed takes on these issues, exploring everything from the sources that transmit Bach's passion settings today to the issues surrounding performance practice (including the question of the size of Bach's ensemble). He delves into the passions as dramatic music, examines the problem of multiple versions of a work and the reconstruction of lost pieces, explores the other passions in Bach's performing repertory, and sifts through the puzzle of authorship. Highly accessible to the non-specialist, the book assumes no technical musical knowledge and does not rely on printed musical examples. Based on the most recent scholarship and using lucid prose, the book opens up the debates surrounding this repertory to music lovers, choral singers, church musicians, and students of Bach's music.

Margot E. Fassler's richly documented history-winner of the Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society and the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America-demonstrates how the Augustinians of St. Victor, Paris, used an art of memory to build sonic models of the church. This musical art developed over time, inspired by the religious ideals of Hugh and Richard of St. Victor and their understandings of image and the spiritual journey. Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris demonstrates the centrality of sequences to western medieval Christian liturgical and artistic experience, and to our understanding of change and continuity in medieval culture. Fassler examines the figure of Adam of St. Victor and the possible layers within the repertories created at various churches in Paris, probes the ways the Victorine sequences worked musically and exegetically, and situates this repertory within the intellectual and spiritual ideals of the Augustinian canons regular, especially those of the Abbey of St. Victor. Originally published in hardover in 1993, this paperback edition includes a new introduction by Fassler, in which she reviews the state of scholarship on late sequences since the original publication of Gothic Song. Her notes to the introduction provide the bibliography necessary for situating the Victorine sequences, and the late sequences in general, in contemporary thought.

This book is an auto-ethnographic account of the development of a charismatic community choir leader. It brings together management literature and a survey of the community choir scene with the development of community choir leadership. It provides a useful introduction to the sustaining of community choirs, including the use of English folksong material in this context. Some useful arrangements of folk songs are included. Community singing events are described with helpful advice on setting up and managing these. It presents a useful model of the range of skills necessary for aspiring community choir leaders. This is linked with the formation of a community that contains spiritual elements; this is theorized in relation to the role of the parish church in communal singing. It also discusses the two aesthetics of choral singing and the relationship between oral and literate traditions. The book arises from the engagement of the University of Winchester in partnership with the local community, which is theorized.

Sing! has grown from Keith and Kristyn Getty's passion for congregational singing; it's been formed by their traveling and playing and listening and discussing and learning and teaching all over the world. And in writing it, they have five key aims: to discover why we sing and the overwhelming joy and holy privilege that comes with singing ; to consider how singing impacts our hearts and minds and all of our lives; to cultivate a culture of family singing in our daily home life; to equip our churches for wholeheartedly singing to the Lord and one another as an expression of unity; to inspire us to see congregational singing as a radical witness to the world. They have also added a few "bonus tracks" at the end with some more practical suggestions for different groups who are more deeply involved with church singing. God intends for this compelling vision of His people singing -- a people joyfully joining together in song with brothers and sisters around the world and around his heavenly throne -- to include you. He wants you,he wants us, to sing.

What did the term 'author' denote for Lutheran musicians in the generations between Heinrich Schutz and Johann Sebastian Bach? As part of the Musical Performance and Reception series, this book examines attitudes to authorship as revealed in the production, performance and reception of music in seventeenth-century German lands. Analysing a wide array of archival, musical, philosophical and theological texts, this study illuminates notions of creativity in the period and the ways in which individuality was projected and detected in printed and manuscript music. Its investigation of musical ownership and regulation shows how composers appealed to princely authority to protect their publications, and how town councils sought to control the compositional efforts of their church musicians. Interpreting authorship as a dialogue between authority and individuality, this book uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore changing attitudes to the self in the era between Schutz and Bach.

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 anagrams, or more generally, the mathemata and morphologically related kalophonic forms of Byzantine melopoeia, constitute the artistic creations by which Psaltic Art is known in all its splendour and becomes an object of admiration. Kalophony as ars nova was born following the recovery of the city of Constantinople after the Latin occupation of Byzantium (AD 1204-1261) during the long reign of Andronicus II (1282-1328) and reached its final form in the first half of the fourteenth century. During the years 1300-1350, four key composers and teachers of the Psaltic Art imposed a new attitude of melic composition on the preexisting forms and designated new compositional techniques dominated by the beautifying kallopistic element. They created new compositions in the new spirit of kallopismos and musical verbosity. This new musical creation was christened with the term kalophony and this period is the golden age of Byzantine Chant. Originally published under the title Hoi anagrammatismoi kai ta mathemata tes byzantines melopoiias (1979 plus seven reprints), this publication thoroughly investigates and reveals for the first time the entire magnitude of Byzantine kalophony with its individual forms, serving as a systematic introduction to the Greek Byzantine music culture and that of the Byzantine Psaltic Art at the height of its expression.

Janet K. Page explores the interaction of music and piety, court and church, as seen through the relationship between the Habsburg court and Vienna's convents. For a period of some twenty-five years, encompassing the end of the reign of Emperor Leopold I and that of his elder son, Joseph I, the court's emphasis on piety and music meshed perfectly with the musical practices of Viennese convents. This mutually beneficial association disintegrated during the eighteenth century, and the changing relationship of court and convents reveals something of the complex connections among the Habsburg court, the Roman Catholic Church, and Viennese society. Identifying and discussing many musical works performed in convents, including oratorios, plays with music, feste teatrali, sepolcri, and other church music, Page reveals a golden age of convent music in Vienna and sheds light on the convents' surprising engagement with contemporary politics.

for SATB unaccompanied Let all mortal flesh keep silence is a reflective, homophonic setting of text from the fourth-century Orthodox Liturgy of St James. Sheehan's setting, an original rather than the customary pairing with the hymn tune 'Picardy', is steeped in the Orthodox tradition, and has pure harmonies and a beautiful stillness.

The Universal Edition is designed for all English-speaking countries outside of the United States, including Canada, the U. K. and Australia. This edition uses the British system of terminology for rhythmic values such as "crotchet" for quarter note.

The fourth-century Christian thinker, Gregory of Nyssa, has been the subject of a huge variety of interpretations over the past fifty years, from historians, theologians, philosophers, and others. In this highly original study, Morwenna Ludlow analyses these recent readings of Gregory of Nyssa and asks: What do they reveal about modern and postmodern interpretations of the Christian past? What do they say about the nature of Gregory's writing? Working thematically through studies of recent Trinitarian theology, Christology, spirituality, feminism, and postmodern hermeneutics, Ludlow develops an approach to reading the Church Fathers which combines the benefits of traditional scholarship on the early Church with reception-history and theology.

for organ
Part of the progressive series for manuals, this third book includes 12 titles for the advanced organist.

The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture examines the powerful but often overlooked presence of the organ in synagogue music and the musical life of German-speaking Jewish communities. Tina Fruhauf expertly chronicles the history of the organ in Jewish culture from the earliest references in the Talmud through the 19th century, when it had established a firm and lasting presence in Jewish sacred and secular spaces in central Europe. Fruhauf demonstrates how the introduction of the organ into German synagogues was part of the significant changes which took place in Judaism after the Enlightenment, and posits the organ as a symbol of the division of the Jewish community into Orthodox and Reform congregations. Newly composed organ music for Jewish liturgy after this division became part of a cross-cultural music tradition in 19th and 20th century Germany, when a specific style of organ music developed which combined elements of Western and Jewish cultures. Concluding with a discussion of the organ in Jewish communities in Israel and the USA, the book presents in-depth case studies which illustrate how the organ has been utilized in the musical life of specific Jewish communities in the 20th century. Based on extensive research in the archives of organ builders and Jewish musicians, The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture offers comprehensive and detailed descriptions of specific organs as well as fascinating portraits of Jewish organists and composers. With an extensive companion website featuring full color illustrations and over 200 organ dispositions, this book will be eagerly read by performers, students, and scholars of the organ, as well as students and scholars in historical musicology and Jewish music.

One of the finest achievements of Western culture is its brilliant heritage of classical music. A Gift of Music looks at the lives of the greatest composers who have given us this heritage, and especially at how their music was shaped by their beliefs.

The result is a remarkable and inspiring book, showing the importance of Christian faith for many composers, and the effect of this upon their music. But it also shows how the lack of faith has brought profound change in the meaning and form of contemporary music.

Thus A Gift of Music seeks to open up a whole new world of music--to encourage listening to the finest compositions with new understanding and pleasure, and to stretch our ears and imaginations. It is a book which will be greatly appreciated by those who already love classical music, and by others who want to explore this delightful world for the first time.