Salamone Rossi (c.1570-c.1628) has earned a special place in music history as the earliest outstanding Jewish composer to work in the European art music tradition--no others of his calibre are to be found until the 19th century. In his life and works, Rossi moved between two worlds: the court and the Jewish community in late Renaissance Mantua. His publications include madrigals set to verses of the most fashionable poets of the time, dances, sinfonias, brilliant trio sonatas, and a collection of Hebrew songs (`The Songs of Solomon'), the first of its kind and, to this day, unique in the history of sacred music. Given the composer's unusual role as a mediator between two cultures, his life and works carry serious implications for an understanding of both the European and the Jewish musical and literary traditions in an era that stands on the threshold of the modern world.

A brilliant gathering of international Mahler specialists writes about Mahler's music from a variety of standpoints. The global spread of the authors is matched by a series of chapters that document the international reach of the composer's own symphonies and song cycles, while previously unexplored areas of research receive attention, both places (such as London and Prague) and people (Mahler's only surviving and highly talented daughter--a sculptor--Anna). In short, a volume that draws on the best resources and most up-to-date information about the composer and will undoubtedly act as the authoritative guide for Mahler enthusiasts for years to come.

Arcangelo Corelli presents a much-needed reappraisal of the life and works of this phenomenally successful composer set against the lavish setting of seventeenth-century Rome, and exploring the paths by which his music became established as `models of perfection' for generations to come.

Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909) composed some of the most enduring masterpieces in a Spanish style, works that remain favourites with guitarists, pianists, and music lovers the world over. This is the only biography in English of the fascinatingly complex man behind this music, and it presents much valuable new information about his career as a performer and composer.

Language, education, science, and song come together in surprising ways in Katherine Bergeron's new history of music in the Belle Epoque. Voice Lessons examines the modern musical art known as la melodie francaise and its rise to prominence in the years around 1900-a period when France was pouring resources into national literacy and French scholars were beginning to grasp the nuances of the spoken tongue. Bergeron explores the relationship between the free, secular, and compulsory school system of the Third Republic, and the experimental sciences of language that grew alongside it, to observe the ways in which both science and school redefined the verbal arts in France at century's end.
The music of Faure, Debussy, and Ravel; the writings of Mallarme, Rimbaud, and Verlaine; the performances of Maggie Teyte, Reynaldo Hahn, and Sarah Bernhardt; the linguistic studies of Paul Passy and Abbe Rousselot: all these sources offer evidence of the new ideas of expression that proliferated during one of the most idealistic moments in French musical history, when poets, composers, actors, singers, and scientists all learned to imagine-and to speak-their language in new ways. Through close readings of songs, poems, sound recordings, and other historical records, Voice Lessons narrates the development of a rare musical art, seeking to explain why this art emerged, why it mattered, and why it eventually disappeared."

A unique treatment of the key influences on the life of this important Australian composer, consisting of oral histories by people who knew Grainger, as well as reflections from his own writings. Percy Grainger [1882-1961] was a pianist, composer, ethnographer, essayist, and much more. The Australian-American musician aspired to the condition of a polymath, with strong interests in language, culture, ecology and technology. In an age of increasing specialisation Grainger held to a breathless all-roundedness. This book looks at the scrabbling diversity of Grainger's life through the eyes of others. Family and friends, pupils, musical associatesand chance acquaintances recall their experiences of Percy Grainger from his boyhood in colonial Australia, through his conservatorium years in Germany, on to his early professional years in London, and further to the zenith of his career and then years of decline in the United States. In the final chapter, Grainger himself explains the driving passions of his life. Fifty illustrations, including architectural drawings, scores and machine plans, vividly depict the enthusiasms described in over ninety recollections of Grainger. A composer of over four hundred compositions and virtuoso performer in some three thousand concerts, Grainger left a large legacy. He was an importantinfluence upon the folk-song movement in Britain, and, through such masterworks as Lincolnshire Posy, he was enduringly popular with the band movement in America. On a personal level, his development of the language of "blue-eyed English" was stillborn, and his muscular style of pianism found few adherents among the next generation of performers. His frankly expressed views on sexual licence were also many decades ahead of their time. Today, however, Grainger the musician is again in the ascendant. His more innovative works are gaining a belated hearing, while his standards, such as Country Gardens, remain firm favorites. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear areco-editors of Grainger on Music and 'The All-Round Man': Selected Letters of Percy Grainger, 1914-1961

The Muse That Sings: Composers Speak About the Creative Process is a collection of interviews with 25 various American composers, born between 1930 and 1960, who explain how they think in sound, mould musical ideas, and ultimately transfer sonic creations to the printed page.

John Taverner was the leading composer of church music under Henry VIII. His contributions to the mass and votive antiphon are varied, distinguished and sometimes innovative; he has left more important settings for the office than any of his predecessors, and even a little secular music survives. Hugh Benham, editor of Taverner's complete works for Early English Church Music, now provides the first full-length study of the composer for over twenty years. He places the music in context, with the help of biographical information, discussion of Taverner's place in society, and explanation of how each piece was used in the pre-Reformation church services. He investigates the musical language of Taverner's predecessors as background for a fresh examination and appraisal of the music in the course of which he traces similarities with the work of younger composers. Issues confronting the performer are considered, and the music is also approached from the listener's point of view, initially through close analytical inspection of the celebrated votive antiphon Gaude plurimum.

The manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français 146, one of the most sumptuous and important of the fourteenth century, stands as an unparalleled witness to the politics, society, and culture of the French royal court in the early fourteenth century. It contains an interpolated version of the Roman de Fauvel, completed by Gervès de Bus in 1314, that uniquely combines the Old French text with music setting poetry in French and Latin, high-quality illuminations (including early depictions of the architecture of medieval Paris), and further literary elaborations and additions. This volume assembles papers by leading medievalists and younger scholars in different fields. Generously illustrated, it includes essential new reference material for medievalists in political, social and urban history, art and architectural history, musicology, the history of the book and codicology, and medieval languages and literatures, principally Old French and Latin.

There can be little doubt that opera and emotion are inextricably linked. From dramatic plots driven by energetic producers and directors to the conflicts and triumphs experienced by all associated with opera's staging to the reactions and critiques of audience members, emotion is omnipresent in opera. Yet few contemplate the impact that the customary cultural practices of specific times and places have upon opera's ability to move emotions. Taking Australia as a case study, this two-volume collection of extended essays demonstrates that emotional experiences, discourses, displays and expressions do not share universal significance but are at least partly produced, defined, and regulated by culture. Spanning approximately 170 years of opera production in Australia, the authors show how the emotions associated with the specific cultural context of a nation steeped in egalitarian aspirations and marked by increasing levels of multiculturalism have adjusted to changing cultural and social contexts across time. Volume I adopts an historical, predominantly nineteenth-century perspective, while Volume II applies historical, musicological, and ethnological approaches to discuss subsequent Australian operas and opera productions through to the twenty-first century. With final chapters pulling threads from the two volumes together, Opera, Emotion, and the Antipodes establishes a model for constructing emotion history from multiple disciplinary perspectives.

MEDIUM AEVUM says of Heaven Singing, the general discussion of the subject from which the present volume follows on with examination of the individual plays: 'A formidable achievement, indispensable for any serious and comprehensive study of early English drama.' Richard Rastall's two books on music in early English religious drama complement each other. Heaven Singing provides an overview of the evidence for music in the plays, and defines the place, nature and cultural contexts ofmusic in the drama; Minstrels Playing is a discussion of the evidence for every play in that repertory, and is therefore concerned with the place and nature of musical performance in each play individually. Followinghis general discussion of music in the anonymous religious plays of 15th- and 16th-century England in The Heaven Singing (1996), this companion volume turns to the individual biblical, saint and moral plays. Richard Rastallplaces each in its intellectual and cultural context, and notes the surviving evidence for music and other aural effects in the dramatic directions, text references, use of Latin and the liturgy, and the existing documentary records. At the end of each chapter a cue-list shows where the music should appear and presents the arguments for specific repertory and performance modes, providing an invaluable aid for directors. This leads on to a section on modern performance, in which Dr Rastall discusses a wide range of issues that impinge on the practicalities of providing music in early English drama and raise problems and queries for producers and musical directors: the type of staging and the nature of the set, the choice of cast, the choice of musical items, the training and rehearsing of singers, and much else. Dr RICHARD RASTALL is Reader in Historical Musicology and Dean of the Faculty of Music, Visualand Performing Arts at the University of Leeds.

Disaster Songs as Intangible Memorials in Atlantic Canada draws on a collection of over 600 songs relating to Atlantic Canadian disasters from 1891 up until the present and describes the characteristics that define them as intangible memorials. The book demonstrates the relationship between vernacular memorials - informal memorials collectively and spontaneously created from a variety of objects by the general public - and disaster songs. The author identifies the features that define vernacular memorials and applies them to disaster songs: spontaneity, ephemerality, importance of place, motivations and meaning-making, content, as well as the role of media in inspiring and disseminating memorials and songs. Visit the companion website: www.disastersongs.ca.

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.

Renowned music historian Philipp Spitta has written that of all the German musicians of the 19th century, none has exercised a greater influence over his own generation and that succeeding it than Weber. Spitta s statement reflects Weber s popularity at the end of the nineteenth century both for his place as a foundational figure of German Romantic opera and for his role in the early German Nationalist movement in music. Indeed, Weber s Der Freischutz is still considered the first German Romantic opera, enjoying a place of privilege in the modern operatic repertoire with performances held the world over and at least two cinematic productions. Despite its enormous popularity throughout the nineteenth century, however, Weber s swan song, Oberon, has remained separate from the mainstream thrust of our modern understanding of German Romantic opera. In Carl Maria von Weber: Oberon and the Cosmopolitanism in the Early German Romantic, music historian and theorist Joseph E. Morgan reassesses Weber s work and aesthetics not just for their influence but also as an expression of the aesthetics and cosmopolitanism that underlay the early Romantic and Nationalist movement in Germany. In a discussion with analyses that features nearly one-hundred musical examples, Morgan tracks the development of Weber s musical style across his career. The investigation culminates with Weber s last and long-misunderstood work, explaining its thematic and harmonic organization, its stylistic idiosyncrasies, and the tenuous place that it holds on the margins of the operatic canon. The discussion is enhanced and corroborated by frequent attention to correlating developments in other art from the period, including painting, poetry and literature. This text will be of interest to students, scholars, and connoisseurs interested in acquiring a new insight on the performance, reception, and aesthetics of early German Romantic opera. Further, because of the interdisciplinary nature of the investigation, anyone interested in the early romantic and nationalist movement in Germany will also certainly find interesting and valuable insights in this book."

The Letters of C.P.E. Bach is a complete edition of the correspondence of the most famous of J.S. Bach's sons. Very few of these letters have appeared previously in English translation. They provide a fascinating picture of an eighteenth-century composer hard at work publishing his own music, debating aesthetic matters, and championing the music and teachings of his father. The readable translation, detailed index, extensive cross referencing, and glossary of names make this an accessible and useful volume.

The growth of African immigration to France at the end of the Twentieth Century wrought cultural change in this epicenter of the avant-garde in European art and music. If one visits the record stores, clubs, and restaurants of contemporary Paris, one would find the influence of France's former colonies at work. James Winders presents the story of African immigrants to France as a unique chapter in the long history of the reception accorded expatriate artists in Paris. Paris Africain demonstrates that France's newest immigrants are making marks in French culture that will not be erased.

This book asks what theological messages theologically educated Catholics in late-eighteenth-century Prague might have perceived in Mozart's late opera seria La clemenza di Tito. The book's thesis is two-fold: first, that Catholics might have heard the opera's advocacy of enlightened absolutism as a celebration of a distinctly Catholic understanding of political governance; and second, that they might have found in the opera a metaphor for the relationship between a gracious God and humanity caught up in sin, expressed as sexual concupiscence, pride, and lust for power. The book develops its interpretation of the opera through narrative character analyses of the main protagonists, an examination of their dramatic development, and by paying attention to the biblical and theological associations they may have evoked in a Catholic audience. The book is geared towards academic readers interested in opera, theologians, historians, and those who work at the intersection of theology and the arts. It contributes to a better understanding of the theological implications of Mozart's operatic work.

Putting forward an extensive new argument for a humanities-based approach to big-data analysis, The Music in the Data shows how large datasets of music, or music corpora, can be productively integrated with the qualitative questions at the heart of music research. The author argues that as well as providing objective evidence, music corpora can themselves be treated as texts to be subjectively read and creatively interpreted, allowing new levels of understanding and insight into music traditions. Each chapter in this book asks how we define a core music-theory topic, such as style, harmony, meter, function, and musical key, and then approaches the topic through considering trends within large musical datasets, applying a combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative interpretation. Throughout, several basic techniques of data analysis are introduced and explained, with supporting materials available online. Connecting the empirical information from corpus analysis with theories of musical and textual meaning, and showing how each approach can enrich the other, this book provides a vital perspective for scholars and students in music theory, musicology, and all areas of music research.

First published in 1999, this volume is the first full-length study to deal with the life and music of Orlando Gibbons since E.H. Fellowes's short book, originally published in 1923. John Harley investigates in detail the family and musical background from which Orlando Gibbons emerged, and gives a fascinating account of the activities of his father, William Gibbons, as a wait in Oxford and Cambridge. He traces, too, the activities of Orlando's brothers - Edward, who was the master of the choristers at King's College, Cambridge and later at Exeter Cathedral; Ferdinando, who may have taken over from his father as head of the Cambridge waits, and who became a wait in Lincoln; and Ellis, who contributed two madrigals to Thomas Morley's collection of 1601, The Triumphs of Oriana. Attention naturally focuses principally on Orlando Gibbons. A full record is given of his remarkably youthful appointment as an organist of the Chapel Royal (he was probably less than twenty at the time) and of his life at court. His additional appointments as one of Prince Charles's musicians and as organist of Westminster Abbey are also described, as is his sudden and premature death in his early forties. Gibbons's music is carefully examined in a series of chapters dealing with his pieces for keyboard and for viols, his songs, his full and verse anthems, and his works for the Anglican liturgy. His development as a composer within these genres is followed, and the character of particular pieces is considered. John Harley concludes that whereas, at one time, Gibbons 'tended to be admired as a successor to Tallis and Byrd, working in a style not essentially different from theirs', it is now 'easier to view him as a pioneer, whose work was cut short by his untimely death'. Orlando Gibbons's son Christopher was only a child when his father died, but he became one of the foremost composers and keyboard players of his generation, writing and performing chamber works and music for the stage during the Commonwealth. Following the Restoration of King Charles II, Christopher Gibbons gained his father's former posts at the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey, for which establishments he wrote a number of anthems. His importance is recognized by the inclusion of a long chapter on his life and works.

At the end of his life, Pierre Schaeffer commented that his musical and sound experiments had attempted to go beyond 'do-re-mi'. This had a direct bearing on EinstA1/4rzende Neubauten's musical philosophy and work, with the musicians always striving to extend the boundaries of music in sound, instrumentation and purpose. The group are one of the few examples of 'rock-based' artists who have been able to sustain a breadth and depth of work in a variety of media over a number of years while remaining experimental and open to development. Jennifer Shryane provides a much-needed analysis of the group's important place in popular/experimental music history. She illustrates their innovations with found- and self-constructed instrumentation, their Artaudian performance strategies and textual concerns, as well as their methods of independence. EinstA1/4rzende Neubauten have also made a consistent and unique contribution to the development of the independent German Language Contemporary Music scene, which although often acknowledged as influential, is still rarely examined.

for solo piano and full orchestra This work opens with a form of Shaman-dance from North-east China, during which the piano mimics some of the animal postures seen in the art of kung fu. Pianobells, the more lyrical and lightly orchestrated second movement, takes two contrasting bells (Mighty Bells and Frost Bells) as its narrative throughout. The third and final movement, which is intended to represent the Peking Opera Monkey's action, is a wild and intense finale with rapid rhythmic patterns from the percussion. This concerto is exciting, lively, and highlights the piano as a virtuoso percussion instrument.

Stephen Storace (1762-96) was a prominent opera composer in London. His works exemplify the best in English opera, with music closely integrated with the drama, and including attractive tunes the audience could sing and play at home. Theatrical life and music publishing are both examined from the perspective of Storace's works.

Schubert's Workshop offers a fresh study of the composer's compositional technique and its development, rooted in the author's experience of realising performing versions of Franz Schubert's unfinished works. Through close examination of Schubert's use of technical and structural devices, Brian Newbould demonstrates that Schubert was much more technically innovative than has been supposed, and argues that the composer's technical discoveries constitute a rich legacy of specific influences on later composers. Providing rich new insights into the creative practice of one of the major figures of classical music, this two-volume study reframes our understanding of Schubert as an innovator who constantly pushed at the frontiers of style and expression.