As Nicholas Kenyon says, quoting Ralph Vaughan Williams in the introduction to this volume, 'We all pay lip service to Henry Purcell, but what do we really know of him?'. Many aspects of the composer's life remain obscure, but, with the approach of the tercentenary of Henry Purcell's death in 1995, much of his music would be performed again, in some cases for the first time for many years. It was clear that many issues of performance practice needed to be aired before 1995; further it was equally clear that such discussion should begin early and should be available in published form. To this end, a group of scholars and performers gathered at Exeter College, Oxford in 1993 and the contents of this volume represents some of the fruits of their deliberation. The first part of the book considers purely musical issues, and covers a wide range of topics. Peter Holman looks at the importance of the Oxford set parts for Restoration Concerted Music in the overall picture of orchestral practice in the seventeenth century. This is followed by two organological essays, one on organs (Dominic Gwynne) and the other on violins (John Dilworth). The remainder of this first section has three studies of historical performance - on Percell's "Exotic" trumpet notes (Peter Downey), on Queen Mary's Funeral Music (Bruce Wood), and ornamenting Purcell's keyboard music (H Diack Johnson) - and two concerning singers and singing - Purcell's stage singers (Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson) and on voice ranges, voice types and pitch (Timothy Morris). The second part of the book, devoted to the stage works, opens with an examination of past performances of the dramatic operas in Michael Burden's essay, 'Percell debauch'd'. Contributors then examine the importance of allegory in performing stage works (Andrew Walkling), theatrical dance (Richard Semmens), costume and etiquette (Ruth Eva Ronen), stage music (Roger Savage), and aspects of performing Dioclesian (Julia and Frans Muller) and King Arthur (Lionel Sawkins).

In 1683 English court musicians and the Musical Society of London joined forces to celebrate St Cecilia's Day (22 November) with a feast and the performance of specially composed music. The most prominent composers and poets of the age wrote for these occasions, including Henry Purcell, John Blow, John Dryden and William Congreve. In 1683 English court musicians and the Musical Society of London joined forces to initiate annual observations of St Cecilia's Day (22 November), celebrating the occasion with a feast and the performance of specially composed musical odes. The most prominent composers and poets of the age wrote for these occasions, including Henry Purcell, John Blow, John Dryden and William Congreve, and the best musicians of the city, primarily drawn from the court music, undertook the performances. After a decade of celebrations, a church service was added before the feast, and elaborate vocal and instrumental music was performed. At the same time, celebrations of St Cecilia's Day began to spread widely throughout the British Isles, where they were held by local music clubs, often with the support of cathedral musicians. Though the annual London celebrations came to an end after 1700 in the face of increasing competition from the city's busy musical and theatrical offerings, Cecilian poetry continued to inspire new musical settings in the eighteenth century, including works by Pepusch, Greene, Boyce and, most notably, Handel. This book examines the social, cultural and religious significance of celebrations of St Cecilia's Day in the British Isles and explores the music and poetry that originated from them. The annual feasts of the Musical Society are analysed in detail, as is the role they played in the development of the ode. The book also considers how advances in musical culture in London were imitated in the provinces and provides a detailed discussion of the variety of Cecilian celebrations held at provincial centres throughout the British Isles.

By integrating theoretical approaches to the female voice with the musicological investigation of female singers' practices, the contributors to this volume offer fresh viewpoints on the material, symbolic and cultural aspects of the female voice in the twentieth century. Various styles and genres are covered, including Western art music, experimental composition, popular music, urban folk and jazz. The volume offers a substantial and innovative appraisal of the role of the female voice from the perspective of twentieth-century performance practices, the centrality of female singers' experimentations and extended vocal techniques along with the process of the 'subjectivisation' of the voice.

Music in 17th and early 18th century Italy was wonderfully rich and varied: in theatrical and secular vocal chamber music alone, we saw the rise of the solo song and cantata, and the birth and growth of opera, all establishing important new structural and expressive paradigms. But this was also a complex time of uncertainty and change, as 'old' and 'new' interacted in subtle and often surprising ways. There is still much to document, explore and explain in terms of composers and repertories and their multi-layered contexts. This collection of essays by European, British and American musicologists seeks to consolidate the recent growth interest in seventeenth century studies. It includes discussions of leading composers (d'India, Monteverdi, Rovetta, Steffani, Albinoni, Vivaldi and Handel), repertories (chamber laments, staged balli and operatic mad-scenes), geographical issues (the arrival of Neapolitan opera in Venice), institutional contexts, and iconography. Inspiration for the book was drawn from the poineering research of Nigel Fortune, to whom the volume is dedicated on his 70th birthday.

The concept of raga forms the basis of melodic composition and improvization in Indian classical music. This study traces the early history and development of the concept in the pre-Islamic period. It draws on early Indian theoretical sources, and focuses especially on the examples of notated melodies that they contain. This book should be of interest to musicologists and music students interested in ethnomusicology, historical musicology, music theory, mode and monody, and improvisation as well as sanskritists and other Indologists.

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.

As the complicated relationship between music and theatre has evolved and changed in the modern and postmodern periods, music has continued to be immensely influential in key developments of theatrical practices. In this study of musicality in the theatre, David Roesner offers a revised view of the nature of the relationship. The new perspective results from two shifts in focus: on the one hand, Roesner concentrates in particular on theatre-making - that is the creation processes of theatre - and on the other, he traces a notion of 'musicality' in the historical and contemporary discourses as driver of theatrical innovation and aesthetic dispositif, focusing on musical qualities, metaphors and principles derived from a wide range of genres. Roesner looks in particular at the ways in which those who attempted to experiment with, advance or even revolutionize theatre often sought to use and integrate a sense of musicality in training and directing processes and in performances. His study reveals both the continuous changes in the understanding of music as model, method and metaphor for the theatre and how different notions of music had a vital impact on theatrical innovation in the past 150 years. Musicality thus becomes a complementary concept to theatricality, helping to highlight what is germane to an art form as well as to explain its traction in other art forms and areas of life. The theoretical scope of the book is developed from a wide range of case studies, some of which are re-readings of the classics of theatre history (Appia, Meyerhold, Artaud, Beckett), while others introduce or rediscover less-discussed practitioners such as Joe Chaikin, Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Thalheimer and Karin Beier.

American composer Morton Feldman is increasingly seen to have been one of the key figures in late-twentieth-century music, with his work exerting a powerful influence into the twenty-first century. At the same time, much about his music remains enigmatic, largely due to long-standing myths about supposedly intuitive or aleatoric working practices. In Composing Ambiguity, Alistair Noble reveals key aspects of Feldman's musical language as it developed during a crucial period in the early 1950s. Drawing models from primary sources, including Feldman's musical sketches, he shows that Feldman worked deliberately within a two-dimensional frame, allowing a focus upon the fundamental materials of sounding pitch in time. Beyond this, Feldman's work is revealed to be essentially concerned with the 12-tone chromatic field, and with the delineation of complexes of simple proportions in 'crystalline' forms. Through close reading of several important works from the early 1950s, Noble shows that there is a remarkable consistency of compositional method, despite the varied experimental notations used by Feldman at this time. Not only are there direct relations to be found between staff-notated works and grid scores, but much of the language developed by Feldman in this period was still in use even in his late works of the 1980s.

The mass is an extraordinary musical form. Whereas other Western art music genres from medieval times have fallen out of favour, the mass has not merely survived but flourished. A variety of historical forces within religious, secular, and musical arenas saw the mass expand well beyond its origins as a cycle of medieval chants, become concertised and ultimately bifurcate. Even as Western societies moved away from their Christian origins to become the religiously plural and politically secular societies of today, and the Church itself moved in favour of congregational singing, composers continued to compose masses. By the early twentieth century two forms of mass existed: the liturgical mass composed for church services, and the concert mass composed for secular venues. Spanning two millennia, The Origins and Ascendancy of the Concert Mass outlines the origins and meanings of the liturgical texts, defines the concert mass, explains how and why the split occurred, and provides examples that demonstrate composers' gradual appropriation of the genre as a vehicle for personal expression on serious issues. By the end of the twentieth century the concert mass had become a repository for an eclectic range of theological and political ideas.

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.

This, the fullest edition of Monteverdi's letters yet to appear in any language, makes every known letter available in English translation. The 127 letters date from the last forty-two years of Monteverdi's career, giving an unrivalled picture of the life of a busy composer working Mantua, Venice, and Parma at one of the most exciting and crucial periods in the history of music. The span of the letters (1601-43) coincides with the early flowering of Italian opera and other dramatic entertainments, and Monteverdi has a great deal to say about his patrons, librettists, instrumentalist and singers. There are continual references to his music, the style of its performance, and to its ornamentation and orchestration. Besides correcting the numerous errors of transcription in previous editions, Professor Stevens has taken special care in his translations to be faithful to the rhythms and the arched symmetry of Moteverdi's prose. Additional biographical and historical material is incorporated into the extensive commentaries which introduce each letter. In this new, fully revised edition, certain changes and revisions affecting letters and commentaries have been made in the light of newly published information books, articles, and reviews, and through private communications. Additional letters and support material are included, and the bibliography has been updated. Professor Stevens also introduces new material covering in some detail the events of Monteverdi's early years in Cremona and Mantua, insofar as they were influenced by his family, his studies, travels, friends and patrons.

The lives, loves, adventures and trailblazing musical careers of four extraordinary women from a stunning debut biographer. 'Magnificent.' Kate Mosse 'Riveting.' Antonia Fraser 'A breath of fresh air.' Kate Molleson 'Fascinating.' Alexandra Harris 'Wonderful.' Claire Tomalin 'Splendid.' Miranda Seymour 'Remarkable.' Fiona Maddocks 'Pioneering.' Andrew Motion Ethel Smyth (b.1858): Famed for her operas, this trailblazing queer Victorian composer was a larger-than-life socialite, intrepid traveller and committed Suffragette. Rebecca Clarke (b.1886): This talented violist and Pre-Raphaelite beauty was one of the first women ever hired by a professional orchestra, later celebrated for her modernist experimentation. Dorothy Howell (b.1898): A prodigy who shot to fame at the 1919 Proms, her reputation as the 'English Strauss' never dented her modesty; on retirement, she tended Elgar's grave alone. Doreen Carwithen (b.1922): One of Britain's first woman film composers who scored Elizabeth II's coronation film, her success hid a 20-year affair with her married composition tutor. In their time, these women were celebrities. They composed some of the century's most popular music and pioneered creative careers; but today, they are ghostly presences, surviving only as muses and footnotes to male contemporaries like Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten - until now. Leah Broad's magnificent group biography resurrects these forgotten voices, recounting lives of rebellion, heartbreak and ambition, and celebrating their musical masterpieces. Lighting up a panoramic sweep of British history over two World Wars, Quartet revolutionises the canon forever.

Mary Cyr addresses the needs of researchers, performers, and informed listeners who wish to apply knowledge about historically informed performance to specific pieces. Special emphasis is placed upon the period 1680 to 1760, when the viol, violin, and violoncello grew to prominence as solo instruments in France. Part I deals with the historical background to the debate between the French and Italian styles and the features that defined French style. Part II summarizes the present state of research on bowed string instruments (violin, viola, cello, contrebasse, pardessus de viole, and viol) in France, including such topics as the size and distribution of parts in ensembles and the role of the contrebasse. Part III addresses issues and conventions of interpretation such as articulation, tempo and character, inequality, ornamentation, the basse continue, pitch, temperament, and "special effects" such as tremolo and harmonics. Part IV introduces four composer profiles that examine performance issues in the music of A0/00lisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, Marin Marais, Jean-Baptiste Barriere, and the Forquerays (father and son). The diversity of compositional styles among this group of composers, and the virtuosity they incorporated in their music, generate a broad field for discussing issues of performance practice and offer opportunities to explore controversial themes within the context of specific pieces.

This study provides a new view of a composer long considered to be one of the century's most rigorously intellectual creators, Anton Webern. By examining a central pre-twelve-tone work, the Trakl cycle, Op 14, in the context of the Viennese intellectual and artistic climate, Professor Shreffler shows how Webern's responses to Trakl's complex verse enabled him to expand his musical vocabulary. The author's emphasis on Webern's compositional process is of particular importance: whether because of the anxiety of creating a new musical language, or because of an innate hyper-perfectionism (or both), Webern rejected most of what he composed. A close examination of the manuscript sources - fragments, sketches, and fair copies - of Webern's comparatively neglected middle-period lieder enables her to shed light on Webern's musical language and his working methods. A focus on the sources also helps to modify the view that his music progressed steadily in the direction of the twelve-tone technique. The works reveal instead a concern with expressing the essence of the text; this lyricism, rather than articulating a substantially different aesthetic from the later works, provides a better understanding of the consummate lyricism of all his music, however compressed or fragmented its utterance in the `classic' twelve-tone works.

Following the earlier volumes in the Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure series, Mahler's Fourth Symphony is a study of the origins of the work as well as a thorough examination of Mahler's compositional process. The source of the Fourth Symphony was the song Das himmlische Leben, which Mahler completed in 1892 and later wished to include in a large-scale work. Originally part of a collection of settings from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the song became, for a time, part of the Third Symphony (1896). Eventually Mahler made Das himmlische Leben the source and goal of the Fourth Symphony, which he completed in 1901. In this book, James Zychowicz explores how Mahler's compositional process for the Fourth, from the early movement plans to preliminary sketches, short score, draft score, and fair copy. At each stage of the process, Mahler added details, decided on textures, and explored tonalities until he arrived at the finished score. This is the first comprehensive study of Mahler's compositional method, concerning a pivotal work in his oeuvre. The Fourth Symphony looks back toward the earlier Wunderhorn period and simultaneously forward to the less programmatic style of his middle symphonies.

Nicholas Medtner (1880-1951) has always been a neglected figure in the history of Russian music, and yet his friend Rachmaninoff considered him the greatest of contemporary composers. He wrote three fine piano concertos, more than one hundred solo piano compositions, including a cycle of fourteen sonatas fully worthy to be set alongside those of Scriabin and Prokofiev, and many beautiful songs. He was also a great pianist. Leaving Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, Medtner lived for a time in Germany and France before finally settling in London, where he passed the final sixteen years of his life. The present work is the first to tell the full story of his eventful life and to consider in turn each of his compositions. The author has drawn on Medtner's own correspondence and writings and collected the reminiscences of those who knew him personally to build a comprehensive picture of a great, if still largely unrecognised, musician.

Bach & God explores the religious character of Bach's vocal and instrumental music in seven interrelated essays. Noted musicologist Michael Marissen offers wide-ranging interpretive insights from careful biblical and theological scrutiny of the librettos. Yet he also shows how Bach's pitches, rhythms, and tone colors can make contributions to a work's plausible meanings that go beyond setting texts in an aesthetically satisfying manner. In some of Bach's vocal repertory, the music puts a "spin " on the words in a way that turns out to be explainable as orthodox Lutheran in its orientation. In a few of Bach's vocal works, his otherwise puzzlingly fierce musical settings serve to underscore now unrecognized or unacknowledged verbal polemics, most unsettlingly so in the case of his church cantatas that express contempt for Jews and Judaism. Finally, even Bach's secular instrumental music, particularly the late collections of "abstract " learned counterpoint, can powerfully project certain elements of traditional Lutheran theology. Bach's music is inexhaustible, and Bach & God suggests that through close contextual study there is always more to discover and learn.

This contemporary view of Brahms, 150 years after his birth, concentrates on his music, with a brief discussion of his life in the Introduction. A list of works includes recent discoveries and a calendar outlines the pattern of his musical life.

Despite utilizing a format with its roots in the Roman Catholic liturgy, many of these politicized concert masses also reflect the increasing religious diversification of Western societies. By introducing non-Catholic and often non-Christian beliefs into masses that also remain respectful of Christian tradition, composers in the later twentieth- century have employed the genre to promote a conciliatory way of being that promotes the value of heterogeneity and reinforces the need to protect the diversity of musics, species and spiritualities that enrich life. In combining the political with the religious, the case studies presented pose challenges for both supporters and detractors of the secularization paradigm. Overarchingly, they demonstrate that any binary division that separates life into either the religious or the secular and promotes one over the other denies the complexity of lived experience and constitutes a diminution of what it is to be human.

A study on the influence which the German novelist Jean Paul Friedrich Richter had upon Robert Schumann's music. Robert Schumann frequently expressed his deep admiration for the novels of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, the late-eighteenth-century German novelist, essayist, and satirist. Schumann imitated Jean Paul's prose style in his own fiction and music criticism, and said once that he learned "more counterpoint from Jean Paul than from my music teacher." Drawing on the recent, groundbreaking work in musico-literary analysis of scholars such as Anthony Newcomb,John Daverio, and Lawrence Kramer, Erika Reiman embarks on a comparative study of Jean Paul's five major novels and Schumann's piano cycles of the 1830s, many of which are staples in the repertoire of concert pianists today. The present study begins with a thorough review of Jean Paul's literary style, emphasizing the digressions, intertextuality, self-reflexivity, and otherworldliness that distinguish it. The similarly digressive style that Schumanndeveloped is then examined in his earliest works, including the enduring and highly original Carnaval [1835], and in cycles of the later 1830s, notably Davidsbundlertanze and Faschingsschwank aus Wien. Finally, an analysis of three one-movement works from 1838-39 reveals links with Jean Paul's exploration of the idyll, an ancient genre that had experienced an eighteenth-century revival. Throughout, the author attempts to keep inmind the actual sound and performed experience of the works, and suggests ways in which an awareness of Jean Paul's style might change the performance and hearing of the cycles. Erika Reiman, received her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Toronto [1999] and has taught at Brock University, Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of Guelph, and the University of Toronto; she is also active as a pianist and chamber musician.

In November 1990 the Handel Institute held its first Triennial Conference, whose subject, `Handel Collections and their History', reflects the great importance for Handel scholarship of the many collections of manuscript copies of his works which were assembled during and after his lifetime by friends and admirers of the man and his music. these collections, mostly written by the composer's own copyists, provide fascinating insights into the compositional history and chronology of his works and their later modification for performance or for subsequent revival; and much can be learnt about Handel's working methods. An international panel of distinguished Handel scholars was assembled for the Conference, and their papers, gathered together in this book, are at once a testimony to the extent and depth of modern Handel scholarship, and a major contribution to our knowledge of one of music's greatest masters.

The Czech composer Pavel Haas (1899-1944) is commonly positioned in the history of twentieth-century music as a representative of Leos Janacek's compositional school and as one of the Jewish composers imprisoned by the Nazis in the concentration camp of Terezin (Theresienstadt). However, the nature of Janacek's influence remains largely unexplained and the focus on the context of the Holocaust tends to yield a one-sided view of Haas's oeuvre. The existing scholarship offers limited insight into Haas's compositional idiom and does not sufficiently explain the composer's position with respect to broader aesthetic trends and artistic networks in inter-war Czechoslovakia and beyond. This book is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive (albeit necessarily selective) discussion of Haas's music since the publication of Lubomir Peduzzi's 'life and work' monograph in 1993. It provides the reader with an enhanced understanding of Haas's music through analytical and hermeneutical interpretation as well as cultural and aesthetic contextualisation, and thus reveal the rich nuances of Haas's multi-faceted work which have not been sufficiently recognised so far.

Late nineteenth-century France was a nation undergoing an identity crisis: the uncertain infancy of the Third Republic and shifting alliances in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War forced France to interrogate the fundamental values and characteristics at the heart of its own national identity. Music was central to this national self-scrutiny. It comes as little surprise to us that Oriental fears, desires, and anxieties should be a fundamental part of this, but what has been overlooked to date is that Britain, too, provided a thinking space in the French musical world; it was often - surprisingly and paradoxically - represented through many of the same racialist terms and musical tropes as the Orient. However, at the same time, its shared history with France and the explosions of colonial rivalry between the two nations introduced an ever-present tension into this musical relationship. This book sheds light on this forgotten musical sphere through a rich variety of contemporary sources. It visits the cafe-concert and its tradition of 'Englishing up' with fake hair, mocking accents, and unflattering dances; it explores the reactions, both musical and physical, to British evangelical bands as they arrived in the streets of France and the colonies; it considers the French reception of, and fascination with, folk music from Ireland and Scotland; and it confronts the culture shock felt by French visitors to Britain as they witnessed British music-making for the first time. Throughout, it examines the ways in which this music allowed French society to grapple with the uncertainty of late nineteenth-century life, providing ordinary French citizens with a means of understanding and interrogating both the Franco-British relationship and French identity itself.

- Applies cutting-edge musical-linguistic approach to the music of early modern England - Uses analysis of emphasis to produce new insights into composers' liturgical music, showing how their settings create different interpretations of the religious text - Relevant to musicology, music theory, and religious history