Christopher Fox (1955) has emerged as one of the most fascinating composers of the post-war generation. His spirit of experimentalism pervades an oeuvre in which he has blithely created his own version of a range of contemporary musical practices. In his work many of the major expressions of European cultural activity - Darmstadt, Fluxus, spectralism, postminimalism and more - are assimilated to produce a voice which is uniquely resonant and multifaceted. In this, the first major study of his work, musicologists, composers, thinkers and practitioners scrutinize aspects of Christopher Fox's music, each exploring elements that relate to their own distinct areas of practice, tracing Fox's compositional trajectory and situating it within post-war contemporary European music practice. Above all this book addresses the question: How can one person dip his fingers into so many paint pots and yet retain a coherent compositional vision? The range of Fox's musical concerns make his work of interest to anyone who wants to study the development of so-called new music spanning the latter twentieth century into the twenty first century.

Masque and Opera in England, 1656-1688 presents a comprehensive study of the development of court masque and through-composed opera in England from the mid-1650s to the Revolution of 1688-89. In seeking to address the problem of generic categorization within a highly fragmentary corpus for which a limited amount of documentation survives, Walkling argues that our understanding of the distinctions between masque and opera must be premised upon a thorough knowledge of theatrical context and performance circumstances. Using extensive archival and literary evidence, detailed textual readings, rigorous tabular analysis, and meticulous collation of bibliographical and musical sources, this interdisciplinary study offers a host of new insights into a body of work that has long been of interest to musicologists, theatre historians, literary scholars and historians of Restoration court and political culture, but which has hitherto been imperfectly understood. A companion volume will explore the phenomenon of "dramatick opera" and its precursors on London's public stages between the early 1660s and the first decade of the eighteenth century.

A plethora of biographical accounts of some of the contemporary composers and musicians at the turn of the twentieth century.

English Dramatick Opera, 1661-1706 is the first comprehensive examination of the distinctively English form known as "dramatick opera", which appeared on the London stage in the mid-1670s and lasted until its displacement by Italian through-composed opera in the first decade of the eighteenth century. Andrew Walkling argues that, while the musical elements of this form are crucial to its definition and history, the origins of the genre lie principally in a tradition of spectacular stagecraft that first manifested itself in England in the mid-1660s as part of a hitherto unidentified dramatic sub-genre, to which Walkling gives the name "spectacle-tragedy". Armed with this new understanding, the book explores a number of historical and interpretive issues, including the physical and rhetorical configurations of performative spectacle, the administrative maneuverings of the two "patent" theatre companies, the construction and deployment of the technologically advanced Dorset Garden Theatre in 1670-71, the critical response to generic, technical, and ideological developments in Restoration drama, and the shifting balance between machine spectacle and song-and-dance entertainment throughout the later decades of the seventeenth century, including in the dramatick operas of Henry Purcell. This study combines the materials and methodologies of music history, theatre history, literary studies, and bibliography to fashion an entirely new approach to the history of spectacular and musical drama on the English Restoration stage. This book serves as a companion to the Routledge publication Masque and Opera in England, 1656-1688 (2017).

This book appraises the contribution of Paul Dukas (1865-1935) to a wide variety of French musical practices. As a composer, critic, artistic collaborator and teacher, Dukas was central to the fin de siecle and early twentieth-century Paris musical scene (and more broadly to the French scene). Significantly, his compositional style mediated tradition through the modern language of his present, while his critical writings pioneered a new mode of musical discourse in the French press. Of further interest are Dukas's professional relationships with iconic figures such as Gabriel Faure and Claude Debussy, and his role in fostering the next generation of French composers. In addition to mentoring famous names such as Olivier Messiaen and Tony Aubin, he staunchly supported his female students, notably Elsa Barraine, Claude Arrieu and Yvonne Desportes. This unique essay collection offers a panoramic perspective on a comparatively neglected French musician. Paul Dukas: Legacies of a French Musician traces two aspects of his work: Part I treats Dukas as a composer, thinker and artistic collaborator; Part II constructs his intellectual legacy as seen in his creative and pedagogic endeavours. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in fin de siecle and early twentieth-century French music, women in French music, music criticism and composition education in the Paris Conservatoire.

Explores the world of women's professional and amateur musical activity as it developed on and beyond the island of Ireland. In a story which spans several centuries, the book highlights representative composers and performers in classical music, Irish traditional music, and contemporary art music whose contributions have been marginalised in music narratives. As well as investigating the careers of public figures, this edited collection brings attention to women who engaged with and taught music in a variety of domestic settings. It also shines a spotlight on women who worked behind the scenes to build infrastructures such as festivals and educational institutions which remain at the heart of the country's musical life today. The book addresses and reconsiders ideas about the intersections of music, gender, and Irish society, including how the national emblem of the harp became recast as a symbol of Irish womanhood in the twentieth century. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 surveys women musicians in Irish society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part 2 discusses women and practice in Irish traditional music. Part 3 studies gaps and gender politics in the history of twentieth-century women composers and performers. Part 4 situates discourses of women, gender, and music in the twenty-first century. The book's contributors encompass musicologists, cultural historians, composers, and performers.

Gyoergy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1974-77, revised 1996) has consolidated its position as one of the major operatic works of the twentieth century. Few operas composed since the 1970s have received such numerous productions, bringing the eclectic score to a global audience. Famously dubbed by Ligeti as an 'anti-anti-opera', the piece is a highly ambiguous, apocalyptic fable about the human condition, fear of death and the final judgement. As the first book in English solely dedicated to discussion of this work, Gyoergy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque offers new perspectives on the opera's musico-dramatic identity in the context of musical postmodernism. Peter Edwards draws on a range of modernist and postmodernist theories to explore the collision of past styles and genre models in the opera, its expressive states and its engagement with the grotesque. This is ably supported by musical analysis and extensive study of Ligeti's sketch materials held at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. Edwards's analyses culminate in a new approach to examining the opera's rich multiplicities, the composition of the musical material and the nature of Ligeti's relationship with the musical past. This is a key reference work in the fields of musical modernism and postmodernism, opera studies and the music of Ligeti.

The area whose capital was the southern Lombard city of Benevento developed a culture identified with the characteristic form of writing known as the Beneventan script, which was used throughout the area and was brought to perfection at the abbey of Montecassino in the late eleventh century. This repertory, along with other now-vanished or suppressed local varieties of music, give a far richer picture of the variety of musical practice in early medieval Europe than was formerly available. Thomas Forrest Kelly has identified and collected the surviving sources of an important repertory of early medieval music; this is the so-called Beneventan Chant, used in southern Italy in the early middle ages, before the adoption there of the now-universal music known as Gregorian chant. Because it was deliberately suppressed in the course of the eleventh century, this music survives mostly in fragments and palimpsests, and the fascinating process of restoring the repertory piece by piece is told in the studies in this book. A companion volume to this collection also by Professor Kelly details the practice of Medieval music.

This new study of the intersection of romance novels with vocal music records a society on the cusp of modernisation, with a printing industry emerging to serve people's growing appetites for entertainment amidst their changing views of religion and the occult. No mere diversion, fiction was integral to musical culture and together both art forms reveal key intellectual currents that circulated in the early nineteenth-century British home and were shared by many consumers. Roger Hansford explores relationships between music produced in the early 1800s for domestic consumption and the fictional genre of romance, offering a new view of romanticism in British print culture. He surveys romance novels by Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg, Edward Bulwer and Charles Kingsley in the period 1790-1850, interrogating the ways that music served to create mood and atmosphere, enlivened social scenes and contributed to plot developments. He explores the connections between musical scenes in romance fiction and the domestic song literature, treating both types of source and their intersection as examples of material culture. Hansford's intersectional reading revolves around a series of imaginative figures - including the minstrel, fairies, mermaids, ghosts, and witches, and Christians engaged both in virtue and vice - the identities of which remained consistent as influence passed between the art forms. While romance authors quoted song lyrics and included musical descriptions and characters, their novels recorded and modelled the performance of songs by the middle and upper classes, influencing the work of composers and the actions of performers who read romance fiction.

This book explores Juan de Anchieta's life and his music and, for the first time, presents a critical study of the life and works of a major Spanish composer from the time of Ferdinand and Isabel. A key figure in musical developments in Spain in the decades around 1500, Anchieta served in the Castilian royal chapel for over thirty years, from his appointment in 1489 as a singer in the household of Queen Isabel, and he continued to receive a pension from her grandson, the Emperor Charles V, until his death in 1523. He traveled to Flanders in the service of the Catholic Monarchs' daughter Juana, and was briefly music master to Charles himself. Anchieta, along with Francisco de Penalosa, his contemporary in the Aragonese chapel, and a few others, was a key figure in the rise of elaborate written polyphony in the Spain of Josquin's time. The book brings together two of the leading specialists in Spanish music of the era in order to review and revise the rich biographical material relating to Anchieta's life, and the historiographical traditions which have dominated its telling. After a biographical overview, the chapters focus on specific genres of his music, sacred and secular, with suggestions as to a possible chronology of his work based on its codicology and style, and consideration of the contexts in which it was conceived and performed. A final chapter summarizes his achievement and his influence in his own time and after his death. As the first comprehensive study of Anchieta's life and works, The Music of Juan de Anchieta is an essential addition to the history of Spanish music.

The flourishing of religious or spiritually-inspired music in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries remains largely unexplored. The engagement and tensions between modernism and tradition, and institutionalized religion and spirituality are inherent issues for many composers who have sought to invoke spirituality and Otherness through contemporary music. Contemporary Music and Spirituality provides a detailed exploration of the recent and current state of contemporary spiritual music in its religious, musical, cultural and conceptual-philosophical aspects. At the heart of the book are issues that consider the role of secularization, the claims of modernity concerning the status of art, and subjective responses such as faith and experience. The contributors provide a new critical lens through which it is possible to see the music and thought of Cage, Ligeti, Messiaen, Stockhausen as spiritual music. The book surrounds these composers with studies of and by other composers directly associated with the idea of spiritual music (Harvey, Gubaidulina, MacMillan, Part, Pott, and Tavener), and others (Adams, Birtwistle, Ton de Leeuw, Ferneyhough, Ustvolskaya, and Vivier) who have created original engagements with the idea of spirituality. Contemporary Music and Spirituality is essential reading for humanities scholars and students working in the areas of musicology, music theory, theology, religious studies, philosophy of culture, and the history of twentieth-century culture.

For students learning the principles of music theory, it can often seem as though the tradition of tonal harmony is governed by immutable rules that define which chords, tones, and intervals can be used where. Yet even within the classical canon, there are innumerable examples of composers diverging from these foundational "rules." Drawing on examples from composers including J.S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Brahms, and more, Bending the Rules of Music Theory seeks to take readers beyond the basics of music theory and help them to understand the inherent flexibility in the system of tonal music. Chapters explore the use of different rule-breaking elements in practice and why they work, introducing students to a more nuanced understanding of music theory.

What role did music play in the creation of a new aesthetics of poetry in French from the 1860s to the 1930s? How did music serve as an unassimilable 'other' against which the French symbolist poets crafted a new poetics? And why did music gradually disappear from early twentieth-century poetic discourse? These are among the questions Joseph Acquisto poses in his lively study of the ways in which Baudelaire, Mallarme, Ghil, and Royere question the nature and function of the lyric through an ever-shifting set of intertextual and cultural contexts. Rather than focusing on 'musicality' in verse, the author addresses the consequences of choosing music as a site of dialogue with poetry. Acquisto argues that memory plays an under acknowledged yet vital role in these poets' rewriting of symbolist poetics. His reading of their interactions, and his focus on both major and neglected poets, exposes the myth of a small handful of 'great authors' shaping symbolism while a host of disciples propagated the tradition. Rather, Acquisto proposes, the multiplicity of authors writing and rewriting symbolism invites a dialogic approach to the poetics of the period. Moreover, music, as theorized rather than performed or heard, serves as a privileged mobile space of poetic creation and dialogue for these poet-critics; it is through engagement with music, supposedly the purest or most abstract of the arts, that one can retrace the textual and cultural transformations accomplished by the symbolist tradition. By extension, these poets' rethinking of poetics is an occasion for present-day critics to re-examine assumptions, not only about the intersections of music and poetry and our understanding of symbolist poetics but also about the role that the aesthetic implicitly plays in the creation, preservation, or reshaping of cultural memory.

John Birchensha (c.1605-?1681) is chiefly remembered for the impression that his theories about music made on the mathematicians, natural philosophers and virtuosi of the Royal Society in the 1660s and 1670s, and for inventing a system that he claimed would enable even those without practical experience of music to learn to compose in a short time by means of 'a few easy, certain, and perfect Rules'-his most famous composition pupil being Samuel Pepys in 1662. His great aim was to publish a treatise on music in its philosophical, mathematical and practical aspects (which would have included a definitive summary of his rules of composition), entitled Syntagma musicA|. Subscriptions for this book were invited in 1672-3, and it was due to be published by March 1675; but it never appeared, and no final manuscript of it survives. Consequently knowledge about his work has hitherto remained extremely sketchy. Recent research, however, has brought to light a number of manuscripts which allow us at last to form a more complete view of Birchensha's ideas. Almost none of this material has been previously published. The new items include an autograph treatise of c.1664 ('A Compendious Discourse of the Principles of the Practicall & Mathematicall Partes of Musick') which Birchensha presented to the natural philosopher Robert Boyle, and which covers concisely much of the ground that he intended to cover in Syntagma musicA|; a detailed synopsis for Syntagma musicA| which he prepared for a meeting of the Royal Society in February 1676; and an autograph notebook (now in Brussels) containing his six rules of composition with music examples, presumably written for a pupil. Bringing all this material together in a single volume will allow scholars to see how Birchensha's rules and theories developed over a period of fifteen years, and to gain at least a flavour of the lost Syntagma musicA|.

This title was first published in 2002. Challenging the accepted orthodoxy on Nietzsche's views on art, this book seeks both to challenge and to establish a new set of concerns as far as discourses on Nietzsche's thoughts on aesthetics are concerned, whilst at the same time using such insights to illuminate more central concerns of Nietzsche scholarship, such as the will to power, the illusion/truth question, the eternal return, the death of God, tragedy, Wagner. Following the development of Nietzsche's thoughts on art from his earliest writings to his last, Pothen counters traditionally accepted interpretations by suggesting a need to recognize the deep suspicion and at times hostility that Nietzsche displays towards art and the artist throughout his text by emphasising the philosophical arguments underlying this deep suspicion, and by viewing this tendency as something deeply connected to the other areas of his thought. Readers with interests in Nietzsche studies, aesthetics, German philosophy, and the philosophy of music, will find this a particularly invaluable and distinctive contribution to Nietzsche scholarship.

Winner of the Nicholas Bessaraboff Prize Musical repertory of great importance and quality was performed on viols in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. This is reported by Thomas Mace (1676) who says that 'Your Best Provision' for playing such music is a chest of old English viols, and he names five early English viol makers than which 'there are no Better in the World'. Enlightened scholars and performers (both professional and amateur) who aim to understand and play this music require reliable historical information and need suitable viols, but so little is known about the instruments and their makers that we cannot specify appropriate instruments with much precision. Our ignorance cannot be remedied exclusively by the scrutiny or use of surviving antique viols because they are extremely rare, they are not accessible to performers and the information they embody is crucially compromised by degradation and alteration. Drawing on a wide variety of evidence including the surviving instruments, music composed for those instruments, and the documentary evidence surrounding the trade of instrument making, Fleming and Bryan draw significant conclusions about the changing nature and varieties of viol in early modern England.

In recent years, scholars and musicians have become increasingly interested in the revival of musical improvisation as it was known in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. This historically informed practice is now supplanting the late Romantic view of improvised music as a rhapsodic endeavour-a musical blossoming out of the capricious genius of the player-that dominated throughout the twentieth century. In the Renaissance and Baroque eras, composing in the mind (alla mente) had an important didactic function. For several categories of musicians, the teaching of counterpoint happened almost entirely through practice on their own instruments. This volume offers the first systematic exploration of the close relationship among improvisation, music theory, and practical musicianship from late Renaissance into the Baroque era. It is not a historical survey per se, but rather aims to re-establish the importance of such a combination as a pedagogical tool for a better understanding of the musical idioms of these periods. The authors are concerned with the transferral of historical practices to the modern classroom, discussing new ways of revitalising the study and appreciation of early music. The relevance and utility of such an improvisation-based approach also changes our understanding of the balance between theoretical and practical sources in the primary literature, as well as the concept of music theory itself. Alongside a word-centred theoretical tradition, in which rules are described in verbiage and enriched by musical examples, we are rediscovering the importance of a music-centred tradition, especially in Spain and Italy, where the music stands alone and the learner must distil the rules by learning and playing the music. Throughout its various sections, the volume explores the path of improvisation from theory to practice and back again.

Once regarded as Ireland's national bard, Thomas Moore's lasting reputation rests on the ten immensely popular collections of drawing-room songs known as the Irish Melodies, published between 1808 and 1834. Moore drew on anthologies of ancient music, breathing new life into the airs and bringing them before a global audience for the very first time. Recognizing the unique beauty of the airs as well as their symbolic significance, these qualities were often interwoven into the verses providing potent political commentary along with a new cultural perspective. At home and abroad, Moore's Melodies created a realm of influence that continued to define Irish culture for many decades to come. Notwithstanding the far-reaching appeal and success of the collections, Moore has only recently begun to receive serious attention from scholars. Una Hunt provides the first detailed study of Moore's Irish Melodies from a combined musical and literary standpoint by drawing on a practical understanding and an unrivalled performance experience of the songs. The initial two chapters contextualize Moore and his songs through a detailed examination of their sources and style while the following chapters concentrate on the collaborative work provided by the composers Sir John Stevenson and Henry Rowley Bishop. Chapters 5 and 6 reappraise musical sources and Moore's adaptation of these, supported and illustrated by the Table of Sources in the Appendix.

This book critically explores ways in which our understanding of late medieval liturgy can be enhanced through present-day enactment. It is a direct outcome of a practice-led research project, led by Professor John Harper and undertaken at Bangor University between 2010 and 2013 in partnership with Salisbury Cathedral and St Fagans National History Museum, near Cardiff. The book seeks to address the complex of ritual, devotional, musical, physical and architectural elements that constitute medieval Latin liturgy, whose interaction can be so difficult to recover other than through practice. In contrast with previous studies of reconstructed liturgies, enactment was not the exclusive end-goal of the project; rather it has created a new set of data for interpretation and further enquiry. Though based on a foundation of historical, musicological, textual, architectural and archaeological research, new methods of investigation and interpretation are explored, tested and validated throughout. There is emphasis on practice-led investigation and making; the need for imagination and creativity; and the fact that enactment participants can only be of the present day. Discussion of the processes of preparation, analysis and interpretation of the enactments is complemented by contextual studies, with particular emphasis on the provision of music. A distinctive feature of the work is that it seeks to understand the experiences of different groups within the medieval church - the clergy, their assistants, the singers, and the laity - as they participated in different kinds of rituals in both a large cathedral and a small parish church. Some of the conclusions challenge interpretations of these experiences, which have been current since the Reformation. In addition, some consideration is given to the implications of understanding past liturgy for present-day worship.

First published in 1994. This study covers a wide cross-section of topics, individuals, groups, and musical practices representing various regions and cities. The subjects discussed reflect the religious, ethnic, and social plurality of the American musical experience as well as the impact on cultural society provided by the arrival of new musical immigrants and the internal movements of musicians and musical practices. The essays are arranged principally on the basis of the historical chronology of the cultural practices and subjects discussed. Each article helps to shed additional light on cultural expressions through music in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America.

First published in 1991. At once poet, dramatist, adaptor and translator, the operatic librettist in turn expresses and mocks social convention. Deirdre O'Grady's study of the Italian operatic librettist identifies opera as a mirror of literary climates, popular taste and political aspirations. The Last Troubadours traces the history of the Italian libretto from its courtly origin in the 16th century, through the crisis of the aristocracy and the 19th-century struggle for national unity, to the birth of social realism. Fundamental elements of Italian opera - heroic valour, cunning servants, revolutionary ardour and romantic tenderness - are considered in their historical and cultural context. Also discussed are famous lyrical and musical collaborations - of Da Ponte and Mozart, Solera and Verdi, Romani and Bellini, and Boito and Verdi.

The enigmatic character of The Art of Fugue became apparent as early as in its first edition, printed more than a year after the composer's death. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who published both the first and the second editions, raised several unsolved questions regarding this opus. Anatoly P Milka presents a consistent and coherent solution to the unresolved questions about the history, structure and appearance of J.S. Bach's The Art of Fugue, opening new perspectives for further exploration of this musical masterpiece. Milka challenges the present scholarly consensus that there exist two different versions of The Art of Fugue (the Autograph and the Original Edition) and argues that Bach had considered four versions, of which only two are apparent and have been discussed so far. Only Bach's illness and death prevented him from fulfilling his plan and publishing a fourth, conclusive version of his opus.

Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300-1918 presents a range of historical case studies on the sounding worlds of the European past. The chapters in this volume explore ways of thinking about sound historically, and seek to understand how people have understood and negotiated their relationships with the sounding world in Europe from the Middle Ages through to the early twentieth century. They consider, in particular: sound and music in the later Middle Ages; the politics of sound in the early modern period; the history of the body and perception during the Ancien Regime; and the sounds of the city in the nineteenth century and sound and colonial rule at the fin de siecle. The case studies also range in geographical orientation to include considerations not only of Britain and France, the countries most considered in European historical sound studies in English-language scholarship to date, but also Bosnia-Herzegovina, British Colonial India, Germany, Italy and Portugal. Out of this diverse group of case studies emerge significant themes that recur time and again, varying according to time and place: sound, power and identity; sound as a marker of power or violence; and sound, physiology and sensory perception and technologies of sound, consumption and meaning.

Provides examples that instructors can readily apply in their teaching, enabling deeper inclusion of Black composers in the music theory curriculum on a practical level This book includes discussion of a wide variety of genres, including: jazz and popular music (including R&B, funk, and pop), string quartets, piano pieces, concertos, symphonies, and art songs Addresses Black composers and musicians working in a wide range of musical styles, including classical and popular works

'An alternately funny and moving book about the most important art form on Planet Earth. Destined to become a classic (pun intended)' Jarvis Cocker Music critic and writer Paul Morley weaves together memoir and history in a spiralling tale that establishes classical music as the most rebellious genre of all. Paul Morley had stopped being surprised by modern pop music and found himself retreating into the sounds of artists he loved when, as an emerging music journalist in the 70s, he wrote for NME. But not wishing to give in to dreary nostalgia, endlessly circling back to the bands he wrote about in the past, he went searching for something new, rare and wondrous - and found it in classical music. A soaring polemic, a grumpy reflection on modern rock, and a fan's love note, A Sound Mind rejects the idea that classical music is establishment; old; a drag. Instead, the book reveals this genre to be the most exciting and varied in music. A Sound Mind is a multi-layered memoir of Morley's shifting musical tastes, but it is also a compelling history of classical music that reveals the genre's rich and often deviant past - and, hopefully, future. Like a conductor, Morley weaves together timelines and timeframes in an orchestral narrative that declares the transformative and resilient power of classical music from Bach to Shostakovich, Brahms to Birtwistle, Mozart to Cage, travelling from eighteenth century salons to the modern age of Spotify.