Beethoven's quartets show a technical mastery, depth of thought, and intensity of musical inspiration unsurpassed by any other composer. This brilliant survey, by one of America's leading musical scholars, has already achieved classic status.

Throughout his distinguished career, Philip Brett wrote about the music of the Tudor period. He carried out pathbreaking work on the life and music of William Byrd (c.1540-1623), both as an editor and a historian. He also studied other composers working during the period, including John Taverner, Thomas Tallis, Orlando Gibbons, and Thomas Weelkes. Collecting these influential essays together for the first time, this volume is a tribute to Brett's agile mind and to his incomparable skill at synthesizing history and musical analysis. Byrd was a prominent court composer, but also a Catholic. Besides important instrumental music and English songs, he wrote a great deal of sacred music, some for his Protestant patrons, and some for his fellow Catholics who celebrated mass in secret. Ranging from the report of Brett's findings on the Paston manuscripts, an unpublished round-table paper that he delivered a few months before his untimely death, to his monograph-length study of Byrd's magnum opus, Gradualia, the essays collected here consider both sacred and secular music, and vocal and instrumental traditions, providing an intimate glimpse into what was unique about Byrd and his music. Elegantly written, with the particular brilliance for which Brett was known, this book opens a fascinating window onto one of the most fruitful periods of English musical history.

"Rarely does one encounter in a single volume such a masterful and graceful display of intellectual virtuosity. Kerman's skill in illuminating musical texts, interpreting meaning, and fashioning historical insights vindicates his reputation as one of the few genuinely significant figures of our time in the study of music. The authoritative range, clarity, and elegance of the essays in this book make it both indispensable and delightful."--Leon Botstein, Director, American Symphony Orchestra

"Reading through the book is a bit like being invited to dinner with a good number of old friends, some acquaintances good to get to know a bit better, and a few strangers definitely worth meeting for the first time. Above all there is the host, willing to be expansive on what many of the people in the room have meant to him in the course of his varied life. It is invidious to deliver judgment: one simply feels honored to be there."--John Deathridge, co-author of "The New Grove Wagner

"Joseph Kerman has in recent years become a kind of bellwether for musicological writing, one who has offered the discipline various kinds of programmatic challenges and then shown us how to meet them. He presents--in essay after essay--exactly the kind of music criticism he has been urging us all to write. There are so many examples of graceful, insightful, humane, even funny ways to get 'out of analysis' and into understanding musical meaning."--Ruth Solie, editor of "Musicology and Difference

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press' new open access publishing program for monographs. Fugue for J. S. Bach was a natural language; he wrote fugues in organ toccatas and voluntaries, in masses and motets, in orchestral and chamber music, and even in his sonatas for violin solo. The more intimate fugues he wrote for keyboard are among the greatest, most influential, and best-loved works in all of Western music. They have long been the foundation of the keyboard repertory, played by beginning students and world-famous virtuosi alike. In a series of elegantly written essays, eminent musicologist Joseph Kerman discusses his favorite Bach keyboard fugues - some of them among the best-known fugues and others much less familiar. Kerman skillfully, at times playfully, reveals the inner workings of these pieces, linking the form of the fugues with their many different characters and expressive qualities, and illuminating what makes them particularly beautiful, powerful, and moving. These witty, insightful pieces, addressed to musical amateurs as well as to specialists and students, are beautifully augmented by performances made specially for this volume: Karen Rosenak, piano, playing two preludes and fugues from TheWell-Tempered Clavier-C Major, book 1; and B Major, book 2 - and Davitt Moroney playing the Fughetta in C Major, BWV 952, on clavichord; the Fugue on "Jesus Christus unser Heiland," BWV 689, on organ; and the Fantasy and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 904, on harpsichord.

PRAISE FOR THE PREVIOUS EDITIONS: "If you are for opera, this book is for you."--"New York Times Book Review"The most influential recent book on opera criticism. . . in the English-speaking world"--"New Grove Dictionary of Opera"Affords the serious reader and listener an absorbing encounter with a sensitive and superbly trained intelligence in the act of thinking about music and music criticism. . . . We come away remembering the sound of Kerman's prose voice, mellifluous, elegant, eminently civilized, beneath its cool control a ground bass of urgent feeling."--"San Francisco Chronicle Book Review"The author's clarity and pungency...make for enjoyable, challenging reading. It is a collection that can tease the person who is primarily interested in opera into wanting to explore the song literature of the English Renaissance or to listen more knowledgeably to Mozart's piano concertos and Beethoven's symphonies."--William Ashbrook, "Opera Quarterly ""Kerman's musicological activity is technical without neglecting the importance of text, cultural context, meaning, expression, and value, and is likely to appeal to educated lay people.... Kerman's scholarship is careful and sensitive, and often subtle and witty. Yet this subtle scholarship has evoked strong and widespread reaction and provided significant leadership within musicology and beyond."--Renee Cox Lorraine, "Notes ""Lucid, lively.... Many aspects of his work can provide inspiration."--Oliver Neighbour, "Music and Letters"

Music examples and charts illustrate the analyses, and each essay is fully annotated by the editor. In some cases, the results of original research by the editor or by others working in the field are published here for the first time. Much of the material has never before appeared in English.

With this book, Joseph Kerman establishes the place of music study firmly in the mainstream of modern intellectual history. He treats not only the study of the history of Western art music-with which musicology is traditionally equated-but also sometimes vexed relations between music history and other fields: music theory and analysis, ethnomusicology, and music criticism. Kerman sees and applauds a change in the study of music toward a critical orientation. As examples, he presents fascinating vignettes of Bach research in the 1950s and Beethoven studies in the 1960s. He sketches the work of prominent scholars and theorists: Thurston Dart, Charles Rosen, Leonard B. Meyer, Heinrich Schenker, Milton Babbit, and many others. And he comments on such various subjects as the amazing absorption of Stephen Foster's songs into the canons of "black" music, the new intensity of Verdi research, controversies about performance on historical instruments, and the merits and demerits of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Contemplating Music is filled with wisdom and trenchant commentary. It will spark controversy among musicologists of all stripes and will give many musicians and amateurs an entirely new perspective on the world of music.