This update to Barbara Hanning’s concise survey aligns it with the Eighth Edition of the Norton Anthology of Western Music and supports your students with a more robust media package. New resources include Audio Timelines, tutorials to help build music history skills, and adaptive activities to reinforce concepts.

New essays by noted authorities on music and related arts in early modern Italy, giving special attention to musical sources, poetry, performance, and visual arts. The rich cultural environment of early modern Italy inspired a vast array of musical innovations: this was the first age of the virtuoso performer, the era that witnessed the beginnings of opera, and a moment that saw the intersection and cross-fertilization of madrigals and songs of all sorts. Word, Image, and Song: Essays on Early Modern Italy presents a broad range of approaches to the study of music and related arts in that era. Topics include musical source studies, issues of performance, poetry and linguistics, influences on music from the classical tradition, and the interconnectedness of music and visual art. Their points of departure include well-known musical workssuch as Monteverdi's madrigals, librettos of seventeenth-century operas, the poetry of Giambattista Marino, and the paintings of Titian and his contemporaries. Contributors: Jennifer Williams Brown, Mauro Calcagno, Alan Curtis, Suzanne G. Cusick, Ruth I. DeFord, Dinko Fabris, Beth L. Glixon, Jonathan E. Glixon, Barbara Russano Hanning, Wendy Heller, Robert R. Holzer, Deborah Howard, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Margaret Murata, David Rosand, Susan ParkerShimp, Gary Tomlinson, Alvaro Torrente, Andrew H. Weaver. Rebecca Cypess is Assistant Professor of Music at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Beth L. Glixon is Instructor in Musicology at the University of Kentucky School of Music. Nathan Link is NEH Associate Professor of Music at Centre College.

Based on "A History of Western Music", by J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca, "Concise History of Western Music, Fourth Edition", offers authoritative coverage of the essential works and genres in Western music history. By setting musical events into a memorable historical and cultural context, "Concise History of Western Music" provides a history students will read and remember.