The definitive survey, combining current scholarship with a vibrant narrative. Carefully informed by feedback from dozens of scholars, it remains the book that students and teachers trust to explain what's important, where it fits and why it matters. Peter Burkholder weaves a compelling story of people, their choices and the western musical tradition that emerged. From chant to hip-hop, he connects past to present to create a context for tomorrow's musicians.

These nineteen essays by a leading scholar of Italian Renaissance music provide a corpus of significant research into Italian music and music theory of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The essays further illuminate the interaction between music theory and practice and between the humanist revival of antiquity and modern ideals of expression in the decades around 1600.

Performers include: * Early music ensembles, such as Chapelle Royale, Lionheart, Sequentia, and the Tallis Scholars * Singers Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Renee Fleming, and Joan Sutherland * Cellist Yo-Yo Ma * Pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Malcolm Bilson, and Artur Rubenstein * The Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra * Conductors Pierre Boulez, John Eliot Gardiner, James Levine, and Michael Tilson Thomas * String quartets, such as the Concord String Quartet and the Tokyo String Quartet * Jazz artists Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie

The definitive survey, combining current scholarship with a vibrant narrative. Carefully informed by feedback from dozens of scholars, it remains the book that students and teachers trust to explain what's important, where it fits and why it matters. Peter Burkholder weaves a compelling story of people, their choices and the western musical tradition that emerged. From chant to hip-hop, he connects past to present to create a context for tomorrow's musicians.

The definitive survey, combining current scholarship with a vibrant narrative. Carefully informed by feedback from dozens of scholars, it remains the book that students and teachers trust to explain what's important, where it fits, and why it matters. Peter Burkholder weaves a compelling story of people, their choices, and the western musical tradition that emerged. From chant to hip-hop, he connects past to present to create a context for tomorrow's musicians.

Vincenzo Galilei, the father of the astronomer Galileo, was a guiding light of the Florentine Camerata. His Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music, published in 1581 or 1582 and now translated into English for the first time, was among the most influential music treatises of his era. Galilei is best known for his rejection of modern polyphonic music in favor of Greek monophonic song. The treatise sheds new light on his importance, both as a musician who advocated a new philosophy of music history and theory based on an objective search for the truth, and as an experimental scientist who was one of the founders of modern acoustics.

Performers include: * Early music ensembles, such as Chapelle Royale, Lionheart, Sequentia, and the Tallis Scholars * Singers Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Renee Fleming, and Joan Sutherland * Cellist Yo-Yo Ma * Pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Malcolm Bilson, and Artur Rubenstein * The Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra * Conductors Pierre Boulez, John Eliot Gardiner, James Levine, and Michael Tilson Thomas * String quartets, such as the Concord String Quartet and the Tokyo String Quartet * Jazz artists Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie

Performers include: * Early music ensembles, such as Chapelle Royale, Lionheart, Sequentia, and the Tallis Scholars * Singers Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Renee Fleming, and Joan Sutherland * Cellist Yo-Yo Ma * Pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Malcolm Bilson, and Artur Rubenstein * The Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra * Conductors Pierre Boulez, John Eliot Gardiner, James Levine, and Michael Tilson Thomas * String quartets, such as the Concord String Quartet and the Tokyo String Quartet * Jazz artists Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie

'Music and Ideas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries' shows Claude Palisca at the height of his powers, discussing the relationships between musical style and history, the influence of humanism on the revival of music theory, and competing notions of style.

First published in Rome in 1555, Nicola Vicentino's treatise was one of the most influential music theory texts of the sixteenth century. This translation by Maria Rika Maniates is the first English-language edition of Vicentino's important work. Unlike most early theorists, Vicentino did not simply summarize the practice of his time. His aim was to change how composers wrote and how musicians thought about music. His best-known contribution is the adaptation of the ancient Greek chromatic and enharmonic genera to modern polyphonic practice. But he also expressed the avant garde's position on the relation between music and the subject matter and feelings of a secular or sacred text. He challenged the view that part-writing had always to conform to the rules of counterpoint, asserting that license was permissible in order to express the feelings of a verbal text. In this he anticipated the manifestos of Vincenzo Galilei and Claudio Monteverdi. Maniates' introduction discusses Vicentino's life and work, the sources of his ideas in earlier theoretical literature, and the contemporary humanists from whom he may have learned..

This book is not meant to be a comprehensive account of Monteverdi's life and works. What it sets out to do is to study certain aspects of his music and environment which have been insufficiently stressed in most of the existing books about him and to offer fresh views about some of his more familiar works. In "The Man as seen through his Letters," Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune provide translations of some forty letters, linked by interpretive commentary, in which the composer's ideas, methods, and approach to composition and other musical matters are clearly revealed. Two chapters on "The Musical Environment" discuss Monteverdi in relation to his teachers, colleagues, and pupils. Monteverdi as thinker and musician is discussed in chapters on the Artusi-Monteverdi controversy, the prima prattica and the seconda prattica, and the madrigal guerrieri, et amorosi. Two further chapters treat Monteverdi as operatic composer, dealing with his first opera and the opera orchestra of his time. The book has a comprehensive bibliography, including a guide to the available editions of the music.

Zarlino’s Le Istitutioni harmoniche, published in 1558, is one of the most influential music treatises of all time. To his contemporaries it revealed the secrets of composition he had learned from Adrian Willaert, who brought to Italy the polyphonic art of the Netherlands. To the modern scholar Zarlino’s treatise illumines the compositional technique of the golden age of vocal polyphony. The essence of this art is contained in Part III, “The Art of Counterpoint,” which is here translated into English for the first time.

A Welsh adaptation of A History of Western Music (fourth edition), which provides a comprehensive guide to Western music to the end of the twentieth century. Accompanying the main narrative are contemporary comments, bibliographies, musical examples and black-and-white illustrations. Suitable for Key Stage 4 music pupils, and all those interested in music. (ACCAC)

This essential summation of Palisca's life work was nearly finished by his death in 2001, and it was brought to completion by Thomas J. Mathiesen.