Seventeen studies by noted experts that demonstrate recent approaches toward the creative interpretation of primary sources regarding Renaissance and Baroque music, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Verdi, Debussy, and beyond. How do we know what notes a composer intended in a given piece? -- how those notes should be played and sung? -- the nature of musical life in Bach's Leipzig, Schubert's Vienna? -- how music related to literature and other arts and social currents in different times and places? -- what attitudes musicians and music lovers had toward the music that they heard and made? We know all this from musical manuscripts and prints, opera libretti, composers'letters, reviews in newspapers and magazines, archival data, contemporary pedagogical writings, essays on aesthetics, and much else. Some of these categories of sources are the bedrock of music history and musicology. Others havebegun to be examined only in recent years. Furthermore, musicologists -- including biographers of famous composers -- now explore these various kinds of sources in a variety of ways, some of them richly traditional and others exciting and novel. These seventeen essays, all newly written, use a wide array of source materials to probe issues pertaining to a cross section of musical works and musical life from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. The resulting, pluralistic profile of current musicology will prove welcome to anyone fascinated by the problems of reconstructing -- reimagining, sometimes -- the evanescent musical art of the past and pondering its implications for musical life today and in the future. Roberta Montemorra Marvin is a Research Fellow at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa where she is also Director of the Institute for Italian Opera Studies; Stephen A. Crist is associate professor and chair of the Music Department at Emory University.

During his lifetime, the sounds of Handel s music reached from court to theater, echoed in cathedrals, and filled crowded taverns. But the man himself known to most as the composer of Messiah is a bit of a mystery. Though he took meticulous care of his musical manuscripts and provided for their preservation in his will, very little of an intimate nature survives. In search of the private man behind the public persona, Ellen T. Harris has tracked down the letters, diaries, financial accounts, court cases, and other documents connected with the composer s closest friends. The result is a tightly woven tapestry of London life in the first half of the eighteenth century, one that weaves together vibrant descriptions of Handel s music with stories of loyalty, cunning, and betrayal. With this wholly new approach, Harris introduces us to an ambitious, shrewd, generous, brilliant, and flawed man."

Fresh and innovative takes on the dissemination of music in manuscript, print, and, now, electronic formats, revealing how the world has experienced music from the sixteenth century to the present. This collection of essays examines the diverse ways in which music and ideas about music have been disseminated in print and other media from the sixteenth century onward. Contributors look afresh at unfamiliar facets of the sixteenth-century book trade and the circulation of manuscript and printed music in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. They also analyze and critique new media forms, showing how a dizzying array of changing technologies has influenced what we hear, whom we hear, and how we hear. The repertoires considered include Western art music -- from medieval to contemporary -- as well as popular music and jazz. Assembling contributions from experts in a wide range of fields, such as musicology, music theory, music history, and jazz and popular music studies, Music in Print and Beyond: Hildegard von Bingen to The Beatles sets new standards for the discussion of music's place in Western cultural life. Contributors: Joseph Auner, Bonnie J. Blackburn, Gabriela Cruz, Bonnie Gordon, Ellen T. Harris, Lewis Lockwood, Paul S. Machlin, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, Honey Meconi, Craig A. Monson, Kate van Orden, Sousan L. Youens. Roberta Montemorra Marvin teaches at the University of Iowa and is the author of Verdi the Student -- Verdi the Teacher (Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 2010) and editor of The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Craig A. Monson is Professor of Musicology at Washington University (St Louis, Missouri) and is the author of Divas in the Convent: Nuns, Music, and Defiance in Seventeenth-Century Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

Applies the notion of musical "voice" to diverse repertoires, ranging from the operas and cantatas of Handel to the autograph albums of nineteenth-century collector Charlotte de Rothschild. The concept of musical voice has been a subject of controversy in recent decades, as the primacy of the composer's place in the creation of the work has been called into question. The essays in Word, Image, and Song: Essays onMusical Voices take the notion of musical voice as a starting point, and apply it in varying ways to diverse repertoires and music-historical circumstances, ranging from the operas and cantatas of Handel to the autograph albums of nineteenth-century collector Charlotte de Rothschild. Rather than attributing interpretive control to the composer, performer, or audience alone, these essays present a range of interpretive strategies with respect to the various voices that one might hear and understand as emerging from a musical work: the composer's voice, the performer's voice, the patron's voice, the collector's voice, and the social or receptive voice. Contributors: Bathia Churgin, Rebecca Cypess, Roger Freitas, Philip Gossett, Ellen T. Harris, Joseph Kerman, Nathan Link, Daniel R. Melamed, Giovanni Morelli, Kristina Muxfeldt, Ruth Smith, Ruth A. Solie. 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.

The ten essays in Literature and the Arts explore the intermedial plenitude of eighteenth-century English culture, honoring the memory of James Anderson Winn, whose work demonstrated how seeing that interplay of the arts and literature was essential to a full understanding of Restoration and eighteenth-century English culture. Scenery, machinery, music, dance, and texts transformed one another, both enriching and complicating generic distinctions. Artists were alive to the power of the arts to reflect and shape reality, and their audience was quick to turn to the arts as performative pleasures and critical lenses through which to understand a changing world. This collection's eminent authors discuss estate design, musicalized theater, the visual spectacle of musical performance, stage machinery and set designs, the social uses of painting and singing, drama’s reflection of a transformed military infrastructure, and the arts of memory and of laughter.

The ten essays in Literature and the Arts explore the intermedial plenitude of eighteenth-century English culture, honoring the memory of James Anderson Winn, whose work demonstrated how seeing that interplay of the arts and literature was essential to a full understanding of Restoration and eighteenth-century English culture. Scenery, machinery, music, dance, and texts transformed one another, both enriching and complicating generic distinctions. Artists were alive to the power of the arts to reflect and shape reality, and their audience was quick to turn to the arts as performative pleasures and critical lenses through which to understand a changing world. This collection's eminent authors discuss estate design, musicalized theater, the visual spectacle of musical performance, stage machinery and set designs, the social uses of painting and singing, drama’s reflection of a transformed military infrastructure, and the arts of memory and of laughter.

Handel wrote over 100 cantatas, compositions for voice and instruments that describe the joy and pain of love. In "Handel as Orpheus," the first comprehensive study of the cantatas, Ellen Harris investigates their place in Handel's life as well as their extraordinary beauty.

The cantatas were written between 1706 and 1723--from the time Handel left his home in Germany, through the years he spent in Florence and Rome, and into the early part of his London career. In this period he lived as a guest in aristocratic homes, and composed these chamber works for his patrons and hosts, primarily for private entertainments. In both Italy and England his patrons moved in circles in which same-sex desire was commonplace--a fact that is not without significance, Harris reveals, for the cantatas exhibit a clear homosexual subtext.

Addressing questions about style and form, dating, the relation of music to text, rhythmic and tonal devices, and voicing, "Handel as Orpheus" is an invaluable resource for the study and enjoyment of the cantatas, which have too long been neglected. This innovative study brings greater understanding of Handel, especially his development as a composer, and new insight into the role of sexuality in artistic expression.