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.

Most scholars since World War Two have assumed that composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847) maintained a strong attachment to Judaism throughout his lifetime. As these commentators have rightly noted, Mendelssohn was born Jewish and did not convert to Protestantism until age seven, his grandfather was the famous Jewish reformer and philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and his music was banned by the Nazis, who clearly viewed him as a Jew.
Such facts tell only part of the story, however. Through a mix of cultural analysis, biographical study, and a close examination of the libretto drafts of Mendelssohn's sacred works, The Price of Assimilation provides dramatic new answers to the so-called "Mendelssohn Jewish question."
Sposato demonstrates how Mendelssohn's father, Abraham, worked to distance the family from its Jewish past, and how Mendelssohn's reputation as a composer of Christian sacred music was threatened by the reverence with which German Jews viewed his family name. In order to prove the sincerity of his Christian faith to both his father and his audiences, Mendelssohn aligned his early sacred works with a nineteenth-century anti-Semitic musical tradition, and did so more fervently than even his Christian collaborators required. With the death of Mendelssohn's father and the near simultaneous establishment of the composer's career in Leipzig in 1835, however, Mendelssohn's fear of his background began to dissipate, and he began to explore ways in which he could prove the sincerity of his faith without having to publicly disparage his Jewish heritage.

The first full-length volume on the life work of one of the most well-known and prolific masters of our time, "William Thomas McKinley: A Bio-Bibliography" provides both musicologists and performers with a guide toward further exploration of the composer and his music. Included within are a complete biography on McKinley, the man and performer; a discography of both McKinley's compositions and his performances; and an in-depth catalog of his works. Each entry of the catalog contains a complete manuscript description, a detailed listing of any sketches or drafts which exist, a piece-specific bibliography, a complete performance history, and editorial notes. Also included are the composer's own writings about his works in the form of his program notes. Program notes by other authors are included as well, as they are the product of interviews with the composer.

The book has been organized with easy access and a larger audience of performers, musicologists, and other interested parties firmly in mind. The works numbering system has been completely restructured from previous bio-bibliographies in order to provide performers with quicker access to works for their particular instrument or group of instruments. Works are cross-listed in several ways and the book is thoroughly indexed, making for easy information access.