Early English Viols: Instruments, Makers and Music
Early English Viols: Instruments, Makers and Music

Author: Michael Fleming

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-11-18

Total Pages: 475

ISBN-13: 1317147154

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Winner of the Nicholas Bessaraboff Prize Musical repertory of great importance and quality was performed on viols in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. This is reported by Thomas Mace (1676) who says that ’Your Best Provision’ for playing such music is a chest of old English viols, and he names five early English viol makers than which ’there are no Better in the World’. Enlightened scholars and performers (both professional and amateur) who aim to understand and play this music require reliable historical information and need suitable viols, but so little is known about the instruments and their makers that we cannot specify appropriate instruments with much precision. Our ignorance cannot be remedied exclusively by the scrutiny or use of surviving antique viols because they are extremely rare, they are not accessible to performers and the information they embody is crucially compromised by degradation and alteration. Drawing on a wide variety of evidence including the surviving instruments, music composed for those instruments, and the documentary evidence surrounding the trade of instrument making, Fleming and Bryan draw significant conclusions about the changing nature and varieties of viol in early modern England.

Harvard Dictionary of Music
Harvard Dictionary of Music

Author: Willi Apel

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1969

Total Pages: 968

ISBN-13: 9780674375017

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Contains nearly 1000 pages of precise and accessible information on all musical subjects.

Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century
Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

Author: Richard Taruskin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006-08-14

Total Pages: 930

ISBN-13: 0199796041

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The universally acclaimed and award-winning Oxford History of Western Music is the eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin's provocative, erudite telling of the story of Western music from its earliest days to the present. Each book in this superlative five-volume set illuminates-through a representative sampling of masterworks- the themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to a significant period in the history of Western music. This first volume in Richard Taruskin's majestic history, Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century , sweeps across centuries of musical innovation to shed light on the early forces that shaped the development of the Western classical tradition. Beginning with the invention of musical notation more than a thousand years ago, Taruskin addresses topics such as the legend of Saint Gregory and Gregorian chant, Augustine's and Boethius's thoughts on music, the liturgical dramas of Hildegard of Bingen, the growth of the music printing business, the literary revolution and the English madrigal, the influence of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and the operas of Monteverdi. Laced with brilliant observations, memorable musical analysis, and a panoramic sense of the interactions between history, culture, politics, art, literature, religion, and music, this book will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand this rich and diverse period.