DIVThis legendary work presents a comprehensive survey that covers every issue of significance to today's performers, with numerous musical examples, authoritative citations, and scholarly interpretations and syntheses. /div
A solid grounding in musical techniques of the 17th and 18th centuries is essential to a complete understanding of Baroque music. As scholar Denis Stevens says in his introduction to this work, "Full enjoyment will come only when the soloist learns the gentle art of tasteful embellishment of a melodic line, and when continuo players learn that their role is perhaps the most important in the entire ensemble." Arnold's legendary work is a comprehensive survey of its topic, covering every issue of significance to today's performer. The text is fully amplified with numerous musical examples, authoritative citations, scholarly interpretations and syntheses, and the author's own conclusions. An inexhaustible collection of source material for the musicologist as well as an indispensable companion for conductor, editor, or performer. Volume 2 of a 2-volume set.
Johann David Heinichen (1683-1729) was a distinguished composer, a contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach, and Cappellmeister at the court of August I in Dresden. His tratise, Der General-Bass in der Composition, is one of the most comprehensive sources for the late Baroque practice of figured-bass, or thorough-bass, accompaniment. It is a fund of information about many complex problems confronting musicians in the performance and interpretation of Baroque music, including meters, embellishments, dissonance, particular complications for recitative, and use of the figured bass. With a judicious combination of translation, interpretation, and commentary George J. Buelow makes Heinichen's famous treatise accessible for contemporary scholars and performers. Buelow provides translations of key sections of the treatise, explains its historical significance, clarifies Heinichen's obscurities, and relates the treatise to other musical theories and practices of the Baroque, including those of Gasparini, Mattheson, and the Bachs. Buelow, one of the world's premier experts on Baroque music, is a professor of musicology at Indiana University.
This book is an edition, with commentary, of Handel's exercises for continuo playing, which he wrote for the daughters of George II. The exercises, which until now have not been readily available, are supplemented by clear and concise commentary. Remaining faithful to his source, Ledbetter, who lectures in keyboard studies, has prepared an edition that will prove invaluable to students and performers of the music of Handel and his contemporaries.
IN WRITING a book for which there is no precedent (the tistic achievements. But, alas, there has not been such last textbooks about accompanying were written during a genius in the realm of music during the twentieth the age of thorough bass or shortly thereafter - the century. The creative musical genius of our space age eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - and dealt has yet to be discovered, if he has been born. exclusively with the problems timely then) one must Our time has perfected technique to such a degree make one's own rules and set one's own standards. This that it could not help but create perfect technician freedom makes the task somewhat easier, if, on the one artists. Our leading creative artists master technique hand, one looks to the past: there is no generally ap to the point of being able to shift from one style to proved model to be followed and to be compared with another without difficulty. Take Stravinsky and Picasso, one's work; but, on the other hand, the task is hard be for instance: they have gone back and forth through as cause one's responsibility to present and future genera many periods of style as they wished. Only with a stu tions of accompanists and coaches is great.
At the height of the Enlightenment, four conservatories in Naples stood at the center of European composition. Maestros taught their students to compose with unprecedented swiftness and elegance using the partimento, an instructional tool derived from the basso continuo that encouraged improvisation as the path to musical fluency. Although the practice vanished in the early nineteenth century, its legacy lived on in the music of the next generation. In The Art of Partimento, performer and music-historian Giorgio Sanguinetti chronicles the history of this long-forgotten Neapolitan art. Sanguinetti has painstakingly reconstructed the oral tradition that accompanied these partimento manuscripts, now scattered throughout Europe. Beginning with the origins of the partimento in the circles of Corelli, Pasquini, and Alessandro Scarlatti in Rome and tracing it through the peak of the tradition in Naples, The Art of Partimento gives a glimpse into the daily life and work of an eighteenth century composer. The Art of the Partimento is also a complete practical handbook to reviving the tradition today. Step by step, Sanguinetti guides the aspiring composer through elementary realization to more advanced exercises in diminution, imitation, and motivic coherence. Based on the teachings of the original masters, Sanguinetti challenges the reader to become a part of history, providing a variety of original partimenti in a range of genres, forms, styles, and difficulty levels along the way and allowing the student to learn the art of the partimento for themselves at their own pace. As both history and practical guide, The Art of Partimento presents a new and innovative way of thinking about music theory. Sanguinetti's unique approach unites musicology and music theory with performance, which allows for a richer and deeper understanding than any one method alone, and offers students and scholars of composition and music theory the opportunity not only to understand the life of this fascinating tradition, but to participate in it as well.