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
This work was the first in Spain to deal specifically and completely with thorough bass accompaniment at the keyboard. This bilingual edition presents a readily legible transcription of the full Spanish text of the 1736 edition with the original pagination.
The Reader's Guide to Music is designed to provide a useful single-volume guide to the ever-increasing number of English language book-length studies in music. Each entry consists of a bibliography of some 3-20 titles and an essay in which these titles are evaluated, by an expert in the field, in light of the history of writing and scholarship on the given topic. The more than 500 entries include not just writings on major composers in music history but also the genres in which they worked (from early chant to rock and roll) and topics important to the various disciplines of music scholarship (from aesthetics to gay/lesbian musicology).
The modern flute owes its invention to the author of this 1871 musicology classic. Topics include acoustics, keying, fingering, care and repair, development of tone, exercises, much more. 50 illustrations.
The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory is the first comprehensive history of Western music theory to be published in the English language. A collaborative project by leading music theorists and historians, the volume traces the rich panorama of music-theoretical thought from the Ancient Greeks to the present day. Recognizing the variety and complexity of music theory as an historical subject, the volume has been organized within a flexible framework. Some chapters are defined chronologically within a restricted historical domain, whilst others are defined conceptually and span longer historical periods. Together the thirty-one chapters present a synthetic overview of the fascinating and complex subject that is historical music theory. Richly enhanced with illustrations, graphics, examples and cross-citations as well as being thoroughly indexed and supplemented by comprehensive bibliographies of the most important primary and secondary literature, this book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.
The Western musical tradition has produced not only music, but also countless writings about music that remain in continuous—and enormously influential—dialogue with their subject. With sweeping scope and philosophical depth, A Language of Its Own traces the past millennium of this ongoing exchange. Ruth Katz argues that the indispensible relationship between intellectual production and musical creation gave rise to the Western conception of music. This evolving and sometimes conflicted process, in turn, shaped the art form itself. As ideas entered music from the contexts in which it existed, its internal language developed in tandem with shifts in intellectual and social history. Katz explores how this infrastructure allowed music to explain itself from within, creating a self-referential and rational foundation that has begun to erode in recent years. A magisterial exploration of a frequently overlooked intersection of Western art and philosophy, A Language of Its Own restores music to its rightful place in the history of ideas.
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.
Tonal Space in the Music of Antonio Vivaldi incorporates an analytical study of Vivaldi's style into a more general exploration of harmonic and tonal organization in the music of the late Italian Baroque. The harmonic and tonal language of Vivaldi and his contemporaries, full of curious links between traditional modal thinking and what would later be considered common-practice major-minor tonality, directly reflects the historical circumstances of the shifting attitude toward the conceptualization of tonal space so crucial to Western art music. Vivaldi is examined in a completely new context, allowing both his prosaic and idiosyncratic sides to emerge clearly. This book contributes to a better understanding of Vivaldi's individual style, while illuminating wider processes of stylistic development and the diffusion of artistic ideas in the 18th century.
Choral Monuments provides extensive material about eleven epoch-making choral masterworks that span the history of Western culture. Included are: Missa Pange lingua (Josquin Desprez); Missa Papae Marcelli (G. P. da Palestrina); B Minor Mass (J. S. Bach); Messiah (G. F. Handel); The Creation (Joseph Haydn); Symphony #9 (Ludwig van Beethoven); St. Paul (Felix Mendelssohn); Ein deutsches Requiem (Johannes Brahms); Messa da Requiem (Giuseppe Verdi); Mass (Igor Stravinsky); and War Requiem (Benjamin Britten). The works are presented in separate chapters, with each chapter divided into three basic sections-history, analysis, and performance practice. Discussions of history are focused on relevancies-the genesis of the designated work in reference to the composer's total choral output, the work's place within the musical environment and social climate of its time, and essential features of the work that make it noteworthy. In addition, the compositional history addresses three other factors: the work's public reception and critical response, both at the time of its composition and in ensuing years; the history of score publications, detailing the various differences between editions; and the texts of the composition. The material regarding textual treatment, which often includes the complete texts of the works being discussed, concentrates on primary concerns of the text's usage; also included in the discussion are noteworthy aspects of texts separate from the music as well as biographical details of librettists and poets, if appropriate. The analysis section of each chapter outlines and describes musical forms and other types of compositional organization, including parody technique, mirror structures, and motto repetitions, as well as salient compositional characteristics that directly relate and contribute to the work's artistic stature. Numerous charts and musical examples illustrate the discussions. The discussion of performance practices includes primary source quotations about a wide range of topics, from performing forces, tempo, and phrasing of each work to specific issues such as tactus, text underlay, musica ficta, metric accentuation, and ornamentation.
Outstanding musical examples — chants, motets, madrigals, more — illustrating course of musical style from early Middle Ages to mid-18th century. Works by Lassus, Josquin des Prez, Schütz, Handel, Bach, many others. Notes.