This is the first in-depth study of Italian instrumental ensemble music during the seventeenth century based on the great majority of surviving primary sources. The book provides comprehensive coverage of every major composer of Italian "trio" sonatas until Corelli, and is intended as a standard work of reference. It also attempts to undermine the mythology surrounding the development of the free sonata acquired from successive generations of historians. The musical development is placed within a broad historical perspective examining such factors as performance and function.
Lelio Colista (1629–80) is considered the foremost composer of Italian trio sonatas in Rome before Corelli. In the Papal City, where he lived for most of his life, he was an acclaimed lutenist, composer, and teacher. He was part of a closely-knit professional milieu including the most appreciated instrumentalists of his generation, such as Alessandro Stradella, Carlo Ambrogio Lonati, and Carlo Mannelli. However, Colista’s trio sonatas were not published during his lifetime. No autograph has survived, and the many manuscript sources are today scattered throughout various European libraries. Their wide dissemination bears witness to the significant circulation of Colista’s trio sonatas in the last decades of the seventeenth century, particularly in England. This volume presents a critical edition of the complete output of Colista’s trio sonatas, and offers for the first time a full reassessment of the entire manuscript transmission, including all the known sources and concordances, as well as incomplete and doubtful works.
"This dissertation compares snapshots of seventeenth-century harmonic practice in 142 instrumental works by three northern Italian composers: Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643), Giovanni Legrenzi (1626-1690), and Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713). All three composers wrote large amounts of music in trio-sonata texture, i.e., two melody instruments plus basso continuo. I explore how tonality is expressed in this iconic genre and how that expression changes over the course of the seventeenth century. I group each composer's works by tonality (according to final and signature) and use custom-built music analysis software to observe the distribution and syntactic behaviour of chords in each tonality. I compare statistical representations of chord distributions (histograms) and chord progressions (n-grams) to determine how closely tonalities resemble one another both within and between the oeuvres of the three composers, working under the assumption that some tonalities are transpositions of others. This project engages with existing research on seventeenth-century conceptions of mode and key (Allsop 1999; Barnett 1998, 2002, 2008; Bonta 1984; Dodds 1999; Lester 1977, 1989; Long 2020; Pedneault-Deslauriers 2017; Powers 1998; Stein 2002) and provides new empirical input by looking at how tonalities can be differentiated using their chord content. By examining chord progressions, I am responding to Lester, who calls for a "study of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century theories of harmonic progression" (Lester 1989). My work also engages with data-driven studies of tonality (Albrecht & Huron 2012, 2014; Quinn 2010; Quinn & White 2013; Tompkins 2017; White 2015), applying tested methodologies to new repertoire. Throughout the project, I wrestle with the notion of the incomplete key signature, which has been problematised by several theorists including Allsop (1999) and Barnett (2002, 2008). My findings corroborate theories of key in French and English music put forward by Pedneault-Deslauriers (2017) and Long (2020), respectively. I show that while signatures that we might call incomplete often do appear in bona fide major or minor tonalities (e.g., G major with an empty signature), there are still measurable differences between some incomplete keys and their "complete" forms (e.g., between G minor with one signature flat and G minor with two signature flats). Ultimately, this dissertation shows that while the number of available finals increases over the course of the seventeenth century, and the number of distinct tonalities (defined by chord content) decreases, there is still not a universal major or minor mode by the time of Corelli, whose tonalities are not perfect transpositions of one another. We observe that all three composers have different conceptions of tonality and that each of them seeks to differentiate the tonalities they use in a unique way"--
This pathbreaking study reveals Purcell's extensive use of symmetry and reversal in his much-loved trio sonatas, and shows how these hidden structural processes make his music multilayered and appealing.
Book web page: https://www.areditions.com/rr/rrb/b185.html Giovanni Maria Ruggieri (ca. 1669¿1714) lived and worked in Venice, and his Suonate da chiesa, op. 4 (Venice: Giuseppe Sala, 1697) is preserved in the Musiksammlung of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. Although Ruggieri remained an amateur musician, this set of sonatas shows that he was a highly accomplished composer. These trio sonatas comprise different styles. Faster fugal movements that accommodate passages of idiomatic instrumental writing are placed alongside more solemn slow movements, saturated with musical-rhetorical figures and, on occasion, stile antico writing. Dance style is merged with the learned style, and the musical quality is remarkable. The present edition enables musicians to explore these fine works, contributing to an understanding of the da chiesa repertoire in late-seventeenth-century Italy and aiding the rediscovery of an unjustly neglected composer. Performance parts available for purchase from the publisher.
Revised and expanded, A Performer's Guide to Seventeenth Century Music is a comprehensive reference guide for students and professional musicians. The book contains useful material on vocal and choral music and style; instrumentation; performance practice; ornamentation, tuning, temperament; meter and tempo; basso continuo; dance; theatrical production; and much more. The volume includes new chapters on the violin, the violoncello and violone, and the trombone—as well as updated and expanded reference materials, internet resources, and other newly available material. This highly accessible handbook will prove a welcome reference for any musician or singer interested in historically informed performance.
In this volume fifteen musicologists from five countries present new findings and observations concerning the production, distribution and use of music manuscripts and prints in seventeenth-century Europe. A special emphasis is laid on the Düben Collection, one of the largest music collections of seventeenth-century Europe, preserved at the Uppsala University Library. The papers in this volume were initially presented at an international conference at Uppsala University in September 2006, held on the occasion of the launching of The Düben Collection Database Catalogue on the Internet. For the first time, the entire collection had been made acessible worldwide, covering a vast number of musical and philological aspects of all items in the collection.
