Few now remember that the guitar was popular in England during the age of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare, and yet it was played everywhere from the royal court to the common tavern. This groundbreaking book, the first entirely devoted to the renaissance guitar in England, deploys new literary and archival material, together with depictions in contemporary art, to explore the social and musical world of the four-course guitar among courtiers, government servants and gentlemen. Christopher Page reconstructs the trade in imported guitars coming to the wharves of London, and pieces together the printed tutor for the instrument (probably of 1569) which ranks as the only method book for the guitar to survive from the sixteenth century. Two chapters discuss the remains of music for the instrument in tablature, both the instrumental repertoire and the traditions of accompanied song, which must often be assembled from scattered fragments of information.
This book explores the representation of music in early modern Spanish literature and reveals how music was understood within the framework of the Harmony of the Spheres, emanating from cosmic harmony as directed by the creator. The Harmony of Spheres was not ideologically neutral but rather tied to the earthly power structures of the Church, Crown, and nobility. Music could be "true," taking the listener closer to the divine, or "false," leading the listener astray. As such, music was increasingly seen as a potent weapon to be wielded in service of earthly centers of power, which can be observed in works such as vihuela songbooks, the colonial chronicle of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and in the palace theater of Pedro Calderón de la Barca. While music could be a powerful metaphor mapping onto ideological currents of imperial Spain, this volume shows that it also became a contested site where diverse stakeholders challenged the Harmonic Spheres of Influence. Music and Power in Early Modern Spain is a useful tool for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in musicology, music history, Spanish literature, cultural studies, and transatlantic studies in the early modern period.
Some thirty-two experts from fifteen countries join three of the world's leading authorities on the design, manufacture, performance and history of brass musical instruments in this first major encyclopedia on the subject. It includes over one hundred illustrations, and gives attention to every brass instrument which has been regularly used, with information about the way they are played, the uses to which they have been put, and the importance they have had in classical music, sacred rituals, popular music, jazz, brass bands and the bands of the military. There are specialist entries covering every inhabited region of the globe and essays on the methods that experts have used to study and understand brass instruments. The encyclopedia spans the entire period from antiquity to modern times, with new and unfamiliar material that takes advantage of the latest research. From Abblasen to Zorsi Trombetta da Modon, this is the definitive guide for students, academics, musicians and music lovers.
The name "mandolin" was used to refer to two quite different instruments: the gut-stringed mandolino, played with the fingers, and the later metal-stringed Neapolitan mandoline, which was played with a plectrum. This is the first book devoted exclusively to these two early instruments about which information in reference books is scant and often erroneous. The authors uncover their rich and varied musical history, examining contemporary playing techniques and revealing the full extent of the instruments' individual repertories, which include works by Vivaldi, Sammartini, Stamitz, and Beethoven. The book's ultimate aim is to help today's players to produce artistically satisfying performances through an understanding of the nature and historical playing style of these unjustly neglected instruments.
This book unfolds the manifold, complex and intertwined relations between Fuzzy Logic and music in a first comprehensive overview on this topic: systematically as an outline, as completely as possible, in the aspects of Fuzzy Logic in this relation, and especially in music as a process with three main phases, five anthropological layers, and thirteen forms of existence of the art work (Classics, Jazz, Pop, Folklore). Being concerned with the ontological, gnoseological, psychological, and (music-) aesthetical status and the relative importance of different phenomena of relationship between music and Fuzzy Logic, the explication follows the four main principles (with five phenotypes) of Fuzzy Logic with respect to music: similarity, sharpening 1 as filtering, sharpening 2 as crystallization, blurring, and variation. The book reports on years of author’s research on topics that have been only little explored so far in the area of Music and Fuzzy Logic. It merges concepts of music analysis with fuzzy logical modes of thinking, in a unique way that is expected to attract both specialists of music and specialists of Fuzzy Logic, and also non-specialists in both fields. The book introduces the concept of dialectic between sharpening and – conscious – “blurring”. In turn, some important aspects of this dialectic are discussed, placing them in an historical dimension, and ending in the postulation of a 'musical turn' in the sciences, with some important reflections concerning a “Philosophy of Fuzzy Logic”. Moreover, a production-oriented thinking is borrowed from fuzzy logic to musicology in this book, opening new perspectives in music, and possibly also in other artistic fields.
Following on from James Tyler's The Early Guitar: A History and Handbook(OUP 1980) tthis collaboration with Paul Sparks (their previous book for OUP, The Early Mandolin, appeared in 1989), presents new ideas and research on the history and development of the guitar and its music from the Renaissance to the dawn of the Classical era. Tyler's systematic study of the two main guitar types found between about 1550 and 1750 focuses principally on what the sources of the music (published and manuscript) and the writings of contemporary theorists reveal about the nature of the instruments and their roles in the music making of the period. The annotated lists of primary sources, previously published in The Early Guitar but now revised and expanded, constitute the most comprehensive bibliography of Baroque guitar music to date. His appendices of performance practice information should also prove indispensable to performers and scholars alike. Paul Sparks also breaks new ground, offering an extensive study of a period in the guitar's history—notably c.1759-c.1800—which the standard histories usually dismiss in a few short paragraphs. Far from being a dormant instrument at this time, the guitar is shown to have been central to music-making in France, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and South America. Sparks provides a wealth of information about players, composers, instruments, and surviving compositions from this neglected but important period, and he examines how the five-course guitar gradually gave way to the six-string instrument, a process that occurred in very different ways (and at different times) in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Britain.