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.
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.
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.
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.
Based on primary sources, many of which have never been published or examined in detail, this book examines the music of the late seventeenth-century composers, Biber, Schmeltzer and Muffat, and the compositions preserved in the extensive Moravian archives in Kromeriz. These works have never before been fully examined in the cultural and conceptual contexts of their time. Charles E. Brewer sets these composers and their music within a framework that first examines the basic Baroque concepts of instrumental style, and then provides a context for the specific works. The dances of Schmeltzer, for example, functioned both as incidental music in Viennese operas and as music for elaborate court pantomimes and balls. These same cultural practices also account for some of Biber's most programmatic music, which accompanied similar entertainments in Kromeriz and Salzburg. The many sonatas by these composers have also been misunderstood by not being placed in a context where it was normal to be entertained in church and edified in court. Many of the works discussed here remain unpublished but have, in recent years, been recorded. This book enhances our understanding and appreciation of these recordings by providing an analysis of the context in which the works were first performed.
A Companion to Music at the Habsburgs Courts in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, edited by Andrew H. Weaver, is the first in-depth survey of the Habsburg family’s musical patronage over a broad span of time.
This book argues that the need for music, and the ability to produce and enjoy it, is an essential element in human nature. Every society in history has produced some characteristic style of music. Music, like the other arts, tells us truths about the world through its impact on our emotional life. There is a structural correspondence between society and music. The emergence of 'modern art music' and its stylistic changes since the rise of capitalist social relations reflect the development of capitalist society since the decline of European feudalism. The leading composers of the different eras expressed in music the aspirations of the dominant or aspiring social classes. Changes in musical style not only reflect but in turn help to shape changes in society. This book analyses the stylistic changes in music from the emergence of ‘tonality’ in the late seventeenth century until the Second World War.
Musical culture in Jewish communities in early modern Italy was much more diverse than researchers originally thought. An interdisciplinary reassessment, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy evaluates the social, cultural, political, economic, and religious circumstances that shaped this community, especially in light of the need to recognize individual experiences within minority populations. Contributors draw from rich materials, topics, and approaches as they explore the inherently diverse understandings of music in daily life, the many ways that Jewish communities conceived of music, and the reception of and responses to Jewish musical culture. Highlighting the multifaceted experience of music within Jewish communities, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy sheds new light on the place of music in complex, previously misunderstood environments.
