Why do we feel the need to perform music in a historically informed style? Is this need related to wider cultural concerns? In this challenging study, John Butt sums up recent debates on the nature of the early music movement, calling upon a seemingly inexhaustible fund of ideas gleaned from historical musicology, analytic philosophy, literary theory, historiography and theories of modernism and postmodernism. He develops the critical views of both supporters and detractors, claiming ultimately that it has more intellectual and artistic potential than its detractors may have assumed.

Scholars and performers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries attempted to revive music that could evoke the Middle Ages. They invented new sounds and new ways of understanding medieval music. This is the fascinating story of the musicians and the societies in which they worked to remake a lost musical world.

Twelve of today's most distinguished scholar-performers present essays on Baroque keyboard music. Topics include the place of the keyboard in concerted music, comparative teaching methods, studies of the repertoire of J.S. Bach and his sons, and writing in the later eighteenth century (including Mozart) and on matters of repertoire and performance practice. The volume concludes with a new arrangement for keyboard of Bach's D minor Violin Partita, published here for the first time.

Yearsley explores the cultural significance of making music with hands and feet, a mode of performance unique to the organ.

A fresh look at the career of Nadia Boulanger, among the most influential musical figures of the entire twentieth century.

A radical new approach to French Baroque organ music in which developments in musical style are coupled to performance practice.

This book reveals the most popular instrument in the world as it was in the age of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare.