The idea that there was a time when men and women lived in perfect harmony with nature and with themselves, though rooted in classical antiquity, was one of the most fertile products of the Renaissance literary and artistic imagination. This book explores one specific aspect of this idea: the musical representation and stylization of the myth of Arcadia in sixteenth-century Italy. Giuseppe Gerbino outlines how Renaissance culture strove to keep this utopia alive and demonstrates how music played a fundamental role in the construction and preservation of this collective illusion. Covering a...

This book explores the fascinating life of the most documented musician of the seventeenth century. Born in 1626 into a bourgeois family in Pistoia, Italy, Atto Melani was castrated to preserve his singing voice and soon rose to both artistic and social prominence. His extant letters not only depict the musical activities of several European centers, they reveal the real-life context of music and the musician: how a singer related to patrons and colleagues, what he thought about his profession, and the role music played in his life. Whether Atto was singing, spying, having sex, composing, or...

A study into indigenous music-making in New World societies, including the Aztecs and the Incas.

Monteverdi's Unruly Women examines the composer's madrigals and music dramas for what they can tell us about the musical and cultural world of singing and the voice in early modern Italy. Monteverdi's music demanded trained, female voices to make dramatic and expressive statements. At a time when singing was not entirely acceptable for respectable women his music allowed women to use their voices to gain power. Bonnie Gordon also explores the social and musical environment in which the singers lived and worked. Using key primary source material such as singing treatises and Renaissance...

We tend to take for granted the labels we put to different forms of music. This study considers the origins and implications of the way in which we categorize music. Whereas earlier ways of classifying music were based on its different functions, for the past two hundred years we have been obsessed with creativity and musical origins, and classify music along these lines. Matthew Gelbart argues that folk music and art music became meaningful concepts only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and only in relation to each other. He examines how cultural nationalism served as...

Hugo Riemann (1849-1919) is generally acknowledged as the most important musicologist of his age. By analyzing his musical thought within the turn-of-the-century context of interest in the natural sciences, German nationhood and modern technology, this book reconstructs how Riemann's ideas not only "made sense" but advanced a belief of the tonal tradition as both natural and German. Riemann influenced the ideas of generations of music scholars because his work coincided with the institutionalization of academic musicology around the turn of the last century.

Cohen traces a history of modernism in migration through the composer Stefan Wolpe, from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College.

The idea that there was a time when men and women lived in perfect harmony with nature and with themselves, though rooted in classical antiquity, was one of the most fertile products of the Renaissance literary and artistic imagination. This book explores one specific aspect of this idea: the musical representation and stylization of the myth of Arcadia in sixteenth-century Italy. Giuseppe Gerbino outlines how Renaissance culture strove to keep this utopia alive and demonstrates how music played a fundamental role in the construction and preservation of this collective illusion. Covering a...

This book explores the fascinating life of the most documented musician of the seventeenth century. Born in 1626 into a bourgeois family in Pistoia, Italy, Atto Melani was castrated to preserve his singing voice and soon rose to both artistic and social prominence. His extant letters not only depict the musical activities of several European centers, they reveal the real-life context of music and the musician: how a singer related to patrons and colleagues, what he thought about his profession, and the role music played in his life. Whether Atto was singing, spying, having sex, composing, or...

This seminal study of Giuseppe Verdi's German-language reception provides important new perspectives on German musical culture and nationalism from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Kreuzer argues that the concept of Germany's musical supremacy, so dear to its nationalist cause, was continually challenged by the popularity of Italian opera, a genre increasingly epitomised by Verdi. The book traces the many facets of this Italian-German opposition in the context of intense historical developments from German unification in 1871 to the end of World War II and beyond. Drawing on an...