A study of the music and ritual at Saint-Denis from the sixth to the sixteenth century, this book is based on an examination of the liturgical books and archival sources relating to the abbey, in particular the surviving service-books, which tell us much about the history of the music and of the Divine Office at Saint-Denis. Robertson also looks at the tropes and sequences proper to the office for Saint Denis, provides information on the performance practices, instruments, musicians, and liturgists from the abbey, and offers an account of the history of the liturgy from the Council of Torus...

Salamone Rossi (c.1570-c.1627) occupies a unique place in Renaissance music culture: he was the earliest outstanding Jewish composer to work in the European art music tradition. Working for the Gonzaga dukes in Mantua, yet remaining faithful to his own religious community, Rossi has a biography fraught with difficult and often exciting questions of socio-cultural order. How Rossi solved, or appears to have solved, the problem of conflicting interests is a subject worthy of inquiry, not only because we want to know more about Rossi, but also because Rossi can stand as a paradigm for other...

Those privileged enough to attend performances of masques at court in the early seventeenth century invariably commented on the sumptuousness of the music. Yet our view of the masque has been dominated by the texts, and indeed, modern scholarship has tended to treat the masque first and foremost as a literary genre. This book is the first complete study of the multi-faceted view of its subject, piecing together a picture of what the music was actually like from musical scores, documentary evidence, and the dramatic texts.

The first study of Pfitzner's output in English, this book sets his music in the context of his cultural opinions, which though conceived as reflections on music, have acquired a more political status to which the history of Pfitzner's times has contributed. Williamson offers a revaluation of his music, partly in order to reveal the innate value of his stage works, chamber music, and songs, and also to illustrate the historical importance of his ideas, which reflect a German conservative tradition which was taken over and nearly destroyed by the Third Reich.

This book surveys North German church music from the period of the best-known of J.S. Bach's immediate German predecessors, Dietrich Buxtehude (c.1637-1707). Webber places particular emphasis on composers whose work has suffered unjust neglect, and on the influence of contemporary Italian church music. As well as providing a detailed study of the music itself, the book also examines its religious and social background and aspects of performance practice.

In the fourteenth century composers and theorists invented mensuration and proportion signs that allowed them increased flexibility and precision in notating a wide range of rhythmic and metric relationships. The origin and interpretation of these signs is one of the least understood and most complex issues in music history. This study represents the first attempt to see the origin of musical mensuration and proportion signs in the context of other measuring systems of the fourteenth century. Berger analyzes the exact meaning of every mensuration and proportion sign in music and theory from...

Agostino Agazzari (c. 1580-c.1642) has long been recognized as one of the most prominent theorists of the early Baroque. The enduring fame of his 1607 treatise on the basso continuo has, however, overshadowed his equally significant contributions as a composer. And for all his renown, relatively little has been written about his professional career in Siena. This book not only provides the first comprehensive study of his life and sacred works, it also opens a window on musical culture in Siena during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Through the use of archival materials,...

This is the first comprehensive survey of seventeenth-century Spanish theatrical music to be written, and the first book-length study devoted to the music of the Spanish baroque in English. While particular aspects of the field have been explored before, no previous single study has succeeded in defining the place and function of music in the Spanish theatre of the Golden Age, and the nature of the extant repertory. This book explains the various musical-theatrical genres that flourished in seventeenth-century Spain, answers essential questions about their nature and development as court and...

Beethoven composed far more folksong settings than any other type of composition. Yet Beethoven's settings, commissioned by George Thomson of Edinburgh, have been neglected by performers and scholars alike, and nearly all accounts of them are both superficial and startlingly inaccurate. This book is based on a very elaborate study of a wide range of sources, and dispels the many myths that have been circulating about this music. Every one of the 179 settings is dated to within a few weeks and an account is given of the souces of the melodies and texts, the difficulties of sending the music...

From the early eighteenth-century until the present day, opera seria as practiced by Handel and his contemporaries has been the subject of satire and even derision for its dramatic artifice and virtuosic vocal displays. Close examination of Handel's autograph manuscripts, the libretti upon which they were based, and other contemporary documents reveal the extent to which Handel was influenced by his singers and their abilities in creating his commercially successful and dramatically effective operas. Drawing on ideas and evidence from these sources, this study demonstrates the fact that...