This book studies how sacred and secular music was actually sung during the Middle Ages. The source of the information is the actual notation in the early manuscripts as well as statements found in approximately. 50 theoretical treatises written between the years 600-1500.

Three hundred performances of oratorios were given in the salons, churches, and oratories of Bologna in the period 1659-1730. This book relates the genesis and development of oratorio in Bologna to the city's religious, political, and cultural aspirations. It is the first critical survey of this huge and largely unknown repertory, describing in detail oratorios by composers such as Bononcini, Cazzati, Colonna, and Perti.

Son of a town trumpeter, Jacob Obrecht became one of the most prominent composers in Europe in the late fifteenth century. In Born for the Muses, Rob Wegman enlarges our picture of the social and cultural conditions that framed his world, drawing on a wealth of new archival sources and a newly discovered dated portrait that sheds light on his development as a composer. Obrecht's greatest contribution lay in the field of mass composition. In a penetrating stylistic analysis, Wegman treats each of the thirty-odd surviving masses as a historical record, tracing influences and establishing a rich...

Why are finales different from other movements? Why can we nearly always tell whether a movement comes first or last in a work with several movements? Is the special character of finales necessary as well as traditional? Michael Talbot explores these questions in depth. His wide-ranging analytical and historical survey covers instrumental (and some vocal) music from the Renaissance up to the present day.

The fundamental changes that resulted in the development of the Baroque style around the turn of the seventeenth century also had a profound effect on music theory. As musicians began to adopt new approaches to composition, authors gradually became aware that the theories on which they relied, some of which dated back to medieval times, were largely obsolete. Thus, over the course of the seventeenth century, there occurred a complete transformation in almost every aspect of theory. Nowhere was this metamorphosis clearer than in England where there was much more willingness to accept and...

The first full-length study for forty years, Arcangelo Corelli offers a much needed reassessment of the seminal composer's life and works. His current historical perspective is still largely conditioned by the opinions of Burney and Hawkins in the late 18th century who saw him as the consolidator of past trends rather than an instigator--a view fully endorsed in the two biographies of the present century. Neither of these writers was truly in a position to make such judgements if only because neither was aware of the contributions of the Roman School to which Corelli emphatically affirmed his...

Though many have written on the musical achievements of the Franco-Flemish school, this book is the first to show how the artists and composers of Bruges worked side by side to shape their acoustic and visual environment and to express their fellow citizens' spiritual needs in art. By combining the methods of modern musicology with those of local historiography, Strohm vividly recreates the music of 14th- and 15th-century Flanders in its socioeconomic context, from the pageants and minstrelsy of the court to popular entertainments and the earliest public concerts.

Jan Dismas Zelenka, the brilliant but elusive contemporary of Bach, musically served the Catholic chapel of the dazzling Dresden court during the first half of the eighteenth century. Research has uncovered biographical information, and reveals the remarkable music of a major figure of the Baroque era.

Music Criticism in Vienna is a close study of the work of some two dozen music critics in Vienna in the fifteen months from October 1896 to December 1897, a period which saw the deaths of Bruckner and Brahms and the rise of Mahler and Richard Strauss. It reconstructs in detail the climate of musical debate in a major center around the turn of the century.

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...