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.
Those privileged enough to attend performances of masques at court in the early seventeenth century invariably commented on the sumptuousness of the m...
The legitimacy of applying historical research to musical performance has been much argued about in recent years. Those advocating historical authenticity have been attacked on philosophical, aesthetic, and even practical grounds. This book both defends the practical value of trying to determine how music sounded in the past and develops an intellectual and musical justification for relating historical research to performance. From the outset Peter Walls stresses the need for research driven by curiosity rather than by the desire to justify a particular approach. Arguing that a performance...
The legitimacy of applying historical research to musical performance has been much argued about in recent years. Those advocating historical authenti...
