This book is the first of two volumes offering a selection of Greek writings on music, newly translated into English and equipped with an extensive commentary. This volume contains passages from Greek poets, historians and essayists, evoking or describing aspects of the practical activities of musical performance and composition, together with excerpts from philosophers and social critics who comment on the moral, education and aesthetic dimensions of the art. Music was of fundamental importance in the culture of ancient Greece. Its nature and significance cannot now, perhaps, be fully...

This book demonstrates, in fascinating diversity, how musicians in the nineteenth century thought about and described music. The analysis of music took many forms (verbal, diagrammatic, tabular, notational, graphic), was pursued for many different purposes (educational, scholarly, theoretical, promotional) and embodied very different approaches. This, the first volume, is concerned with writing on fugue, form and questions of style in the music of Palestrina, Handel, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner and presents analyses of complete works or movements by the most significant theorists and...

This second volume of Greek Musical Writings contains important texts on harmonic and acoustic theory, illustrating the progress of these sciences from their beginnings in the sixth century BC over the subsequent thousand years. Writers represented include Philolaus, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Aristoxenus, Ptolemy, Aristides, Archytas, and Quintilianus. All the Greek texts are newly translated by the editor. Some replace inadequate existing translations; other significant portions of the book include much that is essential for an understanding of medieval and Renaissance musicology. Dr...

In this second volume of nineteenth-century music analyses, Ian Bent provides a further selection of newly translated writings of nineteenth-century music critics and theorists, including composers such as Wagner, Schumann and Berlioz, and critics such as A. B. Marx and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Where Volume I, on Fugue, Form and Style, presented nineteen analyses of a technical nature, all the writing here involves a metaphorical style of verbalised description, some pure examples, and others hybrid forms mixed with technical analysis. The music analysed is amongst the best-known in the repertoire:...

The period covered by this volume is one of the most eventful and fruitful in the history of English music.

In the years following the Act of Uniformity in 1549, musicians seemed to thrive on the challenge of the New Prayer Book.

Authenticity in Performance focuses on nine representative works from the Baroque and Classical periods, defining some of the more important questions that the performer and listener should ask.