Reappraising the Seicento presents new perspectives on some relatively well-researched areas of music history and adumbrates some more arcane aspects of the period, offered by fledgling scholars and early career researchers in the field of musicology. The scope of the title has the potential to warrant a tome on the subject, but it is not the intention to provide a comprehensive survey of music in the seventeenth century. Instead, five essays are presented, divided into two sections, which represent the research activities of young scholars with an interest in the seicento.In the first part...

Historians of instruments and instrumental music have long recognised that there was a period of profound change in the seventeenth century, when the consorts or families of instruments developed during the Renaissance were replaced by the new models of the Baroque period. Yet the process is still poorly understood, in part because each instrument has traditionally been considered in isolation, and changes in design have rarely been related to changes in the way instruments were used, or what they played. The essays in this book are by distinguished international authors that include...