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Singing--Instruction and study, Vocal music--17th century--Instruction and study, and Vocal music--18th century--Instruction and study

A great majority of European music written before 1750 is for voices but remains understudied and underperformed. It includes music for groups of voices and solo voices, with and without instruments, music for the church and the theater, for the court and the chamber, as well as music in different languages and with different national styles. In So You Want to Sing Early Music, Martha Elliott introduces this remarkably rich and varied repertoire within a historical context for the 21st century singer. Focusing on music from the 17th and early 18th centuries, this book offers guidance on style and ornamentation, working with vocal and instrumental colleagues, reading manuscripts and edited editions of scores. Elliot shares advice for how to handle the different kinds of early music performance situations in which singers might find themselves, as well as where to find workshops and performance opportunities. Equally helpful to the classically trained solo singer or amateur choral singer, So You Want to Sing Early Music will allow them to broaden their repertoire and build their stylistic toolbox.Additional chapters by Scott McCoy and Wendy LeBorgne address universal questions of voice science, pedagogy, and vocal health,. The So You Want to Sing series is produced in partnership with the National Association of Teachers of Singing. Like all books in the series, So You Want to Sing Early Music features online supplemental material on the NATS website. Please visit www.nats.org to access style-specific exercises, audio and video files, and additional resources.

Music--17th century and Music--18th century

The earliest surviving hautboy solo is a Symphonia by Johann Christoph Pez from the 1690s or early 1700s. This piece survives in two versions, as a Sonata for violin and a Symphonia for hautboy, and the differences between the two enable a comparison of how Pez viewed the character and technical capabilities of each instrument. The purpose of this edition is to show how Pez's Symphonia can be used as a template to find other works that might become hautboy solos (treble/bass) from the last third or so of the seventeenth century when the instrument came into use. Thus Pez points the way to a seventeenth-century practice that the author demonstrates in four contemporary pieces by writing out examples of what would have been performed at sight or from memory. Adaptations like this of J. S. Bach's keyboard works are being performed by some of today's leading lutenists. This book will make a significant addition to academic libraries and will be of interest to scholars of historical performance practice and to performers of the (baroque) hautboy, the oboe and other wind instruments. It breaks new ground in the same spirit as studies that have offered reconstructions of works with lacunae in scoring or with damaged pages.

Guitar music--17th century, Guitar music--18th century, Guitar music--18th century--History and criticism, Guitar--Performance--History, Tablature (Music)--History--To 1800, and Guitar music--17th century--History and criticism

Music--16th century--History and criticism, Music--17th century--History and criticism, and Music--Social aspects

Peter Philips (c.1560-1628) was an English organist, composer, priest and spy. He was embroiled in multifarious intersecting musical, social, religious and political networks linking him with some of the key international players in these spheres. Despite the undeniable quality of his music, Philips does not fit easily into an overarching, progressive view of music history in which developments taking place in centres judged by historians to be of importance are given precedence over developments elsewhere, which are dismissed as peripheral. These principal loci of musical development are given prominence over secondary ones because of their perceived significance in terms of later music. However, a consideration of the networks in which Philips was involved suggests that he was anything but at the periphery of the musical, cultural, religious and political life of his day. In this book, Philips's life and music serve as a touchstone for a discussion of various kinds of network in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The study of networks enriches our appreciation and understanding of musicians and the context in which they worked. The wider implication of this approach is a constructive challenge to orthodox historiographies of Western art music in the Early Modern Period.

Music--17th century--Dictionaries and Music--18th century--Dictionaries

Although it lies far back, running roughly from about 1600 to 1750, the Baroque period is far from forgotten and Baroque music is played widely today as well, exercising numerous musicians and attracting rather substantial audiences. It experienced the emergence of a new sort of music, increasingly secular and increasingly good listening, if you will, and also the start of opera. Some of the Baroque composers appear among the most popular of all time, such as Bach, Handel and Vivaldi. So yes, this is a book for researchers, but it is also a good book for anyone who enjoys this music.The Historical Dictionary of Baroque Music certainly fills a significant space in the whole sub-series on music, since it tells us much more not only about the music but also the age that generated it. This is done particularly well in an insightful introduction, with the flow of events traced by the chronology. The dictionary section fills in the missing details with over 400 entries on the most important composers and musicians, some of the musical works themselves, important places and institutions, and a smattering of technical terms. The bibliography directs us to further reading.

Music--17th century--History and criticism

In this book, Susan McClary examines the mechanisms through which seventeenth-century musicians simulated extreme affective states—desire, divine rapture, and ecstatic pleasure. She demonstrates how every major genre of the period, from opera to religious music to instrumental pieces based on dances, was part of this striving for heightened passions by performers and listeners. While she analyzes the social and historical reasons for the high value placed on expressive intensity in both secular and sacred music, and she also links desire and pleasure to the many technical innovations of the period. McClary shows how musicians—whether working within the contexts of the Reformation or Counter-Reformation, Absolutists courts or commercial enterprises in Venice—were able to manipulate known procedures to produce radically new ways of experiencing time and the Self.

Music--16th century--History and criticism, Music--17th century--History and criticism, Music--15th century--History and criticism, Performance practice (Music), Music--Interpretation (Phrasing, dynamics, etc.), and Music--500-1400--History and criticism

From Gregorian chant to Bach's Brandenburg Concerti, the music of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods is both beautiful and intriguing, expanding our horizons as it nourishes our souls. In this Very Short Introduction, Thomas Forrest Kelly provides not only a compact overview of the music itself, but also a lively look at the many attempts over the last two centuries to revive it. Kelly shows that the early-music revival has long been grounded in the idea of spontaneity, of excitement, and of recapturing experiences otherwise lost to us--either the rediscovery of little-known repertories or the recovery of lost performing styles, with the conviction that, with the right performance, the music will come to life anew. Blending musical and social history, he shows how the Early Music movement in the 1960s took on political overtones, fueled by a rebellion against received wisdom and enforced conformity. Kelly also discusses ongoing debates about authenticity, the desirability of period instruments, and the relationship of mainstream opera companies and symphony orchestras to music that they often ignore, or play in modern fashion.

Instrumental music--Austria--17th century--History and criticism and Music--17th century

Based on primary sources, many of which have never been published or examined in detail, this book examines the music of the late seventeenth-century composers, Biber, Schmeltzer and Muffat, and the compositions preserved in the extensive Moravian archives in Kromeriz. These works have never before been fully examined in the cultural and conceptual contexts of their time. Charles E. Brewer sets these composers and their music within a framework that first examines the basic Baroque concepts of instrumental style, and then provides a context for the specific works. The dances of Schmeltzer, for example, functioned both as incidental music in Viennese operas and as music for elaborate court pantomimes and balls. These same cultural practices also account for some of Biber's most programmatic music, which accompanied similar entertainments in Kromeriz and Salzburg. The many sonatas by these composers have also been misunderstood by not being placed in a context where it was normal to be entertained in church and edified in court. Many of the works discussed here remain unpublished but have, in recent years, been recorded. This book enhances our understanding and appreciation of these recordings by providing an analysis of the context in which the works were first performed.

Timpani music--17th century--Interpretation (Phrasing, dynamics, etc.), Timpani music--18th century--Interpretation (Phrasing, dynamics, etc.), Timpani--Acoustics, and Timpani--Construction

Timpani Tone and the Interpretation of Baroque and Classical Music explores the nature, production, and evolution of timpani tone and provides insights into how to interpret the music of J. S. Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart. In drawing on 31 years of experience, Steven L. Schweizer focuses on the components of timpani tone and methods for producing it. In so doing, he discusses the importance of timpani bowl type; mallets; playing style; physical gestures; choice of drums; mallet grip; legato, marcato, and staccato strokes; playing different parts of the timpano head; and psychological openness to the music in effectively shaping and coloring timpani parts. In an acclaimed chapter on interpretation, Schweizer explores how timpanists can use knowledge of the composer's style, psychology, and musical intentions; phrasing and articulation; the musical score; and a conductor's gestures to effectively and convincingly play a part with emotional dynamism and power. The greater part of the book is devoted to the interpretation of Baroque and Classical orchestral and choral music. Meticulously drawing on original sources and authoritative scores from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, Schweizer convincingly demonstrates that timpanists were capable of producing a broader range of timpani tone earlier than is normally supposed. The increase in timpani size, covered timpani mallets, and thinner timpani heads increased the quality of timpani tone; therefore, today's timpanist's need not be entirely concerned with playing with very articulate sticks. In exhaustive sections on Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart, Schweizer takes the reader on an odyssey through the interpretation of their symphonic and choral music. Relying on Baroque and Classical performance practices, timpani notation, the composer's musical style, and definitive scores, he interprets timpani parts from major works of these composers. Schweizer pays particular attention to timpani tone, articulation, phrasing, and dynamic contouring: elements necessary to effectively communicate their part to listeners.

Music--Social aspects--History, Music--17th century--History and criticism, Modernism (Music), and Music--20th century--History and criticism

Two crucial moments in the formation and disintegration of musical modernity and the musical canon occurred at the turn of the seventeenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Dr Ljubica Ilic provides a fresh and close look at these moments, exploring the ways musical compositions shift to and away from ideological structures identified with modernity. The focus is on European art music whose grand narrative, defined by tonality and teleological development, begins in the seventeenth century and ends with twentieth-century modernisms. This particular musical'language game'coincides with historical changes in the phenomenological understanding of space and selfhood. A key concept of the book concerns musical compositions that remain without proper conclusions: if the wholesome (musical) work is a manifestation of wholesome subjectivity, the pieces Ilic explores deny it, reflecting conflict of the individual with previous beliefs, with contexts, and even within the self as the basic modern condition. The musical work is, in this case, still bounded and well-defined, but fractured by the incapability or refusal to satisfactorily conclude: the implicit cut forced upon it changes the expected musical flow or - speaking in spatial terms - it influences the musical form. By using the metaphor of space, Ilic explores: how the existence of a separate self as a primary feature of Western modernity becomes negotiated through awareness of the subject's own independence and individuality; innerness as something entirely separate from its surroundings; and the collective space of social interaction. Seeing musical storytelling as a metaphoric representation of selfhood, and modernity as a historical continuum, Ilic examines the boundaries and relationships between the musical work, the subject, and modern European history.

Dance costume--England--History--17th century, Dance--England--History--17th century, and Masques with music--17th century--History and criticism

The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music studies the complex impact of movements, costumes, words, scenes, music, and special effects in English illusionistic theatre of the Renaissance. Drawing on a massive amount of documentary evidence relating to English productions as well as spectacle in France, Italy, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire, the book elucidates professional ballet, theatre management, and dramatic performance at the early Stuart court. Individual studies take a fresh look at works by Ben Jonson, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Carew, John Milton, William Davenant, and others, showing how court poets collaborated with tailors, designers, technicians, choreographers, and aristocratic as well as professional performers to create a dazzling event. Based on extensive archival research on the households of Queen Anne and Queen Henrietta Maria, special chapters highlight the artistic and financial control of Stuart queens over their masques and pastorals. Many plates and figures from German, Austrian, French, and English archives illustrate accessibly-written introductions to costume conventions, early dance styles, male and female performers, the dramatic symbolism of colours, and stage design in performance. With splendid costumes and choreographies, masques once appealed to the five senses. A tribute to their colourful brilliance, this book seeks to recover a lost dimension of performance culture in early modern England.