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How do you tell the key of a piece—without looking at a score? How do you know when a musical work ended before an audience applauds or a radio announcer returns on air? Was there, in fact, a ‘breakdown of tonality’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? These questions and others are the focus of David Wulstan’s Listen Again: A New History of Music. He also shows where the nuove musiche of the early Baroque era came from and what the two critical but unlinked chords in the middle of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. III signify. Previous literature in music does not properly address these questions and innumerable others. In Listen Again, Wulstan illustrates how music from Bach ...
Joseph Kerman is one of the most eminent, wide ranging, and readable of today's writers on music. Admirers of his many books - on musicology, opera, Beethoven, and Elizabethan music - will find much to interest them in this collection of essays, taken from general journals, such as the Hudson Review and the New York Review of Books, as well as more specialized publications.
Two of the most notable figures from the Middle Ages–the volatile, brilliant Abelard and the equally brilliant Heloise–became the parents of their son Astralabe before Abelard’s infamous, brutal castration. The couple spent the rest of their lives as monastics, in each other’s orbits if not in shared presence, as they became movers in the glittering monastic world of the early twelfth-century France. What happened to their strangely named Astralabe? Astralabe: The Life and Times of the Son of Heloise and Abelard rescues the “lost son” from footnotes and fiction and attempts to tell instead the story of a real man living in Europe in the twelfth century. This book assembles the references to Astralabe, provides background in the history of France and Switzerland, uncovers Abelard’s relationships with his family, with the ruling house of Brittany and more, and most importantly draws together all that is known of Astralabe.
The first substantial study of Victoria's Requiem, among the most prominent Renaissance musical works, encompassing its genesis, style, and impact.
Race and Gender in the Western Music History Survey: A Teacher’s Guide provides concrete information and approaches that will help instructors include women and people of color in the typical music history survey course and the foundational music theory classes. This book provides a reconceptualization of the principles that shape the decisions instructors should make when crafting the syllabus. It offers new perspectives on canonical composers and pieces that take into account musical, cultural, and social contexts where women and people of color are present. Secondly, it suggests new topics of study and pieces by composers whose work fits into a more inclusive narrative of music history....
This classic reference work, the best one-volume music dictionary available, has been brought completely up to date in this new edition. Combining authoritative scholarship and lucid, lively prose, the Fourth Edition of The Harvard Dictionary of Music is the essential guide for musicians, students, and everyone who appreciates music. The Harvard Dictionary of Music has long been admired for its wide range as well as its reliability. This treasure trove includes entries on all the styles and forms in Western music; comprehensive articles on the music of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Near East; descriptions of instruments enriched by historical background; and articles that reflect toda...
Is birdsong music? The most frequent answer to this question in the Middle Ages was resoundingly "no." In Sung Birds, Elizabeth Eva Leach traces postmedieval uses of birdsong within Western musical culture. She first explains why such melodious sound was not music for medieval thinkers and then goes on to consider the ontology of music, the significance of comparisons between singers and birds, and the relationship between art and nature as enacted by the musical performance of late-medieval poetry. If birdsong was not music, how should we interpret the musical depiction of birdsong in human music-making? What does it tell us about the singers, their listeners, and the moral status of secula...
This unique volume brings together wide-ranging research that could only be written by someone singularly expert in the full range of Christian worship and music from ancient to modern. These essays by Wendy Porter span eras and areas of study from the New Testament to the present and encompass an expansive view of worship, music, and liturgy. Some focus on what is known (or not) about early Christian worship, including the early creeds and hymns in the New Testament and whether music originated in Jewish or Greco-Roman contexts. Some introduce firsthand work on ancient liturgical manuscripts, such as a sixth-century manuscript by hymnwriter and preacher Romanos Melodus or a tenth-century ek...
The use of high male voices in the past has long been one of the most seriously misunderstood areas of musical scholarship and practice. In opening up this rich subject (to readers of all sorts) with refreshingly clear perspectives and plenty of new material, Simon Ravens' well-researched book goes a very long way to rectifying matters. Ravens writes damnably well, and if the story that emerges is necessarily a complex one, his treatment of it is always engagingly comprehensible.' ANDREW PARROTT Tracing the origins, influences and development of falsetto singing in Western music, Simon Ravens offers a revisionist history of high male singing from the Ancient Greeks to Michael Jackson. This h...