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"A fascinating and genuinely accessible guide....Educating, enjoyable, and delightfully unscary."—Classical Music What if Bach and Mozart heard richer, more dramatic chords than we hear in music today? What sonorities and moods have we lost in playing music in "equal temperament"—the equal division of the octave into twelve notes that has become our standard tuning method? Thanks to How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony, "we may soon be able to hear for ourselves what Beethoven really meant when he called B minor 'black'" (Wall Street Journal).In this "comprehensive plea for more variety in tuning methods" (Kirkus Reviews), Ross W. Duffin presents "a serious and well-argued case" (Goldberg Magazine) that "should make any contemporary musician think differently about tuning" (Saturday Guardian). Some images in the ebook are not displayed owing to permissions issues.
English comedy from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century abounds in song lyrics, but most of the original tunes were thought to have been lost--until now. By deducing that playwrights borrowed melodies from songs they already knew, Ross W. Duffin has used the existing English repertory of songs, both popular and composed, to reconstruct hundreds of songs from more than a hundred plays and other stage entertainments. Thanks to Duffin's incredible breakthrough, these plays have been rendered performable with period music for the first time in five hundred years. Some Other Note not only brings these songs back from the dead, but tells a thrilling tale of the investigations that unraveled these centuries-old mysteries [Publisher description]
A Performer's Guide to Medieval Music is an essential compilation of essays on all aspects of medieval music performance, with 40 essays by experts on everything from repertoire, voices, and instruments to basic theory. This concise, readable guide has proven indispensable to performers and scholars of medieval music.
Eight years in the making, "Shakespeare's Songbook" is a meticulously researched collection of 160 songs--ballads and narratives, drinking songs, love songs, and rounds--that appear in, are quoted in, or alluded to in Shakespeare's plays.
Thomas Ravenscroft is best-known as a composer of rounds owing to his three published collections: Pammelia and Deuteromelia (both 1609), and Melismata (1611), in addition to his harmonizations of the Whole Book of Psalmes (1621) and his original sacred works. A theorist, composer and editor, Ravenscroft wrote two treatises on music theory: A Briefe Discourse (1614), and 'A Treatise of Practicall Musicke' (c.1607), which remains in manuscript. This is the first book to bring together both theoretical works by this important Jacobean musician and to provide critical studies and transcriptions of these treatises.
Is editing music a fallacy? It may appear so when consulting the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines editing as to prepare an edition (of a literary work or works by an earlier author), or to prepare, set in order for publication (literary material which is wholly or in part the work of others). Of course, the parentheses readily allow the musicologist to construct a broadened definition of editing, tacitly declaring music to be akin to literature; but doing so causes a number of other discomforts, for music, while certainly not inimical to words, simply cannot be equated with literature tout court. Even so, the OED mercilessly insists on the origins of the term within the realm of lite...
This classic chronicle of the longstanding challenges of tuning and temperament devotes a chapter to each principal theory, features a glossary and numerous tables, and requires only minimal background in music theory.
The oboe, including its earlier forms the shawm and the hautboy, is an instrument with a long and rich history. In this book two distinguished oboist-musicologists trace that history from its beginnings to the present time, discussing how and why the oboe evolved, what music was written for it, and which players were prominent. Geoffrey Burgess and Bruce Haynes begin by describing the oboe’s prehistory and subsequent development out of the shawm in the mid-seventeenth century. They then examine later stages of the instrument, from the classical hautboy to the transition to a keyed oboe and eventually the Conservatoire-system oboe. The authors consider the instrument’s place in Romantic a...
Few music lovers realize that the arrangement of notes on today’s pianos was once regarded as a crime against God and nature, or that such legendary thinkers as Pythagoras, Plato, da Vinci, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton and Rousseau played a role in the controversy. Indeed, from the time of the Ancient Greeks through the eras of Renaissance scientists and Enlightenment philosophers, the relationship between the notes of the musical scale was seen as a key to the very nature of the universe. In this engaging and accessible account, Stuart Isacoff leads us through the battles over that scale, placing them in the context of quarrels in the worlds of art, philosophy, religion, politics and science. The contentious adoption of the modern tuning system known as equal temperament called into question beliefs that had lasted nearly two millenia–and also made possible the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Debussy, and all who followed. Filled with original insights, fascinating anecdotes, and portraits of some of the greatest geniuses of all time, Temperament is that rare book that will delight the novice and expert alike.