Music: Baroque

This book is a new edition of the most comprehensive life-and-works study of the great Baroque-era organist and composer Dieterich Buxtehude (ca. 1637-1707), released to celebrate the tercentenary of the composer's death. Originally published in 1987 and long out of print, Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck is considered by most musicologists to be the definitive biography. It also includes close description of Buxtehude's compositional output, from trio sonatas to the famed Abendmusiken: Buxtehude's yearly oratorio presentations. The young J. S. Bach traveled to Lübeck on foot in 1705 to learn as much as he could from the great master of the organ and of Lutheran church music. The revised edition contains new information on the organs that Buxtehude played in Scandinavia and Lübeck, excerpts from the newly available account books from St. Mary's in Lübeck, a discussion of newly discovered sources, including one written by J. S. Bach, an evaluation of recent scholarship on Buxtehude, and an extensive bibliography. Written for both the casual reader and the serious scholar.

Carissimi (1605-74), the first Roman composer of international stature after Palestrina, was a crucial figure in the development of the Baroque oratorio, canta, and concertato motet. In his day, Carissimi's reputation was as great as that of Monteverdi, and his music directly influenced works by many composers, including Charpentier and Handel. This book is the first to offer a critical survey of Carissimi's music and to place him into the mainstream of baroque musical life in Rome.

The first full-length study for forty years, Arcangelo Corelli offers a much needed reassessment of the seminal composer's life and works. His current historical perspective is still largely conditioned by the opinions of Burney and Hawkins in the late 18th century who saw him as the consolidator of past trends rather than an instigator--a view fully endorsed in the two biographies of the present century. Neither of these writers was truly in a position to make such judgements if only because neither was aware of the contributions of the Roman School to which Corelli emphatically affirmed his allegiance. Extensive archival research over recent years now dispels much of the anecdote and hearsay accumulated over the centuries and makes possible a more balanced evaluation of Corelli's true status in the development of the prime instrumental genres, accounting for his phenomenal success both during his lifetime and in the creation of musical canon in the decades after his death.

andel is recognised as one of the principal creative figures in Baroque music. In this Companion acknowledged experts on Handel make their expertise accessible to the interested general reader and music lover. All the genres in which Handel composed are considered including oratorio, chamber cantata, opera, and church music, as well as works for the keyboard and orchestra. The wide-ranging, specially-commissioned essays cover topics from Handel's composing methods to his treatment of the Italian language and matters of performance practice. The background to Handel's musical career is a major theme of the volume. The opening chapters deal with his musical education in Germany and the circumstances in Italy during his time there. Most of Handel's career was based in London and important topics here include contemporary concert life and theatre management, the British and Italian musicians among whom he worked, and the librettists for the English oratorios.

Recent scholarship to 1985. Arrangements of annotated entries is in topical chapters. Indexed by works, names, and authors.

Subtitled, Essays in honor of James R. Anthony. This collection covers significant aspects of Lully's life, his works, and the French tradition he influenced.
1 Introduction
2 The first opera in Paris: a study in the politics of art
3 Michel Lambert and Jean-Baptiste Lully: the stakes of a collaboration
4 Chronology and evolution of the grand motet at the court of Louis XFV evidence from the Livres du Rol' and the works of Perrin, the sous-maitres and
5 The sources of Lully's grands motets
6 Some notes on Lully's orchestra
7 The Amsterdam editions of Lully's orchestral suites
8 Parnassus revisited: the musical vantage point of Titon du Tiller
9 The residences of Monsieur de Lully: a west side story
10 The geographical spread of Lully's operas during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: new evidence from the Burets
11 How eighteenth-century Parisians heard Lully's operas: the case of Armide's fourth act
12 La Mariee: the history of a French court dance
13 A re-examination of Rameau's self-borrowings
14 A musician's view of the French baroque after the advent of Gluck: Gretry's Les trois rages de l'opera and its context
15 A bibliography of writings

This book, originally published in Italian, is a leading biographical study of the greatest composer of late Renaissance and early Baroque Italy. Monteverdi's contribution to secular, sacred and theatrical music in the period was unparalleled: his madrigals, church music and operas remain very much alive today. A large number of contemporary documents, including some 130 of his own letters, offer rich insights into the composer and his times, also illuminating the many and varied contexts for music making in the most important musical centres in Italy. Fabbri uses these documents and other sources to present a rich narrative focusing on a composer who has perhaps rightly been called the 'father of modern music'. This translation brings an indispensable text to a much broader readership, providing a vivid picture of a fascinating period in music history.

One can hardly imagine a more satisfactory book dealing with the life, works, and cultural environment of Montverdi, a composer whose genius is now properly celebrated in both print and performance. In contrast to stitched-together collections of essays written in ghastly prose full of unreadable jargon, this is the real thing. The contributors are the right ones, experts all; their writing is clear and pleasing, if occasionally arcane; the topics are well chosen; and the essays are rich in detail--the whole is the very model of how to present the best contemporary scholarship to a wide audience. Scholars will pore over these essays, differing with some conclusions (Monteverdi scholarship is alive and well!) while admiring the quality of research. Students will study the six "Intermedio" chapters, which analyze particular works. All will delight in chapters that illuminate late Renaissance/early Baroque musical life and cultures while integrating an understanding of what "culture" meant then (and now) and discussing Monteverdi's life and works. Particularly fascinating are the chapters on "spaces for music in late Renaissance Mantua," "Monteverdi in performance" (historically and recently), and "Monteverdi studies and 'new' musicologies." The volume includes a useful chronology, fine bibliography, and superb catalog of works. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers, all levels.

One of the foremost composers of the French Baroque operatic tradition, Rameau is often cited for his struggle to steer lyric tragedy away from its strict Lullian form, inspired by spoken tragedy, and toward a more expressive musical style. In this exploration of Rameau's compositional aesthetic, Charles Dill depicts a much more complicated figure: one obsessed with tradition, music theory, his own creative instincts, and the public's expectations of his music, Dill examines the ways Rameau mediated among these often competing values and how he interacted with his critics and with the public. The result is a rethinking of Rameau as a musical innovator. In his compositions, Rameau tried to highlight music's potential for dramatic meanings. But his listeners, who understood lyric tragedy to be a poetic rather than a musical genre, were generally frustrated by these attempts. In fact, some described Rameau's music as monstrous - using an image of deformity to represent the failure of reason and communication. Dill shows how Rameau answered his critics with rational, theoretical arguments about the role of music in lyric tragedy.

Vivaldi boasted that he could compose a concerto faster than a scribe could copy one. Despite his prolificacy, The Four Seasons , and the majority of his already published work had fallen into obscurity by the time of his death in poverty in 1741. Most of his music-concertos, sonatas, operas, and sacral music-has been published only recently. Very little has been written on Vivaldi for the nonspecialist, especially in English. Landon rediscovers the composer in this accessible and musically informed biography while presenting documentation of the musician's life discovered after the Baroque revival in the 1930s. This book includes illustrations of eighteenth-century Venice and several newly translated letters, thoroughly evoking the style of the time and revealing some of the more personal aspects of Vivaldi's life. "Belongs on the shelf of every serious music student."-- Kirkus "Gives a good feel for Vivaldi's life and times . . . and describes particularly well how Vivaldi has been revived."-- Booklist "Robbins Landon is marvelously entertaining, extravagantly learned."

The American Bach Society was founded in 1972 to support the study, performance, and appreciation of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach in the United States and Canada.

The ABS produces Bach Notes and Bach Perspectives, sponsors a biennial meeting and conference, and offers grants and prizes for research on Bach.

Information on membership is available here, along with a short history of the Society and information on its administration.

On this site you can also find links to other Bach organizations and to Bach festivals, as well as a small selection of interesting Bach illustrations.

Founded in 1986 by Howard Serwer, Paul Traver, and J. Merrill Knapp, The American Handel Society seeks to foster study of the life, works, and times of George Frideric Handel, and to encourage and support the performance of his music. To that end, The American Handel Society:

· Sponsors a conference every 2 years, featuring papers and panel discussions by an international gathering of scholars and performers.

· Presents the Howard Serwer Lecture, given by a distinguished scholar, at the conference.

· Nominates two members to the Editorial Board of the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe.

· Offers the J. Merrill Knapp Research Fellowship, a grant for advanced graduate students and scholars in the early stages of their careers to support work in Handel studies or related fields.

SSCM is dedicated to the study and performance of seventeenth-century music and related arts. The Society currently includes more than 250 members and over two hundred additional international subscribers to its electronic newslist SSCM-L. Members receive a semi-annual newsletter, 17th-Century Music. The Society also publishes the on-line, peer-reviewed scholarly Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music; JSCM Instrumenta, an on-line reference series; and the Web Library of Seventeenth-Century Music (WLSCM), an on-line collection of performing and study scores in scholarly editions.

Anderson (Royal Academy of Music) packs much information into these pages. His book is good on the major composers and contains many sagacious passages--on Monteverdi's role in the shift from prima to seconda prattica, on the relationship of poets and texts in general to composers and music (i.e., Metastasio's libretti to opera seria), on the aberrant development of 17th- and 18th-century English music, on Lully's opera orchestra, on the fusion of French and Italian styles in the mature German style during the late Baroque. On the other hand, the many, many "lists" and irrelevant bits of knowledge make the work very like a textbook and somewhat indigestible. Unexplained musical terms and untranslated titles prompt concern as to the intended audience. Anderson's meandering and chronologically chaotic introductory chapter and his sketches of historical contexts can be both suggestive and downright confusing. The skeleton bibliography is inconsistent in its coverage. Very much a "curate's egg" of a book, this is nevertheless recommended, with reservations, for comprehensive general, undergraduate, and preprofessional libraries.

Music and Society is a series of books, by specialists designed to present music in a broad context of socio-political, intellectual and religious life. In place of the technical and stylistic discussion that make up most histories of music, the reader will find music considered rather as a series of responses to social forces. The idea is not to explain simply what happened, but why it happened, and why it happened when and where it did.

The humanist movement, which arose during the Italian Renaissance, brought into prominence several groups of scholars who organized academies after the one founded by Plato in Athens and who met informally to discuss an array of studies devoted to universal knowledge. One of the most important of these academies to the history of music was that which met in Florence at the house of Count Giovanni Bardi during the last decades of the 16th century and which came to be known as the Florentine Camerata. Among those attracted to this group were eminent poets and musicians, and included among the latter was Vincenzo Galilei, father of the famous astronomer and author of a landmark document that set forth the ideas of the group. The Camerata sought to restore to the music of their day the power and intensity of expression associated with that of ancient Greece. The result of their discussions, inquiries, and writings was the rise of a totally new musical genre--opera. Palisca has selected eight documents written by those associated with the Camerata, and he presents these writings in their original lnaguages with literal translations on the opposing page to facilitate ease of comparison (somewhat similar to the format he used in Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought, CH, Jun '86). Palisca prefaces each document with insightful, critical commentaries. These humanistic musical writings constitute an impressive anthology, and their combined significance lies not only in their contribution to cultural history but in the fact that they helped to usher in the musical Baroque. Upper-division undergraduate and graduate collections.

Given the availability of numerous sophisticated surveys on Baroque music history, this reviewer was astonished that this tome exceeded expectations regarding scope and focus. In an effort to offer a discussion that goes beyond the standard canon of thought, Buelow (emer., Indiana Univ.) explores the works of Iberian, Eastern European, Latin American, and indeed even Caribbean composers. The book is replete with extensive score excerpts and analysis, and the chapters are subdivided into sections treating genre, composer, and technical development--an arrangement that makes this sizeable volume painless to navigate. Some of the most complex issues confronting the author are the paradigm shifts away from the knotty theoretical and philosophical concerns of the Renaissance establishment. Buelow excels in handling this, offering a chapter about this transition that even the uninitiated will be able to comprehend. His portrayal of the cross-cultural ramifications resulting from the contemporary political condition brings with it needed context for tracing musical developments as they occur across the Continent. Though the seemingly obligatory Bach and Handel chapters are somewhat overextended, this is a solid addition to the literature. ^BSumming Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. J. Rubin University of Minnesota--Duluth.

Music and Society is a series of books, by specialists designed to present music in a broad context of socio-political, intellectual and religious life. In place of the technical and stylistic discussion that make up most histories of music, the reader will find music considered rather as a series of responses to social forces. The idea is not to explain simply what happened, but why it happened, and why it happened when and where it did.

Opera has been a source of entertainment since its first appearance in the late 16th century. Marco, a respected bibliographer and librarian, identified a core literature of materials on opera in the first edition (CH, Mar'85). Though this second edition bears a ghostly resemblance, it so greatly extends the first edition that it might properly be considered an independent work. Chapters on general topics (history of the genre, opera companies, opera in various countries, recordings, criticism, etc.) provide support for the large chapter dealing with opera composers and their works (which will be the most used section). Entries are uniform in format, with tag lines indicating the works' appearance in Avant-scene opera, Cambridge Opera Handbooks, and other compendiums. This feature is most useful for finding plot precis or other low-level information. Many entries have been entirely reworked from the previous edition. Monographs, dissertations, articles, and some scores are included in the bibliography, and (among other niceties) congress and meeting papers are analyzed. This effort surpasses the first edition in content, quality, and design. Upper-division and graduate students; faculty.

Thanks to the extent, scope, and universality of his work, Bach will always be a subject for new studies. These 15 original essays are dedicated to Christoph Wolff, a leading scholar and writer in all areas of Bach studies and a teacher and friend of many of the contributors. The volume opens with two essays in a section titled "Before Bach": one essay focuses on Johann Pachelbel, the other on the Old Testament roots of the Bach family tree. Following are sections on Bach's circle and on the music itself. Of particular interest is Stauffer's essay "Music for 'Cavaliers et Dames': Bach and the Repertoire of His Collegium Musicum," which describes how a cigar-smoking audience heard Bach at Zimmermann's Coffee House and at the famous Leipzig trade fairs. Over 1,200 hours of Bach's music were performed here; perhaps 800 hours were performed in churches. Bach is not often described as a "fashionable" composer, but this balance should change that view. The final section, "After Bach," provides essays on performance practice (Mozart played by Carl Reinecke), oratorio in London in the early 19th century, and Bach's influence on Schumann's Symphony No. 2. Altogether an interesting collection. Summing Up: Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

The year 2000 has been declared a "Bach Year," marking the 250th anniversary of the great composer's death. Around the world, there will be major celebrations in honor of his astonishing body of work. This major biography of Bach, now completely revised and boasting 25% more material, is published to coincide with these events. In the new edition of this widely acclaimed study, biographical chapters alternate with commentary on the works, to demonstrate how the circumstances of Bach's life helped to shape the music he wrote at various periods. We follow Bach as he travels from Arnstadt and Muhlhausen to Weimar, Cothen, and finally Leipzig, these journeys alternating with insightful discussions of the great composer's organ and orchestral compositions. As well as presenting a rounded picture of Bach, his music, and his posthumous reputation and influence, Malcolm Boyd considers the sometimes controversial topics of "parody" and arrangement, number symbolism, and the style and meaning of Bach's late works. Recent theories on the constitution of Bach's performing forces at Leipzig are also present. The text and the appendixes (which include a chronology, personalia, bibliography, and a complete catalogue of Bach's works) have been thoroughly revised to take account of the research undertaken by Bach scholars, including the gold mine of new information recently uncovered in the former USSR. An authoritative account of the life and work of Johann Sebastian Bach, this volume will be essential reading for everyone interested in the classical composers.

Although we have heard the music of J. S. Bach in countless performances and recordings, the composer himself still comes across only as an enigmatic figure in a single familiar portrait. As we mark the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, author Christoph Wolff presents a new picture that brings to life this towering figure of the Baroque era. This engaging new biography portrays Bach as the living, breathing, and sometimes imperfect human being that he was while bringing to bear all the advances of the last half-century of Bach scholarship. Wolff demonstrates the intimate connection between the composers life and his music showing how Bach's superb inventiveness pervaded his career as musician composer performer scholar, and teacher. And throughout we see Bach in the broader context or his time its institutions, traditions and influences. With this highly readable book, Wolff sets a new standard for Bach biography.