A Performer S Guide To Seventeenth Century Music

Revised and expanded, A Performer's Guide to Seventeenth Century Music is a comprehensive reference guide for students and professional musicians. The book contains useful material on vocal and choral music and style; instrumentation; performance practice; ornamentation, tuning, temperament; meter and tempo; basso continuo; dance; theatrical production; and much more. The volume includes new chapters on the violin, the violoncello and violone, and the trombone—as well as updated and expanded reference materials, internet resources, and other newly available material. This highly accessible handbook will prove a welcome reference for any musician or singer interested in historically informed performance.

Vocal/choral issues. The solo voice in the Renaissance / Ellen Hargis ; On singing and the vocal ensemble I / Alexander Blachly ; On singing and the vocal ensemble II / Alejandro Planchart ; Practical matters of vocal performance / Anthony Rooley -- Wind, string, and percussion instruments. Recorder ; Renaissance flute / Herbert Myers ; Capped double reeds : crumhorn--Kortholt--Schreierpfeif / Jeffery Kite-Powell ; Shawm and curtal / Ross Duffin ; Racket : rackett, Rankett (Ger.), cervelas (Fr.), cervello (It.) / Jeffery Kite-Powell ; Bagpipe / Adam Knight Gilbert ; Cornett / Douglas Kirk ; Sackbut / Stewart Carter -- Bowed instruments / Wendy Gillespie -- The violin / David Douglass -- Plucked instruments / Paul O'Dette -- The harp / Herbert Myers -- Early percussion / Benjamin Harms -- Keyboard instruments / Jack Ashworth -- Practical considerations/instrumentation. Proto-continuo / Jack Ashworth and Paul O'Dette ; Mixed ensembles / James Tyler ; Large ensembles / Jeffery Kite-Powell ; Rehearsal tips for directors / Adam Knight Gilbert ; Performance editions / Frederick Gable -- Performance practice. Tuning and temperament / Ross Duffin ; Pitch and transposition / Herbert Myers ; Ornamentation in sixteenth-century music / Bruce Dickey ; Pronunciation guides / Ross Duffin -- Aspects of theory. Eight brief rules for composing a si placet altus, ca. 1470-1510 / Adam Knight Gilbert ; Renaissance theory / Sarah Mead -- Introduction to Renaissance dance. Early Renaissance dance, 1450-1520 / Yvonne Kendall -- For the early music director. Starting from scratch / Jeffery Kite-Powell.

Clear, comprehensive and with a CD that complements the text, this book focuses on the music of the Baroque period. It will assist AS/A2 music students, degree students, and also amateur performers and their teachers.

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.

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.

Publisher description

Michael Praetorius (1571-1621) was one of the most versatile, wide-ranging, and prolific German composers of the seventeenth century. Also important as a theorist, his Syntagma Musicum, penned around 1619, was originally planned in four parts. He completed only three, with the first discussing the place of music in the church, while Volume II focused on musical instruments. Volume III deals with terminology, theoretical issues, and performance practice. More than any other source from this period, Volume III provides the most thorough coverage of performance practice issues of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It offers detailed commentary about the performance of particular pieces of music, including many of Praetorius's own, as well as those by Lassus, Gabrieli, Monteverdi, and Sch?tz. Throughout, Praetorius offers immensely practical insights on numerous topics such as the definition and classification of vocal forms, the names and characteristics of instruments, arrangement of large-scale works for multiple choirs, description of ligatures, use of proportions, time signatures, transposition, teaching the Italian manner of singing, the types of ornamentation used in Italy in the first two decades of the seventeenth century-and much more. Praetorius is the most often quoted and excerpted writer on performance practice. In this translation, musicologist and early music practitioner Jeffery T. Kite-Powell worked with notoriously difficult syntax to produce a definitive English edition of this important work. For modern scholars, this volume is the preeminent source of contemporary information on performance practice for the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. This essential resource will enable performers to recreate the music of the period in a historically informed manner.