Music In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries

The universally acclaimed and award-winning Oxford History of Western Music is the eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin's provocative, erudite telling of the story of Western music from its earliest days to the present. Each book in this superlative five-volume set illuminates-through a representative sampling of masterworks-the themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to a significant period in the history of Western music. Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries , the second volume Richard Taruskin's monumental history, illuminates the explosion of musical creativity that occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Examining a wealth of topics, Taruskin looks at the elegant masques and consort music of Jacobean England, the Italian concerto style of Corelli and Vivaldi, and the progression from Baroque to Rococo to romantic style. Perhaps most important, he offers a fascinating account of the giants of this period: Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Laced with brilliant observations, memorable musical analysis, and a panoramic sense of the interactions between history, culture, politics, art, literature, religion, and music, this book will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand this rich and diverse period.

Music as a Science of Mankind offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the intellectual representation of music in British eighteenth-century culture. A particularly rich field of investigation, developed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the British philosophy of the mind and of human understanding which looked at music and found in its realm a way of understanding human experience. Maria Semi sheds light on how these reflections moved towards a Science of Music: the discipline that was later to be known as 'musicology'.

Notes inegales is the historical name of the French practice, prevalent from 1690 to 1780, of performing diminution-like passages as uneven pairs of notes despite their notation in equal values. "Overdotting" (a modern term) designates the Baroque custom of rendering certain dotted rhythms longer than their notation indicates. Appropriate adoption of both practices in performance requires that the performer weigh a wide range of interrelated variables, including tempo, articulation, and national musical styles.

Music as a Science of Mankind offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the intellectual representation of music in British eighteenth-century culture. From the field of natural philosophy, involving the science of sounds and acoustics, to the realm of imagination, involving resounding music and art, the branches of modern culture that were involved in the intellectual tradition of the science of music proved to be variously appealing to men of letters. Among these, a particularly rich field of investigation was the British philosophy of the mind and of human understanding, developed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which looked at music and found in its realm a way of understanding human experience. Focussing on the world of sensation - trying to describe how the human mind could develop ideas and emotions by its means - philosophers and physicians often took their cases from art's products, be it music (sounds), painting (colours) or poetry (words as signs of sound conveying a meaning), thus looking at art from a particular point of view: that of the perceiving mind. The relationship between music and the philosophies of mind is presented here as a significant part of the construction of a Science of Man: a huge and impressive 'project' involving both the study of man's nature, to which - in David Hume's words - 'all sciences have a relation', and the creation of an ideal of what Man should be. Maria Semi sheds light on how these reflections moved towards a Science of Music: a complex and articulated vision of the discipline that was later to be known as 'musicology'; or Musikwissenschaft.

This is the most comprehensive account ever given of the theory behind the music of Baroque and Classical composers, from Bach to Beethoven. While giving preeminent theorists their due in this panoramic survey of musical thought, Joel Lester also examines the works of more than one hundred seventeenth- and eighteenth century writers.

The second edition of the “milestone” work of history that focuses on female musicians through the ages (College Music Symposium). This updated, expanded, and reorganized edition of Women and Music features even more women composers, performers, and patrons, even more musical contexts, and an expanded view of women in music outside Europe and North America. A popular university textbook, Women and Music is enlightening for scholars, a good source of programming ideas for performers, and a pleasure for other music lovers.