The Keyboard Sonatas Of Domenico Scarlatti And Eighteenth Century Musical Style

W. Dean Sutcliffe investigates one of the greatest yet least understood repertories of Western keyboard music: the 555 keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. Scarlatti occupies a position of solitary splendour in musical history. The sources of his style are often obscure and his immediate influence is difficult to discern. Further, the lack of hard documentary evidence has hindered musicological activity. Dr Sutcliffe offers not just a thorough reconsideration of the historical factors that have contributed to Scarlatti's position, but also sustained engagement with the music, offering both individual readings and broader commentary of an unprecedented kind. A principal task of this book is to remove the composer from his critical ghetto (however honourable) and redefine his image. In so doing it will reflect on the historiographical difficulties involved in understanding eighteenth-century musical style.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This work proposes a solution to what is often considered the central problem facing Scarlatti scholarship, determining the chronological order of his keyboard sonatas. In the data-poor arena of Scarlatti research, this work, avoiding a primarily musicological or organological approach, analyzes large-scale patterns of musical characteristics over all (or parts) of a sonata sequence founded primarily on the Parma manuscript. As a result of an extensive application of this analytic approach to the sequence, this work notes that many sequence patterns seem to be chronologically structured, that none seem anti-chronological, and that a few mirror historical changes in the music of Scarlatti's time. These phenomena and other observations delimit something like a general history of Scarlatti's musical development enriched further by a variety of localized events. Among some 26 patterns observed in the sequence are a systematic rise in Scarlatti's use of the major mode, stepped increases in sonata compass that seem to accord with the sequential availability of larger keyboards, and both an increase in the rate at which the sonatas were combined into sets of two or three works and the use by Scarlatti of progressively complex techniques for doing so. This work also sketches a methodological background for the chronological proposal, including a discussion of why chronological order seems a superior interpretation of the sequence compared to the thought that it may have been reorganized, whether at random or by specific criteria. This study also discusses such subjects as the probable location of the 30 essercizi within the sonata sequence, the likely mis-location of several other sonatas, implications of chronological order from organology, a broadly dated window for the latter part of the sequence, the relationship between conservative and radical elements in Scarlatti's compositions, a late-sequence change in his approach to writing slow sonatas, and the interplay of structural integration and musical diversity in the later sonatas. It presents a new catalog of the sonatas that, while substantially congruent with Kirkpatrick's, proposes modifications to his ordering of the first hundred sonatas as well to a few other but smaller regions of the sequence.

“Badura-Skoda addresses the place of the piano in the eighteenth century from the perspective of a scholar and performer” (Eighteenth-Century Music). In the late seventeenth century, Italian musician and inventor Bartolomeo Cristofori developed a new musical instrument—his cembalo che fa il piano e forte, which allowed keyboard players flexible dynamic gradation. This innovation, which came to be known as the hammer-harpsichord or fortepiano grand, was slow to catch on in musical circles. However, as renowned piano historian Eva Badura-Skoda demonstrates, the instrument inspired new keyboard techniques and performance practices and was eagerly adopted by virtuosos of the age, including Scarlatti, J. S. Bach, Clementi, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Presenting a rich array of archival evidence, Badura-Skoda traces the construction and use of the fortepiano grand across the musical cultures of eighteenth-century Europe, providing a valuable resource for music historians, organologists, and performers. “Badura-Skoda has written a remarkable volume, the result of a lifetime of scholarly research and investigation. . . . Essential.” —Choice

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Interprets an eighteenth-century musical repertoire in sociable terms, both technically (specific musical patterns) and affectively (predominant emotional registers of the music).