Books in the Musical Performance and Reception series

Nadia Boulanger - composer, critic, impresario and the most famous composition teacher of the twentieth century - was also a performer of international repute. This book is the first to investigate Boulanger's performing career, tracing her influence on musical performance in Europe and America in the years before 1945.

The guitar is the most played instrument in the West. This book charts its success in England during the seventeenth century, a time of great political upheaval in England. It gathers a rich array of portraits, archival materials and literary works, and will interest guitar enthusiasts as well as music historians.

In this challenging 2002 study, John Butt sums up debates on the nature of historically informed musical performance, calling upon a seemingly inexhaustible fund of ideas gleaned from historical musicology, analytic philosophy, literary theory, historiography and theories of modernism and postmodernism.

The guitar was played everywhere in the age of Elizabeth I and Shakespeare, from the royal court to the tavern. This groundbreaking book uses new literary and archival material, together with depictions in contemporary art, to explore the social and musical world of the instrument among courtiers, gentlemen and apprentices.

Medieval music has become hugely popular but it is largely a modern construct. The story of the reinvention of medieval music is told here - a story of individuals, the societies in which they worked, their tastes and beliefs, all interacting to remake a lost musical world.

The widely held belief that Beethoven was a rough pianist, impatient with his instruments, is not altogether accurate: it is influenced by anecdotes dating from when deafness had begun to impair his playing. Presenting a detailed biography of Beethoven's formative years, this book reviews the composer's early career, outlining how he was influenced by teachers, theorists and instruments. Skowroneck describes the development and decline of Beethoven's pianism, and pays special attention to early pianos, their construction and their importance for Beethoven and the modern pianist. The book also includes discussions of legato and Beethoven's trills, and a complete annotated review of eyewitnesses' reports about his playing. Skowroneck presents a revised picture of Beethoven which traces his development from an impetuous young musician into a virtuoso in command of many musical resources.

Twelve of today's most distinguished scholar-performers offer essays on new and intriguing aspects of baroque keyboard music. The volume gives a balanced picture of the latest theories and discoveries, and concludes with a new arrangement for keyboard of Bach's D minor Violin Partita, published here for the first time.

This 2004 book traces the changing interpretation of troubadour and trouvere music, a repertoire of songs which have successfully maintained public interest for eight centuries, from the medieval chansonniers to contemporary rap renditions. A study of their reception therefore serves to illustrate the development of the modern concept of 'medieval music'. Important stages include sixteenth-century antiquarianism, the Enlightenment synthesis of scholarly and popular traditions and the infusion of archaeology and philology in the nineteenth century, leading to more recent theories on medieval rhythm. More often than now, writers and performers have negotiated a compromise between historical research and a more imaginative approach to envisioning the music of troubadours and trouveres. This book points not so much to a resurrection of medieval music in modern times as to a continuous tradition of interpreting these songs over eight centuries.

Since the eighteenth century Antonio Stradivari has been universally regarded as the greatest of all violin makers. Stradivari provides a fascinating biography of this legendary maker, as well as a detailed study of the tools he used. Lavishly illustrated throughout, the book includes colour photographs of 16 famous Stradivari instruments.

Focusing on the reception of Palestrina, this bold interdisciplinary study explains how and why the works of a sixteenth-century composer came to be viewed as a paradigm for modern church music. It explores the diverse ways in which later composers responded to his works and style, and expounds a provocative model for interpreting compositional historicism. In addition to presenting insights into the works of Bruckner, Mendelssohn and Liszt, the book offers fresh perspectives on the institutional, aesthetic and ideological frameworks sustaining the cultivation of choral music in this period. This publication provides an overview and analysis of the relation between the Palestrina revival and nineteenth-century composition and it demonstrates that the Palestrina revival was just as significant for nineteenth-century culture as parallel movements in the other arts, such as the Gothic revival.

Ponsford takes a fresh approach to French Baroque organ music by analysing each genre chronologically and tracing influences from Italian and French secular music. The study enhances understanding of French influence on J. S. Bach, and will appeal to all those who play, study and admire this unique repertory.

Varwig places the music of the celebrated seventeenth-century Dresden composer Heinrich Schutz in a richly detailed historical context, considering its role within major political, religious and intellectual currents in early modern Germany. The analysis is complemented by a critical examination of the composer's later reception in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German historiography.

Matthew Dirst presents a wide-ranging historical explanation of J. S. Bach's keyboard works. Closely examining the most important ideas this music has inspired, Dirst explores the significance, influence and reception of canonic works including The Well-Tempered Clavier during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The organist seated at the king of instruments with thousands of pipes rising all around him, his hands busy at the manuals and his feet patrolling the pedalboard, is a symbol of musical self-sufficiency yielding musical possibilities beyond that of any other mode of solo performance. In this book, David Yearsley presents an interpretation of the significance of the oldest and richest of European instruments, by investigating the German origins of the uniquely independent use of the feet in organ playing. Delving into a range of musical, literary and visual sources, Bach's Feet demonstrates the cultural importance of this physically demanding mode of music-making, from the blind German organists of the fifteenth century, through the central contribution of Bach's music and legacy, to the newly-pedaling organists of the British Empire and the sinister visions of Nazi propagandists.