Books in the Royal Musical Association Monographs series

Until relatively modern times, musicians relied upon patrons to fund their music - social savoir-faire was as important as technical proficiency when attracting wealth. This volume provides a reassessment of Salomon's uneven career as a violinist in London during the 1780s.

This study unpacks the history of Verdi's composition from its creation, performance, and publication in the 1860s through its appropriation as social and political commentary and its perception by American broadcast media as a 'weapon of art' in the mid-twentieth century.

In this important study, Margaret Seares places Johannes Mattheson's Pieces de clavecin (1714) in the context of his work as a public intellectual who encouraged German musicians and their musical public to embrace a universalism of style and expression derived from contemporary currents in music of the leading European nations.

The treatise on musica plana and musica mensurabilis written by Lambertus/Aristoteles is our main witness to thirteenth-century musical thought in the decades between the treatises of Johannes de Garlandia and Franco of Cologne.

The grotesque is one of art's most puzzling figures. In "The Miraculous Mandarin" and "Cantata Profana", Bartok engaged scenarios featuring either overtly grotesque bodies or closely related transformations and violations of the body. This book argues that Bartok's concerns with stylistic hybridity, the body, and the grotesque are inter-connected.

Regina Mingotti was the first female impresario to run London's opera house. Michael Burden offers the first considered survey of Mingotti's London years, including material on Mingotti's publication activities, and the identification of the characters in the key satirical print 'The Idol'.

Luciano Berio's Sinfonia (1968) marked a return by the composer to orchestral writing after a gap of six years. This in-depth study demonstrates the central position the work occupies in Berio's output. David Osmond-Smith discusses the way in which Berio used the Bororo myth described in Levi-Strauss's Le cru et le cuit as a framework for Sinfonia. This is one of many influences in the work, which also include Joyce's 'Sirens' chapter from Ulysses, Beckett's The Unnameable and the scherzo from Mahler's 2nd Symphony. The listener who takes refuge in the score of Sinfonia, argues Osmond-Smith, finds there a maze of allusions to things beyond the score. It is some of those allusions that this book seeks to illuminate.

Examining one of the seventeenth-century 'treasures' of the Bibliotheque Nationale (Vma ms res 571), this title reveals that the reign of Louis XIII witnessed a flowering of musical activity and the development of musical techniques normally associated with the grand motet of Louis XIV.

"Manuscript Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magliabechiana XIX, 164-167" ("FlorBN Magl. 164-7") has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention. This monograph provides a bibliographical and codicological report on "FlorBN Magl. 164-7".

Provides an investigation of continuo realization styles appropriate to Restoration sacred music. The author undertakes detailed analysis of a group of organ books closely associated with the major Restoration composers Purcell, Blow and Humfrey, and the London institutions where they spent their professional lives.

'Repetition in Music' comprises a series of music-theoretical essays which, informed by the thinking of cognitive science, examine the place of repetition in perceived musical structure and in theories of music and music analysis.

This book takes its departure from an experiment presented by Vincenzo Galilei in the Florentine Camerata in about 1580. This first demonstration of the stile recitativo is known from a single later source, a letter written in 1634 by Pietro dei Bardi. This report has remained a curiosity in the history of music.

L'incoronazione di Poppea is the most compelling of all early Italian operas and this has, in part, been responsible for the way in which it has become separated from its social and historical context. In this book, Iain Fenlon and Peter Miller show how an understanding of contemporary Venetian intellectual currents and preoccupations provides a key to the structure of the opera's libretto, the progress of the action and the points of emphasis in both the music and the text.

In 1946 Schoenberg wrote of Sibelius and Shostakovich, ''I feel they have the breath of symphonists.'' This book poses the question of what exactly that ''breath'' means in the context of Shostakovich''s 10th Symphony (1953). Written shortly after Stalin''s death, the work marks a turning point in the composer''s output and in the history of Russian music, heralding the possibility of a new creative direction for Soviet artists. David Fanning''s close analysis of the 10th sheds light on issues associated with the genre of the twentieth-century epic symphony, issues of structure and expression, unity and contrast. The book reveals how the work displays some of Shostakovich''s most effective strategies for confronting these issues.