The University of North Carolina Press is proud to announce Howard Smither’s ground-breaking four-volume A History of the Oratorio, are now available in one convenient Omnibus E-Book edition. Published as UNC Press Enduring Editions, these volumes bring Smither’s landmark scholarship to a new generation of readers and scholars.Written by an eminent scholar in a style that represents American musicological writing at its communicative best, A History of the Oratorio

The Oratorio in the classical Era is the third volume of Howard Smither’s monumental History of the Oratorio, continuing his synthesis and critical appraisal of the oratorio. His comprehensive study surpasses in scope and treatment all previous works on the subject. A fourth and final volume, on the oratorio in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is forthcoming.In this volume Smither discusses the Italian oratorio from the 1720s to the early nineteenth century...

With this volume, Howard Smither completes his monumental History of the Oratorio. Volumes 1 and 2, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1977, treated the oratorio in the Baroque era, while Volume 3, published in 1987, explored the genre in the Classical era. Here, Smither surveys the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century oratorio, stressing the main geographic areas of oratorio composition and performance: Germany, Britain, America, and France.Con...

Written by an eminent scholar in a style that represents American musicological writing at its communicative best, A History of the Oratorio offers a synthesis and critical appraisal so exhaustive and reliable that the serious student of the oratorio will be compelled to look to these volumes as an indispensable source. No work on the history of the oratorio has yet appeared in the English language that is comparable in scope and treatment with Howard Smither’s comprehensive four–...

Howard Smither has written the first definitive work on the history of the oratorio since Arnold Schering published his Geschichte des Oratoriums in 1911. This volume is the first of a four-volume comprehensive study that offers a new synthesis of what is known to date about the oratorio.Volume 1, divided into three parts, opens with the examination of the medieval, Renaissance, and early Baroque antecedents and origins of the oratorio, with emphasis on Rome and Philip Ner...

18 November, 1741. George Frideric Handel, one of the world's greatest composers, arrives in Dublin – the second city of the Empire – to prepare his masterpiece, Messiah, for its maiden performance the following spring …In Hallelujah, Jonathan Bardon, one of Ireland's leading historians, explores the remarkable circumstances surrounding the first performance of Handel's now iconic oratorio in Dublin, providing a panoramic view of a city in flux – at once struggling to contain the chaos unl...

In his more than 200 cantatas Bach interprets the human condition through musical assertion and examination of the relevance of the gospels and epistles of the Christian Bible. Every cantata is discussed in my six book series On the Cantatas of J.S. Bach.The epistle, which is essentially didactic, is from the Apostolic letters retained in Scripture. The gospel, which is concerned with the life and teachings of Christ, is effectively an exposition of His adherence to princi...

The Grosse Fuge, composed by Ludwig van Beethoven in his late period, has an involved and complicated history. Written for a string quartet but published as an independent work, the piece raises interesting questions about whether music without words can have meaning, and invokes speculation about the composer and his frame of mind when he wrote it. Kahn looks closely at the musical, aesthetic, philosophical, and historical problems the work raises, considering its history, structure and d...

The memoir that inspired the two-time Golden Globe Award–winning comedy series: "Funny . . . heartbreaking . . . [and] utterly absorbing" (Lee Smith, New York Times–bestselling author of Guests on Earth).Oboist Blair Tindall recounts her decades-long professional career as a classical musician—from the recitals and Broadway orchestra performances to the secret life of musicians who survive hand to mouth in the backbiting New York...

The 25th anniversary edition of Chuck Klosterman’s debut, a hilarious memoir of growing up as a shameless metalhead in Wyndmere, North Dakota (population: 498), empirically proving that no matter where you are, kids wanna rock—now with a new introduction from the author.With a voice like Ace Frehley’s guitar, Klosterman hacks his way through hair-band history, beginning with that fateful day in 1983 when his older brother brought home Mötley Crüe’s Shout at the...

MAKE A SOUND INVESTMENT IN CLASSICAL MUSICWho are the ten most important classical composers? Who in the world was Palestrina? Why did Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" cause a riot? Which five of each important composer's works should you buy? What is a concerto and how does it differ from a sonata?Maybe you don't know the answers to these questions; author Phil Goulding certainly didn't. When Goulding first tried to learn about classical music, he found himself buried in an ava...

In 1999, when Napster made music available free online, the music industry found itself in a fight for its life. A decade later, the most important and misunderstood story—and the one with the greatest implications for both music lovers and media companies—is how the music industry has failed to remake itself. In Fortune’s Fool, Fred Goodman, the author of The Mansion on the Hill, shows how this happened by presenting the singular history of Edgar M. Bron...