This book investigates the changing ways in which composers employed notation and musicians understood it between the middle of the eighteenth century and the start of the twentieth century. While explicit notational practices were increasingly the norm throughout this time, many aspects of performance--even as late as the late nineteenth century--were assumed rather than specified and it was still widely understood that much had to be read between the lines. Furthermore, during the twenti...

This is an important book: a valuable book for learning and understanding. It is a book to read through and one to refer to repeatedly. I believe this book is an integral part in the study of the church and beneficial to all serious students of the Bible. The materials it contains will inform and edify you. For some time now, it has been my desire to place within the hands and hearts of believers an introductory study on the teaching of the church, a book to help meet the needs of many who...

Volume 3 of the SELECTED WORKS OF Louis Spohr 1784-1859- Pietro von Abano. At about this time one of his pupils, the twenty-three-year-old Carl Friedrich Curschmann, who had ambitions to compose an opera, showed Spohr a libretto that had been adapted from Ludwig Tieck's novel Pietro von Abano oder Petrus Apone, eine Zaubergeschichte (Breslau 1825) by the Kassel lawyer and poet Carl Pfeiffer. Spohr was immediately impressed by the libretto and, having dissuaded Curschmann from going ahead w...

Volume 4 of the SELECTED WORKS OF Louis Spohr 1784-1859- Die Letzten Dinge. (The Last Judgement) Spohr was a key figure in the early history of the regional musical festivals that were to play such an important part in stimulating the composition of German oratorios. A subject which appealed to a number of German composers in the eighteenth century was the Apocalypse, a not inappropriate theme in the war-torn Europe of Napoleon. Including an introduction and score.

Since his death in 1847, Felix Mendelssohn’s music and personality have been both admired and denigrated to extraordinary degrees. In this valuable book Clive Brown weaves together a rich array of documents-letters, diaries, memoirs, reviews, news reports, and more-to present a balanced and fascinating picture of the composer and his work. Rejecting the received view of Mendelssohn as a facile, lightweight musician, Brown demonstrates that he was in fact an innovative and highly cer...

Since its first publication in 1990, Brahms and His World has become a key text for listeners, performers, and scholars interested in the life, work, and times of one of the nineteenth century's most celebrated composers. In this substantially revised and enlarged edition, the editors remain close to the vision behind the original book while updating its contents to reflect new perspectives on Brahms that have developed over the past two decades. To this end, the original essays b...

When R. Larry Todd’s biography, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music, appeared in 2003, it won acclaim from several critics as a definitive biography. In researching Mendelssohn’s life over the last two and a half decades, Todd uncovered much new information about the composer and his music, his family and his peers, and his complex reception history. Now, as we approach the 2009 bicentenary of Mendelssohn’s birth, the author has chosen and compiled fifteen essays written between 1980 and...

A fantastic little book about Bach and the musical climate before and during his life, with a look at his continuing influence in music. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

An extraordinary prodigy of Mozartean abilities, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a distinguished composer and conductor, a legendary pianist and organist, and an accomplished painter and classicist. Lionized in his lifetime, he is best remembered today for several staples of the concert hall and for such popular music as "The Wedding March" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing." Now, in the first major Mendelssohn biography to appear in decades, R. Larry Todd offers a remarkably fresh account...

J. S. Bach composed some of the best-loved and most moving music in Western culture. Surviving mostly in manuscript collections, his music also exists in special and unique publications that reveal much about his life and thoughts as a composer. In this book, Peter Williams, author of the acclaimed J. S. Bach: A Life in Music, revisits Bach's biography through the lens of his music. Reviewing all of Bach's music chronologically, Williams discusses the music collection by collection to reve...

New Music at Darmstadt explores the rise and fall of the so-called 'Darmstadt School', through a wealth of primary sources and analytical commentary. Martin Iddon's book examines the creation of the Darmstadt New Music Courses and the slow development and subsequent collapse of the idea of the Darmstadt School, showing how participants in the West German new music scene, including Herbert Eimert and a range of journalistic commentators, created an image of a coherent entity, despite the ve...

Presenting a fresh interpretation of Mozart's Requiem, Simon P. Keefe redresses a longstanding scholarly imbalance whereby narrow consideration of the text of this famously incomplete work has taken precedence over consideration of context in the widest sense. Keefe details the reception of the Requiem legend in general writings, fiction, theatre and film, as well as discussing criticism, scholarship and performance. Evaluation of Mozart's work on the Requiem turns attention to the autogra...