Historical Musicology: Sources, Methods, Interpretations - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1580463010 ISBN 13: 9781580463010

Publisher: University of Rochester Press, 2008

Synopsis

Seventeen studies by noted experts that demonstrate recent approaches toward the creative interpretation of primary sources regarding Renaissance and Baroque music, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Verdi, Debussy, and beyond. How do we know what notes a composer intended in a given piece? -- how those notes should be played and sung? -- the nature of musical life in Bach's Leipzig, Schubert's Vienna? -- how music related to literature and other arts and social currents in different times and places? -- what attitudes musicians and music lovers had toward the music that they heard and made? We know all this from musical manuscripts and prints, opera libretti, composers'letters, reviews in newspapers and magazines, archival data, contemporary pedagogical writings, essays on aesthetics, and much else. Some of these categories of sources are the bedrock of music history and musicology. Others havebegun to be examined only in recent years. Furthermore, musicologists -- including biographers of famous composers -- now explore these various kinds of sources in a variety of ways, some of them richly traditional and others exciting and novel. These seventeen essays, all newly written, use a wide array of source materials to probe issues pertaining to a cross section of musical works and musical life from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. The resulting, pluralistic profile of current musicology will prove welcome to anyone fascinated by the problems of reconstructing -- reimagining, sometimes -- the evanescent musical art of the past and pondering its implications for musical life today and in the future. Roberta Montemorra Marvin is a Research Fellow at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa where she is also Director of the Institute for Italian Opera Studies; Stephen A. Crist is associate professor and chair of the Music Department at Emory University.

About this title

Review

In this book some of the best minds in current musicology explore untrodden territory. They show that the classic source study and the traditional methods of musical analysis are not only alive and kicking, but generating new rich ideas -- some of them controversial, all of them stimulating. --Nicholas Temperley, professor emeritus of musicology, University of Illinois, and author of Bound for America: Three British Composers

Striding onto the stage of the 'New Musicology', the seventeen contributors to Historical Musicology proceed to kick in the footlights. Out of the broken glass, they manage to create an approach to the scholarly study of music that recognises that musical scholarship [whatever its methodological imperatives] remains rooted in the study of primary sources, and go on to demonstrate brilliantly how the benefits of the 'New' can be combined with the 'Old'. --Mark Everist, professor of music, University of Southampton

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Rochester Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1580463010
• ISBN 13: 9781580463010
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 444
• Editor: Crist Stephen A., Marvin Roberta Montemorra