The eight chapters of Understanding Boccherini’s Manuscripts discuss various aspects of the study of the manuscript sources for the music of Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805), one of the foremost composers of the second half of the eighteenth century. This book begins by outlining the various types that can be distinguished among the manuscripts written by the composer himself or by his copyists, such as manuscripts for archival purposes, for publishers and for patrons. Germán Labrador continues with a discussion of the chronology of both Boccherini’s works and their manuscript sources, and Loukia Drosopoulou describes the musical handwriting that we find in the manuscripts under discussion. Boccherini produced several catalogues of his works of which some are lost, while others have been preserved. Marco Mangani and Federica Rovelli review these documents. The second half of this book addresses more specific topics. Giulio Battelli pays attention to a recent addition to Boccherini’s known oeuvre, the Laudate pueri, a very early work, preserved in the library of the Istituto Musical in Lucca. Rupert Ridgewell deals with the relations between Boccherini and the Viennese publishing house Artaria. Matanya Ophee considers the sources for Boccherini’s Guitar Quintets recently come available, and, finally, Jaime Tortella comments upon some letters to the nineteenth-century collector Julian Marshall – one of them by Alfredo Boccherini, a great-grandson of the composer – that shed light on the adventures of Boccherini’s manuscripts in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, a common bibliography following all the chapters is supplied, as are extensive indexes. In addition to regular indexes of subjects and names, indexes covering letters cited, catalogues, manuscript sources, early editions, and Boccherini’s works are also provided. As such, this book is an altogether indispensable tool for everybody with a scholarly interest in the life and work of Luigi Boccherini, and a splendid model for similar work on other composers.

Annotation A study of how the physical processes of learning to play a piece of music can enrich and inform the mental process of studying and analyzing the music, using the cello music of Luigi Boccherini as a case study.

The Reader's Guide to Music is designed to provide a useful single-volume guide to the ever-increasing number of English language book-length studies in music. Each entry consists of a bibliography of some 3-20 titles and an essay in which these titles are evaluated, by an expert in the field, in light of the history of writing and scholarship on the given topic. The more than 500 entries include not just writings on major composers in music history but also the genres in which they worked (from early chant to rock and roll) and topics important to the various disciplines of music scholarship (from aesthetics to gay/lesbian musicology).