Marco Armiero is Senior Researcher at the Italian National Research Council and Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies, Universitat Aut(noma de Barcelona. He has published extensively on-Italian environmental history and edited Views from the South: Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World. --

This classic chronicle of the longstanding challenges of tuning and temperament devotes a chapter to each principal theory, features a glossary and numerous tables, and requires only minimal background in music theory.

Since its original publication, Composing a World by Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman has become the definitive work on the prolific California composer Lou Harrison, often cited as one of America's most original and influential figures. Composing a World presents a compelling and deeply human portrait of an exceptionally beloved pioneer in American music.This paperback edition is an updated version of the highly acclaimed Lou Harrison: Composing a World. The product of extensive research, as well as seventy-five interviews with the composer and those associated with him over half a century, this new edition features an updated works catalog reflecting compositions completed after 1997, adds a brief description of the circumstances of Harrison's death, and corrects a few minor errors. It also includes an annotated works-list detailing more than 300 compositions and a CD featuring over 74 minutes of illustrative Harrison compositions, including several unique and previously unrecorded works.Extending beyond simple biography, Composing a World includes chapters on music and dance, intonation and tuning, instrument building, music criticism, political activism, homosexuality, and Harrison's Asian influences, among other topics. This indispensable study of Harrison's life and works--currently out of print--will be welcomed back by performing artists, students, and scholars of American music."

This classic work is a meticulous chronological survey of music for the keyboard from the earliest extant manuscripts of the 14th century to the end of the 17th. Apel traces the evolution of keyboard instruments, genres, national schools and styles (from Poland to Portugal), and the oeuvre of many composers. A monument of scholarship, this indispensable reference work is also remarkably user-friendly and engagingly written throughout.

Tonal music, from a historical perspective, is far from homogenous; yet an enduring feature is a background "diatonic" system of exactly seven notes orderable cyclically by fifth. What is the source of the durability of the diatonic system, the octave of which is representable in terms of two particular integers, namely 12 and 7? And how is this durability consistent with the equally remarkable variety of musical styles — or languages — that the history of Western tonal music has taught us exist? This book is an attempt to answer these questions. Using mathematical tools to describe and explain the Western musical system as a highly sophisticated communication system, this theoretical, historical, and cognitive study is unprecedented in scope and depth. The author engages in intense dialogue with 1000 years of music-theoretical thinking, offering answers to some of the most enduring questions concerning Western tonality. The book is divided into two main parts, both governed by the communicative premise. Part I studies proto-tonality, the background system of notes prior to the selection of a privileged note known as "final." After some preliminaries that concern consonance and chromaticism, Part II begins with the notion "mode." A mode is "dyadic" or "triadic," depending on its "nucleus." Further, a "key" is a special type of "semi-key" which is a special type of mode. Different combinations of these categories account for tonal variety. Ninth-century music, for example, is a tonal language of dyadic modes, while seventeenth-century music is a language of triadic semi-keys. While portions of the book are characterized by abstraction and formal rigor, more suitable for expert readers, it will also be of value to anyone intrigued by the tonal phenomenon at large, including music theorists, musicologists, and music-cognition researchers. The content is supported by a general index, a list of definitions, a list of notation used, and two appendices providing the basic mathematical background.