David Johnson's classic study describes Scotland in the eighteenth century, a period when music, both folk and classical, flourished. Thomas Erskine, the Earl of Kelly, is the most remarkable composer of the time, but this book shows how the vibrant musical flowering left no section of society untouched. Musical societies and assemblies were active in all the main towns; the gatherings of genteel society revolved around performances of music and dancing; and among folk instrumentalists the fiddle was overtaking the bagpipe as the mainstay of popular entertainment. At this time both the folk and the classical traditions were at a peak and developing rapidly. One of the achievements of this book is to show the complexity of the relationship between these two main strands of Scottish culture. Much of the repertoire of present-day traditional fiddle music, sometimes romantically depicted as the creation of generations of illiterate farm workers, originated in the eighteenth century through the interplay of classical and folk musicians (many of whom could read music). As remarkable as this hundred-year burst of creative activity is its sudden collapse.Almost two centuries passed before, in our own time, Scottish music has again begun to flourish. In a provocative new introduction to this edition, David Johnson casts a critical eye over the current musical scene in Scotland. He shows how the eighteenth century experience sheds light on the present day, and on what is likely to happen next. If the recent Scottish musical renaissance is to continue, it will have to learn the lessons, so masterfully unfolded here, of an earlier golden period of Scottish music.

Music as a Science of Mankind offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the intellectual representation of music in British eighteenth-century culture. From the field of natural philosophy, involving the science of sounds and acoustics, to the realm of imagination, involving resounding music and art, the branches of modern culture that were involved in the intellectual tradition of the science of music proved to be variously appealing to men of letters. Among these, a particularly rich field of investigation was the British philosophy of the mind and of human understanding, developed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which looked at music and found in its realm a way of understanding human experience. Focussing on the world of sensation - trying to describe how the human mind could develop ideas and emotions by its means - philosophers and physicians often took their cases from art's products, be it music (sounds), painting (colours) or poetry (words as signs of sound conveying a meaning), thus looking at art from a particular point of view: that of the perceiving mind. The relationship between music and the philosophies of mind is presented here as a significant part of the construction of a Science of Man: a huge and impressive 'project' involving both the study of man's nature, to which - in David Hume's words - 'all sciences have a relation', and the creation of an ideal of what Man should be. Maria Semi sheds light on how these reflections moved towards a Science of Music: a complex and articulated vision of the discipline that was later to be known as 'musicology'; or Musikwissenschaft.

A generously illustrated examination of pentatonic ("black-key scale") techniques in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western art-music. Pentatonicism from the Eighteenth Century to Debussy offers the first comprehensive account of a widely recognized aspect of music history: the increasing use of pentatonic ("black-key scale") techniques in nineteenth-century Western art-music. Pentatonicism in nineteenth-century music encompasses hundreds of instances, many of which predate by decades the more famous examples of Debussy and Dvorák. This book weaves together historical commentary with music theory and analysis in order to explain the sources and significance of an important, but hitherto only casually understood, phenomenon. The book introduces several distinct categories of pentatonicpractice -- pastoral, primitive, exotic, religious, and coloristic -- and examines pentatonicism in relationship to changes in the melodic and harmonic sensibility of the time. The text concludes with an additional appendix of over 400 examples, an unprecedented resource demonstrating the individual artistry with which virtually every major nineteenth-century composer (from Schubert, Chopin, and Berlioz to Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler) handled theseemingly "simple" materials of pentatonicism. Jeremy Day-O'Connell is assistant professor of music at Knox College.

Reveals how the musical benefit allowed musicians, composers, and audiences to engage in new professional, financial, and artistic contexts.

The volume covers many of the most significant themes in pre-industrial Scottish society.