The universally acclaimed and award-winning Oxford History of Western Music is the eminent musicologist Richard Taruskin's provocative, erudite telling of the story of Western music from its earliest days to the present. Each book in this superlative five-volume set illuminates-through a representative sampling of masterworks-the themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to a significant period in the history of Western music. Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries , the second volume Richard Taruskin's monumental history, illuminates the explosion of musical creativity that occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Examining a wealth of topics, Taruskin looks at the elegant masques and consort music of Jacobean England, the Italian concerto style of Corelli and Vivaldi, and the progression from Baroque to Rococo to romantic style. Perhaps most important, he offers a fascinating account of the giants of this period: Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Laced with brilliant observations, memorable musical analysis, and a panoramic sense of the interactions between history, culture, politics, art, literature, religion, and music, this book will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand this rich and diverse period.

Notes inegales is the historical name of the French practice, prevalent from 1690 to 1780, of performing diminution-like passages as uneven pairs of notes despite their notation in equal values. "Overdotting" (a modern term) designates the Baroque custom of rendering certain dotted rhythms longer than their notation indicates. Appropriate adoption of both practices in performance requires that the performer weigh a wide range of interrelated variables, including tempo, articulation, and national musical styles.

One of the most influential figures in the twentieth-century revival of early music, Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) was the first to apply academic attention to the issue of authentic historical performance. His groundbreaking study, The Interpretation of the Music of the 17th and 18th Centuries, first appeared in 1915 and remains a landmark of musicology. An outstanding musician, teacher, and maker of Baroque-style instruments, Dolmetsch sought the correct interpretation of Baroque music in order to heighten its expressive intent and emotional impact. In this study, he quotes extensively from both familiar and lesser-known treatises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, adding enlightening comments to each quotation and providing illuminating conclusions. Topics include tempo, rhythm, ornamentation, figured bass realization, wrist positioning, and fingering, and musical instruments of the period. A rare appendix of musical examples, originally published separately, appears in this new edition of the first book to address in a comprehensive and scholarly manner the problems of performing Baroque music. More than a text on performance practices, this classic offers glimpses of what Baroque music meant—both as an art and a science—to musicians of the era.

Music as a Science of Mankind offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the intellectual representation of music in British eighteenth-century culture. A particularly rich field of investigation, developed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the British philosophy of the mind and of human understanding which looked at music and found in its realm a way of understanding human experience. Maria Semi sheds light on how these reflections moved towards a Science of Music: the discipline that was later to be known as 'musicology'.

Revised and expanded, A Performer's Guide to Seventeenth Century Music is a comprehensive reference guide for students and professional musicians. The book contains useful material on vocal and choral music and style; instrumentation; performance practice; ornamentation, tuning, temperament; meter and tempo; basso continuo; dance; theatrical production; and much more. The volume includes new chapters on the violin, the violoncello and violone, and the trombone—as well as updated and expanded reference materials, internet resources, and other newly available material. This highly accessible handbook will prove a welcome reference for any musician or singer interested in historically informed performance.

The Oxford History of Western Music is a magisterial survey of the traditions of Western music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time. This text illuminates, through a representative sampling of masterworks, those themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to each musical age. Taking a critical perspective, this text sets the details of music, the chronological sweep of figures, works, and musical ideas, within the larger context of world affairs and cultural history. Written by an authoritative, opinionated, and controversial figure in musicology, The Oxford History of Western Music provides a critical aesthetic position with respect to individual works, a context in which each composition may be evaluated and remembered. Taruskin combines an emphasis on structure and form with a discussion of relevant theoretical concepts in each age, to illustrate how the music itself works, and how contemporaries heard and understood it. It also describes how the context of each stylistic period-key cultural, historical, social, economic, and scientific events-influenced and directed compositional choices.