First published in 1999, this volume is the first full-length study to deal with the life and music of Orlando Gibbons since E.H. Fellowes’s short book, originally published in 1923. John Harley investigates in detail the family and musical background from which Orlando Gibbons emerged, and gives a fascinating account of the activities of his father, William Gibbons, as a wait in Oxford and Cambridge. He traces, too, the activities of Orlando’s brothers – Edward, who was the master of the choristers at King’s College, Cambridge and later at Exeter Cathedral; Ferdinando, who may have taken over from his father as head of the Cambridge waits, and who became a wait in Lincoln; and Ellis, who contributed two madrigals to Thomas Morley’s collection of 1601, The Triumphs of Oriana. Attention naturally focuses principally on Orlando Gibbons. A full record is given of his remarkably youthful appointment as an organist of the Chapel Royal (he was probably less than twenty at the time) and of his life at court. His additional appointments as one of Prince Charles’s musicians and as organist of Westminster Abbey are also described, as is his sudden and premature death in his early forties. Gibbons’s music is carefully examined in a series of chapters dealing with his pieces for keyboard and for viols, his songs, his full and verse anthems, and his works for the Anglican liturgy. His development as a composer within these genres is followed, and the character of particular pieces is considered. John Harley concludes that whereas, at one time, Gibbons ‘tended to be admired as a successor to Tallis and Byrd, working in a style not essentially different from theirs’, it is now ‘easier to view him as a pioneer, whose work was cut short by his untimely death’. Orlando Gibbons’s son Christopher was only a child when his father died, but he became one of the foremost composers and keyboard players of his generation, writing and performing chamber works and music for the stage during the Commonwealth. Following the Restoration of King Charles II, Christopher Gibbons gained his father’s former posts at the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey, for which establishments he wrote a number of anthems. His importance is recognized by the inclusion of a long chapter on his life and works.

"A History of Western Choral Music explores the various genres, important composers, and influential works essential to the development of the western choral tradition. Divided across two volumes, this comprehensive investigation moves from the Medieval period through the Avant-Garde." -- Publisher description.

A History of Western Choral Music explores the various genres, key composers, and influential works essential to the development of the western choral tradition. Author Chester L. Alwes divides this exploration into two volumes which move from Medieval music and the Renaissance era up to the 21st century. Volume I surveys the choral music of composers including Josquin, Palestrina, Purcell, Handel, and J.S. Bach while detailing the stylistic, textual, and extramusical considerations unique to the topics covered. Consideration of Renaissance music includes both sacred and secular works, specifically addressing the growth of sacred music, the rise of secular music, and the proliferation of sacred polyphony from Josquin to Palestrina. Discussion of the Baroque era is organized by geographic location, exploring the spread of Baroque style from Italy to German, France, and England. Volume I concludes by examining the aesthetic underpinnings of the early Classical and Romantic eras. Framing discussion within the political, religious, cultural, philosophical, aesthetic, and technological contexts of each era, A History of Western Choral Music offers readers specialized insight into major composers and works while providing a cohesive understanding of choral music's place in Western history.

English keyboard music reached an unsurpassed level of sophistication in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as organists such as William Byrd and his students took a genre associated with domestic, amateur performance and treated it as seriously as vocal music. This book draws together important research on the music, its sources and the instruments on which it was played. There are two chapters on instruments: John Koster on the use of harpsichord during the period, and Dominic Gwynn on the construction of Tudor-style organs based on the surviving evidence we have for them. This leads to a section devoted to organ performance practice in a liturgical context, in which John Harper discusses what the use of organs pitched in F may imply about their use in alternation with vocal polyphony, and Magnus Williamson explores improvisational practice in the Tudor period. The next section is on sources and repertoire, beginning with Frauke Jürgensen and Rachelle Taylor’s chapter on Clarifica me Pater settings, which grows naturally out of the consideration of improvisation in the previous chapter. The next two contributions focus on two of the most important individual manuscript sources: Tihomir Popović challenges assumptions about My Ladye Nevells Booke by reflecting on what the manuscript can tell us about aristocratic culture, and David J. Smith provides a detailed study of the famous Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. The discussion then broadens out into Pieter Dirksen’s consideration of a wider selection of sources relating to John Bull, which in turn connects closely to David Leadbetter’s work on Gibbons, lute sources and questions of style.

Written by fourteen leading experts in the field, this Companion covers almost every aspect of the harpsichord - the history of the instrument, tuning systems, the role of the harpsichord in ensemble, its use in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and includes separate chapters devoted to Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach and Handel. Chapters featuring almost every national style are written by authors with close connections to the countries about which they are writing, including England, The Netherlands, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, as well as the less extensive harpsichord traditions of Russia, the Nordic and Baltic countries, and colonial Spanish and Portuguese America. With musical examples, illustrations, a timeline of the harpsichord, and an appendix of composers, reliable editions and original sources, this book is for all who love the harpsichord, or want to learn more about it.

This superbly authoratitive new work provides a comprehensive A-Z guide to some 1000 years of Western music. It explores in detail the lives and achievements of a vast range of composers, as well as looking at such key topics as music history (from medieval plainchant to contemporary minimalism), performers, theory and jargon. Throught Griffiths skilfully blends lightly worn scholarship with personal insight, whether examining the emotional colouring that different musical keys achieve or charting the rise and development of the symphony.

Recent scholarship has offered a veritable landslide of studies about early modern women, illuminating them as writers, thinkers, midwives, mothers, in convents, at home, and as rulers. Musical Voices of Early Modern Women adds to the mix of early modern studies a volume that correlates women's musical endeavors to their lives, addressing early modern women's musical activities across a broad spectrum of cultural events and settings. The volume takes as its premise the notion that while women may have been squeezed to participate in music through narrower doors than their male peers, they nevertheless did so with enthusiasm, diligence, and success. They were there in many ways, but as women's lives were fundamentally different and more private than men's were, their strategies, tools, and appearances were sometimes also different and thus often unstudied in an historical discipline that primarily evaluated men's productivity. Given that, many of these stories will not necessarily embrace a standard musical repertoire, even as they seek to expand canonical borders. The contributors to this collection explore the possibility of a larger musical culture which included women as well as men, by examining early modern women in "many-headed ways" through the lens of musical production. They look at how women composed, assuming that compositional gender strategies may have been used differently when applied through her vision; how women were composed, or represented and interpreted through music in a larger cultural context, and how her presence in that dialog situated her in social space. Contributors also trace how women found music as a means for communicating, for establishing intellectual power, for generating musical tastes, and for enhancing the quality of their lives. Some women performed publicly, and thus some articles examine how this impacted on their lives and families. Other contributors inquire about the economics of music and women, and how in different situations some women may have been financially empowered or even in control of their own money-making. This collection offers a glimpse at women from home, stage, work, and convent, from many classes and from culturally diverse countries - including France, Spain, Italy, England, Austria, Russia, and Mexico - and imagines a musical history centered in the realities of those lives.