Offering comprehensive coverage of classical music, this guide surveys more than eleven thousand albums and presents biographies of five hundred composers and eight hundred performers, as well as twenty-three essays on forms, eras, and genres of classical music. Original.

Traditional approaches to musical form have always adopted a top-down perspective whereby a work's form organizes and unifies the individual parts of the work through an overarching logic. How Sonata Forms turns this view on its head, proposing instead that it was the parts that conditioned and enabled the whole. Relying on a corpus of over a thousand works, author Yoel Greenberg illustrates how the elements of sonata form arose independently of one another, with an overarching idea of form only emerging at the tail end of its formative period during the eighteenth century. Appreciation of the bottom-up nature of sonata form's evolution reveals it not as a stable package of features that all serve a common aesthetic or formal goal, but rather as an unstable collection of disparate and sometimes even contradictory common practices. The resolution of these contradictions presents a challenge to composers, rendering form a creative catalyst in itself, rather than as a compositional convenience. More generally, the deeply diachronic perspective of How Sonata Forms offers an alternative to the traditional synchronic outlook that pervades music theory in general and the study of form in particular. Rather than focus on definitions and taxonomies, How Sonata Forms proposes a focus on the motion of the system of form as a whole, suggesting that it is often more productive to appreciate the dynamics of a system than it is to rigorously define its parts.

Elegant works of great lyric expressiveness that rank among the glories of Baroque music. This volume, reprinted from the standard edition, contains all 48 of the trio sonatas (including the famous chaconne) of Opp. 1, 2, 3 and 4, along with all twelve solo sonatas, Op. 5.

Kalmus proudly presents this complete collection of the flute sonatas of Johann Matheson. Included are the piano accompaniment and a separate solo flute part in this new cleanly printed edition.

Among his numerous children, Johann Sebastian Bach sired five musically gifted sons. The eleventh volume of Bach Perspectives presents essays that explore these men’s lives and careers via distinctive and, in several cases, alternative and interdisciplinary methodologies. Robert L. Marshall traces how each of the sons grappled with—and at times suffocated beneath—their illustrious father’s legacy. Mary Oleskiewicz’s essay investigates the Bach family’s connections to historical keyboard instruments and musical venues at the Prussian court, while David Schulenberg looks at Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s diverse and innovative keyboard works. Evan Cortens digs into everything from performance materials to pay stubs to offer a detailed view of the business of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s liturgical music. Finally, Christine Blanken discusses how the rediscovery of Bach family musical manuscripts in the Breitkopf archive opens up new perspectives on familiar topics. A supplemental companion website is now available for Bach Perspectives 11. This resource features additional images, captions, and short descriptions to provide an essential supplement to the printed text.