David Buch's informative volume is the first modern study edition and commentary dealing with almost all of the surviving French five-part scores of dance music from the ballets de cour 1575-1651. These full scores are especiall y important since most ballets from this time are preserved only in two-part readings (melody and bass). The exception here is a newly-created five-part score for the Ballet des Nations based on an original two-part setting. Also included are the six Allemandes from 1575 to ca. 1600 a Ballet cheval of 1615 a selection of miscellaneous Entres from several ballets prepared for the Concert Louis XIII par les Viollons et lest 12 Grands hautbois of 1627 and Philidor's five-part reading of seventeen Entres from the Ballet du Roy des Festes de Baccus of 1651.

Listeners, performers, students and teachers will find here the analytical tools they need to understand and interpret musical evidence from the baroque era. Scores for eleven works, many reproduced in facsimile to illustrate the conventions of 17th and 18th century notation, are included for close study. Readers will find new material on continuo playing, as well as extensive treatment of singing and French music. The book is also a concise guide to reference materials in the field of baroque performance practice with extensive annotated bibliographies of modern and baroque sources that guide the reader toward further study. First published by Ashgate (at that time known as Scolar Press) in 1992 and having been out of print for some years, this title is now available as a print on demand title.

Ornaments play an enormous role in the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and ambiguities in their notation (as well as their frequent omission in the score) have left doubt as to how composers intended them to be interpreted. Frederick Neumann, himself a violinist and conductor, questions the validity of the rigid principles applied to their performance. In this controversial work, available for the first time in paperback, he argues that strict constraints are inconsistent with the freedom enjoyed by musicians of the period. The author takes an entirely new look at ornamentation, and particularly that of J. S. Bach. He draws on extensive research in England, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States to show that prevailing interpretations are based on inadequate evidence. These restrictive interpretations have been far-reaching in their effect on style. By questioning them, this work continues to stimulate a reorientation in our understandiing of Baroque and post-Baroque music.

The twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation, English-speaking audiences are largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now, for the first time, an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet provides a translation of Chrétien’s major poem, Yvain, in verse that fully and satisfyingly captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.

This book, first published in 1974, has become the classic study of one of the most popular musical forms in early eighteenth-century France. It not only documents and examines a considerable repertoire for the first time, but it also places the genre in the wider context of both French and Italian baroque musical styles.