For more than three decades Richard Charteris has researched European music, sources and collections, focusing particularly on late Renaissance England, Germany and Italy. This group of essays, many concerning previously unknown or unexplored works and materials, covers the 16th and early to mid 17th centuries. The studies involve variously 'new' compositions, music manuscripts and editions, and documents that relate to figures such as the Italians Giovanni Gabrieli, Claudio Monteverdi and Alfonso Ferrabosco the Elder, the Germans Hans Leo Hassler and Adam Gumpelzhaimer, as well as the Englishmen John Coprario, John Dowland, John Jenkins, Henry Lawes, William Lawes, Peter Philips, and the French composer Marin Marais. In addition, Charteris elucidates contemporary performance practice in relation to works by Gabrieli, investigates printed music editions that originated from the Church of St Anna, Augsburg, and evaluates materials in collections, inlcuding ones in Berlin, Hamburg, Kraków, London, Regensburg and Warsaw.

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"Knowledge and debate in the field of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Venetian music has greatly benefitted in recent decades from studies of major institutions, composers, repertories, and sources, as also from investigations of the quantitative aspects of musical life in what was one of the largest, richest, and most commercially oriented cities on the Italian peninsula: the Venetian musical phenomenon includes, on the one hand, regular or sporadic musical activities in the city's many churches and private palaces (activities which provided significant earnings for large numbers of musicians, whether or not salaried members of the ducal cappella) and, on the other, the auxiliary trades of music printing and instrument making. The transmission of the musical repertories has also received notable attention: in particular, the contemporary and later reception of Venetian musical repertories in different political, linguistic, and/or confessional areas ... This collection of essays on the life, times, and works of a composer who ranks among the most outstanding musical personalities of his day variously unites these strands in an albeit partial attempt to interpret Giovanni Gabrieli's output and activities in their Venetian context and, at the same time, cast light on their broader historiographical significance: on the one hand Gabrieli as point of synthesis of a complex Venetian musical tradition, on the other his interaction with and impact on contemporary musical life, his influence on later generations of composers both at home and abroad, the rediscovery of his achievements by nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians and performers, the revisitations of his music by twentieth-century composers."--From introduction.

Giovanni Gabrieli (c.1555-1612) is the greatest Venetian composer of the late Renaissance, and one of the most significant figures of the period. Since the time when Richard Charteris was invited by the American Institute of Musicology to edit Giovanni Gabrieli's complete works in twelve volumes for the series Corpus mensurabitis music?, he has uncovered a considerable number of previously unknown works by this composer, and discovered a vast quantity of hitherto unknown sources of h is music. This thematic catalogue presents data about these discoveries and many others, besides collating an enormous amount of widely-scattered information. The catalogue covers: UL>l(1)the early music manuscripts and prints, almost all of which the auth or has consulted firsthand in collections in the northern hemisphere; /ll(2) a selection of modern music manuscripts;/ll (3) theplethora of modern editions and printed fragments; /ll(4) the sound recordings, including 78s, long-playing records and CDs; /ll(5) the relevant literature dealing with each work; /ll(6) the nature of the vocal texts and their use at St. Mark's; /ll(7) the doubtful and spurious works, among them pieces that are wrongly accepted today as genuine; and /ll(8), the parodies of Gabrieli's works by other composers./l/ul> There is much else in the book, not the least being a thematic indicator of each work and an English translation of each of Gabrieli's vocal texts. In short, this book will be an invaluable reference work for anyone concerned with the music of Giovanni Gabrieli, be they scholars, students or performers.

"'Giovanni Gabrieli, ye gods, what a man.' Thus Heinrich Schütz recalled his teacher, the greatest of that school of Venetian composers which flourished in the later Renaissance. Denis Arnold's new study, based on prolonged research in the Venetian archives, attempts a fresh appraisal of Gabrieli's music and pays particular attention to the social requirements which were of such importance in the Venice of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The book also devotes considerable space to Gabrieli's contemporaries--his uncle Andrea Gabrieli, Croce, Merulo, Bassano, and others--which sheds much light on a major school of composition."--Dust jacket.