The Crucifixion in Music studies the musical representation of words and the concepts and contexts to which words refer, examining the way the treatment of a literary text, namely the Crucifixus, coalesces into a recognizable musical tradition that individual composers follow, develop, modify, or ignore.

Leipzig, Germany, is renowned as the city where Johann Sebastian Bach worked as a church musician until his death in 1750, and where Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy directed the famed Gewandhaus orchestra until his own death in 1847. But the century in between these events was critically important as well. During this period, Leipzig's church music enterprise was convulsed by repeated external threats-a growing middle class that viewed music as an object of public consumption, religious and political tumult, and the chaos of the Seven Years and Napoleonic wars. Jeffrey S. Sposato's Leipzig After Bach examines how these forces changed church and concert life in Leipzig. Whereas most European cities saw their public concerts grow out of secular institutions such as a royal court or an opera theater, neither of these existed when Leipzig's first subscription concert series, the Grosse Concert, was started in 1743. Instead, the city had a thriving Lutheran church-music enterprise that had been brought to its zenith by Bach. Paid subscription concerts therefore found their roots in Leipzig's church music tradition, with important and unique results. These included a revolving door between the Thomaskantor position and the Gewandhaus directorship, as well as public concerts with a distinctly sacred flavor. Late in the century, as church attendance faltered and demand for subscription concerts rose, the Gewandhaus dominated the musical life of Leipzig, influencing church music programming in turn. Examining liturgical documents, orchestral programs, and dozens of unpublished works of church and concert music, Leipzig After Bach sheds new light on a century that redefined the relationship between sacred and secular musical institutions.

In this book George B. Stauffer explores the music and complex history of Bach's last and possibly greatest masterpiece. Stauffer examines the B-Minor Mass in greater detail than ever before, demonstrating for the first time Bach's reliance on contemporary models from the Dresden Mass repertory and his brilliantly innovative methods of unifying his immense composition. Musicians, music scholars, students, and music lovers will find in this engagingly written book a wealth of information about Bach's extraordinary choral work. Stauffer surveys the roots of the Mass Ordinary text and its treatment in settings known to Bach. He looks at the events that led to the writing of the B-Minor Mass and places the work within the context of the composer's late style. In three deeply informed chapters, Stauffer considers the individual sections of the Mass--the Kyrie and Gloria, the Credo, and the Sanctus and Agnus Dei. The book also traces the history of the work after Bach's death, addresses specific issues of performance practice, and investigates the qualities that give the B-Minor Mass its universal appeal.

Volume one contains essays by David Schulenberg, Russell Stinson, Michael Marissen, Eric Chafe, Stephen Crist, and James Brokaw.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach provides an indispensable introduction to the Bach research of the past thirty-fifty years. It is not a lexicon providing information on all the major aspects of Bach's life and work, such as the Oxford Composer Companion: J. S. Bach. Nor is it an entry-level research tool aimed at those making a beginning of such studies. The valuable essays presented here are designed for the next level of Bach research and are aimed at masters and doctoral students, as well as others interested in coming to terms with the current state of Bach research. Each author covers three aspects within their specific subject area; firstly, to describe the results of research over the past thirty-fifty years, concentrating on the most significant and controversial, such as: the debate over Smend's NBA edition of the B minor Mass; Blume's conclusions with regard to Bach's religion in the wake of the 'new' chronology; Rifkin's one-to-a-vocal-part interpretation; the rediscovery of the Berlin Singakademie manuscripts in Kiev; the discovery of hitherto unknown manuscripts and documents and the re-evaluation of previously known sources. Secondly, each author provides a critical analysis of current research being undertaken that is exploring new aspects, reinterpreting earlier assumptions, and/or opening-up new methodologies. For example, Martin W. B. Jarvis has suggested that Anna Magdalena Bach composed the cello suites and contributed to other works of her husband - another controversial hypothesis, whose newly proposed forensic methodology requires investigation. On the other hand, research into Bach's knowledge of the Lutheran chorale tradition is currently underway, which is likely to shed more light on the composer's choices and usage of this tradition. Thirdly, each author identifies areas that are still in need of investigation and research.

Explores the meanings of the term 'author' for seventeenth-century German musicians, examining how compositions were made and used.