Antonio Stradivari is, perhaps, the only maker of violins who ranks alongside Van Gogh and Turner as an artist. A household name to many, he is associated with secret formulae and mystical processes ensuring the world's greatest soloists seek his instrum

Winner of the Nicholas Bessaraboff Prize Musical repertory of great importance and quality was performed on viols in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. This is reported by Thomas Mace (1676) who says that ’Your Best Provision’ for playing such music is a chest of old English viols, and he names five early English viol makers than which ’there are no Better in the World’. Enlightened scholars and performers (both professional and amateur) who aim to understand and play this music require reliable historical information and need suitable viols, but so little is known about the instruments and their makers that we cannot specify appropriate instruments with much precision. Our ignorance cannot be remedied exclusively by the scrutiny or use of surviving antique viols because they are extremely rare, they are not accessible to performers and the information they embody is crucially compromised by degradation and alteration. Drawing on a wide variety of evidence including the surviving instruments, music composed for those instruments, and the documentary evidence surrounding the trade of instrument making, Fleming and Bryan draw significant conclusions about the changing nature and varieties of viol in early modern England.

The chapters in this volume explore the relationship between music and art in Italy across the long sixteenth century, considering an era when music-making was both a subject of Italian painting and a central metaphor in treatises on the arts. Beginning in the fifteenth century, transformations emerge in the depiction of music within visual arts, the conceptualization of music in ethics and poetics, and in the practice of musical harmony. This book brings together contributors from across musicology and art history to consider the trajectories of these changes and the connections between them, both in theory and in the practices of everyday life. In sixteen chapters, the contributors blend iconographic analysis with a wider range of approaches, investigate the discourse surrounding the arts, and draw on both social art history and the material turn in Renaissance studies. They address not only paintings and sculpture, but also a wide range of visual media and domestic objects, from instruments to tableware, to reveal a rich, varied, and sometimes tumultuous exchange among musical and visual arts and ideas. Enriching our understanding of the subtle intersections between visual, material, and musical arts across the long Renaissance, this book offers new insights for scholars of music, art, and cultural history. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This book presents the major Ancient Egyptian musical instruments, their ranges, and playing techniques. This book consists of five chapters: Chapter 1: The Wealth of Instruments will cover the general characteristics of Egyptian instruments as well the major components of the musical orchestra Chapter 2: Stringed Instruments will cover various Ancient Egyptian stringed instruments such as lyres, tri-gonon (zither), Harps including playing techniques: Harps—Playing Techniques; The All-Encompassing Capacities of Ancient; string instruments with neck—such as short-neck Lute; the long-neck Egyptian guitars; and Bowed Instruments [Kamanga, Rababa]. Chapter 3: Wind Instruments will cover The end blown flute; transverse flute; pan flute; single reed pipe (clarinet); double Pipe; double clarinet; double oboe; arghool; others (bagpipe and organ); and horns/trumpets. Chapter 4: Percussion Instruments will cover the membrano-phone instruments such as drums and tambourines; and the non-membrano-phone (idiophone) instruments such as percussion sticks, clappers, sistrums/sistra, cymbals, castanets, bells (chimes), xylophone and glockenspiel and human parts (hands, fingers, thighs, feet, etc.). Chapter 5: The Musical Performance will cover the significance and roles of the fingers and their knuckles in producing and directing musical performances; as well as the varied methods for maintaining the rhythmic timing/tempo—including the use of syllables.