One of the most influential figures in the twentieth-century revival of early music, Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) was the first to apply academic attention to the issue of authentic historical performance. His groundbreaking study, The Interpretation of the Music of the 17th and 18th Centuries, first appeared in 1915 and remains a landmark of musicology. An outstanding musician, teacher, and maker of Baroque-style instruments, Dolmetsch sought the correct interpretation of Baroque music in order to heighten its expressive intent and emotional impact. In this study, he quotes extensively from both familiar and lesser-known treatises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, adding enlightening comments to each quotation and providing illuminating conclusions. Topics include tempo, rhythm, ornamentation, figured bass realization, wrist positioning, and fingering, and musical instruments of the period. A rare appendix of musical examples, originally published separately, appears in this new edition of the first book to address in a comprehensive and scholarly manner the problems of performing Baroque music. More than a text on performance practices, this classic offers glimpses of what Baroque music meant—both as an art and a science—to musicians of the era.

Music as a Science of Mankind offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the intellectual representation of music in British eighteenth-century culture. A particularly rich field of investigation, developed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the British philosophy of the mind and of human understanding which looked at music and found in its realm a way of understanding human experience. Maria Semi sheds light on how these reflections moved towards a Science of Music: the discipline that was later to be known as 'musicology'.

Revised and expanded, A Performer's Guide to Seventeenth Century Music is a comprehensive reference guide for students and professional musicians. The book contains useful material on vocal and choral music and style; instrumentation; performance practice; ornamentation, tuning, temperament; meter and tempo; basso continuo; dance; theatrical production; and much more. The volume includes new chapters on the violin, the violoncello and violone, and the trombone—as well as updated and expanded reference materials, internet resources, and other newly available material. This highly accessible handbook will prove a welcome reference for any musician or singer interested in historically informed performance.

Music as a Science of Mankind offers a philosophical and historical perspective on the intellectual representation of music in British eighteenth-century culture. From the field of natural philosophy, involving the science of sounds and acoustics, to the realm of imagination, involving resounding music and art, the branches of modern culture that were involved in the intellectual tradition of the science of music proved to be variously appealing to men of letters. Among these, a particularly rich field of investigation was the British philosophy of the mind and of human understanding, developed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which looked at music and found in its realm a way of understanding human experience. Focussing on the world of sensation - trying to describe how the human mind could develop ideas and emotions by its means - philosophers and physicians often took their cases from art's products, be it music (sounds), painting (colours) or poetry (words as signs of sound conveying a meaning), thus looking at art from a particular point of view: that of the perceiving mind. The relationship between music and the philosophies of mind is presented here as a significant part of the construction of a Science of Man: a huge and impressive 'project' involving both the study of man's nature, to which - in David Hume's words - 'all sciences have a relation', and the creation of an ideal of what Man should be. Maria Semi sheds light on how these reflections moved towards a Science of Music: a complex and articulated vision of the discipline that was later to be known as 'musicology'; or Musikwissenschaft.

One of the most influential figures in the twentieth-century revival of early music, Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940) was the first to apply academic attention to the issue of authentic historical performance. His groundbreaking study first appeared in 1915 and remains a landmark of musicology. An outstanding musician, teacher, and maker of Baroque-style instruments, Dolmetsch sought the correct interpretation of Baroque music in order to heighten its expressive intent and emotional impact. In this study, he quotes extensively from both familiar and lesser-known treatises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, adding enlightening comments to each quotation and providing illuminating conclusions. Topics include tempo, rhythm, ornamentation, figured bass realization, wrist positioning, and fingering, and musical instruments of the period. More than a text on performance practices, this classic offers glimpses of what Baroque music meant--both as an art and a science--to musicians of the era.