Download or read book Purcell Studies written by Curtis Price and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-09-14 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tercentenary of Henry Purcell's death fell in 1995, and this 1995 volume of specially commissioned essays was collected to celebrate Purcell's music in his tercentenary year. The essays are representative of the best research and deal mainly with the autograph manuscripts, Purcell's compositional technique, the relationship between Purcell and his teacher John Blow, a reassessment of Purcell court odes, performance practice and wordsetting, and eighteenth-century reception history, particularly regarding King Arthur. The volume is well illustrated with music examples and photographs of important manuscripts. It also analyses Purcell's compositional techniques through detailed study of his manuscripts and reports on the discovery of two important autograph manuscripts. The book opens with an assessment of Purcell's illusive personality.
Download or read book The History and Technique of the Counter tenor written by Peter Giles and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In two parts, the first covering the history of the voice and the second part describes the mechanism and techniques of the counter-tenor.
Download or read book Purcell Manuscripts written by Robert Shay and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-02 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few details are known about the life of Henry Purcell. This book provides an in-depth analysis of the most obvious documentary evidence of Purcell's career - the music manuscripts of his own hand and those copied by his colleagues. Robert Shay and Robert Thompson offer a richly illustrated study of Purcell's sources, examining in detail the physical features of the manuscripts as well as their musical content. Their survey sheds light on the chronology of composition and copying of Purcell's works and reassesses the place of extant autographs in his musical development. Major sources are fully catalogued, providing information about the context in which Purcell's music was collected and performed, and his handwriting is more closely examined than ever before. The book represents a significant reference tool for scholars, applying a forensic approach that greatly enriches our knowledge of the composer and the music of his time.
Download or read book Purcell written by Jonathan Keates and published by UPNE. This book was released on 1996 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry Purcell (1659-1695) is the greatest of all English composers and a pivotal figure in European musical history. In this rich and colorful biography, Jonathan Keates deftly traces Purcell's life and artistry against the backdrop of the turbulent political, religious, theatrical, and social movements of his time. Purcell's musical genius both embraced and transcended the variable moods and tensions of Restoration England, and gave the period and the culture an unforgettable voice. With great skill and historical understanding, Keates follows Purcell through his extraordinarily prolific career, from chorister at the Chapel Royal, to composer for the theater and the court, to writer of sacred music, chamber music, and the triumphant Dido and Aeneas, the first British opera. Keates considers Purcell's musical studies with Pelham Humfrey and John Blow as well as his adaptation of Matthew Locke's innovative and colorful style. He provides a superb critical appreciation of Purcell's music in all its forms. Keates also discusses the musical history of the period, including the influence of French and Italian composers, whose music blended with and modified native traditions.
Download or read book The Supernatural Voice written by Simon Ravens and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2014 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The use of high male voices in the past has long been one of the most seriously misunderstood areas of musical scholarship and practice. In opening up this rich subject (to readers of all sorts) with refreshingly clear perspectives and plenty of new material, Simon Ravens' well-researched book goes a very long way to rectifying matters. Ravens writes damnably well, and if the story that emerges is necessarily a complex one, his treatment of it is always engagingly comprehensible.' ANDREW PARROTT Tracing the origins, influences and development of falsetto singing in Western music, Simon Ravens offers a revisionist history of high male singing from the Ancient Greeks to Michael Jackson. This history embraces not just singers of counter-tenor and alto parts up to and including our own time but the castrati of the Ancient world, the male sopranists of late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and the dual-register tenors of the Baroque and Classical periods. Musical aesthetics aside, to understand the changing ways men have sung high, it is also vital to address extra-musical factors - which are themselves in a state of flux. To this end, Ravens illuminates his chronological survey by exploring topics as diverse as human physiology, the stereotyping of national characters, gender identity, and the changing of boys' voices. The result is a complex and fascinating history sure to appeal not only to music scholars but to performers and all those with an interest particularly in early music. Simon Ravens is a performer, writer, and director of Musica Contexta, with whom he has performed in Britain and Europe, regularly broadcast, and made numerous acclaimed recordings. Ravens had previously founded and directed Australasia's foremost early music choir, the Tudor Consort. Between 2002 and 2007 his regular monthly column Ravens View appeared in the Early Music Review, to which he still regularly contributes.
Download or read book Performance Practice written by Roland John Jackson and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Burning in Blueness The Dark Light of a Countertenor written by Maxine Handy and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2011-06-21 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Burning in Blueness is a haunting memoir of the world's foremost countertenor James Bowman. The author lyrically portrays and interprets her affinity with the great man and his music. The text is in three parts covering a total of three decades, to include James' work with David Munrow, Britten and Pears, and as the voice of Robert King's five-year Purcell series. The account is not chronological, but traces the creative contact between the author's literary interests and James Bowman's musical genius. The book makes a valuable contribution to musical history, as the famous and intensely private countertenor himself, has always resisted the suggestion of a conventional biography. Burning in Blueness is part of James' legacy as he approaches his 70th birthday in 2011.
Download or read book Purcell written by William Hayman Cummings and published by . This book was released on 1881 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Henry Purcell written by William Allen Graham and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Counter Tenor written by Peter Giles and published by London [Angleterre] : Muller. This book was released on 1801 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Billboard written by and published by . This book was released on 1970-11-28 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its 114th year, Billboard remains the world's premier weekly music publication and a diverse digital, events, brand, content and data licensing platform. Billboard publishes the most trusted charts and offers unrivaled reporting about the latest music, video, gaming, media, digital and mobile entertainment issues and trends.
Download or read book Henry Purcell and the London Stage written by C. A. Price and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984-06-14 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was the first comprehensive survey of Purcell's dramatic music. It is concerned as much with the London theatre world - playhouses, poets, actors, singers, producers - as with the music itself. Purcell wrote music for more than fifty plays of various types, most of them produced at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, between 1690 and 1695. The songs, dialogues, choruses, act tunes and larger musical scenes are often active participants in the spoken drama, not simply grafted-on entertainments. The extraordinary semi-operas - Dioclesian, King Arthur, and The Fairy-Queen - are placed in the context of a theatre that thrived mainly on plays that, though less lavish, were no less musical. The traditional picture of a composer trapped within a degraded musical society, his natural predilection for opera ignored, is redrawn to show a consummate dramatist exploiting a remarkably musical theatre.
Download or read book Henry Purcell s Dido and Aeneas written by Ellen T. Harris and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Purcell's Dido and Aeneas stands as the greatest operatic achievement of seventeenth-century England, and yet, despite its global renown, it remains cloaked in mystery. The date and place of its first performance cannot be fixed with precision, and the absolute accuracy of the surviving scores, which date from almost 100 years after the work was written, cannot be assumed. In this thirtieth-anniversary new edition of her book, Ellen Harris closely examines the many theories that have been proposed for the opera's origin and chronology, considering the opera both as political allegory and as a positive exemplar for young women. Her study explores the work's historical position in the Restoration theater, revealing its roots in seventeenth-century English theatrical and musical traditions, and carefully evaluates the surviving sources for the various readings they offer-of line designations in the text (who sings what), the vocal ranges of the soloists, the use of dance and chorus, and overall layout. It goes on to provide substantive analysis of Purcell's musical declamation and use of ground bass. In tracing the performance history of Dido and Aeneas, Harris presents an in-depth examination of the adaptations made by the Academy of Ancient Music at the end of the eighteenth century based on the surviving manuscripts. She then follows the growing interest in the creation of an "authentic" version in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through published editions and performance reviews, and considers the opera as an important factor in the so-called English Musical Renaissance. To a significant degree, the continuing fascination with Purcell's Dido and Aeneas rests on its apparent mutability, and Harris shows this has been inherent in the opera effectively from its origin.
Download or read book Musical Creativity in Restoration England written by Rebecca Herissone and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musical Creativity in Restoration England is the first comprehensive investigation of approaches to creating music in late seventeenth-century England. Understanding creativity during this period is particularly challenging because many of our basic assumptions about composition - such as concepts of originality, inspiration and genius - were not yet fully developed. In adopting a new methodology that takes into account the historical contexts in which sources were produced, Rebecca Herissone challenges current assumptions about compositional processes and offers new interpretations of the relationships between notation, performance, improvisation and musical memory. She uncovers a creative culture that was predominantly communal, and reveals several distinct approaches to composition, determined not by individuals, but by the practical function of the music. Herissone's new and original interpretations pose a fundamental challenge to our preconceptions about what it meant to be a composer in the seventeenth century and raise broader questions about the interpretation of early modern notation.
Download or read book Compositional Artifice in the Music of Henry Purcell written by Alan Howard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major study to propose an analytical approach to Purcell's music beginning from contemporary compositional aims and techniques.
Download or read book Aspects of the Secular Cantata in Late Baroque Italy written by Michael Talbot and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As shown by the ever-increasing volume of recordings, editions and performances of the vast repertory of secular cantatas for solo voice produced, primarily in Italy, in the second half of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century, this long neglected genre has at last 'come of age'. However, scholarly interest is currently lagging behind musical practice: incredibly, there has been no general study of the Baroque cantata since Eugen Schmitz's handbook of 1914, and although many academic theses have examined microscopically the cantatas of individual composers, there has been little opportunity to view these against the broader canvas of the genre as a whole. The contributors in this volume choose aspects of the cantata relevant to their special interests in order to say new things about the works, whether historical, analytical, bibliographical, discographical or performance-based. The prime focus is on Italian-born composers working between 1650 and 1750 (thus not Handel), but the opportunity is also taken in one chapter (by Graham Sadler) to compare the French cantata tradition with its Italian parent in association with a startling new claim regarding the intended instrumentation. Many key figures are considered, among them Tomaso Albinoni, Giovanni Bononcini, Giovanni Legrenzi, Benedetto Marcello, Alessandro Scarlatti, Alessandro Stradella, Leonardo Vinci and Antonio Vivaldi. The poetic texts of the cantatas, all too often treated as being of little intrinsic interest, are given their due weight. Space is also found for discussions of the history of Baroque solo cantatas on disc and of the realization of the continuo in cantata arias - a topic more complex and contentious than may at first be apparent. The book aims to stimulate interest in, and to win converts to, this genre, which in its day equalled the instrumental sonata in importance, and in which more than a few composers invested a major part of their creativity.
Download or read book Vocal Authority written by John Potter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-02 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating history of singing styles from the ancient world to the present.