The Real Colegio Seminario de Corpus Christi in València, founded by Archbishop Juan de Ribera, was (along with the cathedral) the most important centre of musical activity in the city during the 17th century. The Constituciones of the chapel organize the liturgical calendar and its music, in the process stipulating the presence of instrumentalists on certain occasions. Later documents reveal gradual

AssociationsAmerican Musical Instrument Society317Galpin Society357CoursesSargent, Sally, Historical keyboard tuition405Instrument-makersRoss, Leslie bassoons375PublishersBrepols Publisher NV333Christine Headley, Sound the trumpet405C. P. E. Bach: The Complete WorksivHarpsichord and Fortepiano Magazine357Oxford Booksifc, obcOxford Grove Music OnlineibcOxford Journals History334Oxford History Online318University

Mr Baptiste was a musician living in late 17th-century Jamaica who composed music portraying African traditions as they were performed by enslaved musicians on the island. This article argues that Baptiste was probably a free person of colour and perhaps one of the earliest-known Black American composers to have published Western notation. His music was printed in Hans Sloane’s 1707 travelogue and

AssociationsAmerican Musical Instrument Society317Galpin Society357CoursesSargent, Sally, Historical keyboard tuition405Instrument-makersRoss, Leslie bassoons375PublishersBrepols Publisher NV333Christine Headley, Sound the trumpet405C. P. E. Bach: The Complete WorksivHarpsichord and Fortepiano Magazine357Oxford Booksifc, obcOxford Grove Music OnlineibcOxford Journals History334Oxford History Online318University

AssociationsAmerican Musical Instrument Society317Galpin Society357CoursesSargent, Sally, Historical keyboard tuition405Instrument-makersRoss, Leslie bassoons375PublishersBrepols Publisher NV333Christine Headley, Sound the trumpet405C. P. E. Bach: The Complete WorksivHarpsichord and Fortepiano Magazine357Oxford Booksifc, obcOxford Grove Music OnlineibcOxford Journals History334Oxford History Online318University

AssociationsAmerican Musical Instrument Society317Galpin Society357CoursesSargent, Sally, Historical keyboard tuition405Instrument-makersRoss, Leslie bassoons375PublishersBrepols Publisher NV333Christine Headley, Sound the trumpet405C. P. E. Bach: The Complete WorksivHarpsichord and Fortepiano Magazine357Oxford Booksifc, obcOxford Grove Music OnlineibcOxford Journals History334Oxford History Online318University

Twisting through a dissonant flattened 7th now more commonly recognized as the Jazz ‘blue’ 7th, the ‘English’ cadence is a distinctive feature of early modern English music. Typically embedded within the texture of a piece in an inner part, this distinctive voice-leading pattern works by pulling against its own regularity: it highlights its predictability, the regularity of the cadence, by spiralling

AssociationsAmerican Musical Instrument Society317Galpin Society357CoursesSargent, Sally, Historical keyboard tuition405Instrument-makersRoss, Leslie bassoons375PublishersBrepols Publisher NV333Christine Headley, Sound the trumpet405C. P. E. Bach: The Complete WorksivHarpsichord and Fortepiano Magazine357Oxford Booksifc, obcOxford Grove Music OnlineibcOxford Journals History334Oxford History Online318University

Anthony Rooley’s article in this journal on the Neo-Platonic background to John Dowland’s Lachrimae (Rooley, ‘New light on John Dowland’s songs of darkness’, Early Music, xi/1 (1983), pp.6–21) has received little support, for good reasons. At the same time, the failure to address his arguments has prevented us from seeing an interesting and instructive fact about the reception of these compositions

A comment from a friend about my book Towards a new history of the piano (Munich and Salzburg, 2019, isbn 978 387397 270 4) shows that I should have been clearer with regard to the use of the term ‘Pantalon’. ‘Pantalon’ can mean various sorts of piano in the old literature. But using the word ‘Pantalon’ as part of modern vocabulary is confusing, just as wrenching the word ‘fortepiano’ out of its historical

Eleven years have passed since the publication of Michael Talbot’s volume dedicated to the Italian chamber cantata (Aspects of the secular cantata in late Baroque Italy (2009)). As was outlined in a review of the book, the volume was the culmination of decades of cantata studies, which until then had not succeeded in representing ‘the variety, versatility and even ambiguity that this repertory often

The first time I heard a recording of Studio der Frühen Musik was one of those revelatory moments that change the course of one’s life. The recording of L’Agonie du Languedoc from 1975, recounting the horror of the Albigensian crusade, was played during my first-semester Music History class at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. This was medieval music as I had never heard it before,

AbstractDuring the preparation of a new critical edition of Couperin’s keyboard music for Bärenreiter (Book 1, 2016; Book 2, 2018), I examined 72 exemplars of the first book and 52 of the second, listed variously in RISM and in French regional library catalogues. This large number of surviving exemplars is testimony to the exceptionally wide diffusion of these publications and also their remarkable

AbstractIn 1933 Louise Dyer launched her publishing company Les Éditions de l’Oiseau Lyre with the Œuvres complètes de François Couperin. The 12 volumes constituted a monument to France’s cultural patrimony in an age of growing nationalism. While Couperin’s harpsichord works had been available in modern editions for some time, it was the first modern printing of his sacred works, secular songs and

AbstractThrough the lenses of magic, witchcraft and superstition, this article explores Veneno es de amor la envidia (Biblioteca Nacional de España, Ms. 19254), a little-known zarzuela by Sebastián Durón and Antonio de Zamora. I consider this zarzuela within its wider cultural context, looking at changing attitudes towards magic and witchcraft in early modern Spain, as well as within the context of

ZohnSteven, The Telemann compendium (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020), £55

The past two decades have witnessed an encouraging resurgence of scholarly activity relating to the life and music of François Couperin (1668–1733). In particular, a surprising number of new works and sources have come to light. The former range from two short, mock-serious vocal canons (see Early Music, xxxii/4 (2004), pp.541–7) to a six-movement cantata discussed by two contributors to the present

AbstractIn 2016 Christophe Rousset identified an anonymous manuscript cantata entitled Ariane consolée par Bacchus as being the cantata Ariane abandonnée par Thésée attributed to Couperin by Titon du Tillet in Le Parnasse françois (1732). Rousset and I subsequently edited this cantata for the Éditions du Centre de musique baroque de Versailles. Over and above stylistic and other considerations, support

It is indeed rare that one finds a single disc that combines all aspects of early musicianship: performer, editor, historian and even luthier. Martin Shepherd’s Fantasia · Lute music from the early 16th century (FS Records fsr181, issued 2018, 71′), however, does just that. Surprisingly, since Shepherd has been well known in the lute community as a luthier and performer since the 1970s, this is his

This collection of seven recordings offers a fragmentary insight into the riches of the musical repertory produced or widely known in the Low Countries between the ends of the 16th and 18th centuries. From 1586, this region was the setting of the civil and religious Eighty Years’ War, which ended with a political and confessional split in the country. The southern Netherlands, whose territory corresponded

{Recording reviewn.november@auckland.ac.nz}

Bach and his circle, before and beyond, continue to exert a fascination for keyboard players, and this group of new recordings on harpsichord and organ includes both core repertory and works ranging from the 17th century to the last of Bach’s pupils. Steven Devine’s Johann Sebastian Bach: Das wohltemperierte Klavier volume 1 (Resonus res10239, issued 2019, 111′) uses a Colin Booth double after Fleischer

BettinaHoffmann, The viola da gamba, trans. FergusonPaul (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), £96

The lives of classical musicians over the last few months have been rather turbulent with diaries being wiped clean and uncertainty remaining on when live music as we know it might be able to return. It has been wonderful to see the innovative and engaging steps that many ensembles have made to keep elements of performance going, thereby both keeping audiences entertained and providing musicians with

LionnetJean, ‘Parve che Sirio … rimembrasse una florida primavera’: Scritti sulla musica a Roma nel Seicento con un inedito, ed. CilibertiGalliano (Bari: Florestano Edizioni, 2018), €50

AbstractOne of the best-known texts on 18th-century French harpsichord playing, Couperin’s L’art de toucher le clavecin (1716), has long been considered a valuable source for performers of French Baroque keyboard music. This article investigates the cultural contexts that shaped its text and its aesthetic preoccupations. Various passages dealing with the human body (on seating and position, and on

AbstractThe Eglantine Table at Hardwick Hall (c.1568) was probably crafted to commemorate marriages made between the Hardwick-Cavendish and Talbot families. In addition to various heraldic symbols, the table’s friezes depict gaming paraphernalia, thirteen musical instruments, and several music books, including a stacked score of a devotional song by Thomas Tallis: ‘O Lord, in thee is all my trust’

AbstractAriane consolée par Bacchus, newly discovered by Christophe Rousset and the only surviving cantata attributed to François Couperin, is scored for bass voice, obbligato bass viol and continuo. Because Couperin passionately engaged with Italian music, scholars have long assumed that he would have composed cantatas, but until now none had been known to survive. His choice of bass voice and viol

The trouvere repertory contains over a hundred groups of contrafacta with a variety of parodic, satirical and devotional functions. This article discusses how certain cases of contrafacture can res ...

This article outlines how computational analysis can be applied to the process of making and evaluating idiomatic reconstructions of polyphonic music from lute intabulations. It focuses on some of William Byrd’s consort songs that survive only as intabulations in one of the lute books owned by Edward Paston (1550–1630), London, British Library, Add. Ms. 31992. Fourteen of the consort songs survive

Early Music, Vol. xlvii, No. 2 © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial

‘Imitate the human voice’ is a familiar exhortation to instrumentalists in the pedagogical literature of the 16th and 17th centuries. In 1584 Girolamo Dalla Casa stated that the cornett is the most excellent of all wind instruments precisely on account of its ability to imitate the human voice. But what does it mean to imitate the voice in practical terms? To what extent does the ‘vocality’ of the

James A. Winn’s paper ‘A versifying maid of honour: Anne Finch and the libretto for Venus and Adonis’ (Review of English Studies n.s., lix (2008), pp.67-85) presented an array of evidence enabling him to identify Anne Kingsmill (later Anne Finch, ultimately Anne Countess of Winchilsea) as the likely author of the libretto of Venus and Adonis, an all-sung court entertainment performed before King Charles

The 1597 inventory of manuscripts of Philip II of Spain lists, among its many entries, a music book opening with a six-voice motet Salve Jesu by Pierre de la Rue. Unfortunately this manuscript no longer exists, and as the motet could not be located in any of the Alamire manuscripts or in other sources containing La Rue’s works, it figures as a lost composition in lists of La Rue’s works. This article

A late eighteenth-century mechanical organ, built into a clock made by Henry Borrell of London, plays melodies that sound completely unlike those normally found on English domestic musical clocks. This article draws on the disciplines of historical musicology, ethnomusicology and horology to argue that these tunes derive directly from the repertory of the eighteenth-century Ottoman court. The melodies

This article explores evidence for polyphonic music in Italian convents during the first half of the 16th century. It presents a summary of documentary evidence relating to conventual music in the pre-Tridentine era, alongside practical evidence from contemporary treatises regarding methods by which convent choirs could develop a polyphonic repertory from existing music. It revisits claims for mandatory

The manuscript of Striggio’s Mass Ecco si beato giorno for 40 and 60 voices is a fascinating bibliographical object, the dating of which has always been problematic. From the 18th century with Sebastien de Brossard, to the present day with Laurent Guillo and, more recently, Davitt Moroney, several hypotheses have been proposed for the date of this unicum, copied in France during the 17th century. This

The present article demonstrates the complexity of musico-textual relationships in Ave miles celestis curie, a fourteenth-century polyphonic song whose generic markers relate it to both English troped chant settings and to the motet. Ave miles celestis curie was written in honour of the St Edmund, King and Martyr, whose cult flourished in England, particularly in East Anglia. Through a fresh analysis

From Les Fetes d’Hebe and Dardanus in 1739 to the revival of Hippolyte et Aricie in 1778, Rameau and his music were the target of satirical engravers and designers. While some of the artists remain anonymous, others include such famous names as Louis Carrogis dit Carmontelle, Charles-Nicolas Cochin II the younger, and Marin Fessard the younger, after Pierre-Louis Durand and Charles-Nicolas Cochin II

In 1720 Pepusch signed an inventory of the Duke of Chandos’s instruments that included a gut-strung harpsichord by a ‘Mr Longfellow of Pembroke Hall in Cambridge’. The maker was in fact Roger Long, Fellow and later Master of Pembroke Hall (now Pembroke College), Lowndes Professor of Astronomy, but also a keen musician and maker of astronomical, musical and other instruments. Long’s commonplace book