This article examines the interplay of performing technique and compositional structure in the works of four violinist-composers from late 17th-century German-speaking lands: Johann Jakob Walther, Johann Paul von Westhoff, Heinrich Biber and Johann Georg Pisendel. Focusing on these musicians’ complex polyphonic writing, the article argues that the physical techniques necessary to perform their works—specifically

As part of his policy to establish French artistic supremacy in Europe, Louis XIV encouraged the development of a national musical style spearheaded by two genres that differed radically from anything composed abroad: the tragédie en musique and the motet à grand chœur. The role of Jean-Baptiste Lully in giving the former its distinctive character is well known. But although he never held an official

From a certain point of view, Handel studies already started to be published during his lifetime, with essays, evaluations and polemical pamphlets appearing across several decades even before John Mainwaring’s Memoirs of the life of the late George Frederic Handel (printed in 1760, one year after its subject’s death). With Messiah, the Water Music and Zadok the Priest, and a few popular arias never

John Byrt died on 15 January, shortly after his 80th birthday, from hospital-acquired Covid-19: tragically, his Covid injection a week before admission had not had time to take effect.

AbstractQueen Caroline (1683–1737) was a long-term supporter of Handel and his music. Her connection to the composer began in 1710 when he was appointed Kapellmeister to the Hanoverian court. In London from 1714 Caroline continued to show interest in music and Handel in particular, helping him to further develop his career. She regularly attended the opera, organized private performances at court,

Handel’s musical career in London was largely centred on the theatre—the annual seasons of operas and oratorios, and their performers, often dominated by castratos and sopranos. There was, however, an alternative strand to his creative achievement that related to the singers who held posts in London’s major ecclesiastical choirs—the Chapel Royal, Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral—with particular

AbstractThe Grand Tour was the highpoint of the education of the sons of many members of the British upper classes. Despite its contributions to British culture, the Tour came in for contemporary objection and satire. More recently Richard Leppert has used his construct of 18th-century British ideology of gender, class and music to argue that men’s musical activities on the Tour were devalued. This

There can be no doubting that Jeremy Montagu was a towering figure in the field of Organology, both concerning Western and ethnological instruments. He may not have aspired to either a professorship or even a doctorate, but in different circumstances would surely have merited both.

The Zaragoza manuscripts, a third major set of Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas closely contemporary with the Venice and Parma sets and, like them, of Spanish origin, have recently been described in detail by Celestino Yáñez Navarro (‘La existencia en España de una tercera gran colección de sonatas de D. Scarlatti copiada por el escriba de los manuscritos de Venecia (Libros I–XIII) y Parma (Libros I–XV)’

AssociationsAmerican Musical Instrument Society463Galpin Society586CoursesSargent, Sally, Historical keyboard tuition596Bach in WeimarifcInstrument-makersRoss, Leslie bassoons566PublishersC. P. E. Bach: The Complete WorksivHarpsichord and Fortepiano Magazine586Oxford BooksobcOxford Grove Music OnlineibcOxford Journals History440, 464University of California Press 19th-Century Music426

In 1519 Girolamo Alibrandi completed an altarpiece depicting the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple for the Compagnia of the Church of Santa Maria Candelora dei Verdi in Messina. The painting celebrates the service of Candlemas, the titular feast of the church and confraternity. One arresting detail, an open music book, appears in the lower-right quadrant of the work. Despite considerable damage sustained

When Jephtha an Oratorio was published by John Walsh in April 1752, music allocated to the character Hamor was headed as sung by ‘Mr. Brent’. William Barclay Squire began his Dictionary of national biography entry (1885) on the soprano Charlotte Brent by stating that she was the daughter of ‘a fencing-master and alto singer, who sang in Handel’s “Jephtha” in 1752’, and this has been generally accepted

AbstractIn recent years, Beethoven’s metronome marks for his Ninth Symphony have experienced a renewed relevance, with several ensembles incorporating the indicated speeds in their performances. Nevertheless, previous research has shown that some of the marks have been incorrectly transmitted, and there is the suspicion that further mistakes are still undiscovered. Focusing particularly on the second

The clutch of recordings reviewed here ranges across the sacred repertories of a variety of cities and courts— both Lutheran and Catholic—in the German lands and Austria: from north to south, Hamburg, Saxony (Leipzig and Dresden) and imperial Vienna. Chronologically they take us from the late 16th century to the mid 18th, and generically they encompass Latin motets and antiphon settings; a parody Mass;

I write this review at a time of great uncertainty: the emergence of a new Covid-19 variant has been announced; London and much of south-east England have just entered the newly created Tier 4; lorries are queuing at Dover; Brexit talks have broken down; and many countries have closed their borders with the UK. For many of us musicians fortunate enough not to have been bereaved by the pandemic, Christmas

This batch of recordings criss-crosses Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, presenting works from all corners of the Continent. The theme of journeying or road-tripping across the European Baroque is poignant in this period when travel and live music have been severely curtailed. However, several of these discs serve as reminders of inventive programming and experimentation that we have seen continue

Christine Headley, Sound the trumpet: Alfred Deller, Stour Music and the early music revival (Stroud: Bach Lovers Press, 2019), £27

Falling between two issues of Early Music that include clusters of related articles—on music and early modern commemoration in issue xlviii/4, and on Handel in the upcoming issue xlix/2—this first issue of 2021 showcases the extraordinary variety of topics that fall within the purview of the journal, as well as the high quality of submissions that we are so grateful to receive. While the ongoing pandemic

AbstractFrench compositional treatises penned between c.1600 and c.1750 rarely if ever provide any instructional exercises with basses, from which apprentice composers could create multi-voice pieces by applying the rules described by their authors. Instead, these treatises—of which the most famous and widespread were no doubt those by Parran (1639), Mignot (1656), Masson (1697) and Rameau (1722)—reproduce

AbstractThis article is the result of a comprehensive study of folia grounds—usually known as Farinel’s Ground in England—published, copied in or otherwise connected with England, a list of which is provided. A discussion of general characteristics as well as of typical melodic, harmonic and rhythmic features of folia grounds from this period is followed by a comparative analysis of all English folias

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

Amongst the many visual stimuli that fill late medieval churches, text scrolls occupy an important place. Merging both image and text in the shape of written banderoles, they add a layer of ‘sound’ to a variety of objects. This article deals with their specific use on funeral monuments where, acting as ‘speech scrolls’, they provide the dead with a distinctive voice. The musical resonances of the texts

AbstractTwo different courtiers are mourned in laments with similar texts that begin ‘Cueurs desolez’. One is a complete rondeau that appears anonymously in a chansonnier of Margaret of Austria, and Pierre de La Rue is the probable composer. The other musical setting is ascribed to Josquin, which provides only the text of a rondeau refrain. The complete text survives in a poetry collection prepared

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

In the preface to his Geistliche Chor-Music (1648), Heinrich Schütz looked back at the styles of sacred music in previous decades, encouraging fellow composers to persist in cracking the ‘hard nut’ of counterpoint as found in motets in 16th-century style. His comments outlined the diversity of performance possibilities for church music in the early 17th century. Motets in the old style, without basso

This article aims to shed light on aspects of Byrd’s contrapuntal technique—particularly in relation to the crafting of fuga (or imitation)—by subjecting to close analysis a small sample from his Cantiones sacrae (1589), and in so doing offers in effect a trailer for the study of the collection as a whole. A number of issues are raised which indicate some of the directions in which future research

All polyphonic Requiem settings have a commemorative purpose, but none is more multi-layered in its memorializing aims and strategies than that by Jean Richafort (c.1480–c.1550). This piece is unique among Renaissance Requiems in drawing its materials and procedures from an earlier composer’s oeuvre: Richafort mined no fewer than three works by Josquin des Prez. Indeed, Richafort’s Requiem is so deeply

This article considers questions relating to the performance practice of listening to music in early modern contexts. The evidence of paintings by Pieter Lastman, Gerard ter Borch and Hendrik Sorgh, poetry by Robert Herrick, William Shakespeare and Edmund Waller, and accounts of performances by Francesco da Milano, Nicola Matteis and Queen Elizabeth I all help to bring into focus questions of attentiveness

AbstractDeath and commemoration were central to the devotions that filled the side chapels and adorned the votive altars of 15th-century churches with exquisite sounds, forms and colours. Musicians participated in this outpouring of innovative memorials as both contributors to the ceremonies, providing the sacred harmonies that permeated these spaces on behalf of the deceased, and also as donors who

Antoine Brumel’s Missa pro defunctis is one of the earliest polyphonic Requiem settings, and the first by several decades to include the sequence, Dies irae. Whereas most chants in the Mass for the Dead were set c.1500 to the low-pitched, highly consonant polyphony that denoted mourning and penitence at the time, the Dies irae is a musical portrayal of the Last Judgement that might seem to demand more

MarxHans JoachimandVossSteffen, Die G. F. Händel zugeschriebenen Kompositionen, 1700–1800 / The compositions attributed to G. F. Handel, 1700–1800 (Hildesheim: Olms, 2017), €69

ZingesserEliza, Stolen song: How the troubadours became French (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), hardcover $34.95, e-book $16.99

EcclesJohn, The Judgment of Paris, ed. HarbesonEric J, The Works of John Eccles, Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era 203 (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2018), $165.

BarbieriPatrizio, Hydraulic musical automata in Italian villas, and other ingenia, 1400–2000 (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2019), €50

The 48th annual Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference took place from 1 to 4 July 2020. Owing to adaptations put in place for covid-19, the conference, which was originally set to take place in Edinburgh, was delivered virtually. Papers examined themes as varied as notation, music and cities, religion and spirituality, work towards archival histories, organology and chant. These themes fell into

The drive for personal commemoration after death was central to the innovative devotional activities and objects that filled the side chapels and altars of 15th- and 16th-century churches with vibrant colours, forms, words and sounds. Many commemorative objects were the sites of audible activities, including spoken and sung prayers, that preserved the identity of the individuals who had funded them

At the main train station in Prague today, a few bars of Smetana’s ‘Vltava’ from Má vlast (1882) periodically alert travellers to announcements. For many, this is the quintessential piece of Bohemian music. Yet while the blossoming of Czech national musical style in the late 19th century produced numerous masterpieces, of which ‘Vltava’ is among the most famous, it is a shame that works by 18th-century

Handel is featured prominently across these six discs of early to mid-18th-century arias by various composers, dominating the Baroque recording landscape now as much as he ever did the London operatic scene, and obviously deemed by record labels to be the marquee name drawing in the mainstream listener. Well-known Handel arias clear the path for recordings of complex da capo arias by Handel’s less-remembered

If one could journey back into the medieval past and listen once more to a particular moment in music history, what—I wonder—would the sounds and musical experiences of that moment be?

This selection of Romantic chamber music runs from Beethoven to Brahms, from pianistic poetry to glittering ensemble works, and from the intimacy of the salon to the show-stopping brilliance of the concert stage. Wending our way past familiar stalwarts and novel finds becomes a welcome journey through the 19th century.

BacciagaluppiClaudio, Artistic disobedience: music and confession in Switzerland, 1648–1762, St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Leiden: Brill, 2017), €120

AbstractMusicians and their monuments in the Burgundian Netherlands: some art historical perspectivesThis article examines the monuments with which some of the most celebrated musicians and composers of the Burgundian Netherlands were commemorated. Perhaps best known is Guillaume Du Fay’s wall-mounted memorial; thanks to musicologists’ research, his sculpted tablet is also one of the best documented

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