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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.

A Companion to Music at the Habsburgs Courts in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, edited by Andrew H. Weaver, is the first in-depth survey of the Habsburg family's musical patronage over a broad span of time.

Identity, Intertextuality, and Performance in Early Modern Song Culture for the first time explores comparatively the dynamic process of group formation through the production and appropriation of songs in various European countries and regions.

In the 17th century, only Moscow's elite had access to the magical, vibrant world of the theater.In Russia's Theatrical Past, Claudia Jensen, Ingrid Maier, Stepan Shamin, and Daniel C. Waugh mine Russian and Western archival sources to document the history of these productions as they developed at the court of the Russian tsar. Using such sources as European newspapers, diplomats' reports, foreign travel accounts, witness accounts, and payment records, they also uncover unique aspects of local culture and politics of the time. Focusing on Northern European theatrical traditions, the authors explore the concept of intertheater, which describes transmissions between performing traditions, and reveal how the Muscovite court's interest in theater and other musical entertainment was strongly influenced by diplomatic contacts.Russia's Theatrical Past, made possible by an international research collaborative, offers fresh insight into how and why Russians went to such great efforts to rapidly develop court theater in the 17th century.

Based on primary sources, many of which have never been published or examined in detail, this book examines the music of the late seventeenth-century composers, Biber, Schmeltzer and Muffat, and the compositions preserved in the extensive Moravian archives in Kromeriz. These works have never before been fully examined in the cultural and conceptual contexts of their time. Charles E. Brewer sets these composers and their music within a framework that first examines the basic Baroque concepts of instrumental style, and then provides a context for the specific works. The dances of Schmeltzer, for example, functioned both as incidental music in Viennese operas and as music for elaborate court pantomimes and balls. These same cultural practices also account for some of Biber's most programmatic music, which accompanied similar entertainments in Kromeriz and Salzburg. The many sonatas by these composers have also been misunderstood by not being placed in a context where it was normal to be entertained in church and edified in court. Many of the works discussed here remain unpublished but have, in recent years, been recorded. This book enhances our understanding and appreciation of these recordings by providing an analysis of the context in which the works were first performed. Contents: Preface; Stylus Phantasticus and Stylus Hyporchematicus: concepts of instrumental music in late 17th-century Central and East-Central Europe; Johann Heinrich Schmeltzer (c.1620/23-80) and music at the Viennese court; The chapel of Prince-Bishop Carl Liechtenstein-Castelcorn; Biber and Muffat at Salzburg; The dissemination and dissolution of the Stylus Phantasticus; Appendices; Select bibliography; Index. Charles E. Brewer is Associate Professor of Musicology at The College of Music of The Florida State University and Director of the Early Music Ensembles. His research interests have focused on the broader questions of music and culture both during the Middle Ages and Baroque period. Beginning with his dissertation on the music of medieval Poland, much of his published work has been focused on the early music of Central and East Central Europe. He has worked in many of the archives and libraries in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia with the support of the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the International Research and Exchanges Board, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is also an avid performer on early keyboard instruments and is currently editing a number of unpublished sonatas by C.P.E. Bach.

Two crucial moments in the formation and disintegration of musical modernity and the musical canon occurred at the turn of the seventeenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Dr Ljubica Ilic provides a fresh and close look at these moments, exploring the ways musical compositions shift to and away from ideological structures identified with modernity. The focus is on European art music whose grand narrative, defined by tonality and teleological development, begins in the seventeenth century and ends with twentieth-century modernisms. This particular musical “language game” coincides with historical changes in the phenomenological understanding of space and selfhood. A key concept of the book concerns musical compositions that remain without proper conclusions: if the wholesome (musical) work is a manifestation of wholesome subjectivity, the pieces Ilic explores deny it, reflecting conflict of the individual with previous beliefs, with contexts, and even within the self as the basic modern condition. The musical work is, in this case, still bounded and well-defined, but fractured by the incapability or refusal to satisfactorily conclude: the implicit cut forced upon it changes the expected musical flow or – speaking in spatial terms – it influences the musical form. By using the metaphor of space, Ilic explores: how the existence of a separate self as a primary feature of Western modernity becomes negotiated through awareness of the subject's own independence and individuality; innerness as something entirely separate from its surroundings; and the collective space of social interaction. Seeing musical storytelling as a metaphoric representation of selfhood, and modernity as a historical continuum, Ilic examines the boundaries and relationships between the musical work, the subject, and modern European history.

Although it lies far back, running roughly from about 1600 to 1750, the Baroque period is far from forgotten and Baroque music is played widely today as well, exercising numerous musicians and attracting rather substantial audiences. It experienced the emergence of a new sort of music, increasingly secular and increasingly good listening, if you will, and also the start of opera. Some of the Baroque composers appear among the most popular of all time, such as Bach, Handel and Vivaldi. So yes, this is a book for researchers, but it is also a good book for anyone who enjoys this music. The Historical Dictionary of Baroque Music certainly fills a significant space in the whole sub-series on music, since it tells us much more not only about the music but also the age that generated it. This is done particularly well in an insightful introduction, with the flow of events traced by the chronology. The dictionary section fills in the missing details with over 400 entries on the most important composers and musicians, some of the musical works themselves, important places and institutions, and a smattering of technical terms. The bibliography directs us to further reading.

In the decades around 1600 many privileges for printed music were issued by the Holy Roman Emperor and the Elector of Saxony. Such privileges gave a bookseller or author an exclusive right to publish specified works for a limited period (usually ten years). The privileges threatened confiscation of any unauthorised copies, and fines for anyone caught printing or selling them. This article offers the first systematic study of archival material documenting the privileges for music, as preserved in the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna, and the Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Dresden. It reconstructs the ritualistic procedure for obtaining a privilege, analyses how composers justified their applications for privileges, and asks whether privileges gave effective protection against unauthorised editions. Revising previous interpretations of the privilege system as an early form of copyright, I instead argue that privileges enhanced the commercial and symbolic value of printed music.

The link between music and politics during the consecration of the Puebla Cathedral on April 18, 1649, has taken on new relevance given current debates on the role of this art in history when studied from two complementary angles. The first analyzes the careers of the primary protagonists and the roles they played in the plainsong ceremony that inaugurated the consecration rite, while the second examines those extraordinary and symbolic elements utilized in the process of musical composition, in this case of the mass Ego Flos Campi by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla (1550­1664), the cathedral’s Kapellmeister. Through an emphasis on how sound articulates situations of ceremonial and political performativity - such as the words of a liturgical text - this analysis traces the connections between music, painting, the configuration of the cathedral chapter and political changes under King Philip IV. Fortunately, current musicology no longer argues that the greatest works should overcome the social and economic factors that surround them and artistic creation is considered to be a point of intersection between these and other, complementary parameters. All too often, however, musical composition is described as a result and not an agent. This article takes the perspective that both musical creation and execution can promote specific political content.