Exploring experimental attitudes in music Experimental Affinities in Music brings together diverse artistic, musicological, historical, and philosophical essays, enhancing a broad discourse on artistic experimentation, and exploring various experimental attitudes in music composed between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries. The golden thread running through the different chapters is the quest for inherently experimental musical practices, a quest pursued from interrogating, descriptive, or challenging perspectives, and always in relation to concrete music examples. Experimental is taken as an adventurous compositional, interpretive, or performative attitude that can cut across different ages and styles. Affinitiessuggest connectors and connections, convergences, contiguities, and adjacencies that are found in and through a diversity of approaches and topics. The texts share a common genesis: the lectures of the International Orpheus Academies for Music and Theory convened by Luk Vaes (2011) and Paulo de Assis (2012, 2013). The affinities found in this volume include essays by Lydia Goehr, Felix Diergarten, Mark Lindley, Martin Kirnbauer, Edward Wickham, Lawrence Kramer, Hermann Danuser, and Thomas Christensen, as well as interviews with pianist Leon Fleisher, with pianist-composer Frederic Rzewski, and with composer Helmut Lachenmann. Contributors Paulo de Assis (Orpheus Institute, Ghent), Thomas Christensen (University of Chicago), Hermann Danuser (Humboldt University), Felix Diergarten (Schola Cantorum Basiliensis), Leon Fleisher (pianist), Lydia Goehr (Columbia University), Martin Kirnbauer (University of Basel), Lawrence Kramer (Fordham University), Helmut Lachenmann (composer), Mark Lindley (University of Hyderabad), Frederic Rzewski (pianist-composer), Luk Vaes (Orpheus Institute, Ghent), Edward Wickham (St Catharine’s College, Cambridge)

This book is a pioneering attempt to explore the fascinating and hardly known realm of reciting poetry in medieval and Renaissance Italy. The study of more than 50 treatises on both music and poetry, as well as other literary sources and documents from the period between 1300 and 1600, highlights above all the practice of parlar cantando («speaking through singing» - the term found in De li contrasti, a fourteenth-century treatise on poetry) as rooted in the art of reciting verses. Situating the practice of parlar cantando in the context of late medieval poetic delivery, the author sheds new light on the origin and history of late Renaissance opera style, which their inventors called stile recitativo, rappresentativo or, exactly, parlar cantando. The deepest roots of the Italian tradition of parlar cantando are thus revealed, and the cultural background of the birth of opera is reinterpreted and revisited from the much broader perspective of what appears to be the most important Italian mode of music making between the age of Dante and Petrarch and the beginning of Italian opera around 1600.

Present scholarly conversations about early European and global modernity have yet to acknowledge fully the significance of Spain and Spanish cultural production. Poetry and ideology in early modern Spain form the backdrop for Imperial Lyric, which seeks to address this shortcoming. Based on readings of representative poems by eight Peninsular writers, Imperial Lyric demonstrates that the lyric was a crucial site for the negotiation of masculine identity as Spain’s noblemen were alternately cajoled and coerced into abandoning their identifications with images of the medieval hero and assuming instead the posture of subjects. The book thus demonstrates the importance of Peninsular letters to our understanding of shifting ideologies of the self, language, and the state that mark watersheds for European and American modernity. At the same time, this book aims to complicate the historicizing turn we have taken in the field of early modern studies by considering a threshold of modernity that was specific to poetry, one that was inscribed in Spanish culture when the genre of lyric poetry attained a certain kind of prestige at the expense of epic. Imperial Lyric breaks striking new ground in the field of early modern studies.

Extensively field-tested and fine-tuned over many years, and designed specifically for a one-year course, JC McKeown's Classical Latin: An Introductory Course offers a thorough, fascinating, and playful grounding in Latin that combines the traditional grammatical method with the reading approach. In addition to grammar, paradigms, and readings, each chapter includes a variety of extraordinarily well-crafted exercises that reinforce the grammar and morphology while encouraging the joy of linguistic and cultural discovery.

Discussion of tonal structure has been one of the most problematic and controversial aspects of modern study of Medieval and Renaissance polyphony. These new essays written specifically for this volume consider the issue from historical, analytical, theoretical, perceptual and cultural perspectives.

In A Conductor’s Guide to Selected Baroque Choral-Orchestral Works, Jonathan D. Green's sixth book-length contribution of guides for conductors, he offers this companion to his critically acclaimed A Conductor’s Guide to the Choral-Orchestral Works of J. S. Bach. In this volume, Green addresses works of the Baroque era from Monteverdi through Bach's contemporaries. In addition to brief biographical sketches for each composer, Green includes for each work the approximate duration, text sources, performing forces, currently available editions, locations of manuscript materials, notes, performance issues, evaluation of solo roles, evaluation of difficulty, and a discography and bibliography. Duration information comes from a variety of sources, but Green turns to actual recording times of performances. The purpose of this book is to aid conductors in selecting repertoire appropriate to their needs and the abilities of their ensembles. The discographies and bibliographies, while not exhaustive, serve as helpful starting points for further research. A Conductor’s Guide to Selected Baroque Choral-Orchestral Works should appeal to conductors in supporting their concert programming. Librarians and music student will also find this work an ideal reference title for the study of Baroque repertoire.