This is a thorough-going study of Monteverdi's Vespers, the single most significant and most widely known musical print from before the time of J.S. Bach. The author examines Monteverdi's Vespers from multiple perspectives, combining his own research with all that is known and thought of the Vespers by other scholars. The historical origin as well as the musical and liturgical context of the Vespers are surveyed; similarly the controversial historiography of the Vespers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is scrutinized and evaluated. A series of analytical chapters attempt to clarify Monteverdi's compositional process and the relationship between music and text in the light of recent research on modal and tonal aspects of early seventeenth century music. The final section is devoted to thirteen chapters investigating performance practice issues of the early seventeenth century and their application to the Vespers, including general and specific recommendations for performance where appropriate. The book concludes with a series of informational appendices, including the psalm cursus for Vespers of all major feasts in the liturgical calendar, texts, and structural outlines for the Vespers compositions based on a cantus firmus, an analytical discography, and bibliographies of seventeenth-century musical and theoretical sources.

A guide to Monteverdi's Vespers, providing in-depth information on music settings and performance practice.

Claudio Monteverdi is one of the most important figures of 'early' music, a composer whose music speaks powerfully and directly to modern audiences. This book, first published in 2007, provides an authoritative treatment of Monteverdi and his music, complementing Paolo Fabbri's standard biography of the composer. Written by leading specialists in the field, it is aimed at students, performers and music-lovers in general and adds significantly to our understanding of Monteverdi's music, his life, and the contexts in which he worked. Chapters offering overviews of his output of sacred, secular and dramatic music are complemented by 'intermedi', in which contributors examine individual works, or sections of works in detail. The book draws extensively on Monteverdi's letters and includes a select discography/videography and a complete list of Monteverdi's works together with an index of first lines and titles.

Combining a close study of Monteverdi's secular works with recent research on late Renaissance history, Gary Tomlinson places the composer's creative career in its broad cultural context and illuminates the state of Italian music, poetry, and ideology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Although he is often identified as a Monteverdi scholar (Approaches to Monteverdi: Aesthetic, Psychological, Analytical and Historical Studies, published in the Variorum series in 2013), the majority of Jeffrey Kurtzman’s work has focused on other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian sacred music. Organized into three sections, part one begins with a chapter on the Monteverdi Mass and Vespers of 1610 which spotlights the other major work in Monteverdi’s first prominent sacred print, the Missa in illo tempore, followed by examples of Kurtzman’s work on the sacred music of other composers such as Giovanni Francesco Capello and Palestrina. The section concludes with a piece on polyphonic psalm structures in seventeenth-century Italian Office music. Part two includes pieces which explore the relationship between the standard clef set, the high clef set, specific Magnificat tones and sounding pitch in the Magnificats of Roman composers; the issue of polyphonic psalm antiphons and the question of vocal and instrumental substitutes for plainchant antiphons in the Vespers service; and the use of instruments in the performance of sacred music, demonstrating that the concertato style of the seventeenth century had its origins in the practice of substituting instruments for voices and doubling voices with instruments, thereby introducing multifaceted possibilities for varying sonorities through the course of a composition. Part 3 contains two articles: the first surveying various styles in the Office repertoire of the seventeenth-century based on the approximately 1500 prints of Italian Office music in Kurtzman’s and Anne Schnoebelen’s catalogue of Mass, Office and Holy Week Music Printed in Italy, 1516-1770. The second article, published for the first time in this volume, assesses the impact on Italian liturgical music of the Catholic reform of the second half of the sixteenth-century.

This volume gathers together twelve essays on the composer’s music, reflecting the author's interests in aesthetic and psychological issues, the sacred works, methods of structural analysis, and the problems of making critical editions. The opera Orfeo and two madrigals from Monteverdi's Book Eight are the subject of aesthetic and psychological investigation, especially from the perspective of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things and the psychology of C.J. Jung, all supported by musical analysis. Two essays analyze in detail the structural principles of the psalms Laetatus sum from the 1610 Vespers and the first Dixit Dominus from the Sevla Morale e spirituale of 1641. Two others re-examine the story of Monteverdi's Mass of Thanksgiving and consider the question of what sacred music Monteverdi actually or likely wrote but is now lost. The final essay critiques and compares the methodology and problems of the Malipiero and Cremona editions of Monteverdi's Opera Omnia. All but one of these essays were originally published over a time span of twenty years in journals, conference reports, Festschriften, and as book chapters. The majority of them were not widely distributed or readily available until now. The essay on the Malipiero and Cremona editions appears here for the first time.

Claudio Monteverdi is now recognized as the towering figure of a critical transitional moment of Western music history: relentless innovator in every genre within chamber, church and theatre music; self-proclaimed leader of a 'new dispensation' between words and their musical expression; perhaps even 'Creator of Modern Music'. During recent years, as his arrestingly attractive music has been brought back to life in performance, so too have some of the most outstanding musicologists focussed intensely on Monteverdi as they worked through the 'big' questions in the historiography and hermeneutics of early Baroque music, including musical representation of language; compositional theory; social, institutional, cultural and gender history; performance practices and more. The 17 articles in this volume have been selected by Richard Wistreich to exemplify the best scholarship in English and because each, in retrospect, turns out to have been a ground-breaking contribution to one or more significant strands in Monteverdi studies.

Claudio Monteverdi: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography that navigates the vast scholarly resources on the composer with the most updated compilation since 1989. Claudio Monteverdi transformed and mastered the principal genres of his day and his works influenced generations of musicians and other artists. He initiated one of the most important aesthetic debates of the era by proposing a new relationship between poetry and harmony. In addition to scholarship by musicologists and music theorists, Monteverdi’s music has attracted attention from literary scholars, cultural historians, and critical theorists. Research into Monteverdi and Renaissance and early baroque studies has expanded greatly, with the field becoming more complex as scholars address such issues as gender theory, feminist criticism, cultural theory, new criticism, new historicism, and artistic and popular cultures. The guide serves both as a foundational starting point and as a gateway for future inquiry in such fields as court culture, opera, patronage, and Italian poetry.

The intricacies and challenges of musical performance have recently attracted the attention of writers and scholars to a greater extent than ever before. Research into the performer's experience has begun to explore such areas as practice techniques, performance anxiety and memorisation, as well as many other professional issues. Historical performance practice has been the subject of lively debate way beyond academic circles, mirroring its high profile in the recording studio and the concert hall. Reflecting the strong ongoing interest in the role of performers and performance, this History brings together research from leading scholars and historians and, importantly, features contributions from accomplished performers, whose practical experiences give the volume a unique vitality. Moving the focus away from the composers and onto the musicians responsible for bringing the music to life, this History presents a fresh, integrated and innovative perspective on performance history and practice, from the earliest times to today.