Ferdinando Giorgetti's Metodo per Esercitarsi a Ben Suonare L'Alto Viola (A Self-Training Method for Playing the Viola Well) was first published in Florence in 1854. In this translation, Sciannameo (multidisciplinary studies, music, Carnegie Mellon University) gives background on Giorgetti's life an

"Italian Literature before 1900 in English Translation provides the most complete record possible of texts from the early periods that have been translated into English, and published between 1929 and 2008. It lists works from all genres and subjects, and includes translations wherever they have appeared across the globe. In this annotated bibliography, Robin Healey covers over 5,200 distinct editions of pre-1900 Italian writings. Most entries are accompanied by useful notes providing information on authors, works, translators, and how the translations were received. Among the works by over 1,500 authors represented in this volume are hundreds of editions by Italy's most translated authors - Dante Alighieri, [Niccoláo] Machiavelli, and [Giovanni] Boccaccio - and other hundreds which represent the author's only English translation. A significant number of entries describe works originally published in Latin. Together with Healey's Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation, this volume makes comprehensive information on translations accessible for schools, libraries, and those interested in comparative literature."--Pub. desc.

This study asserts that Stravinsky's Octour pour instruments a vents (1923) is pivotal within Stravinsky's progressions in regard to orchestrational practice, instrumental choices, and compositional choices, and presents it as the point in which all of these transitions came together for the first time. After an opening discussion of Stravinsky's early life and compositional career, it concentrates on setting up the Octet and Concerto through discussion of the years leading up to their composition. In addition to placing the two works within their context of their position and broader influence upon Stravinsky's surrounding production, it provides a full musical analysis of the Octet, followed by comparative analysis between it and the Concerto. The analysis is predominantly centered around compositional practices and orchestrational techniques.

In this work, a broad spectrum of publication is studied, from Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, through Rodgers and the Beatles. It contains essays annotating bibliographic entries concerning percussion. Subjects include opera, symphony orchestra, and popular and jazz music.

Larrick shares his knowledge of the theory and composition of percussion music. In the first section, more than a dozen brief entries address such topics as music education's treatment of drummers and the notation of Western music. In the second section, Larrick presents an annotated bibliography of music theory books found in the University Library at the U. of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. The third section contains bibliographical references for a wide range of materials relating to percussion. A life-long performer, Larrick is the author of a number of scholarly books on percussion. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Bendikas' research work is particularly praiseworthy, given the difficulty of recreating the ephemeral experience of any staged production. Her examples are specific, grounded in impeccable scholarship, and employed to make important forays into matters of twentieth-century stage practice and theory as well as suggesting important questions about aesthetics and artistry in general. For theatre practitioners, the implications of Ponnelle's work for performance are immensely valuable. - Langdon Brown, University at Albany This work is the first full-length analysis of the major productions of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (1932-1988), who has been hailed internationally as one of the most important opera directors/designers of the last century. In a career spanning four decades he was in demand at the leading opera houses of the world where he regularly collaborated with world-class conductors and singer-actors producing an enormous range of operas representing every period, genre and style from Monteverdi and Rossini to Wagner and Strauss. He was instrumental in reinstating the seria operas of Mozart into the active repertoire and was a formidable champion for new works. These credentials

As founder of the Experimental Music Studio at the U. of Illinois in 1958, American composer Lejaren Hiller was a pioneer in the area of computer assisted music composition. In this study, Bohn provides detailed analyses of several of Hiller's most important works, including the ILLIAC Suite and the Computer Cantata . Other topics include (for exam

This work proposes a solution to what is often considered the central problem facing Scarlatti scholarship, determining the chronological order of his keyboard sonatas. In the data-poor arena of Scarlatti research, this work, avoiding a primarily musicological or organological approach, analyzes large-scale patterns of musical characteristics over all (or parts) of a sonata sequence founded primarily on the Parma manuscript. As a result of an extensive application of this analytic approach to the sequence, this work notes that many sequence patterns seem to be chronologically structured, that none seem anti-chronological, and that a few mirror historical changes in the music of Scarlatti's time. These phenomena and other observations delimit something like a general history of Scarlatti's musical development enriched further by a variety of localized events. Among some 26 patterns observed in the sequence are a systematic rise in Scarlatti's use of the major mode, stepped increases in sonata compass that seem to accord with the sequential availability of larger keyboards, and both an increase in the rate at which the sonatas were combined into sets of two or three works and the use by Scarlatti of progressively complex techniques for doing so. This work also sketches a methodological background for the chronological proposal, including a discussion of why chronological order seems a superior interpretation of the sequence compared to the thought that it may have been reorganized, whether at random or by specific criteria. This study also discusses such subjects as the probable location of the 30 essercizi within the sonata sequence, the likely mis-location of several other sonatas, implications of chronological order from organology, a broadly dated window for the latter part of the sequence, the relationship between conservative and radical elements in Scarlatti's compositions, a late-sequence change in his approach to writing slow sonatas, and the interplay of structural integration and musical diversity in the later sonatas. It presents a new catalog of the sonatas that, while substantially congruent with Kirkpatrick's, proposes modifications to his ordering of the first hundred sonatas as well to a few other but smaller regions of the sequence.

For the past decade, Fiske (music, U. of Western Ontario) has been using neural network models to test his theory that musical thinking can be described as a hierarchy of progressively more intricate pattern-comparison activity, and that the resulting musical realizations are limited to only three cognitive category types. He describes the development of his theory, several related experimental studies, and the neural network models he uses to test the theory. Neural network methodology can seem daunting, he admits, so he has tried to keep technical descriptions to a minimum in order to highlight his main goal: to describe and test a set of principles that appear to represent the foundation of musical understanding. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).