Beginning in the second half of the fifteenth century, under the patronage of the Gonzaga family, the northern Italian city of Mantua became a vibrant center for visual art, theatre, and music. The performance at the Gonzaga court of Poliziano's Fabula di Orfeo, around 1480, marked the beginning of secular music theatre. The use of musical numbers within the drama anticipated the beginnings of opera at Florence a century later, as well as the first masterpiece of the genre, Monteverdi's La favola d'Orfeo at Mantua in 1607. Mantua reached the zenith of its artistic distinction during the reign of Duke Vincenzo I, between 1587 and 1612. During this time, Wert and Gastoldi were joined at the court by the important Jewish composer Salamone Rossi and, most notably, by Monteverdi. The premieres of his Orfeo and Arisanna made the Gonzaga court, for that brief period, the most important center in the development of opera. In Music at the Gonzaga Court in Mantua, Donald C. Sanders discusses musical composition at the court in the context of the brilliant visual art that provided such a conducive environment. Sanders also traces the history of this very colorful family and their relationships with the emperors, kings, and popes who shaped modern Europe. Part history, part musicology, Sanders' analysis spans the fifteenth century through the seventeenth century, filling informative gaps with details essential for students in courses on Renaissance or Baroque music, or in more specialized courses on madrigal, opera, or liturgical music. Music at the Gonzaga Court in Mantua is also important reading for knowledgeable musical amateurs and anyone with interest in Italian history and arts.

In Music at the Gonzaga Court in Mantua, Donald C. Sanders examines the history of musical composition and performance at the northern Italian court of Mantua from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth century. Music is discussed in the context of the visual art, poetry, and theater that graced the court and of the Gonzaga family's interaction with the major European historical figures of the era.

Explores the role of music in the cultural, religious, and political upheavals of late Renaissance Italy, revealing how musical activity of all kinds was instrumentalized by those in power. Italian culture did not lose its vigour after 1530, but underwent a transformation.

Renaissance music, like its sister arts, was most often experienced collectively. While it was possible to read Renaissance polyphony silently from a music manuscript or print, improvise alone, or perform as a soloist, the very practical nature of Renaissance music defied individualism. The reading and improvisation of polyphony was most frequently achieved through close co-operation, and this mutual endeavour extended beyond the musicians to include the society to which it is addressed. In sixteenth-century Milan, music, an art traditionally associated with the court and cathedral, came to be appropriated by the old nobility and the new aristocracy alike as a means of demonstrating social primacy and newly acquired wealth. As class mobility assumed greater significance in Milan and the size of the city expanded beyond its Medieval borders, music-making became ever more closely associated with public life. With its novel structures and diverse urban spaces, sixteenth-century Milan offered an unlimited variety of public performance arenas. The city's political and ecclesiastical authorities staged grand processions, church services, entertainments, and entries aimed at the propagation of both church and state. Yet the private citizen utilized such displays as well, creating his own miniature spectacle in a visual and an aural imitation of the ecclesiastical and political panoply of the age. Using archival documents, music prints, manuscripts and contemporary writing, Getz examines the musical culture of sixteenth-century Milan via its life within the city's most influential social institutions to show how fifteenth-century courtly traditions were adapted to the public arena. The book considers the relationship of the primary cappella musicale, including those of the Duomo, the court of Milan, Santa Maria della Scala, and Santa Maria presso San Celso, to the sixteenth-century institutions that housed them. In addition, the book investigates the musician's role as an actor and a functionary in the political, religious, and social spectacles produced by the Milanese church, state, and aristocracy within the city's diverse urban spaces. Furthermore, it establishes a context for the numerous motets, madrigals, and lute intabulations composed and printed in sixteenth-century Milan by examining their function within the urban milieu in which they were first performed. Finally, it musically documents Milan's transformation from a ducal state dominated by provincial traditions into a mercantile centre of international acclaim. Such an important study in Italian Renaissance music will therefore appeal to anyone interested in the culture of Renaissance Italy.

The subject of this study has two distinct but not unrelated aspects: first, an investigation into the sociology of music as an autonomous and specialized discipline; and second, an examination of certain fundamental facts that may be considered within the purview of the sociology of music itself. If an analysis and study even a preliminary one of these facts is to be properly focused and fruitful, we must first try to determine the subject and methods of the sociology of music, its position and boundaries in respect to musicology, and, most especially, its relation to the aesthetics of music and music history. It is equally indispensable to ascertain what the sociology of music as a separate scholarly discipline embraces, where its investigation leads, and, finally, to establish its position vis-a-vis sociology in general. (From the Author's Introduction.)

Analyzing the artistic patronage of famous and lesser known women of Renaissance Mantua, and introducing new patronage paradigms that existed among those women, this study sheds new light the social, cultural and religious impact of the cult of female mystics of that city in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Author Sally Hickson combines primary archival research, contextual analysis of the climate of female mysticism, and a re-examination of a number of visual objects (particularly altarpieces devoted to local beatae, saints and female founders of religious orders) to delineate ties between women both outside and inside the convent walls. The study contests the accepted perception of Isabella d'Este as a purely secular patron, exposing her role as a religious patron as well. Hickson introduces the figure of Margherita Cantelma and documents concerning the building and decoration of her monastery on the part of Isabella d'Este; and draws attention to the cultural and political activities of nuns of the Gonzaga family, particularly Isabella's daughter Livia Gonzaga who became a powerful agent in Mantuan civic life. Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua provides insight into a complex and fluid world of sacred patronage, devotional practices and religious roles of secular women as well as nuns in Renaissance Mantua.

Women & Music now features even more women composers, performers, and patrons, even more musical contexts, and an expanded view of women in music outside Europe and North America. A popular university textbook, Women & Music is enlightening for scholars, a good source of programming ideas for performers, and a pleasure for other music lovers.

The Companion to Baroque Music is an illuminating survey of musical life in Europe and the New World from 1600 to 1750. With informative essays on the social, national, geographical, and cultural contexts of the music and musicians of the period by such internationally known scholars as Peter Holman, Louise Stein, Michael Talbot, Julie Anne Sadie, Stanley Sadie, and David Fuller, the Companion offers a fresh perspective on the musical styles and performance practices of the Baroque era. The Companion to Baroque Music is an illuminating survey of musical life in Europe and the New World from 1600 to 1750. With informative essays on the social, national, geographical, and cultural contexts of the music and musicians of the period by such internationally known scholars as Peter Holman, Louise Stein, Michael Talbot, Julie Anne Sadie, Stanley Sadie, and David Fuller, the Companion offers a fresh perspective on the musical styles and performance practices of the Baroque era.

Viewed traditionally, the history of sixteenth-century Mantuan music is almost a catalogue of some of the most distinguished composers of the age, from Tromboncino and Cara, via Jacquet of Mantua, to Wert, Palestrina, Marenzio, Pallavicino, Gastoldi, Rossi and Monteverdi. The remarkable achievements of composers under Gonzaga patronage, practically synonymous with Mantuan patronage during this period, are treated here in their social context. The arguments proceed not just from the music itself, but from detailed examination of archival sources, from which Dr Fenlon reconstructus employment patterns and describes the social structure and institutional life of the city. The aim of the book is to show how the patterns of patronage, and music and musicians, reflect and illuminate the temperaments and prime preoccupations of successive rulers. The book contains a substantial appendix of unpublished archival documents, a small proportion only of the scholarly and comparative sources on which the study is based. This study will appeal to musicologists, as well as to students and teachers interested in the cultures of early modern Italy. A selection of music, illustrating in various ways the system of patronage which brought it into being and enabled its survival, will be published in a companion volume.

The Reader's Guide to Music is designed to provide a useful single-volume guide to the ever-increasing number of English language book-length studies in music. Each entry consists of a bibliography of some 3-20 titles and an essay in which these titles are evaluated, by an expert in the field, in light of the history of writing and scholarship on the given topic. The more than 500 entries include not just writings on major composers in music history but also the genres in which they worked (from early chant to rock and roll) and topics important to the various disciplines of music scholarship (from aesthetics to gay/lesbian musicology).