This book gives a practical method for playing the harpsichord in a way that was lost when the instrument was marginalized by the piano in the 19th century. Since a thorough knowledge of historical performance practice is such an important aspect of playing this repertoire, excerpts from relevant primary sources are given at the end of many of the lessons.

A History of the Harpsichord brings together for the first time more than 200 photographs, illustrations, and drawings of harpsichords in public museums and private collections throughout Europe the United States. Edward L. Kottick draws on his extensive technical knowledge and experience as a harpsichord builder to detail the changing design, structure, and acoustics of the instrument over seven centuries.Based on painstaking research, the book considers the place of the instrument in society and vividly describes the market forces that brought about changes in its form, decoration, and cultural importance. An accompanying CDincludes performances on several of the historical instruments described and illustrated in the volume, including a 1580 spinett virginal by Martin van der Biest and instruments built by Ruckers and Pleyel. The volume devotes attention to American harpsichord design as well as to present and future uses of the instrument.Also of interestThe History of the PianoforteA Documentary in SoundEva Badura-Skoda0-253-33582-5 HB £37.95

Elena discovers a magical book in her grandmother's attic, The Harpsichord Diaries. Transported through five centuries, she meets eccentric talking harpsichords that bring music and history to life. Internationally acclaimed harpsichordist Elaine Funaro teamed up with her twins, professional theater director Eric Love and award-winning animator Andrea Love to create this unique musical journey.

Yonit Lea Kosovske surveys early music and writing about keyboard performance with the aim of facilitating the development of an expressive tone in the modern player. Reviewing the work of the pedagogues and performers of the late Renaissance through the late Baroque, she gives special emphasis to la douceur du toucher or a gentle touch. Other topics addressed include posture, early pedagogy, exercises, articulation, and fingering patterns. Illustrated with musical examples as well as photos of the author at the keyboard, Historical Harpsichord Technique can be used for individual or group lessons and for amateurs and professionals.

Covers every aspect of the harpsichord and its music, including composers, genres, national styles, tuning, and the art of harpsichord building.

An expansive analysis of the relationship between human and machine in music. From the mid-eighteenth century on, there was a logic at work in musical discourse and practice: human or machine. That discourse defined a boundary of absolute difference between human and machine, with a recurrent practice of parsing “human” musicality from its “merely mechanical” simulations. In Sounding Human, Deirdre Loughridge tests and traverses these boundaries, unmaking the “human or machine” logic and seeking out others, better characterized by conjunctions such as and or with. Sounding Human enters the debate on posthumanism and human-machine relationships in music, exploring how categories of human and machine have been continually renegotiated over the centuries. Loughridge expertly traces this debate from the 1737 invention of what became the first musical android to the creation of a “sound wave instrument” by a British electronic music composer in the 1960s, and the chopped and pitched vocals produced by sampling singers’ voices in modern pop music. From music-generating computer programs to older musical instruments and music notation, Sounding Human shows how machines have always actively shaped the act of music composition. In doing so, Loughridge reveals how musical artifacts have been—or can be—used to help explain and contest what it is to be human.

In this collection of essays Mary Cyr explores some of the written and unwritten performance conventions that applied to French and English music of the 17th and early 18th centuries. Using composers' own notations, marks added by 18th-century performers, historical treatises, and pictorial evidence, she investigates both vocal and instrumental genres, including opera, cantatas, instrumental chamber music, and solo music for the viol and violin. Some of the performance conventions remain controversial, such as the use of gesture by the French opera chorus, and others are still little-known, such as the use of the double bass for rhythmic and harmonic support in early 18th-century French opera. As many of these essays demonstrate, French Baroque music allowed performers a wider latitude of nuance and expression than is often assumed today. The essays in this volume will be of particular interest to scholars and performers who are interested in adopting a historically-informed approach to performing music by Henry Purcell, Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and their contemporaries. Several studies also deal with attributions, sources, and the discovery of a cantata by Rameau.

Humans are remarkably adept at identifying individuals on the basis of their facial features, or other traits such as gait or vocal timbre. Besides voice, another auditory medium capable of carrying identity information is music. Indeed, certain famous musicians, such as John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins, need only to play a few notes to be unequivocally recognized. Along with emotion and structural cues, artistic individuality seems to be a key element communicated in music performance. Yet, the means by which individuality is expressed in performance, as well as the cognitive processes employed by listeners to perceive identity cues, remain poorly elucidated. Other pertinent issues, including the connection between a performer’s technical competence and ability to convey a specific musical identity, as well as potential links between individuality and career-defining outcomes such as critical recognition and aesthetic appraisal, warrant further exploration. Quantitative approaches to the study of music performance have benefited greatly from MIDI technology and the application of computational methods, leading to the flourishing of empirical music performance research over the last few decades. More recently, neuroimaging techniques have provided valuable insights into the neural mechanisms involved in the cognitive processes of performing music. Nevertheless, this field continues to benefit greatly from qualitative approaches, given that the communication of affect and identity cues in music performance leads to a rich subjectivity of impressions that must be accounted for in order to lead to a greater understanding of this multifaceted phenomenon. The aim of this Research Topic is to provide a forum for interdisciplinary research broadly related to the expression and perception of individuality in music performance. Research methodology includes behavioral, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging techniques. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are presented The scope of this Research Topic includes laboratory studies as well as studies in real-life performance settings and longitudinal studies on performers.

This series presents introductory guides to key musical genres in the Western classical canon. Designed for the avid listener or the student of music history, each volume offers chapters exploring principal composers and their works, as well as contextual essays. Written by eminent music scholars, generously illustrated with musical examples, and furnished with suggested bibliographies, Routledge Studies in Musical Genres provide readable yet informative surveys for music lovers and dedicated musicians alike. Book jacket.