Handel

Handel
Author: Donald Burrows
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 144
Release: 1991-06-24
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780521376204

This new guide to Handel's most celebrated work traces the course of Messiah from Handel's initial musical response to the libretto, through the oratorio's turbulent first years to its eventual popularity with the Foundling Hospital performances. Different chapters consider the varying reception the work received in Dublin and London, the uneasy relationship between the composer and his librettist Charles Jennens and the many changes Messiah underwent through the varying needs and capacities of Handel's performers. As well as tracing the history of the work's development, the book addresses musical and technical issues such as Messiah's place in the oratorio genre, Handel's treatment of structural design, tonal relationships and English word-setting. An edited libretto elucidates the variants between the text that Handel set and the texts of the early printed word-books. Donald Burrows brings many new insights to this fascinating account of one of the favourite works of the concert hall.

Handel’s Messiah

Handel’s Messiah
Author: Amanda Babington
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2024-06-07
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1040052053

The soundtrack of the Christmas season for many music lovers, Messiah is performed annually by choral societies across the world. And so, perhaps unsurprisingly, many aspects of it have been explored by scholars over the years. The work is the subject of several listeners’ guides and there are a number of books and articles of various lengths that describe the biographical circumstances of the work’s formation and details of its many performances, many including lists of singers for each performance (an area that has itself spawned a whole field of research). There has been no extensive study of the creative process of Messiah, however, since 1969. This book seeks to redress this imbalance by providing a thorough investigation of the work’s creative process. Beginning with the creative process of the libretto, it examines the earliest sketches, Handel’s use of pre-existent material, alterations made to the autograph score, and the latest versions of movements. Each stage of composition is examined via primary source material, with particular reference to the autograph score and conducting score. Each chapter is formed as a case study and contains related discussion points for use in teaching or study settings.

G. F. Handel

G. F. Handel
Author: Mary Ann Parker
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2013-10-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 113678358X

Baroque composer George Frideric Handel easily ranks among the world's greatest composers. The first edition of this research guide on Handel appeared in 1988; since that time a great deal of scholarly work has been published on Handel and related areas, including the discovery of a hitherto unknown work. New general resources such as the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992), electronic resources such as the RISM libretto catalogue online, and the study of Handel's continuing popularity as evidenced by the new Handel House Museum in London and Handel practice around the world (e.g., Messiah and millennium celebrations in Tonga, singalong Messiahs etc.) are incorporated into this revised edition of the Handel guide.

Choral Masterworks from Bach to Britten

Choral Masterworks from Bach to Britten
Author: Robert J. Summer
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2007
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780810859036

Presents a series of discussions about sixteen choral masterworks, facilitating conductors who perform these works and wish to know them. This work examines compositions such as Bach's "Mass in B Minor", Mahler's "8th Symphony", and more, in terms of textual symbolism, musical structure, and identification of endearing traits of each work.

Multiple Originals

Multiple Originals
Author: Gary D. Martin
Publisher: Society of Biblical Lit
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2010
Genre: Bibles
ISBN: 1589835131

Textual criticism is in a period of change, as it seeks to account for an ever-growing body of textual data as well as the development of new methodologies. Since the older methodologies cannot simply be modified to meet our present needs, Multiple Originals seeks to build bridges between methods of traditional textual criticism and those of orality and formulaic analysis. Examining practices of textual criticism across a wide range of texts and disciplines, this book challenges the assumption that there can be only one correct reading and argues for the presence of multivalences of both meaning and text. It demonstrates that in some cases multivalences were intended by the composer, while in other cases, during the periods from which our earliest extant manuscripts derive, they fell within the limits of variability acceptable to those who valued and transmitted those texts.

A Conductor's Guide to Selected Baroque Choral-Orchestral Works

A Conductor's Guide to Selected Baroque Choral-Orchestral Works
Author: Jonathan D. Green
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2013-12-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0810886502

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.

Reader's Guide to Music

Reader's Guide to Music
Author: Murray Steib
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 2624
Release: 2013-12-02
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1135942692

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).