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Musical representations of Europe in myth and allegory are well known, but when and under what circumstances did the words'European'and'music'become linked together? What did the resulting term mean in music before 1800 and how did it evolve into the label'Western music,'which features so prominently in pedagogical and scholarly discourses? In The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century, author D. R. M. Irving traces the emergence of such large-scale categories in Western European thought. Beginning in the 1670s, Jesuit missionaries in China began to refer to'European music,'and for the next hundred years the term appeared almost exclusively in comparison with musics from other parts of the world. It entered common use from the 1770s, and in the 1830s became synonymous with a new concept of'Western music.'Western European writers also associated these terms with notions of'progress'and'perfection.'Meanwhile, changing ideas about'modern'Europe's cultural relationship with classical antiquity, together with theories that systematically and condescendingly racialized people from other continents, influenced the ways that these scholars imagined and interpreted musical pasts around the globe. Irving weaves his analyses throughout the book's historical examinations, suggesting that'European music'originates from self-fashioning in contexts of intercultural comparison outside the continent, rather than from the resolution of national aesthetic differences within it. He shows that'Western music'as understood today arose in line with the growth of Orientalism and increasing awareness of musics of'the East.'All such reductive terms often imply homogeneity and essentialism, and Irving asks what a reassessment of their beginnings might mean for music history. Taken as a whole, the book shows how a renewed critique of primary sources can help dismantle historiographical constructs that arose within narratives of musical pasts involving Europe.

A study of musical salons in Europe and North America between 1760 and 1800 and the salon hostesses who shaped their musical worlds. In eighteenth-century Europe and America, musical salons—and the women who hosted and made music in them—played a crucial role in shaping their cultural environments. Musical salons served as a testing ground for new styles, genres, and aesthetic ideals, and they acted as a mediating force, bringing together professional musicians and their audiences of patrons, listeners, and performers. For the salonnière, the musical salon offered a space between the public and private spheres that allowed her to exercise cultural agency. In this book, musicologist and historical keyboardist Rebecca Cypess offers a broad overview of musical salons between 1760 and 1800, placing the figure of the salonnière at its center. Cypess then presents a series of in-depth case studies that meet the salonnière on her own terms. Women such as Anne-Louise Brillon de Jouy in Paris, Marianna Martines in Vienna, Sara Levy in Berlin, Angelica Kauffman in Rome, and Elizabeth Graeme in Philadelphia come to life in multidimensional ways. Crucially, Cypess uses performance as a tool for research, and her interpretations draw on her experience with the instruments and performance practices used in eighteenth-century salons. In this accessible, interdisciplinary book, Cypess explores women's agency and authorship, reason and sentiment, and the roles of performing, collecting, listening, and conversing in the formation of eighteenth-century musical life.

During the 17th and 18th century musicians'mobilities and migrations are essential for the European music history and the cultural exchange of music. Adopting viewpoints that reflect different methodological approaches and diversified research cultures, the book presents studies on central scopes, strategies and artistic outcomes of mobile and migratory musicians as well as on the transfer of music. By looking at elite and non-elite musicians and their everyday mobilities to major and minor centers of music production and practice, new biographical patterns and new stylistic paradigms in the European East, West and South emerge.

The societal dimension of music in urban life in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesAlthough early modern urban musical life has been the object of investigation with several researchers, little is known about the ways in which musical cultures were integrated within their broader urban environments. Building upon recent trends within urban musicology, the authors of this volume aim to transcend descriptive overviews of institutions and actors involved with music within a given city. Instead, they consider the urban environment as the constitutive context for music making, and music as a significant aspect of urban society and identity.Through selected case studies and by focusing on three ‘musical circuits'—opera and theatre music, sacred music, and secular songs—this book contributes to a more effective understanding of music in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century urban societies in the southern Netherlands and beyond. Musicological and historical research perspectives are fruitfully integrated, as well as insights from theatre scholarship and literary criticism. With attention to the musical life behind the traditional institutions, the circulation of repertoires, and musical cultures in peripheral urban environments or in cities ‘in decay', Music and the City sheds new light on the societal dimension of music in urban life. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content). Contributors: Bruno Blondé (University of Antwerp), Timothy De Paepe (University of Antwerp), Rudolf Rasch (Utrecht University), Bruno Forment (Free University Brussels – Ghent University), Stefanie Beghein (University of Antwerp), Eugeen Schreurs (Artesis University College Antwerp, Royal Conservatory), Tanya Kevorkian (Millersville University), Anne-Madeleine Goulet (École française de Rome), Louis P. Grijp (Utrecht University – Meertens Institute)

The'ballet d'action'was one of the most successful and controversial forms of theatre in the early modern period. A curious hybrid of dance, mime and music, its overall and overriding intention was to create drama. It was danced drama rather than dramatic dance, musical drama rather than dramatic music. Most modern critical studies of the ballet d'action treat it more narrowly as stage dance and very few view it as part of the history of mime. Little use has previously been made of the most revealing musical evidence. This innovative book does justice to the distinctive hybrid nature of the ballet d'action by taking a comparative approach, using contemporary literature and literary criticism, music, mime and dance from a wide range of English and European sources. Edward Nye presents a fascinating study of this important and influential part of eighteenth-century European theatre.

Streifzug durch die Geschichte der Musik. Carl Dahlhaus und Norbert Miller erläutern, wie sich die traditionelle Opernform und der neue sinfonische Stil seit 1770 gegenseitig befruchten. Die Geschichte dieser Symbiose ist die Geschichte der klassisch-romantischen Musik als eine einheitliche Epoche. An ausgewählten Ereignissen werden die Umbrüche ebenso wie die kaum merkbaren Veränderungen sichtbar gemacht. Der zweite Band setzt in der Epochenmitte bei den Opern Webers und Spontinis ein. In Kapiteln über Rossinis Pariser Karriere, über Meyerbeer und die grand opéra, über Berlioz'und Schumanns Versuche einer'Opéra de concert'und über Verdis und Wagners musiktheatralische Neuerungen gehen die Autoren der Ästhetik der romantischen Oper und der Idee der symphonischen Dichtung auf den Grund.

Music in the Galant Style is an authoritative and readily understandable study of the core compositional style of the eighteenth century. Gjerdingen adopts a unique approach, based on a massive but little-known corpus of pedagogical workbooks used by the most influential teachers of the century, the Italian partimenti. He has brought this vital repository of compositional methods into confrontation with a set of schemata distilled from an enormous body of eighteenth-century music, much of it known only to specialists, formative of the'galant style.'

We tend to take for granted the labels we put to different forms of music. This study considers the origins and implications of the way in which we categorize music. Whereas earlier ways of classifying music were based on its different functions, for the past two hundred years we have been obsessed with creativity and musical origins, and classify music along these lines. Matthew Gelbart argues that folk music and art music became meaningful concepts only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and only in relation to each other. He examines how cultural nationalism served as the earliest impetus in classifying music by origins, and how the notions of folk music and art music followed - in conjunction with changing conceptions of nature, and changing ideas about human creativity. Through tracing the history of these musical categories, the book confronts our assumptions about different kinds of music.