Historical Musicology

Seventeen studies by noted experts that demonstrate recent approaches toward the creative interpretation of primary sources regarding Renaissance and Baroque music, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Verdi, Debussy, and beyond.

How do we know what notes a composer intended in a given piece? -- how those notes should be played and sung? -- the nature of musical life in Bach's Leipzig, Schubert's Vienna? -- how music related to literature and other arts and social currents in different times and places? -- what attitudes musicians and music lovers had toward the music that they heard and made?

We know all this from musical manuscripts and prints, opera libretti, composers'letters, reviews in newspapers and magazines, archival data, contemporary pedagogical writings, essays on aesthetics, and much else. Some of these categories of sources are the bedrock of music history and musicology. Others havebegun to be examined only in recent years.

Furthermore, musicologists -- including biographers of famous composers -- now explore these various kinds of sources in a variety of ways, some of them richly traditional and others exciting and novel.

These seventeen essays, all newly written, use a wide array of source materials to probe issues pertaining to a cross section of musical works and musical life from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries.

The resulting, pluralistic profile of current musicology will prove welcome to anyone fascinated by the problems of reconstructing -- reimagining, sometimes -- the evanescent musical art of the past and pondering its implications for musical life today and in the future.

Roberta Montemorra Marvin is a Research Fellow at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa where she is also Director of the Institute for Italian Opera Studies; Stephen A. Crist is associate professor and chair of the Music Department at Emory University.