More Details

Summary:

In recent years, scholars and musicians have become increasingly interested in the revival of musical improvisation as it was known in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. This historically informed practice is now supplanting the late Romantic view of improvised music as a rhapsodic endeavour - a musical blossoming out of the capricious genius of the player - that dominated throughout the twentieth century. In the Renaissance and Baroque eras, composing in the mind (alla mente) had an important didactic function. For several categories of musicians, the teaching of counterpoint happened almost entirely through practice on their own instruments. This volume offers the first systematic exploration of the close relationship among improvisation, music theory and practical musicianship from late Renaissance into the Baroque era. It is not a historical survey per se, but rather aims to re-establish the importance of such a combination as a pedagogical tool for a better understanding of the musical idioms of these periods. The authors are concerned with the transferral of historical practices to the modern classroom, discussing new ways of revitalising the study and appreciation of early music. The relevance and utility of such an improvisation-based approach also changes our understanding of the balance between theoretical and practical sources in the primary literature, as well as the concept of music theory itself.

Table of Contents:

• The improvisatory moment / Thomas Christensen
• Musical invention, rhetorical loci, and the art of memory / Stefano Lorenzetti
• Climbing the stairs of the memory palace : gestures at the keyboard for a flexible mind / Massimiliano Guido
• Toward a stylistic history of Cantare super librum / Philippe Canguilhem
• Contrapunto and fabordâon : practices of extempore polyphony in Renaissance Spain / Giuseppe Fiorentino
• Discovering the practice of improvised counterpoint / Jean-Yves Haymoz
• Composing at the keyboard : Banchieri and Spiridion, two complementary methods / Edoardo Bellotti
• Partimento teaching according to Francesco Durante, investigated through the earliest manuscript sources / Peter van Tour
• Partimento and incomplete notations in eighteenth-century keyboard music / Giorgio Sanguinetti
• Teaching theory through improvisation / Peter Schubert
• Learning tonal counterpoint through keyboard improvsation in the twenty-first century / Michael Callahan.

Contributors:

Guido, Massimiliano , editor

Languages:

English

Language Notes:

English text.

Subjects:

Improvisation (Music) — History

Improvisation (Music)

Genres:

History

General Notes:

Cover title.
Includes bibliographical references and index: pages 205-219.

Physical Description:

xvi, 219 pages : music ; 24 cm

Call Numbers:

ML457 .S88 2017

ISBNs:

9781472473271 (hardback)
1472473272

Library of Congress Control Numbers:

2016029978

OCLC Numbers:

949987918