Music in the Baroque (Western Music in Context: A Norton History)

Arts & Photography

Heller, Wendy

Music

W.W.Norton&Company

A concise anthology including a wide range of Baroque music.Anthology for Music in the Baroque, part of the Western Music in Context series, is the ideal companion to Music in the Baroque. Twenty-six carefully chosen works―including a lute song by John Dowland, a cantata by Barbara Strozzi, and selections from J. S. Bach’s Art of Fugue―offer representative examples of genres and composers of the period. Commentaries following each score present a careful analysis of the music, and online links to purchase and download recordings make listening easier than ever.

Anthology for Music in the Baroque (Western Music in Context: A Norton History)

Baroque music in its cultural, social, and intellectual contexts. Wendy Heller's Music in the Baroque traces the production and consumption of music in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Going beyond a history of styles, the text explores patronage, education, religious and civic ritual, theater, and visual culture. Heller focuses not only on the nature of music in the Baroque period, but also on the very different ways in which men and women experienced music in their daily lives. Treating music as an expression of political and national identity, she examines it in the context of the era's art and literature, political and religious conflicts, and contentious issues of class and gender. Western Music in Context: A Norton History comprises six volumes of moderate length, each written in an engaging style by a recognized expert. Authoritative and current, the series examines music in the broadest sense―as sounds notated, performed, and heard―focusing not only on composers and works, but also on broader social and intellectual currents.

Opera developed during a time when the position of women―their rights and freedoms, their virtues and vices, and even the most basic substance of their sexuality―was constantly debated. Many of these controversies manifested themselves in the representation of the historical and mythological women whose voices were heard on the Venetian operatic stage. Drawing upon a complex web of early modern sources and ancient texts, this engaging study is the first comprehensive treatment of women, gender, and sexuality in seventeenth-century opera. Wendy Heller explores the operatic manifestations of female chastity, power, transvestism, androgyny, and desire, showing how the emerging genre was shaped by and infused with the Republic's taste for the erotic and its ambivalent attitudes toward women and sexuality. Heller begins by examining contemporary Venetian writings about gender and sexuality that influenced the development of female vocality in opera. The Venetian reception and transformation of ancient texts―by Ovid, Virgil, Tacitus, and Diodorus Siculus―form the background for her penetrating analyses of the musical and dramatic representation of five extraordinary women as presented in operas by Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli, and their successors in Venice: Dido, queen of Carthage (Cavalli); Octavia, wife of Nero (Monteverdi); the nymph Callisto (Cavalli); Queen Semiramis of Assyria (Pietro Andrea Ziani); and Messalina, wife of Claudius (Carlo Pallavicino).

Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice

University of California Press

Tales from around the world retold simply and vividly by Wendy Heller and illustrated with pencil drawings.

The Sunshine Tree

Children's Books

Fairy Tales, Folk Tales & Myths

Believe In Yourself Publishing

Lidia: The Life of Lidia Zamenhof, Daughter of Esperanto

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

George Ronald Pub Ltd

Lidia: The life of Lidia Zamenhof, daughter of Esperanto

G.Ronald

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