This series was originally supported by funds made available to the Royal Musical Association from the estate of Thurston Dart. Its purpose is to provide a medium for specialized investigations of a topic, concept or repertory - studies of a kind that would not normally be feasible for commercial publishers and that would be too long for most periodicals.
By J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Oliver Chandler
February 16, 2024
This book is a music-theoretical and critical-theoretical study of late tonal music, and, in particular, of the music of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. First, in terms of music theory, it proposes a new theory of tonal function that returns to the theories of Hugo Riemann to rediscover a development of ...
By Colin Timms
December 12, 2023
This book establishes the cultural background to the productions of Milton’s Comus that were staged in the 1740s by Baptist Noel, 4th Earl of Gainsborough, at Exton Hall, his country seat in the East Midlands of England. The author reveals that Handel’s visit in 1745 occurred in a richer and ...
By Catherine A. Bradley
September 25, 2023
Questions of authorship are central to the late thirteenth-century motet repertoire represented by the seventh section or fascicle of the Montpellier Codex (Montpellier, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Section de médecine, H. 196, hereafter Mo). Mo does not explicitly attribute any of its ...
By Florian Bassani
September 25, 2023
Neither Spem in alium, the widely acclaimed ‘songe of fortie partes’ by Thomas Tallis, nor Alessandro Striggio’s forty-part Mass is the largest-scale counterpoint work in Western music. The actual winner is Gregorio Ballabene, a relatively unknown Roman maestro di cappella, a contemporary of ...
By Dolores Pesce
February 08, 2023
This monograph offers a comprehensive study of the topos of the malmariée or the unhappily married woman within the thirteenth-century motet repertory, a vocal genre characterized by several different texts sounding simultaneously over a foundational Latin chant. Part I examines the malmariée ...
By Karen M. Cook
January 09, 2023
The manuscript Seville, Biblioteca Colombina y Capitular 5-2-25, a composite of dozens of theoretical treatises, is one of the primary witnesses to late medieval music theory. Its numerous copies of significant texts have been the focus of substantial scholarly attention to date, but the shorter, ...
By Beverly Jerold
December 22, 2021
The founding in 1777 of the Journal de Paris, France’s first daily and distinctly commercial paper, represents an early use of disinformation as a tool for political gain, profit, and societal division. To attract a large readership and bar competition for C.W. Gluck’s works at the Paris Opéra, it ...
By Cheryll Duncan
October 14, 2019
Felice Giardini and Professional Music Culture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London explores Giardini’s influence on British musical life through his multifaceted career as performer, teacher, composer, concert promoter and opera impresario. The crux of the study is a detailed account of Giardini’s ...
By Roger Savage
September 11, 2019
The Pre-history of ‘The Midsummer Marriage’ examines the early collaborative phase (1943 to 1946) in the making of Michael Tippett’s first mature opera and charts the developments that grew out of that phase. Drawing on a fascinating group of Tippett’s sketchbooks and a lengthy sequence of his ...
By Matthew Head
August 15, 2019
Matthew Head explores the cultural meanings of Mozart's Turkish music in the composer's 18th-century context, in subsequent discourses of Mozart's significance for 'Western' culture, and in today's (not entirely) post-colonial world. Unpacking the ideological content of Mozart's numerous ...
By Michael Burden
June 10, 2019
Regina Mingotti was the first female impresario to run London's opera house. Born in Naples in 1722, she was the daughter of an Austrian diplomat, and had worked at Dresden under Hasse from 1747. Mingotti left Germany in 1752, and travelled to Madrid to sing at the Spanish court, where the opera ...
By James Cook
April 12, 2019
England in the fifteenth century was the cradle of much that would have a profound impact on European music for the next several hundred years. Perhaps the greatest such development was the cyclic cantus firmus Mass, and scholarly attention has therefore often been drawn to identifying potentially ...