Product Description: More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization...read more

Professional and amateur musicians will appreciate this clear, readable guide to the music of Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Telemann, and other Baroque composers. Author Victor Rangel-Ribeiro draws upon the writings of C. P. E. Bach, J. J. Quantz, G. P. Telemann, Francesco Geminiani, Leopold Mozart, and Giuseppe Tartini to offer advice on the difficult aspects of eighteenth-century German, Italian, and English masterworks.Advancing from relatively simple material to more complex works, this guide begins by outlining the problems inherent in Baroque performance. Subsequent chapters examine ornamentation and the principles of "figured bass," applying them to various types of works, including keyboard concertos and vocal music. An epilogue sheds new light on a highly complex rhythmic issue, and the appendices present three unfamiliar examples of ornamentation. Profusely illustrated with musical examples, this volume was praised by violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin for its "readable and engaging style, free from the pedantic, overly scholarly approach."