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Walter Piston, Armonia, 1989
Piston’s text has a long history in the teaching of harmony in English-speaking countries; its use for the same purpose in Italy should make it possible both to renew teaching methods and to engage with themes, needs and perspectives typical of countries with different educational systems. Particularly beneficial and stimulating in this respect is the contrast between the theoretical and deductive character of harmony teaching as it has traditionally been taught in our country, and the practical and inductive approach of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The constant connection between musical examples, analysis and theoretical discussion is not a prerogative of harmony alone, but of a broader approach to music pedagogy in which learning theory and practice remains firmly and consistently linked to analysis and to the systematic study of the musical literature.
Ian Bent-William Drabkin, Analisi musicale, 1990
The rich analytical tradition that has flourished over the past century in German-, English- and French-speaking countries still remains largely unfamiliar to the educated Italian musician and music lover. This volume is intended to provide the tools needed to remedy this gap in training and information, from a broad interdisciplinary perspective. Alongside the essential sections of the original handbook, it includes notes and bibliographical references specifically designed for our readership, as well as a series of essays never before translated into Italian, illustrating the work of some of the leading analysts of our time, from Donald Francis Tovey to Heinrich Schenker, and from Allen Forte to Jean-Jacques Nattiez. The editor’s preface offers a number of essential suggestions for both classroom and self-directed use of the volume, placing it against the backdrop of the widespread interest in analysis now evident across the most diverse areas of our musical culture.
Angelo Gilardino, Enrico Allorto, Mario Dell’Ara, Ruggero Chiesa, The Guitar, 1990
Organized into four sections (Organology, Notation, Fingering, Methods and Treatises), this handbook draws on the contributions of some of the most authoritative scholars in the field. It examines, in sequence, the construction of the guitar from the Renaissance to the present day; the development of guitar notation from eighteenth-century shorthand writing to the complex symbolism introduced by contemporary composers; fingering, illustrated with musical examples drawn from the most important works in the teaching and concert repertoire; and finally a comprehensive survey of the Methods and Treatises that have shaped the history of guitar pedagogy over the centuries.
Anthony Baines, Brass Instruments, 1991
“Brass instruments hold a particular fascination for all those who love musical instruments. Their history spans periods in which they played only a minor musical role, yet one crucial to human survival, and others in which they attained a truly remarkable artistic level. It is therefore only natural that these instruments should increasingly have attracted the attention of historians and become the subject of numerous specialist studies involving a range of related disciplines. […] What has long been lacking, however, is a concise overall survey, and this is precisely what the present volume intends to offer musicians and music lovers.” The most up-to-date and comprehensive historical study of brass instruments: trumpets, trombones, horns and tubas examined from an interdisciplinary perspective that embraces anthropology, acoustics, archaeology and ethnomusicology.
Felix Salzer, Carl Schachter, Counterpoint in Composition, 1992
By calling into question the “abstract” study of counterpoint as it has been practised for centuries in our conservatories, Felix Salzer and Carl Schachter seek in this book to demonstrate just how reductive the traditional pedagogical conception of counterpoint really is when it is treated merely as a preparatory exercise for the study of composition. The two scholars broaden this perspective by showing how the fundamental, simple patterns of old-school counterpoint, codified by Fux in the eighteenth century, can also be found in the most sophisticated and complex compositions of the following century and of the twentieth century (in Beethoven, Wagner, Scriabin…). The authors teach readers how to rediscover them by using a clear and effective analytical method: the one proposed by Heinrich Schenker more than fifty years ago and now universally adopted in Anglo-American music schools. The result of this solid teaching experience is a volume marked by lucid explanations, a progressive method and carefully graded exercises. Its aim is to teach mastery of counterpoint while at the same time fostering practical command of the most important compositional techniques. The book is ideally suited to students and teachers in composition and analysis programmes, but the musicological world too will find in it ideas and suggestions of extraordinary relevance.
Ian Woodfield, The Viol. From Its Origins to the Renaissance, 1999
Despite the leading role played by the viol in the musical repertoire of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, the historical development of this instrument long remained overshadowed by scholars’ predominant interest in the violin family. Only in recent decades, thanks to the attention generated by performance on original instruments, has research begun to turn systematically towards earlier instruments, yielding important results in the historical study of the viol as well. In this respect, Ian Woodfield’s book is truly exceptional, not least because of his exemplary use of iconographic sources, which made it possible to identify the Spanish origins of the instrument. Brought to southern Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century by its Aragonese rulers, it was immediately taken up by Italian luthiers, who soon transformed it into the earliest model of the viol. But Woodfield’s work has much more to offer the Italian reader. It presents an unprecedented survey of documents and historical evidence, together with a detailed examination of the principal sixteenth-century theoretical and practical musical sources—Italian, German, French and English—relating to what was the most intricate and, until now, least well-known period in the history of this instrument, a central protagonist of Renaissance and Baroque musical life.
Enzo Porta, The Violin in History, 2000
What we normally call the History of Music consists not only of an uninterrupted sequence of masterpieces, but also of a complex web of artistic, organological, philosophical and other developments. Here Enzo Porta outlines, for the first time with clarity and rigour, one of the most fascinating of these histories: that of violin pedagogy. The gradual growing awareness among musicians of the instrument’s technical possibilities, the emergence of the concept of the “violin school” and its development in its various national forms, the great masters and their works (from Tartini and Geminiani to Ševčík and Flesch, by way of Leopold Mozart and Niccolò Paganini), the more recent developments in pedagogy and the birth of violin physiology: all this is presented in rich detail and with extensive use of examples drawn from historical treatises. For each school, the volume examines its distinctive theoretical reflection, its practical applications (from “methods” to so-called “art pedagogy”, embodied in the various collections of Studies, Caprices, Preludes, and so forth), and the most representative figures through whom it found expression. The volume is completed by an original annotated genealogical tree of the violin schools, through which it is possible to trace the affiliations and stylistic legacies of each of the great instrumentalists of the past and present, together with a selection of readings drawn from some of the classics of violin pedagogy.
Emilio Galante, Gianni Lizzari, The Transverse Flute, 2003
Alda Bellasich, Sigfrido Leschiutta, Ferdinando Granziera, Emilia Fadini, The Harpsichord, 2005
Samuel Adler, The Study of Orchestration, 2008
A book founded on the conviction that the orchestra is not merely the sum of its components, and that it is possible to identify in the scores of nineteenth- and twentieth-century classics, as well as in some more recent works, general principles that can prove useful, not to say essential, to the training of every composer, musician or student of music. This is by no means a self-evident conviction, if one considers how few texts move beyond describing individual instruments to address, as this one does, their combinations, relationships, balances, contrasts and functions within the orchestral context. Through more than eight hundred solo and orchestral musical examples, dozens of drawings, photographs and tables, and hundreds of suggestions for further study, Adler provides the reader with an impressive wealth of information and advice, developed over a long career in composition, teaching and conducting, and organized with unsurpassed pedagogical skill. The book also contains numerous and detailed references to transcription for various orchestral media, including wind bands, and gives particular attention to the correct graphic presentation of scores.
Ala Botti Caselli (ed.), The Piano, 2018
In the tradition of the Manuali prepared in collaboration with the Società Italiana di Musicologia, a wide-ranging, up-to-date and comprehensive volume, edited by leading specialists in the field, offering all the theoretical and practical information needed for the study of the piano and for the life of the pianist. Edited by Ala Botti Caselli.
