A New Source of Restoration Keyboard Music

1987 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 53-57
Author(s):  
Peter Holman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Keyboard Music ◽  
Source Studies ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Henry Purcell

Restoration keyboard music has been well served in recent years by modern editions, source studies and thematic catalogues. Thus it is all the more surprising that Brussels Conservatoire MS XY 15139, a large manuscript from the early eighteenth century containing unique pieces by John Blow and William Croft as well as a number of early copies of music by Henry Purcell, has almost entirely escaped notice. It seems that the only references to it in the scholarly literature to date have been a brief description by Margaret Reimann in her article on the Kortkamp family in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, and my edition of two Croft suites in the 1982 revision of that composer's Complete Harpsichord Works.

Embodied Invention

2021 ◽  
pp. 115-140
Author(s):  
Bettina Varwig
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Keyboard Music ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

This chapter develops a historical account of Bach’s musicking body, and those of early-eighteenth-century keyboardists more generally, as a way to rethink how Bach’s keyboard music was conceived and performed. It synthesizes aspects of contemporaneous medical, scientific, and theological discourses about the human faculties of touch, memory, and invention, and brings these into dialogue with the inventive and performative dimensions of Bach’s keyboard practice. The chapter unearths historical conceptions of memory as physiologically grounded and distributed across the body, of touch as a corporeal-spiritual faculty, and of human bodies as purposive and intelligent. These notions of a bodily kind of intelligence suggest the need to ascribe much greater agency to the embodied aspects of early-eighteenth-century modes of composing and performing. The chapter thus offers a somatic alternative to the customary focus on mental, disembodied patterns of invention in understanding Bach’s compositional and improvisatory practices at the keyboard.

The Musical Topic of the Mass in B Minor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.

Kant and a Philosophical History of Logic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huaping Lu-Adler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
History Of Logic ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
Systematic Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Kantian Theory

This chapter discusses certain exegetical challenges posed by Kant’s logic corpus, which comprises the Logic compiled by Jäsche, Kant’s notes on logic, transcripts of his logic lectures, and remarks about logic in his own publications. It argues for a “history of philosophical problems” method by which to reconstruct a Kantian theory of logic that is maximally coherent, philosophically interesting, and historically significant. To ensure a principled application of this method, the chapter considers Kant’s conception of history against the background of the controversy between eclecticism and systematic philosophy that shaped the German philosophical discourse during the early eighteenth century. It thereby looks for an angle to make educated decisions about how to select materials from each of the periods considered in the book and builds a historical narrative that can best inform our understanding of Kant’s theory of logic.

Schopenhauer’s Pessimism in Context

2020 ◽  
pp. 283-298
Author(s):  
Mark Migotti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

In this chapter, the author attempts to establish what is philosophically living and what is philosophically dead in Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Against the background of the intriguing the history of the terms “optimism” and “pessimism”—in debates about Leibniz’s theodicy in the early eighteenth century and the popularity of Schopenhauer in the late nineteenth century, respectively—the author points up the distinction between affirming life, which all living beings do naturally, and subscribing to philosophical optimism (or pessimism), which is possible only for reflective beings like us. Next, the author notes the significance of Schopenhauer’s claim that optimism is a necessary condition of theism and explains its bearing on his pessimistic argument for the moral unacceptability of suicide. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s case for pessimism is not conclusive, but instructive; his dim view of the prospects for leading a truly rewarding, worthwhile human life draws vivid attention to important questions about how and to what degree an atheistic world can nevertheless be conducive to human flourishing.

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