Fans of opera will delight in the opportunity presented in First Nights: a chance to experience the premiere performances of five operatic masterpieces. Kelly compliments his own prose re-creation of
The Latin liturgical music of the medieval church is the earliest body of Western music to survive in a more or less complete form. It is a body of thousands of individual pieces, of striking beauty a
Kelly (Harvard U.) presents non-majors with a music appreciation text that acquaints them with all historical periods of Western music through 28 specific pieces. Chapters are arranged chronologically
Why make a scroll when you can make a book? This is the key question that music historian Thomas Forrest Kelly answers in The Role of the Scroll. Scrolls were the standard form of book in Western anti
How music functioned in the middle ages, what it meant to its hearers, and how it was performed: these are the subjects of this fascinating volume. The studies collected here introduce the reader to t
Offers an overview of the best scholarship in the study of medieval music. This series introduces readers to an enormous swathe of musical history. It is suitable for scholars and students.
From Gregorian chant to Bach's Brandenburg Concerti, the music of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods is both beautiful and intriguing, expanding our horizons as it nourishes our souls. In
What was it like at the opening night of Mozart’s Don Giovanni or Wagner’s Das Rheingold? This glittering introduction to the world of opera takes us behind the scenes during premiere per
For scholars and students, Kelly (Harvard U.) collects 16 seminal writings on oral and written transmission in Gregorian chant. The writings first address early types of neumatic writing, the origins
From at least the eighth century and for about a thousand years the repertory of music known as Georgian chant, or plainsong, formed the largest body of written music AND was the most frequently performed and the most assiduously studied in Western civilisation. But plainsong did not follow rigid conventions. It seems increasingly clear that, whatever may have been intended with respect to uniformity and tradition, the practice of plainsong varied considerably within time and place. It is just this variation, this living quality of plainsong, that these essays address. The contributors have sought information from a wide variety of areas: liturgy, architecture, art history, secular and ecclesiastical history and hagiography, as a step towards reassembling the tesserae of cultural history into the rich mosaic from which they came.
From the High Middle Ages the dominance of Gregorian chant has obscured the fact that musical practice in early medieval Europe was far richer than has hitherto been recognized. Despite its historical importance, the "Gregorian" is not the most consistent and probably not the oldest form of Christian chant. The recovery and study of regional musical dialects having a common ancestry in the Christian church and Western musical tradition are reshaping our view of the early history of Christian liturgical music. Thomas Kelly's major study of the Beneventan chant reinstates one of the oldest surviving bodies of Western music: the Latin church music of southern Italy as it existed before the spread of Gregorian chant. Dating from the seventh and eighth centuries it was largely forgotten after the Carolingian desire for political and liturgical uniformity imposed "Gregorian" chant throughout the realm. But a few later scribes, starting apparently in the tenth century, preserved a part of
The Ambrosian liturgy and its music, practiced in and around medieval Milan, is the only one of several regional traditions not to have been suppressed during the Carolingian urge to uniformity that
