Janet K. Page explores the interaction of music and piety, court and church, as seen through the relationship between the Habsburg court and Vienna's convents. In the first full-length study of its kind, she reveals a golden age of convent music in Vienna and the convents' surprising engagement with contemporary politics.

Janet K. Page explores the interaction of music and piety, court and church, as seen through the relationship between the Habsburg court and Vienna's convents. For a period of some twenty-five years, encompassing the end of the reign of Emperor Leopold I and that of his elder son, Joseph I, the court's emphasis on piety and music meshed perfectly with the musical practices of Viennese convents. This mutually beneficial association disintegrated during the eighteenth century, and the changing relationship of court and convents reveals something of the complex connections among the Habsburg court, the Roman Catholic Church, and Viennese society. Identifying and discussing many musical works performed in convents, including oratorios, plays with music, feste teatrali, sepolcri, and other church music, Page reveals a golden age of convent music in Vienna and sheds light on the convents' surprising engagement with contemporary politics.

The image of Vienna as a musical city is a familiar one. This book explores the history of music in Vienna, focussing on three different epochs, 1700, 1800 and 1900.

How did castrati manage to amaze their eighteenth-century audiences by singing the same aria several times in completely different ways? And how could composers of the time write operas in a matter of days? The secret lies in the solfeggio tradition, a music education method that was fundamental to the training of European musicians between 1680 and 1830 a time during which professional musicians belonged to the working class. As disadvantaged children in orphanages learned the musical craft through solfeggio lessons, many were lifted from poverty, and the most successful were propelled to extraordinary heights of fame and fortune. In this first book on the solfeggio tradition, author Nicholas Baragwanath draws on over a thousand manuscript sources to reconstruct how professionals became skilled performers and composers who could invent and modify melodies at will. By introducing some of the simplest exercises in scales, leaps, and cadences that apprentices would have encountered, this book allows readers to retrace the steps of solfeggio training and learn to generate melody by 'speaking' it like an eighteenth-century musician. As it takes readers on a fascinating journey through the fundamentals of music education in the eighteenth century, this book uncovers a forgotten art of melody that revolutionizes our understanding of the history of music pedagogy.

Grief, Identity and the Arts addresses the interplay between grief and identity in a broad range of artistic disciplines, historical periods, and geographical areas.

Introduction -- Precocious in print -- Acting like children -- Kinderlieder and the work of play -- Cadences of the childlike -- Toying with Mozart.

Moving beyond narratives of female suppression, and exploring the critical potential of a diverse, distinguished repertoire, this Companion transforms received understanding of women composers. Organised thematically, and ranging beyond elite, Western genres, it explores the work of diverse female composers from medieval to modern times, besides the familiar headline names. The book's prologue traces the development of scholarship on women composers over the past five decades and the category of 'woman composer' itself. The chapters that follow reveal scenes of flourishing creativity, technical innovation, and (often fleeting) recognition, challenging long-held notions around invisibility and neglect and dismissing clichés about women composers and their work. Leading scholars trace shifting ideas about composers and compositional processes, contributing to a wider understanding of how composers have functioned in history and making this volume essential reading for all students of musical history. In an epilogue, three contemporary composers reflect on their careers and identities.