Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | Notes

Seventeenth-Century British Keyboard Sources.

Article Excerpt
By Candace Bailey. (Detroit Studies in Music Bibliography, 83.) Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2003. [xiii, 151 p. ISBN 0-89990-113-1. $42.50.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

This volume is a welcome addition to the available literature on British keyboard music of the later Renaissance/early baroque eras. It is a synthetic study, summarizing in a single reference volume the present state of scholarship, attempting an overview of the music itself as well as of the primary sources in which this varied and fascinating repertoire is found. As much of the literature on the output of the English Virginalists and their successors is now quite old, and especially as much recent work on it has appeared in Ph.D. theses and specialist articles (some of the latter in out-of-the-way publications), it is good to have a text that provides essential orientation and references the up-to-date literature in which more detailed treatment of particular issues may be found. The structure of the present volume falls into two parts: "A General Survey of British Keyboard Music and Its Sources" (pp. 3-43);...