This book is an exercise in pragmatic music criticism. By providing a rational basis for evaluating the essential issues, Swain seeks to show how a spiritually wholesome stability might supplant the confusion.

This new edition of Swain's classic text, winner of the 1991 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, reveals how a musical drama achieves plot movement, character development and conflict through strategic placement of song and music in 20 musical plays.

Some of the Baroque composers appear among the most popular of all time, such as Bach, Handel and Vivaldi. So yes, this is a book for researchers, but it is also a good book for anyone who enjoys this music.

Rather, to perform the ritual is to sing, and to sing the ritual is to perform it. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Sacred Music contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography.

The illustrations used in the book range from the most elemental speech sounds to the poetry of Emerson, from a single saxophone note to the grandest passages of Beethoven; they include discussions of medieval polyphony and the music of ...

The book goes on to propose a theory of interpretation of these pictures, explaining how to read the ebb and flow of harmonic-rhythm tensions that arise from the motion of harmony and its contrapuntal changes.

An examination of the music of two great exponents of Baroque music and their influence on later composers.