Nicholas Baragwanath is a British music theorist, musicologist and pianist. He is currently Professor of Music at the University of Nottingham. He is best known for his contributions to the compositional theory and practice of 19th-century Italian Opera. [1] He regularly writes and presents for BBC Radio 3. [2]
Baragwanath trained as a pianist at the Royal Academy of Music and, under Ryszard Bakst, at the Royal Northern College of Music. In 1998, he completed his MA and D.Phil at the University of Sussex and lectured at the University of Wellington, New Zealand. In 2001, Baragwanath moved to the Royal Northern College of Music to become Head of Postgraduate Studies and later became the Dean of Research and Enterprise. Since 2010, he has taught at the University of Nottingham. [3]
Baragwanath's research into the Italian traditions of 19th century Opera has revised opinions as to how composition was learned by composers by offering a detailed analysis of the methods of the Italian conservatories, notably in Naples and Northern Italy. [4] These historical Italian methods of composition, grounded in solfeggio, partimento and counterpoint, offer an alternative method of analysis of Italian Opera to the standard Austro-German tradition. [5]
Baragwanath's latest book on the solfeggio tradition provides the first major study of the fundamentals of eighteenth-century music education. It recovers an entirely forgotten art of melody that allowed musicians to develop exceptional skills in improvisation, composition, and score-reading. [6]
Giacomo Puccini was an Italian composer known primarily for his operas. Regarded as the greatest and most successful proponent of Italian opera after Verdi, he was descended from a long line of composers, stemming from the late-Baroque era. Though his early work was firmly rooted in traditional late-19th-century Romantic Italian opera, he later developed his work in the realistic verismo style, of which he became one of the leading exponents.
Operetta is a form of theatre and a genre of light opera. It includes spoken dialogue, songs, and dances. It is lighter than opera in terms of its music, orchestral size, length of the work, and at face value, subject matter. Apart from its shorter length, the operetta is usually of a light and amusing character. It sometimes also includes satirical commentaries.
New musicology is a wide body of musicology since the 1980s with a focus upon the cultural study, aesthetics, criticism, and hermeneutics of music. It began in part a reaction against the traditional positivist musicology—focused on primary research—of the early 20th century and postwar era. Many of the procedures of new musicology are considered standard, although the name more often refers to the historical turn rather than to any single set of ideas or principles. Indeed, although it was notably influenced by feminism, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and critical theory, new musicology has primarily been characterized by a wide-ranging eclecticism.
Carl Dahlhaus was a German musicologist who was among the leading postwar musicologists of the mid to late 20th-century. A prolific scholar, he had broad interests though his research focused on 19th- and 20th-century classical music, both areas in which he made significant advancements. However, he remains best known in the English-speaking world for his writings on Wagner. Dahlhaus wrote on many other composers, including Josquin, Gesualdo, Bach and Schoenberg.
Italian opera is both the art of opera in Italy and opera in the Italian language. Opera was in Italy around the year 1600 and Italian opera has continued to play a dominant role in the history of the form until the present day. Many famous operas in Italian were written by foreign composers, including Handel, Gluck and Mozart. Works by native Italian composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini, are amongst the most famous operas ever written and today are performed in opera houses across the world.
Bel canto —with several similar constructions —is a term with several meanings that relate to Italian singing.
Jacopo Napoli was an Italian composer of the 20th century.
Musical improvisation is the creative activity of immediate musical composition, which combines performance with communication of emotions and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to other musicians. Sometimes musical ideas in improvisation are spontaneous, but may be based on chord changes in classical music and many other kinds of music. One definition is a "performance given extempore without planning or preparation". Another definition is to "play or sing (music) extemporaneously, by inventing variations on a melody or creating new melodies, rhythms and harmonies". Encyclopædia Britannica defines it as "the extemporaneous composition or free performance of a musical passage, usually in a manner conforming to certain stylistic norms but unfettered by the prescriptive features of a specific musical text." Improvisation is often done within a pre-existing harmonic framework or chord progression. Improvisation is a major part of some types of 20th-century music, such as blues, rock music, jazz, and jazz fusion, in which instrumental performers improvise solos, melody lines and accompaniment parts.
James Webster is a musicologist, specializing in the music of Joseph Haydn and other composers of the classical era. His professional position is as the Goldwin Smith Professor of Music at Cornell University.
Lucilla Udovich was an American soprano of Croatian ancestry.
The rule of the octave is a way of harmonizing each note of the diatonic scale, reflecting common practice, and has its origin in the practice of thorough bass, or basso continuo, where it provided an easy way to find which chord could accompany each note of the scale in the bass, particularly in the absence of figuring. The earliest description of the chords harmonizing an octave may be that by Antonio Bruschi in 1711. The name was first given by François Campion in 1716. The rule of the octave also formed the cornerstone of the "regole" (rules) of partimento collections. There is normally a different harmonization for ascending and descending bass lines, and, although called a rule, there are several variants with different chords. Different versions for the major and minor scales are recorded. One example for the major scale by John Hiles, :
Simon Le Duc, more commonly Leduc, was a French violinist, soloist at the Concert Spirituel, music publisher and composer. His younger brother, Pierre Le Duc (1755–1818), was also a violinist. Leduc was a pupil of the famous violinist and professor at the Paris Conservatoire, Pierre Gaviniès. He later became director of the Concerts Spirituel, with Gaviniès and François-Joseph Gossec
Mark Everist is a British music historian, critic and musicologist.
A Partimento is a sketch, written out on a single staff, whose main purpose is to be a guide for the improvisation ("realization") of a composition at the keyboard. A Partimento differs from a basso continuo accompaniment in that it is a basis for a complete composition. Partimenti were central to the training of European musicians from the late 1600s until the early 1800s. They were developed in the Italian conservatories, especially at the music conservatories of Naples, and later at the Paris Conservatory, which emulated the Neapolitan conservatories.
Guglielmo Andreoli was an Italian pianist, music teacher and composer.
Robert O. Gjerdingen is a scholar of music theory and music perception, and is an emeritus professor at Northwestern University. His most influential work focuses on the application of ideas from cognitive science, especially theories about schemas, as an analytical tool in an attempted "archaeology" of style and composition methods in galant European music of the eighteenth century. Gjerdingen received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 after studying with Leonard B. Meyer and Eugene Narmour. His 2007 book Music in the Galant Style, an authoritative study on galant schemata, received the Wallace Berry award from the Society for Music Theory in 2009 and has become influential in the field of music theory. Gjerdingen was also editor of the journal Music Perception from 1998 to 2002.
Giorgio Sanguinetti is an Italian musicologist, music historian and music theorist. He is best known as the author of The Art of Partimento: History, Theory, and Practice, the first monograph dedicated to the history, theory, and practice of partimento instruction as practiced in the music conservatories of Naples from the end of the 17th century to the middle of the 19th century. Sanguinetti is full professor of theory and analysis of music at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.
Peter van Tour is a Dutch musicologist, music historian and music theorist, specializing in Aural Training, Counterpoint and Historical Improvisation. After moving to Sweden in 1990, he co-founded the Gotland School of Music Composition together with Prof. Sven-David Sandström and Ramon Anthin. At this institution, Peter taught counterpoint, aural skills, music analysis, and history of composition. He is best known as an expert in the field of Partimento and is the author of "Counterpoint and Partimento: Methods of Teaching Composition in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples", his doctoral dissertation. Van Tour is an associate professor of Music Theory and Musical Analysis at Örebro University in Sweden.
Ewald Demeyere is a Belgian harpsichordist, conductor and music theorist. He is known as an expert in partimento realization and counterpoint.
Vasili Byros is a Greek-American music theorist, musicologist and pianist. He is best known for his contributions to the field of music schemata theory and partimento.
Baragwanath's research into the craft of solfeggio training gives the reader a new and original insight into historical music pedagogy: esoteric teaching (and learning) codes are eventually cracked and explained in a lively prose.
