Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music

The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music seeks to provide the most up-to-date knowledge on seventeenth-century music together with a vital questioning of the way in which such a history can be told or put together for our present purposes. Written by a distinguished team of experts in the field, the chapters not only address traditional areas of knowledge such as opera and church music, but also look at the way this extremely diverse and dynamic musical world has been categorised in the past and how its products are viewed from various cultural points of view. While this history does not depart entirely from the traditional study of musical works and their composers, there is a strong emphasis on the institutions, cultures and politics of the age, together with an interrogation of the ways in which music related to contemporary arts, sciences and beliefs.

Tim Carter is the author of the Cambridge Opera Handbook on Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro (1987), Jacopo Peri (1561–1633): His Life and Works (1989), Music in Late Renaissance and Early Baroque Italy (1992) and Monteverdi's Musical Theatre (2002). He has also published numerous journal articles and essays on music in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italy; those to 1998 were reprinted in Music, Patronage and Printing in Late Renaissance Florence and Monteverdi and his Contemporaries (both 2000). In 2001 he moved from Royal Holloway, University of London, to become David G. Frey Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. John Butt is Gardiner Professor of Music at the University of Glasgow. His book Playing With History: The Historical Approach to Music Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2002) was the winner of the 2003 Dent Medal, and was shortlisted for the 2003 British Academy Book Prize. He is the author of Music Education and the Art of Performance in the German Baroque (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Bach: Mass in B Minor (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Bach Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1990), and edited The Cambridge Companion to Bach (Cambridge University Press, 1997).