ePub Architectural Programming: Information Management for Design by Donna P. Duerk in Arts-Photography

Review

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Quality scholarship and easy to read.By S L HCome on. Cambridge Companion books are fabulous jumping off books. Theyre just good. Quality scholarship; easy to read.14 of 14 people found the following review helpful. An important book on the music of MonteverdiBy chpFirst; who will get the most out of this book? Not the general reader: it is too technical. The core chapters of the book are the seven chapters discussing Monteverdis music: the early madrigals; the Mantuan madrigals; the opera Orfeo; the Mantuan sacred works; the Venetian secular music; the Venetian sacred music; and the two late operas. The chapter on Orfeo is a detailed musical analysis of the opera; with ten musical examples. It is hard to imagine getting full benefit from this very interesting discussion without a recording and even better a score in hand. The other six chapters are less analytic; but each is followed by a short "intermedio" by the same author; which presents an analytic discussion of a key work; or part of a work. These seven chapters are excellent. The notes; the detailed bibliography; the catalog of the works of Monteverdi; and the index of titles and first lines make this a valuable tool for the student; probably the best book on Monteverdis music available today Little is said in a systematic way about the life of Monteverdi: instead the reader is referred to the now standard biography by Paolo Fabbri. As in many of the Cambridge Companions; one gets a detailed Chronology instead. The remaining chapters are disconnected essays on various aspects of the music; often of a musicological nature: for example; the musical sources of Monteverdis music; performance places his music in Mantua; new musicologies; and Monteverdi in performance. This last chapter is very strong on performance in Monteverdis time; but has almost nothing to say (barely more than a page) about the changes in the performances of Monteverdis music in recent times. One of the founders of the modern day performances of Monteverdis operas; Nikolaus Harnoncourt; is dismissed in one sentence:"Growing familiarity of audiences with a recognizable sound of early music has contributed to a gradual move away from the integrationist aesthetics of earlier distortions of Monteverdis notation in performances; which at its extreme included; for example; the dense reorchestrations and verismo singing in the productions of the Venetian operas directed by the historicist Nikolaus Harnoncourt in the late 1970s."This reader would have liked to see a real discussion of the changes in performing Monteverdi over the past fifty years; say at the same level as the change in the musicology described in the preceding chapter. Finally the selected discography is of little value. It does not give the recording date of any of the CDs or DVDs; it does not give the selection principle; and it does not comment on the recordings. All readers would have enjoyed learning more. They would also have liked hearing about some of the epoch-making recordings: the operas by Harnoncourt; already mentioned; the Vespers of 1610 by Juuml;rgen Juuml;rgens; recorded in 1966; and the complete Venetian sacred music recorded by Michel Corboz in 1969. An example of how this could be handled is given in John Whenhams book on Monteverdis Vespers (1610). To conclude; this is an excellent high-level introduction to the music of Monteverdi; based on the latest findings and written by the leading Monteverdi researchers.