Studies on Authorship in Historical Keyboard Music

Andrew Woolley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781032168111
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000968415
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

Authorship is a pertinent issue for historical musicology and musicians more widely, and some controversies concerned with major figures have even reached wider consciousness. Scholars have clarified some of the issues at stake in recent decades, such as the places of borrowing and arranging in the creative process and the wider cultural significance of these practices. The discovery of new sources and methodologies has also opened up opportunities for reassessing specific authorship problems. Drawing upon this wider musicological literature as well as insights from other disciplines, such as intellectual history and book history, this book aims to build on what has already been achieved by focussing on keyboard music. The nine chapters cover case studies of authorship problems, the socioeconomic conditions of music publishing, the contributions of composers, arrangers, copyists and music publishers in creating notated keyboard compositions, the functions of attribution and ascription, and how the contexts in which notated pieces were used affected concepts of authorship at different times and places.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Music examples
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• RISM Sigla
• Introduction
• 1 Conrad Paumann’s fundamentum?: New light on authorship in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century instrumental music
• 2 Authorship in sixteenth-century Italian printed keyboard music
• 3 Authorship and identity in early English keyboard music
• 4 Authorship and improvisation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century keyboard music
• 5 Chronology, style and attribution in the early keyboard suites of J. S. Bach
• 6 The authorship of BWV 565: Disputing former methodologies and assessing the evidence of five new manuscript sources
• 7 ‘Es fällt kein Meister vom Himmel’: W. F. Bach’s juvenilia and the methods of creative imitation
• 8 Many hands make light work: ‘Nel cor più non mi sento’ and multiple layers of authorship at the keyboard
• 9 Authorship and authenticity in John and William Crotch’s Original Airs (1803)
• Index