Early Music News & Reviews

The co-editors of this book of essays, Anna Maria Busse Berger and Henry Spiller, have collected a multitude of narratives addressing how outsiders transformed the fabric of Indonesian musical history. Notably, Busse Berger has spent most of her career working in early-music scholarship; she now exemplifies the trend toward expanding the definition of early music to a global scale.

A new recording of golden-age viola da gamba music, highlighted by Marin Marais and Antoine Fourqueray, makes for a rewarding debut album. Pairing the viol with just a single theorbo, intriguingly, allows for easy, conversational flow between the two musicians.

Anyone curious about the phenomenal growth of early music in the last decades of the 20th century is bound to run across the name David Munrow. In his short but ebullient career, just nine years, the English musician, scholar, and entrepreneur arguably did more than anyone to create the early-music scene we know today.

In 18th- and 19th-century Europe (and colonial culture in the Americas), dancing was used to make social connections and impress members of one's class. 'Dance and Sociability' offers detailed descriptions of the social context for European dance among the upper classes during this period, including a thought-provoking article on how to define “grace.”