EMA Recording & Book Reviews

A rewarding new biography on Henry Purcell brings the composer's life and times into one slender volume. At the book's center is an up-to-date dictionary — accessible to non-specialists — that mentions well-known collaborators and a range of musicians, political events, performance practices, relevant musical terms, and more.

Fiddle and banjo music played by free and enslaved Blacks before the 1860s is a key element of American musical and cultural history. But the evidence is scant. In 'Go Back and Fetch It,' authors Kristina R. Gaddy and Rhiannon Giddens explore more than three centuries of songs in this landmark new book.

Despite Bach's overwhelming presence in our musical lives, a lot of influential scholarship remains inaccessible to a broader public because it is in German. A recent book (and searchable website) has bridged this gap with translations of over 50 lectures by prominent Bach expert Hans-Joachim Schulze. Loaded with the latest in-depth scholarship, the talks are nevertheless aimed toward the amateur listener.

In recent years, there's been so much new information on J.S. Bach's six cello suites that it can be hard to keep up. A new book is not only the newest (and therefore the most up-to-date) entry in the long catalog of Bach suite studies, it is also outstandingly comprehensive in scope. 

A valuable new book (and accompanying website) on protest songs gives insightful political context to music that can seem detached from its original meaning and culture. 'A protest song, like protest itself, is intent upon political change—of ideas, attitudes, or actions.'

Robert L. Kendrick's ambitious new monograph, a detailed look at the oratorio in Catholic Italy and Hapsburg Vienna, covers more than a century of repertoire, connecting Biblical stories — fratricide, child sacrifice, forbidden love, death — with political events and considers the social and moral impact on the listeners.

Historians over the past two centuries have tended to think of opera and tragic theater as developing along separate lines. This new collection of essays attempts to show developmental connections between them, as well as with other influential forms of opera and theater in the 17th and 18th century.

The premise of these essays on the beginnings of French opera isn’t so much about the expected topics — composers and repertoire — but about the Académie royale de musique, the complicated, personality-rich institution that managed and shaped how the burgeoning art form evolved. It’s a rewarding approach when viewed as “an almost ideal example of tradition building.”

This new study broadens our understanding of the Enlightenment in Spain. Author Sánchez-Rojo builds a case for the modernization occurring in 18th-century Spain and explores the very notion of modernity, including the boom of the Spanish periodical press in the 1780s and a captivating treatment of music and medicine focused on the tarantella.

A new book asks 'whose music matters?' and critiques the conventional music history curriculum, including well-meaning but hollow additions for the mere sake of inclusion. Even traditional subjects like early music, the author writes, 'can be taught in diverse, ethical ways.'