Keyboard instruments and their repertoire, 1560-1780

The eleven chapters included here are the outcome of interactions between many aspects of musical study, including historical musicology, music analysis, archival work, data management, editing, organology, performance and teaching. Keyboards and their music are a valuable area of study, as their uses and design are critically related to the development of music and performance over several centuries. This was a period that saw the rise of the public concert, significant technological developments in organology, the development of notated teaching methods and the origins of idiomatic instrumental composition.

The four sections cover repertoire, composers, sources and instruments from the mid-16thto the late 18th centuries. Discussion of the virginalists includes a fundamental reexamination of the surviving information relating to ornamentation and performance practice, together with a historiographical discussion of Giles Farnaby and his music.

Four studies of Bach include practice-led research project, a consideration of a neglected group of pieces with intermittent pedal parts, a typological analysis of cadence types in Bach’s cantata recitatives, and an edition of all the surviving keyboard duos by J. S., W. F., C. P. E. and J. C. Bach. The third section describes a late 17th-century liturgical organ book and an early 18th-century teaching manuscript, while the fourth, devoted to the clavichord, includes a comprehensive discography, a discussion of the role the instrument may have played in French musical culture, and an examination of the sole surviving English clavichord.