Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (1314) portrays Hell as an alienated realm, in which the doomed spirits must spend eternity in isolation and regret. Franz Liszt’s two-movement Dante Symphony (1857), based on the Inferno and Purgatorio, gives musical form to Dante’s textual expressions of agony. These evocations of suffering are enhanced by Lisz…[Read more]

Review of Biagio Marini: Madrigali et Symfonie, ed. Aurelio Bianco and Sara Dieci. pp. 217. Épitome Musical. (Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, 2014).

Review of Aurelio Bianco, ‘Nach englischer und frantzösischer Art’: Vie et oeuvre de Carlo Farina (avec l’édition des cinq recueils de Dresde) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010).

Discusses the idea of “translation” and applies it to the flexibility of performance in early music.

Review of a CD of string music by Paul Ben-Haim. Touches on issues of identity, diaspora, and reception.

Several points of intersection exist between vocal and instrumental music by Italian composers of the early seventeenth century. First, like books of vocal monody with an overt pedagogical purpose, volumes of instrumental music may have been designed to instruct the performer in the conventions of the modern style. Specifically, many books…[Read more]