2nd International Congress of Musicology

Athens Concert Hall, 4-6 November 2003

Paper Abstracts

Pyrros Bamichas

The Choice of Analytical Instruments, and the Evaluation of Analysis in the Approach of Early Baroque Music

The first half of the seventeenth century has been broadly recognized as a period of great importance for the course of western music, so for vocal as for instrumental too. The redefinition of the relationship between words and music, in combination with the emergence of the “continuo” line and that of new musical genres, act heavily upon the evolution of music, and they are related to a great number of problems concerning the determination of adequate criteria about the attribution of “identity” to the new types of composition, the investigation of the already existing, their evolution, the following of the new harmonic thought, and finally, the interpretation and evaluation of the music works in general.
For historical musicology, the attainment of a completed analysis depends much on the best possible exploitation of historical data, biographical and archival elements, aesthetic-philosophical conceptions of music creators and their professional and social environment, performance practices, etc, factors, which all together characterize – more or less in each case, of course – the profile of music composition. The comprehension of the analytical method, each time, and its usefulness for the study of music theory as well as for artistic interpretation, becomes possible through its practical application on, published or unpublished, examples of vocal and instrumental music, taken from the Italian and German repertoire of the period.

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