A Small Selection from among the Many Things that I Still Do Not Know about Baroque Music

John Walter Hill University of Illinois, emeritus

Keywords: tonaltiy, rhetoric

Abstract

After writing Baroque Music for W. W. Norton, my remaining questions include those that concern the history of the ritornello procedure, concerto-style orchestral accompaniment of homophonic choral writing, the “church aria” family of musical forms, the relation of the New Lutheran Cantata to the contemporaneous Catholic, Latin solo motet, relations among the semi-opera genres of Spain, France, and England, the source of the distinctive style features of the Spanish villancico, the notation of Spanish solo song, music for autos sacramentales, the disappearance of violins from Spain in the seventeenth century, the roles of Jewish and marrano musicians, the exactly definition of Baroque “tonality,” and current caution over the application of rhetorical terms.

Author Biography

John Walter Hill, University of Illinois, emeritus

John Walter Hill is professor emeritus of musicology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, 1984–86, and on the editorial boards of the Journal for Seventeenth-Century Music, Computing in Musicology, Monumenta Musica Europea, and Musical Education (Nanjing). W. W. Norton published his Baroque Music: Music in Western Europe, 1580–1750 in 2005. His earlier books include The Life and Works of Francesco Maria Veracini, Vivaldi's Ottone in villa: A Study in Musical Drama, and Roman Monody, Cantata, and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto. He is the author of approximately 90 articles and reviews. Biographical entries about him have appeared in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., and in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd ed.

Published

2011-02-01

Issue

Vol 1 No 2: (Spring 2011) The Textbook Issue

Section

Articles

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