In his study of Bach’s Clavier-Ubung III, Gregory Butler makes a major contribution to organ music and Bach studies by giving to original printed copies of this work the kind of attention normally reserved for manuscripts. He details the work’s chronology, production, aim, and even spiritual program, treating the prints as unique documents with discernible variants and readings.
The need to examine early printed copies of music is being recognized as an important tool which can reveal as much as the study of early manuscripts. Composers themselves frequently took a major role in the preparation of the engraving.
Clavier-Ubung III—arguably the most carefully planned, intellectually conceived, and challenging volume of organ music ever published—is a particularly useful example of Bach’s printed works known chiefly from the print itself. The print is richer in information than any of the other original prints of Bach’s music, making it a distinctly suitable repertory for the author’s innovative treatment. Butler reveals fascinating new information on the genesis and history of the collection’s composition, finding, in part, that sections of the work were composed considerably earlier than previously was believed.

Haydn’s music has been performed continuously for more than two hundred years. But what do we play, and what do we listen to, when it comes to Haydn? Can we still appreciate the rich rhetorical nuances of this music, which from its earliest days was meant to be played by professionals and amateurs alike?

With The Virtual Haydn, Tom Beghin—himself a professional keyboard player—delves deeply into eighteenth-century history and musicology to help us hear a properly complex Haydn. Unusually for a scholarly work, the book is presented in the first person, as Beghin takes us on what is clearly a very personal journey into the past. When a discussion of a group of Viennese sonatas, for example, leads him into an analysis of the contemporary interest in physiognomy, Beghin applies what he learns about the role of facial expressions during his own performance of the music. Elsewhere, he analyzes gesture and gender, changes in keyboard technology, and the role of amateurs in eighteenth-century musical culture.

The resulting book is itself a fascinating, bravura performance, one that partakes of eighteenth-century idiosyncrasy while drawing on a panoply of twenty-first-century knowledge.