Music in the Seventeenth Century

The seventeenth century was a period of profound change in the history of music. In this volume Lorenzo Bianconi considers the radical developments of the century as long-lived musical traditions died out and others were created in response to new social functions. This period saw, for example, the flowering of the polyphonic madrigal and its subsequent decline in favour of a new concertato style, the rise of the basso continuo and the growth of purely instrumental composition. Most importa...