The Crucifixion in Music

Unique and diverse in its approach, The Crucifixion in Music examines how text was set to music during the musicological period from 1680 to 1800, focusing on the Crucifixus from the Credo of the Ordinary of the Roman Catholic Mass. Combining analytical theory and method to address musical rhetoric, semiotics, and theory, Jasmin Melissa Cameron follows the Crucifixion through many settings in baroque and classical music. In this first title in Scarecrow Press's Contextual Bach Studies series, Cameron explores musical representations of the text through a discussion that establishes a theoretical framework. She then applies the framework to individual case studies, such as Johann Sebastian Bach's B Minor Mass. By studying the musical representation of the text and the concepts and contexts to which the words refer, she examines the way the treatment of a literary text fuses into a recognizable musical tradition that composers can follow, develop, and modify. With equal time given to the settings of the Crucifixus by composers before and after Bach, the reader is provided with a more complete historical context of his genius. Cameron also combines the beliefs of past theorists with those of today, fostering a common ground and providing a basis and analytical foundation for further study. Book jacket.