Product Description
Again available in paperback, this definitive work on the genius of Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) is the result of twelve years of devoted effort by America's foremost harpsichordist and one of the principal authorities on eighteenth-century harpsichord music. Mr. Kirkpatrick traveled extensively to collect material that has tripled the known facts about Scarlatti's life, providing the first adequate biography of one of the greatest harpsichord composers of the eighteenth century and one of the most original composers of all time. The second half of his book is an illuminating study of Scarlatti's 555 sonatas, concluding with a chapter on their performance. The book contains extensive appendixes, including discussions of ornamentation and Scarlatti's vocal music, and an updated section of addenda and corrigenda. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Must read!
This book is so crucial for any one playing Scarlatti sonatas.
There is somuch detail, historical context, and yet the writing is such that even an amateur pianist like me can get a grasp on how to interpret the sonatas. There are some nice sections on how to approach them on the piano.

I wish I could find similar books for every other composer!

Bedrock Scarlatti
Ralph Kirkpatrick's 1953 work remains THE book on Domenico Scarlatti and his keyboard sonatas. There have been no substantial revisions in the biography of DS since 1953.Georgio Pestelli and many others have questioned Kirkpatrick on chronology, but when it comes to analysis of individual sonatas, Kirkpatrick is strong.And his performances speak well even 50 years later. Kirkpatrick was not a musicologist, so his book is actually interesting to read!

A Scarlatti Primer..Plus
The first 7 chapters are historical narratives without unusual merit except as an intoduction to the real book which is about music. There is a chapter on harpsichords. Kirkpatrick was not the first thinker on Scarlattias evidenced by the extensive bibliography and appendix

He did establish the K identification number systemwhich has stood the test of time at least in this country.

His real contribution is in identifying Scarlattias a real musician writing music of extraordinary merit. His chapter on Scarlatti's harmony is very difficult reading.

The last chapter on "Performance of the Scarlatti Sonatas" should be read again and again by everymusical teacher and student (he talks about tempo, rhythm, phrasing, articulation and attitudes).

Of course, one must have the sheet music on hand to see what it's all about, and a mind-set ready to accept Scarlatti into the company of Chopin and Liszt as well as Granados and Albéniz.

Kirkpatrick talks a little about the influence of Iberian song and dance forms on the sonatas of Scarlatti; a few others have scattered hints on this subject. I think the world would welcome a full-blown research here as a fitting sequel to this book.

Domenico Scarlatti
An indispensable reference for all those interested in one of the greatest keyboardists of all time. Kirkpatrick's work is one of real scholarship. Written in 1953, no one has since bested it.

pioneering effort
This book is an indispensable reference for those studying the great composer Domenico Scarlatti. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Good as far as it goes, but isn't "historically accurate"
This book is a nice inexpensive edition of some really wonderful sonatas, easily readable and with typical Dover binding that takes the abuse I give my piano books fairly well. The only warning that I would give for this book is that the editor presumed to give some dynamic and tempo markings specifically for piano that aren't in accordance with the best research on baroque performance. I would definatly recommend it for amatuer musicians because of it's usability, but college music majors would be advised to find a different edition. ... Read more

Product Description
This investigation of one of the greatest yet least understood repertories of Western keyboard music reveals the reasons why the 555 keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti have not been written about more often. The lack of documentary evidence and the composer's position between the so-called Baroque and the Classical periods are crucial factors. W. Dean Sutcliffe also examines each individual sonata in unprecedented detail. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

An exploration of Scarlatti's music, his style, and many theories put forward about the music
First, let me say how grateful I am to Robin Friedman for pointing me to this book.

I think most pianists (and other keyboard players) are aware of the first time they heard the music of Domenico Scarlatti.This music has a sound and style that is uniquely his and when you play it, your conviction about its special character is strengthened.His music is wonderful stuff and his 500 or so keyboard sonatas are an ocean that few of us chart completely.Most of us are happy playing through several dozen of them and learning a few of them well.W. Dean Sutcliffe has made Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas an object of deep academic study and this work is a treasure and a gift of us who want to deepen our understanding of the master and his music.

And most of our understanding has to come through the music since there is almost no documentary evidence of Domenico's life.Many people have supplied stories, rumors, conjecture, and surmises.But there is precious little to nothing beyond a few letters.There isn't even an autograph copy of the sonatas.There are two large collections that copied out the sonatas and several individual copies found in various places over the centuries.However, nothing in Domenico's hand.

Sutcliffe organizes the exploration of the sonatas in seven chapters.Each chapter is a fascinating exploration of the sonatas from the perspective of an explanatory theory put forward at various times.The author includes their variants and refutations as well as where the speculations seem to explain something and where they actually make our understanding even cloudier.Each of these chapters uses various sonatas to make its point.While there are many musical examples (a generous number), you will have to either have a good collection of the sonatas or be willing to travel to a very good music library (say, at a music school of repute) to check out some of the less well known. The author also discusses various recordings of some of these works.By comparing what you think of them and what the author says about them you can get a better fix on where you and the author are relative to the music.

The first chapter takes us through what little we know of Domenico the man and the speculations by many about his life.Most of the chapter is spent showing us why this or that surmise is false.What we actually know is stated clearly, but even what many are sure of (say, the gambling debts) are shown to be myths more than history.

The second chapter is called "Panorama" and takes us through a large number of common theories put forward to explain Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas over the centuries.Is it really a written down improvisatory style?Were they written to teach keyboard playing for those he served at court?What is the influence of the organ and the newly invented piano on these works?What about the influence of the many nations he travelled to and through in his service to royalty?Stucliffe elucidates all these and more in a very interesting way.

Chapter 3 is called "Heteroglossia" and looks at how Scarlatti defies common labels.Yes, you can hear the Iberian in the music, but also the Italian.Is he a Baroque, Gallant, or a composer of some other tradition?Does Scarlatti achieve his effects by mixing topics in polyglot and opposing ways?This is a fascinating chapter.

Chapter 4 examines Scarlatti's syntax.Why does he seem to repeat music so much?How does he use rhythm within his phrase structure and is it like the phrase rhythm of anyone else?What about the ways in which he starts and end his sonatas and how about his use of sequence?Do these elements tie him to anyone else?

Chapter 5 looks at Scarlatti's breaks with traditions that could have been used to explain him.His counterpoint and voice leading is handled oddly at points.What about those disturbing clustered chords?Are they mixed harmonies, sonic effects, or depicting something in a programmatic way?The author also explores how quickly the sonatas should be played, especially the walking tempo Andantes.When Sutcliffe explores ornamentation I find myself taking his certainty with a good spoonful of salt.I think the author gives too much purpose to the ornaments written in the copied sources we have, especially when the ornaments differ in parallel sections of the music.

Yes, it is interesting and worth considering, but written music in this period did not require the slavish reproduction of notes and ornaments that much art music requires in the 20th Century.It was an improvisatory style and composers understood that players would change things as it suited them much like Jazz musicians have done for a century.Even the great Romantic, Chopin said that he never played his own music the same way twice.Is it possible that we journeyman musicians will produce something less wonderful than the great artist would have created in performance?Of course!But a slavish reproduction of just so many notes in a trill or failing to add unwritten ornaments where they seem called for also seems to take away from the glory of the music, too.So, read what Sutcliffe has to say and decide for yourself how you want to ornament these pieces.

Chapter 6 is called "Una genuine música de teclá" which translates, I believe, roughly to "a genuine style of music for the keyboard" or "a true keyboard musical style".Here the author deals with the profoundly odd aspects of Scarlatti's music that exploit they keyboard.He also notes the tortuous crossed hands in the few keyboard sonatas published in Scarlatti's lifetime.Some of the great pianists of the past re-arranged them to be played by hands in normal positions.Other pianists have dressed up the thin textures of the sonatas to take advantage of late 19th century's grand piano's vast sonority.If you are a pianist who wants to play Scarlatti, this chapter is especially relevant.Sure, dig deeply into every chapter, but this one deals with what Scarlatti is doing with your hands on the keyboard and speculates about why.

Scarlatti's use of form is discussed in chapter 7.Everyone who knows any of these sonatas understands the binary nature of these forms.(For those confused by the title "sonata", it simply means an instrumental piece as opposed to the sung piece of a cantata.Yes, the word came to mean something else again in the hands of masters such as CPE Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and hundreds of others, but Scarlatti is not dealing with "sonata form".)I enjoyed Sutcliffe's examination of what he calls Scarlatti's "balanced binary" form and how various subtleties are manifested.

If you are interested in Scarlatti, I cannot imagine you being without this book.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

Finally!
Everyone who takes western music history lite, aka "music appreciation," hears a sample sonata by Domenico Scarlatti--usually K 159, 1, 141--and, depending on the textbook, reads a few words about binary sonata, Spanish influence, keyboard virtuosity--and then moves on to the far better known works of two other great composers born in 1685: Bach and Handel.In comparison to their work, a single Scarlatti sonata seems lightweight.

But those who become interested enough to listen to the numerous recordings--say, Pogorelich on piano or Kipnis on harpsichord--will be impressed not only with the quality of the 16 or so sonatas per CD but also with how unlike each sonata is from the one before.It gets addictive, and by the time one reaches sonata #555, the conclusion is obvious: there is no "typical" Scarlatti sonata.So what and why and how questions lead listeners first to CD program notes--mostly useless--and to Ralph Kirkpatrick's 1953 _Domenico Scarlatti_ (seminal work, but dated) and Malcolm Boyd's 1986 _Domenico Scarlatti--Master of Music_ (quite readable, but only about 75 pages deal with keyboard sonatas).The only other substantial treatment in English is Joel Sheveloff's unpublished 1970 Ph.D. thesis.

Finally, W. Dean Sutcliffe has written the most interesting and best-informed book on Scarlatti's sonatas since Kirkpatrick.It's a scholarly book, beginning with a review of past works on Scarlatti's sonatas.This is also a lively review of how the historical perception of Scarlatti has changed.Sutcliffe provides the known biographical details of Scarlatti along with the wry admission that we will never know--perhaps by the composer's design?--anything about his personal life.Sutcliffe is an academic, but his writing is nonetheless interesting and suggests some of the passion that the sonatas express.

The heart of the book then follows, a consideration of Scarlatti's harmony, rhythm ("syntax"), form, and a review of the harpsichord/(Florentine) piano debate.All of this discussion is supported by numerous printed examples of the score, just barely large enough to play from.

What if you only play recordings?One of the strengths of this book is that it includes frequent references to recorded performances.Sutcliffe doesn't provide such refs to provide examples for those who can't read music, but rather because he regards performances as just more evidence for his points.For example, he cites the performance of Mikhail Pletnev, noting all his omissions and additions in MP's recording of K 523. Sutcliffe doesn't do this in the spirit of "Aha, I caught you playing wrong notes" but as backup to his pointing out that the arrangements of Scarlatti's music by contemporaries Charles Avison and G.F. Handel make clear how Scarlatti just did not fit the conventions of Baroque music.Everyone feels the compulsion to adjust it in some way.

In another instance, Sutcliffe offers an absolutely brilliant analysis of K 474 that explains the motivic web that unifies this disquieting (aren't they all?) sonata, and considers the decisions several performers make on whether or not to perform a critical trill in m 46.This sounds very techie, but because of Sutcliffe's lively yet exact writing, you don't need to read music to profit from his analysis.

I don't always agree with Sutcliffe--for example, he sees the opening of the second half of K 461 as contrast between the Alberti bass and the learned style right hand part as support for his thesis that Scarlatti was trying to hit on the galant/baroque contrast, while I play 4-part counterpoint here.He completely misses the similarity in melodic contour and thus the relationship between the sections in contrasting tempo in K 162 (think Brahms op 76, 5).

Regarding the physical book, I have a gripe: The font is small, 10-point or maybe even 9-point--so Cambridge UP's washed-out print is hard to read.

... Read more

Product Description
This compilation of popular selections by the great master presents favorites from his more than 500 miniature "sonatas" (each about 4 minutes long). All of the best-loved miniature masterpieces appear here—tarantellas, Siciliennes, pastoral pieces, and high-speed keyboard toccatas.Pianists and other music lovers will relish this handsome, inexpensive compilation reproduced from the G. Ricordi edition.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

I love this book
I love it!The selections are fun, and the interpretive markings (i.e. dynamics) provided by the editor are very good.After playing from this book I can finally do a good Baroque style.Highly recommended! ... Read more

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Alessandro Scarlatti is one of the most celebrated and least performed composers of the Baroque, and his son Domenico remains one of the most enigmatic figures of the period. Roberto Pagano's Two Lives examines the relationship between father and son, interpreted in the context of seventeenth-century Sicilian culture. This study in historical anthropology is filled with new documentation on the lives and careers of the two men, but the boundaries between documented and informed speculation are clearly marked.At the heart of the relation between the two Scarlattis lies Domenico's famous legal emancipation from his father, which has generally been viewed as a bold act of personal and artistic defiance. Pagano reveals, through a corrected text and translation of the crabbed Latin notarial document, that it was actually a renunciation of the ancient Roman patria potestas, a fathers' power of life and death over his children. Two Lives is the most important contribution to Scarlatti studies since Ralph Kirkpatrick's Domenico Scarlatti of 1953. Roberto Pagano is a leading authority on the lives and music of the Scarlattis and the author of their entries in the New Grove. He has written widely on Sicilian musical life and has served as Artistic Director of the Sicilian National Orchestra and the Teatro Massimo in Palermo. Translator Frederick Hammond is both performer and scholar. His scholarly works include Girolomo Frescobaldi(1984) and Music Spectacle in Baroque Rome(1994). He holds the Irma Brandeis Chair of Romance Studies at Bard College. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A wonderful look at their lives, their times, and the scholarship about these composers
Telling the lives of Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti in one biography makes a great deal of sense.Rarely do a father and son of similar genius appear in history.Roberto Pagano does a very fine job of telling us about the context of their lives, what the documentary evidence tells us, what the conjectures are, and a great deal about their royal patrons.We also get into some of the intimate details of the Scarlatti family and its messy behaviors.I also appreciated how Pagano talks about the Kirkpatrick biography of Domenico.He tells us where Kirkpatrick got some evidence wrong, where he speculated maybe a bit too much, and where he disagrees with Kirkpatrick's interpretations and findings.Of course, he is also unstinting in his praise of all Kirkpatrick achieved.

What I found somewhat disappointing was the lack of discussion of the music.Oh, various works are mentioned, how they were received, where and when they were performed, and so forth.However, there is no listing of their works, or even the least musicological consideration of style, development, or resources.But maybe that is because I am used to the British and American style of biographies of composers that almost focus more on the music than the life of the person that created the music.Of course this book is tremendously valuable, and it is always unfair to judge a book because the author didn't write the book you wanted.So, I will chastise myself on my disappointment.However, I do want to prevent you from being disappointed if you are looking for a journey through the music of these two brilliant musicians.It isn't that there is no talk of music here, it just isn't talked about in depth, in a systematic way, or in a way that a musician wanting to dig into the music would prefer.

While some see his using Alessandro's life as a way of explaining Domenico (because there is so little documentary evidence of Domenico's life) as fantasy rather than scholarship, I do think Pagano's putting their lives in social context valuable.If you want to know about their life, times, and the scholarship about the Scarlattis, this is a terrific resource.

A seminal work and enthusiastically recommended
Ably translated into English by Frederick Hammond, "Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti: Two Lives In One" is an inherently fascinating and impressively informative biography of Alessandro Scarlatti, one of the most celebrated and least performed composers of the Baroque, and his son Domenico. Biographer Roberto Pagano examines their lives within the context of seventeenth-century Sicilian culture and in doing so, draws upon new documentation concerning their lives and careers. A masterpiece of original bibliographic scholarship, there is clear distinction between authenticated sources and Pagano's own insightful speculation. "Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti" is a seminal work and enthusiastically recommended for academic library European Music History and Biography collections. ... Read more

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This up-to-date guide includes an annotated bibliography which identifies and discusses selected articles, books, and dissertations about the composers' lives and works. The guide focuses on recent studies and major review articles which discuss them and points to areas that still have to be investigated. It also includes extensive lists of modern editions, published and unpublished, as well as discographies of recordings that have current and historical interest. Some of the discussions in the guide examine the Scarlattis' relationships to other composers, the cultural milieu in which each worked, questions of performance practice, and other research problems. ... Read more

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Nos. 1-30 ... Read more

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In the data-poor arena of Scarlatti research, this work, avoiding a primarily musicological or organological approach, analyzes large-scale patterns of musical characteristics over all (or parts) of a sonata sequence founded primarily on the Parma manuscript. Preface Stephen Dydo This monograph is in some ways the strangest example of music theory I have ever seen. It doesn't talk about music in the usual sense. There is not, anywhere within its covers, a single musical example. Nor is there an analysis of a single musical phrase. No individual note is ever here discussed. What's more, we don't hear very much at all about particular pieces. On the other hand, the composer under discussion does fleetingly enter in, and we might find, for example, that the harpsichords he played earlier in life don't seem to have had as many keys as the ones he played later. But these brief walk-ons are not, in any real sense, biographical. The pertinent facts are mentioned, and then the composer, as a living, breathing man, is dismissed from our presence. Our relationship with him is occasional and occurs are a great remove. What this monograph is about, really, is a mass of music.In particular, it is about the mass of music that is Domenico Scarlatti's extant opus for the keyboard. (We do not say "entire opus" because the point of this study is to characterize the most significant part of his work.) Furthermore, this mass of music is discussed, not as a collection of some 550 solo keyboard pieces, but rather as the mass itself. The individual piece is discussed, on the infrequent occasions when the discussion zooms in even this closely, only as an element that helps to shape the mass of which it is a part. Individual pieces are frequently referenced, but generally only to note their keys or tempo markings. Again, these features are delineated only to define the shape of their enclosing aggregate mass. The size and ingredients of the mass are partly what make this discussion so unusual. A discussion of Beethoven's late quarters, say, involves us with an aggregation of pieces that we can easily visualize and, given a little time, audition in our mind's ear. Even a discussion of Bach cantatas involves us with a group of musical entities that are reasonably delineated from one another, at least by title, text, instrumentation, and so forth.However, in the case of Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas, we are dealing with 550 pieces all written for essentially the same instrument, all of them about the same length, and all having a similar structure. (The cases where there are differences in structure only become further tools for defining the shape of the enclosing mass.) To imagine all of these pieces at once requires a vision not unlike that described in Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: Among twenty snowy peaks, the only moving thing was the eye of the blackbird. Vision of such scope is beyond most of us without a stretch of the imagination. Fortunately, as readers, we can let Matthew Flannery do the imagining for us, while we sit and watch the view. This is the landscape that we can see: a huge expanse, a collection of many, many hours of listening. We don't get a sense of peaks and valleys, but rather of slowly changing surfaces, changing in one detail, then another, in a gradual fashion. The occasional jagged abruption stands out in relief simply because of the overall smoothness of the landscape.The putative goal of this monograph is the establishment of a chronology for Scarlatti's keyboard works. The precise chronological sequence of creation of each of the 554 sonatas is not indicated by any of the published editions from Scarlatti's time, nor is there any documentary evidence from other sources that is useful in dating the sonatas. Therefore, the only way we can reasonably hope to give relative dates to these pieces is by examining the internal evidence. Yet, is it not enough for us to know that his early career focused heavily on operatic works, to the extent that we have mostly operatic or other vocal works from the early part of his career, with few extant keyboard works to speak of; and that the extant keyboard pieces were mostly written in the later part of his career, at a time when he was not, so far as we know, burdened with many other compositional tasks? Surely, this fact by itself would give us plenty to chew on while ruminating through his massive body of keyboard sonatas. Flannery's principal tool in his broad analysis is the delineation of various stratified patterns that run through the sequence.These features, or "occurrence patterns" and "sonata groups," involve a wide range of characteristics: pitch range, tempo, rate of unfolding, style, formal structure, notation style, etc. In the end, Flannery delineates 28 occurrence patterns and 26 sonata groups in his analysis. Each of these is presented as a type of activity that occurs more often, or in a more particular way, in some sonatas than others. We are presented, one after another, with new layers of activity and then are escorted through the various permutations of each layer. This kind of analysis is at odds with the type that we expect to be applied to a single piece. Although a thoughtful examination of a particular work of music will very likely, perhaps at the outset, review the core vocabulary of the composition - even describing what occurrence patterns and what sonata group are fundamental to such a work -, it is more often the singularity of that piece that sparks our interest.The number of A major chords in a piece in D, the number of repetitions of the first and second theme in a sonata-allegro composition, the relative prominence of arpeggiated chords: these are all, in effect, background to the stuff that makes us listen to the same piece repeatedly. The singular events - the one and only appearance of the first theme in the relative minor, the unique stretto passage, the reappearance of the fugal subject in the "wrong" transposition - these are the sort of thing that makes us sit at attention. So why should the caring and attentive listener find joy in the remote view of an entire life's work, with the seductive details blurred from the distance? Isn't our core musical experience based on the building up of a musical view based on the succession of individual and discrete events?Yet, the reverse process, focusing on the tectonic movement of massively instanced occurrence patterns, only occasionally drilling down to something as localized as a particular piece, is enormously satisfying when applied to such large spans of music because, as Flannery writes, it "can paint in our minds something that our view of the keyboard sonatas has lacked till now: a temporal landscape of the origins and development of the highest achievement of Scarlatti's composing career." ... Read more

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Published within the 'Signature' Series, a series of authoritative performing editions of standard keyboard works, prepared from original sources by leading scholars. Including informative introductions and performance notes ... Read more

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This sheet music was newly engraved from early and authoritative editions. ... Read more

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This sheet music was newly engraved from early and authoritative editions. ... Read more

Product Description
This sheet music was newly engraved from early and authoritative editions. ... Read more

Product Description
Published within the 'Signature' Series, a series of authoritative performing editions of standard keyboard works, prepared from original sources by leading scholars. Including informative introductions and performance notes ... Read more

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These arrangements are at the intermediate to advanced level. In addition to the music, there are several pages of information about Scarlatti & the sonatas. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Excellent Scarlatti solo guitar sheet!
I`ll assume you already know D. Scarlatti`s unique beautiful baroque music, so I`ll skip to say this is a fine book in every sense. It is very well clear printed (all notes and every aditional quoting) and the paper is made out of good quality (not thin, but thick paper).

Considering the music transcribing work, the author really did a good job. He kept original scales or changed it to other more managable guitar scales. The author chose nice songs, and since they are 40, there is lots to choose from. It even comes with a small biography of D. Scarlatti. No notes typos so far.

In the end, you will include more than just a piece to your classical repertoire. ... Read more