Royal Musical Association Monographs
About the Book Series
This series was originally supported by funds made available to the Royal Musical Association from the estate of Thurston Dart. Its purpose is to provide a medium for specialized investigations of a topic, concept or repertory - studies of a kind that would not normally be feasible for commercial publishers and that would be too long for most periodicals.
The RMA Monograph series follows the same policy for ethics in peer reviews as the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and RMA Research Chronicle. The full statement is available here: https://www.rma.ac.uk/publications/
Paraguayan Musical Nationalism in the Symphonies of Florentín Giménez
1st Edition
By Alfredo Colman
October 08, 2025
This study of the music and career of Florentín Giménez discusses the various ways in which he expressed his Paraguayan cultural identity and musical nationalism through his symphonies. Florentín Giménez (1925–2021) stands as one of the most prolific Paraguayan composers of both concert and folk ...
Skryabin, Philosophy and the Music of Desire
1st Edition
By Kenneth M. Smith
May 12, 2025
Commentary on Skryabin has struggled to situate an understanding of the composer's music within his idiosyncratic philosophical world views. Early commentators' efforts to do so failed to establish a thorough or systematic approach. And later twentieth-century studies turned away from the ...
The Malmariée in the Thirteenth-Century Motet
1st Edition
By Dolores Pesce
August 26, 2024
This monograph offers a comprehensive study of the topos of the malmariée or the unhappily married woman within the thirteenth-century motet repertory, a vocal genre characterized by several different texts sounding simultaneously over a foundational Latin chant. Part I examines the malmariée ...
Return to Riemann: Tonal Function and Chromatic Music
1st Edition
By J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Oliver Chandler
February 16, 2024
This book is a music-theoretical and critical-theoretical study of late tonal music, and, in particular, of the music of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. First, in terms of music theory, it proposes a new theory of tonal function that returns to the theories of Hugo Riemann to rediscover a development of ...
Music, Books and Theatre in Eighteenth-Century Exton: A Context for Handel's ‘Comus’
1st Edition
By Colin Timms
December 12, 2023
This book establishes the cultural background to the productions of Milton’s Comus that were staged in the 1740s by Baptist Noel, 4th Earl of Gainsborough, at Exton Hall, his country seat in the East Midlands of England. The author reveals that Handel’s visit in 1745 occurred in a richer and ...
Authorship and Identity in Late Thirteenth-Century Motets
1st Edition
By Catherine A. Bradley
September 25, 2023
Questions of authorship are central to the late thirteenth-century motet repertoire represented by the seventh section or fascicle of the Montpellier Codex (Montpellier, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Section de médecine, H. 196, hereafter Mo). Mo does not explicitly attribute any of its ...
Gregorio Ballabene’s Forty-eight-part Mass for Twelve Choirs (1772)
1st Edition
By Florian Bassani
September 25, 2023
Neither Spem in alium, the widely acclaimed ‘songe of fortie partes’ by Thomas Tallis, nor Alessandro Striggio’s forty-part Mass is the largest-scale counterpoint work in Western music. The actual winner is Gregorio Ballabene, a relatively unknown Roman maestro di cappella, a contemporary of ...
Music Theory in Late Medieval Avignon: Magister Johannes Pipardi
1st Edition
By Karen M. Cook
January 09, 2023
The manuscript Seville, Biblioteca Colombina y Capitular 5-2-25, a composite of dozens of theoretical treatises, is one of the primary witnesses to late medieval music theory. Its numerous copies of significant texts have been the focus of substantial scholarly attention to date, but the shorter, ...
Disinformation in Mass Media: Gluck, Piccinni and the Journal de Paris
1st Edition
By Beverly Jerold
December 22, 2021
The founding in 1777 of the Journal de Paris, France’s first daily and distinctly commercial paper, represents an early use of disinformation as a tool for political gain, profit, and societal division. To attract a large readership and bar competition for C.W. Gluck’s works at the Paris Opéra, it ...
Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart's Turkish Music
1st Edition
By Matthew Head
August 15, 2019
Matthew Head explores the cultural meanings of Mozart's Turkish music in the composer's 18th-century context, in subsequent discourses of Mozart's significance for 'Western' culture, and in today's (not entirely) post-colonial world. Unpacking the ideological content of Mozart's numerous ...
Regina Mingotti: Diva and Impresario at the King's Theatre, London
1st Edition
By Michael Burden
June 10, 2019
Regina Mingotti was the first female impresario to run London's opera house. Born in Naples in 1722, she was the daughter of an Austrian diplomat, and had worked at Dresden under Hasse from 1747. Mingotti left Germany in 1752, and travelled to Madrid to sing at the Spanish court, where the opera ...
Playing on Words: A Guide to Luciano Berio's Sinfonia
1st Edition
By David Osmond-Smith
April 05, 2016
Luciano Berio's Sinfonia (1968) marked a return by the composer to orchestral writing after a gap of six years. This in-depth study demonstrates the central position the work occupies in Berio's output. David Osmond-Smith discusses the way in which Berio used the Bororo myth described in ...