Language and Music in Action: Harold S. Powers’s Writings on Italian Opera

Harold S. Powers (1928-2007) was the Scheide Professor of Music History Emeritus at Princeton and his diverse scholarly interests encompassed musicology, ethnomusicology and music theory. He served on the Princeton faculty from 1973 to 2001. Powers’s work as a scholar of Western art music centered on Italian opera, starting with the 17th century but then moving into the 19th and early 20th centuries. This invaluable volume presents a substantial collection of that work. The editor, David Rosen, has made a careful selection of Powers’s writings, choosing published works that are not readily accessible in electronic databases or which were published outside Italy. Two of these are translated from Italian for the first time. A substantial body of Powers’s unpublished work is also included in the book, work which was completed but not yet published or work in preparation.