Baroque Music (3rd edition) - C.Palisca - 1990

The problem with teaching a survey course that introduces a topic a broad and deep as the Baroque era of music (roughly 1600 - 1740) is that there is never enough time to do more than touch on the most important points. If you dive deeply into one area, say, the concerto, that's it. You are done for the term and maybe more. This text does a good job in supporting such a course. It allows the student to get a quick overview and use all those nice new terms they are learning. It is not comprehensive; no single volume book could be.There are many good music examples and the writing is clear and to the point. A professor using this text will likely provide his or her own supplementary material and focus in on certain areas more than another. Some chapters are likely to be assigned reading, but not discussed much in class.

The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral (Musical Meaning and Interpretation) - R.Monelle - 2006

The Musical Topic is an invaluable study that discusses three topics prominently featured in Western European music: the hunt, the military, and the pastoral. Monelle provides an in-depth cultural and historical study for each musical topic. He carefully considers each musical topic's origin, thematization, manifestation, and meaning and how each topic is in itself its own expressive figure.
Musical topics -- short melodic figures, harmonic, or rhythmic formulae -- sometimes reflect whole social and cultural worlds, and may be related to social history and to the other arts, especially literature. After a general introduction in which the theory of topics is formalized and rationalized, three of these are studied in depth. The topic of the hunt is shown to be only obliquely related to the hunting of the 17th to 19th centuries, but connected to older ideas of hunting. The military topic, similarly, is ambiguously related to the military life of the period, though indicative of a heroic myth of soldiering. The pastoral topic is described in relation to the long cultural tradition of the pastoral. Each topic is illustrated from the music of all periods.

Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance - Cambridge - 2002

Why do we feel the need to perform music in a historically informed style? Is this need related to wider cultural concerns? In this challenging study, John Butt sums up recent debates on the nature of the early music movement, calling upon a seemingly inexhaustible fund of ideas gleaned from historical musicology, analytic philosophy, literary theory, historiography and theories of modernism and postmodernism. He develops the critical views of both supporters and detractors, claiming ultimately that it has more intellectual and artistic potential than its detractors may have assumed.