• About The Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones

 

"Victor Coelho's examination of the four great albums the Stones released between 1968 and 1972 is one of the book's best essays… Coelho's explication of the album's themes, however, is a rare deep dive into the Stones' lyric content… The essays in the Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones at their best explain not only what the band accomplished but why they still matter." Rating 7/10

- Pop Matters (January, 2020)

 

"The Cambridge Companion… gives the Nanker/Phelge crew a gravitas – even a soulfulness – that most biographers have failed to discern."

 

• About Instrumentalists and Renaissance Culture

 

"the book at hand is unquestionably an outstanding one, certain to become the standard work on the topic… Coelho and Polk have written the first-book-length study of Renaissance instrumental musicand instrumentalists in English, and they have done so in an exemplary fashion."

 

- Journal of the American Musicological Society

 

• About Music and Science in the Age of Galileo

"This valuable collection of essays... offers important new scholarship as well as suggesting avenues for further research. It represents a significant contribution to the histories of science, music, and Early modern European culture."- Annals of Science

"A first-class collection, which would very usefully supplement Palisca's Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought in any course on these questions. -Metascience  

"Music and Science in the Age of Galileo unites in a single volume a multitude of viewpoints using modern epistemological tools.... Prudent and audacious, these studies illuminate the time of European history when our foundations of thought and our sense of hearing were established."-Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences

• About The Manuscript Sources of Seventeenth-Century Italian Lute Music:

"Because of the instrument's technical peculiarities (barely understood by non-lutenists) and its unique forms of notation, the repertory and its sources are virtually impenetrable without a guide like Coelho, who combines expertise as a lutenist with extensive scholarly experience in dealing with this material. The detailed analysis of the 50 manuscripts included and the reconstruction of their histories that Coelho is able to provide can only be described as awesome. This book will frequently be consulted as a goldmine of information, not just on lute manuscripts, but also on the social history of music in 17th-century Italy."

- Alexander Silbiger, Duke University 

"Rarely does a reference work of this importance and usefulness appear. Victor Coelho's book is... an invaluable tool for research in many areas: dance music, social history, manuscript transmission, accompaniment and continuo realization of Italian monody, changing tastes and trends in Italian composition for lute, the transmission of popular music, the music of the Commedia dell'arte, and most important, the history of seventeenth-century Italian instrumental music.... This book should be on the shelves of every music reference library in the world... and in the personal libraries of every lutenist and scholar of Italian Baroque music."

-James Tyler, Notes 

"A monumental task with careful attention to detail... this is scholarship of the first order."

- Fontes Artis Musicae 

"...an extremely thorough survey of a repertoire that is not at all well known... This is the result of ten years' research; the time has been well spent and lutenists will be grateful that this territory is uncharted no longer."

- Early Music 

• About Performance on Lute, Guitar and Vihuela: Historical Practice and Modern Interpretation: 

"Books like this one prove that the field of performance practice is a rich and vibrant one, capable of extension and self-analysis.... [It] is a valuable repository of approaches, ideas and information... [and] an interesting and positive indicator of the state of the discipline."

- Journal of the Royal Musical Association 

"Coelho draws on his considerable knowledge of manuscript sources to discuss seventeenth-century Italian lutenists' varying approaches to interpretation. His exemplars of pedagogical manuscripts and of professional players' elaborations of classic pieces are particularly compelling.... One hopes that this book signals a trend toward fresh approaches to performance practice for these instruments. The advances into new areas of source materials and the more realistically flexible interpretations of solutions to problems presented here are positive developments."

-Notes

"[Coelho's] combination of scholarship and original thought is insightful and stimulating... [his] essay alone is worth the price of the book. It will repay the attention of not just lutenists but of anyone interested in playing or listening to 17 th-century music"

-Early Music Today