Clemson University Press: Studies in British Musical Cultures – serie

Winner of the 2024 H. Robert Cohen/RIPM Award from the American Musicological SocietyRecently, studies of opera, of print culture, and of music in Britain in the long nineteenth century have proliferated. This essay collection explores the multiple point of interaction among these fields. Past scholarship often used print as a simple conduit for information about opera in Britain, but these essays demonstrate that print and opera existed in a more complex symbiosis.This collection embeds opera within the culture of Britain in the long nineteenth century, a culture inundated by print. The essays explore: how print culture both disseminated and shaped operatic culture; how the businesses of opera production and publishing intertwined; how performers and impresarios used print culture to cultivate their public persona; how issues of nationalism, class, and gender impacted reception in the periodical press; and how opera intertwined with literature, not only drawing source material from novels and plays, but also as a plot element in literary works or as a point of friction in literary circles.As the growth of digital humanities increases access to print sources, and as opera scholars move away from a focus on operas as isolated works, this study points the way forward to a richer understanding of the intersections between opera and print culture.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.In his views on the music of other composers, Benjamin Britten had strong preferences, and his particularly active life as a performer meant that these preferences were often expressed in his programming choices, in particular for his own Aldeburgh Festival. Six composers in particular (Purcell, Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Verdi and Mahler) received special attention and two others Verdi and Mahler) received as much as possible given the limitations of resources at the Festival.He also showed his admiration for these composers in the way in which he allowed these programmed works to influence his own compositions. This book frames discussion of each composer and his influence around the relationship between a particular work by Britten and a particular one by the composer concerned that was performed by Britten at approximately the same time.Thus, Britten’s Second String Quartet (1945) is compared with Purcell’s “Chacony in G minor”. The chamber operas The Rape of Lucretia (1946) and Albert Herring (1947) owe much to Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff. The song cycle “Winter Words” (1953) relates to Schubert’s “Winterreise”. War Requiem (1962) is influenced by Bach’s two Passions. “Night Piece” for piano (1963) connects to the second “Nachtmusik” from Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. Finally, parallels exist between the opera Death in Venice (1973) and Mozart’s Idomeneo.

Byrd Studies in the Twenty-First Century demonstrates current approaches to Byrd studies in the twenty-first century and represents the sole major print effort to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the composer’s death in 2023. The volume's chapters, by both early-career and established scholars, cover topics that engage with Byrd’s milieu and music, incorporating themes such as reception history, exploration and exile, historiography, digital scholarship, literary criticism, and reconstruction. It also expands upon established areas of Byrd scholarship, including Byrd’s Catholicism, analysis, performance practice, and reformation politics, investigating how approaches to Byrd and his music have changed over since the last major anniversary in 1923.This timely volume not only marks the quatercentenary of a beloved English composer but works to situate scholarship on Byrd within the changing landscape of interdisciplinary music study. It includes contributions from scholars drawing widely from literary studies, visual culture, music theory, performance studies, and cultural history. Byrd's exceptional life at the heart of elite and courtly culture during tumultuous late-Elizabethan England is a unique window to late-sixteenth, early-seventeenth century England that will be of value to scholars and students from both within and without music studies. Byrd Studies in the Twenty-first Century provides new approaches and perspectives on Byrd's music, performance, and legacy.

The Gentleman Dancing-Master: Mr Isaac and the English Royal Court from Charles II to Queen Anne is a study of the life of the most significant dancing-master at the late-Stuart court in London. It discusses his use of dance music and brings together, for the first time, reprints of the notations of all his twenty-three surviving dances created for performance at court in the presence of the monarch, including several created to celebrate the birthdays of Queen Anne or named after important courtiers or political events. This study highlights the significance of dance as a central part of court culture, and also the wider context of the London book trade within which Isaac’s notators turned his dances into a publishable form ultimately taken over by John Walsh’s music publishing firm. Using extensive archival and printed sources from his day, the book follows Isaac’s career as a dancer, teacher, and choreographer of sophisticated duets in the fashionable French style, some of which were also performed in the theatre. Isaac, however, was no slavish follower of French fashion, and by careful consideration of the extant dances from the point of view of a dancer, this study also seeks to throw light on Isaac’s often individualistic approach to choreography.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.The religious reforms of the mid-sixteenth century raised important questions about what it meant to be English in the Tudor period—after all, the medieval liturgy had been one of the few constants for English people of all ages and classes for centuries. Reforming Community examines the key role religious music played in the formation of English identity in the nation’s capital as the governments of Edward VI and Mary I imposed competing religious agendas on a populace whose members held a plurality of views about reform. The book begins by examining the relationship between the “official” liturgical policies of Edward VI and Mary I and the practices of London’s parish churches, demonstrating that those across the confessional spectrum relied on links to the Henrician past to redefine their worship spaces. In the public sphere, however, supporters of the Edwardine and Marian governments sometimes differed; though both turned to the new genre of godly ballads, the former shaped discourses around Englishness and religion by promoting scripture-based song, while the latter relied heavily on public processions to reinforce an explicitly Catholic identity. Reforming Community thus argues that in using specific music to assert confessional preferences, Londoners sought to forge their own understanding of their identities separate from Catholic (and Protestant) Europe.

In its first years of existence, in the 1930s, the Glyndebourne Festival Opera set out to internationalize English opera culture, both by attracting international artists and leading proponents of a new concept of opera production and by giving émigrés the chance to further hone skills developed in Central Europe and beyond.The first five years of productions were marked by the collaboration of Artistic Directors, Fritz Busch and Carl Ebert, and the festival’s General Manager, Rudolph Bing, all of whom had emigrated from Nazi Germany in 1933. Beyond these architects of the festival, Glyndebourne employed the talents of many other émigrés, including the young conductor Hans Oppenheim, singers Irene Eisinger and Ina Souez, and répétiteur Jani Strasser. Many of these individuals sought refuge from fascism, and each contributed substantially to the achievements of the festival during its formative years.This book is the first to fully consider the impact immigrants had on the early Glyndebourne project. Using frameworks developed by scholars of mobility and migration, it is also the first to explore the festival as a place both bounded and unbounded by the Sussex Downs—as a festival created in England, but also in the far-flung sites in which the work of Glyndebourne was often accomplished.

In eighteenth-century England, “variety” became a prized aesthetic in musical culture. Not only was variety—of counterpoint, harmony, melody, and orchestration—expected for good composition, but it also manifested in cultural mediums such as songbook anthologies, which compiled miscellaneous songs and styles in single volumes; pasticcio operas, which were cobbled together from excerpts from other operas; and public concerts, which offered a hodgepodge assortment of different types and styles of performance. I call this trend of producing music through the collection, assemblage, and juxtaposition of various smaller pieces as musical miscellany; like a jigsaw puzzle (also invented in the eighteenth century), the urge to construct a whole out of smaller, different parts reflected a growing desire to appeal to a quickly diversifying England. This book explores the phenomenon of musical miscellany in early eighteenth-century England both in performance culture and as an aesthetic. Chapters offer analyses of concert programming, early music criticism, the compilation of pasticcio operas and songbook miscellanies, and even the ways in which composers and performers shaped their freelancing careers. Musical miscellany, in its many forms, juxtaposed foreign and homegrown musical practices and styles in order to stimulate discourse surrounding English musical culture during a time of cosmopolitan transformation as the eighteenth century unfolded.

Printed Musical Propaganda in Early Modern England reveals how consistently music, in theory and practice, was used as propaganda in a variety of printed genres that included or discussed music from the English Civil Wars through the reign of William and Mary. These printed items—bawdy broadside ballads, pamphlets paid for by Parliament, sermons advertising the Church of England’s love of music, catch-all music collections, music treatises addressed to monarchs, and masque and opera texts—when connected in a contextual mosaic, reveal a new picture of not just individual propaganda pieces, but multi-work propaganda campaigns with contributions that cross social boundaries. Musicians, Royalists, Parliamentarians, government officials, propagandists, clergymen, academics, and music printers worked together setting musical traps to catch the hearts and minds of their audiences and readers. Printed Musical Propaganda proves that the influential power of music was not merely an academic matter for the early modern English, but rather a practical benefit that many sought to exploit for their own gain.

In eighteenth-century England, “variety” became a prized aesthetic in musical culture. Not only was variety—of counterpoint, harmony, melody, and orchestration—expected for good composition, but it also manifested in cultural mediums such as songbook anthologies, which compiled miscellaneous songs and styles in single volumes; pasticcio operas, which were cobbled together from excerpts from other operas; and public concerts, which offered a hodgepodge assortment of different types and styles of performance. I call this trend of producing music through the collection, assemblage, and juxtaposition of various smaller pieces as musical miscellany; like a jigsaw puzzle (also invented in the eighteenth century), the urge to construct a whole out of smaller, different parts reflected a growing desire to appeal to a quickly diversifying England. This book explores the phenomenon of musical miscellany in early eighteenth-century England both in performance culture and as an aesthetic. Chapters offer analyses of concert programming, early music criticism, the compilation of pasticcio operas and songbook miscellanies, and even the ways in which composers and performers shaped their freelancing careers. Musical miscellany, in its many forms, juxtaposed foreign and homegrown musical practices and styles in order to stimulate discourse surrounding English musical culture during a time of cosmopolitan transformation as the eighteenth century unfolded.