Patricia Howard

Rediscovering the muses : women's musical traditions

The idea of the title is that women have long been viewed as the inspiration to mens artistic creation, while womens creative works themselves have been overlooked. This volume draws together essays by musicologists, ethnographers, classicists, and historians to explore female musical activity in

Gluck : an eighteenth-century portrait in letters and documents

This book brings together a variety of eighteenth century sources in an attempt to construct a portrait of one of the most interesting musicians of that century. Celebrated today for his historical significance, as the one composer who did most to effect the transition between baroque and classical opera, Gluck in his lifetime was both a controversial figure and a colourful one: the sources portray a man of enormous energy, relish for good food and good company, and passion for his art. The basis of the book is the body of letters to and from Gluck. There has been only one previous attempt to collect and translate the material into English, and apart from the fact that it was universally deemed inadequate at the time of publication (1962), it has been superceded by discoveries of new material, now incorporated in this study. Besides the letters, the book includes a wealth of factual documents and informal anecdotes, not easily accessible in the original German, French and Italian languages, almost none of which has ever been made available in English. The material has been arranged and translated with the aim of providing readers with a lively, continuous narrative of Glucks life, while at the same time indicating the major locations of the published and unpublished sources, in order that scholars can access the material in its original languages.

The Wandering Minstrel: An Eighteenth-Century Fiction?

Ofall the various productions of the press, none are so eagerly received ... as the writings of travellers.1 Travellers tales formed one of the most popular genres of eighteenth-century literature. The fact that travel itself was becoming easier and safer stimulated rather than quenched the thirst for descriptions of serious scientific inquiries, accounts of the Grand Tour, quests for romantic landscape, and investigations into the curious manners and customs of societies near and far. Travel books were published in proliferation, widely read, and frequently referred to by other travellers, so that a chain of reception can often be established. A seminal text, Joseph Addisons Remarks on Several parts of Italy (1705)2 shaped the aims and ambitions ofmany travellers embarking on their own tours, Boswell among them: I shall certainly take Addisons Travels with me, as you hint. I shall read them abroad, with high relish.3 Almost as influential, and not

Lully and the ironic convention

Three hundred years after his death in 1687 Jean-Baptiste Lullys reputation is entering a new phase. Only a minority of opera-goers today have had the opportunity of seeing one of Lullys operas performed in the theatre. French music, always a degree less accessible to a non-French public than the music of its Italian and Austro-German neighbours, remains the last corner of the seventeenth-century repertory to make a popular appeal to twentieth-century audiences. There are indications, however, in the appearance of a new collected edition, in the small output of new recordings, and in the greater volume of scholarly investigation associated with the tercentenary, that the distinctive sound of Lullys music will soon become at least as familiar as that of his contemporaries Purcell and Cavalli. And familiarity will surely engender popularity: the music needs no special pleading. The dramatic contexts it serves are, however, less readily open to modern audiences. The genres of court ballet and comedie-ballet have no exact counterparts in the better-known music of other national traditions, and the operas themselves the thirteen tragedies which constitute the composers most substantial achievement are based on conventions which may appear arcane to a listener who lacks prior knowledge of the sung and spoken theatre of the Grand Siecle. This article, then, focuses on one of the conventions which structure these works. It traces a relationship between style and situation in a practice which appears to belong exclusively to the French stage, which was initiated by Lully, and which, half a century after his death, seems to have been forgotten.