The Academy of Ancient Music (1726–1802): Its History, Repertoire and Surviving Programmes
| Autor: | H. Diack Johnstone |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle. 51:1-136 |
| ISSN: | 2167-4027 1472-3808 |
| Popis: | It was way back in the mid-1960s that I first became interested in the Academy of Ancient Music, and I have been collecting stray scraps of information relating to them ever since. Fifty years on, methinks it’s high time I shared my findings with the world of eighteenth-century musical scholarship at large. Others meanwhile have dealt with various bits of the story, but no one so far as I know has yet attempted to bring it all together in one place. What follows here is in three self-contained parts and two appendices. The first part surveys the history of the society from cradle to grave so to speak, and deals with all the main personalities and events involved. The second, and by far the longest, part provides details of all the Academy programmes known to have survived together with various references to be found in diaries, letters and other manuscript material of the period; there is also, for the 1780s and 90s in particular, a good deal of supporting comment in the London newspapers. Also duly noted in this section are the present-day whereabouts of all those individual works that can be identified as having once formed part of its celebrated library. Part III is an editorial conflation of the 1761 and 1768 editions of The Words of such pieces as are most usually performed by the Academy of Ancient Music (plus a short and hitherto unnoticed addition to the latter to be found only in some copies), and keyed to it are the dates of all known performances tabled in Part II. Appendix A provides an annotated list of all those who were named as subscribers on 9 April 1730. This is the last such list to have survived, and here, for the first time, an attempt has been made to identify those various City merchants, clerics and others who are not among those well-known musicians usually named as being members. Appendix B refers to an interesting document now in the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale. It contains not only the names of the subscribers to the 1785–86 season but also a list of all those singers and instrumentalists who were employed by the Academy in 1786–87 (and how much they were paid). Only the latter, however, is reproduced here, and its content has been reordered in the interests of greater clarity. Standard RISM sigla are used for all but a very few library references. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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