The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and Eighteenth-Century Musical Style (review)

Notes ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Kroll
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Keyboard Sonatas

Fantasia and Sensibility

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Head
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Response ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Single Type ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Opera Seria

Fantasia and sensibility are not like other topics. Composed and improvised in all shapes and sizes, fantasias are not reducible to a single type of material. The fantasia was a host genre, a context of topical play, incorporating a range of stylistic and generic references. The frequent use of passages inspired by accompanied recitative and aria reveals an affinity with opera seria. The idea that the fantasia influences other genres is prominent in music criticism only after 1800 and represents an idealist trope foreign to much of the eighteenth century. Sensibility, though thematized in scenes of musical pathos and tenderness which display stylistic commonalities through a range of conventional materials, was not a musical style but a capacity for refined emotional response and sympathetic identification broadly relevant to the project of aesthetics and the fine arts.

‘SCARLATTINO, THE WONDER OF HIS TIME’: DOMENICO SCARLATTI’S ABSENT PRESENCE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-298
Author(s):  
TODD DECKER
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fanny Burney ◽  
Anecdotal Evidence ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Profound Change ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Personal Accounts ◽  
Absent Presence

Domenico Scarlatti played a consistently significant role in English musical life from 1738 to the end of the century, even though he never travelled to England. His ‘absent presence’ was mediated by the eighty-three Scarlatti sonatas available in print in the eighteenth century. Scarlatti’s ‘English’ sonatas – defined here as those pieces available in print or manuscript to an eighteenth-century English player – display common compositional traits, in particular the frequent use of virtuoso techniques that appeal to the eye as well as the ear, such as crossed-hand passagework and leaps. English professional keyboard players used these visually virtuoso sonatas to establish their credentials in a competitive market, and the performance of this repertory – the most difficult in print – remained a benchmark for skilful execution at the keyboard to the end of the century. The performance venues for Scarlatti sonatas are difficult to document outside of anecdotal evidence drawn from personal accounts such as those by Charles and Fanny Burney. I provide new documentary evidence for semi-public performances of Scarlatti sonatas by Charles Jr and Samuel Wesley in the 1770s and offer further evidence that Scarlatti’s music held its place during a period of profound change in musical style and taste. Even as his sonatas were published and played to the end of the century, Scarlatti was frequently invoked in writings on music and aesthetics. His shifting position as exemplar or bad example is demonstrated in texts by Charles Avison, William Crotch, Uvedale Price, Sir John Hawkins and Charles Burney. Much like Arcangelo Corelli, another Italian with a strong absent presence principally mediated by print, Domenico Scarlatti had a powerful and lasting impact in England. This article presents an eighteenth-century portrait in absentia of the ‘English’ Scarlatti, suggesting how this elusive figure might be moved out of courtly isolation and into the thick of the eighteenth-century musical marketplace.

Listening to Bach

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
New Words ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Way

Modern audiences can learn to listen to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor BWV 232 and Christmas Oratorio BWV 248 in ways that reflect eighteenth-century sensibilities and that recognize our place in the tradition of the works’ performance and interpretation. The sacred music of Bach’s time recognized both old and new styles. In the Mass in B Minor, Bach contrasts, combines, and reconciles them to make a musical point. Listeners can also learn to hear musical types and musical topics that were significant in the eighteenth century, including sleep arias, love duets, and secular choral arias, and how Bach put these types to use. A sensitivity to musical style also offers ways to listen to and think about music created by parody—the reuse of music with new words—like almost all of the Mass in B Minor and most of the Christmas Oratorio. Parody, though interesting, is almost never audible and is of little consequence compared with what listening tells us about a piece. Modern performances are stamped with audible consequences of our place in the twenty-first century. The ideological choices we make in performing the Mass and the Oratorio, the present-day way of performing the Christmas work in relation to the calendar, and the legacy of reception and interpretation have all affected the way his music is understood and heard today.

The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and Eighteen-Century Musical Style

2006 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 214
Author(s):  
Marie Demeilliez ◽  
W. Dean Sutcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Musical Style ◽  
Keyboard Sonatas ◽  
Eighteen Century

TRAZOM'S WIT: COMMUNICATIVE STRATEGIES IN A ‘POPULAR’ YET ‘DIFFICULT’ SONATA

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
VASILI BYROS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Successful Communication ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Communicative Strategies ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Keyboard Sonatas ◽  
Communicative Strategy

ABSTRACTVienna, 21 August 1773: Mozart signs off a letter to his sister Nannerl in his usual jocular manner: ‘oidda – gnagflow Trazom neiw ned 12 tsugua 3771’. This ‘arseways’ spelling of his signature is an early example of Mozart's well-known fondness for jesting and playing with patterns – spatial, arithmetical, linguistic and musical. Mozart appears to have been especially committed to such games in the 1770s. This was a period when he was also involved with the more serious matter of advancing his career, in which the composition of the first six so-called ‘difficult’ yet also ‘popular’ keyboard sonatas, k279–284, played an integral part. This article reads certain inexplicable gestures in the first sonata, k279, as reflecting Mozart's preoccupation with witty expressions at this time, seemingly as part of his attempt to gain the favour of prospective patrons, publishers and employers. The idiosyncrasies of the sonata result from an intersection of the syntax of phrase-level patterning and large-scale form with the semiosis of musical topics, eliciting laughter or simply a smile. Mozart's communicative strategy is situated in a broader context of the compositional play, wit and humour discussed in late eighteenth-century theory and aesthetics. It also allows us to revisit several implications arising from Danuta Mirka and Kofi Agawu's Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music of 2008, including the importance of ‘context’ for successful communication, the susceptibility of eighteenth-century artefacts to present-day misreading and the problem of Kenner, Liebhaber and audiences in general.

ALLAN RAMSAY, THE IDEA OF ‘SCOTTISH MUSIC’ AND THE BEGINNINGS OF ‘NATIONAL MUSIC’ IN EUROPE

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Gelbart
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Scottish Music ◽  
National Music ◽  
Historical Moment

ABSTRACTThis article examines the process of fashioning an idea of ‘national’ music, by considering the social and political conditions that made such an idea possible at a particular historical moment. An early example, Scotland, is the focus here, and helps to show the type of discursive and active work involved in giving meaning to the idea of ‘Scottish music’ in a cultural sense. I argue that the poet and song collector Allan Ramsay played a central role in the years beginning around 1720. Before Ramsay's generation, there was only a limited sense of ethnic identity translating into poetic or musical style. Furthermore, Ramsay himself, in attempting to harness song and music as national cultural capital, also had to contend with the fact that Scotland was ethnically, culturally and linguistically split along the Highland–Lowland divide, and in other ways as well. Through his song collectionA Tea-Table Miscellanyand his follow-up publication of tunes for that collection, as well as through his involvement with Edinburgh's elite musical community, Ramsay helped transform Scotland's musical culture from a manuscript-based milieu organized around specific musical functions and occasions to one in which national origins helped validate music, and printed collections enshrined such groupings. Lastly, in addition to its direct influence, Ramsay's work helped shape the emergent discourse about national song indirectly: an extensive outgrowth of thought rooted partly in Ramsay's own ideas led to his being used as a negative example among collectors of ‘folk’ music from the later eighteenth century onward.

Composing Authority in Six Forged “Haydn” Sonatas

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Reece
Keyword(s):  
Historical Writing ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Shared History ◽  
Standards Of Evidence ◽  
Keyboard Sonatas

In December 1993 news broke that six keyboard sonatas whose rediscovery was being hailed as “The Haydn Scoop of the Century” were, in fact, not by Haydn at all. It soon emerged that the compositions—initially believed to be the lost Hob. XVI:2a–e and 2g—were not simple misattributions, but rather something that has rarely been discussed in the music world: modern forgeries deliberately constructed to deceive scholars and listeners. Adapting philosophical and art-historical writing on forgery to music, this article examines the six “Haydn” sonatas in the context of contemporary debates about expertise, postmodernism, and the author concept. Analyzing the stylistic content of the works in question sheds new light on musical forgeries as artifacts of aesthetic prejudice and anti-academic critique. More broadly, it suggests that the long-overlooked phenomenon of forgery poses questions about authorship, authority, and truth itself that have an important place in our shared history as musicologists. Should our standards of evidence be rooted in historical sources, musical style, or some combination of the two? What kind of relationship do we believe exists between composers and their works? And is there any inherent reason—cultural, ethical, or otherwise—that we cannot write music like Haydn’s today? In posing such questions, the story of the forged Haydn sonatas provides us with a unique opportunity to reflect on the values and future of the field.

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