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  1. September 15, 2021

    A Second-Empire Theatrical Spectacle: Ohé! les p’tits agneaux!, the revue de fin d’année for 1857 at the Théâtre des Variétés

    By Richard Sherr

    My edition of the Parisian revue de fin d’année for the year 1857, Ohé! les p’tits agneaux!, has its origins in a problem faced by many people my age: “What am I going to do in retirement?” In 2013, after my decision to retire in 2015 had been gleefully accepted by the administration of Smith College, I began to seriously contemplate my future scholarly life. In one sense, the answer was easy. I could continue doing what I had been doing for the past fifty years: working in the Vatican Library on the lives and careers of singers in the papal chapel in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, I was getting tired of it. So, I decided it was time for a change. But what change? I had always liked Paris; what topic could I choose that would bring me to (pre-COVID) Paris as often as possible? As I searched, one genre stood out: the revue de fin d’année, a specifically Parisian genre in which an entire year in the news and the theater was recapitulated in a series of comic and satirical skits. The result is the first edition ever of the complete text and music of a nineteenth-century Parisian revue de fin d’année.

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  2. May 12, 2021

    Priest, Organist, Composer: Repositioning Sumaya

    By Drew Edward Davies

    My interest in Manuel de Sumaya (1678–1755) began in graduate school, over two decades ago, when I started to research music from New Spain. At that time, the historiography positioned Sumaya—a near-contemporary of J. S. Bach born in Mexico City—as a progressive composer who introduced New Spain to fashionable Italian music. Around 2002, during dissertation research in north-central Mexico at Durango Cathedral, I located a villancico for St. Peter by Sumaya that had been virtually unknown. It was evident in that piece that, despite the composer’s progressive reputation, the music exhibited an older seventeenth-century style with erudite harmonic and contrapuntal elements. Finally, subsequent cataloging work with the Musicat Project in Mexico City brought me into contact with the corpus I would later edit for A-R editions, a series of villancicos that Sumaya wrote for religious services at Mexico City Cathedral during the 1710s and 20s. Through the process of editing these villancicos for A-R Editions, I came to interpret Sumaya in a different light, one that repositions him as a composer but perhaps appreciates him more are a multifaceted priest-musician.

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  3. March 31, 2021

    Bringing to Light Music at Dublin Castle: J. S. Kusser’s Serenatas

    By Samantha Owens

    In some ways, it feels as though Johann Sigismund Kusser (or, as he was known in early eighteenth-century Ireland, John Sigismond Cousser) has been following me around since the 1990s, when, during the course of my Ph.D. research, I first became aware of the brief period he was employed as Württemberg court kapellmeister. Born in 1660 in Bratislava (at that time Pressburg, Hungary), Kusser moved to Stuttgart with his family while still a teenager, before going on to study music in France. His professional career began in the early 1680s with a string of kapellmeister appointments at different German courts, as well as several years in Hamburg. After two and a half years working in England as a freelancer, Kusser arrived in Dublin, where he lived the remaining twenty years of his life. Over the course of those years, Kusser would compose and direct performances of more than twenty semi-staged serenatas at Dublin Castle, before the elite audience of the Irish viceregal court.

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  4. December 09, 2020

    A Tale of Parisian Chansons in Italy: Ottaviano Scotto’s Canzoni francese libro primo of 1535

    By Paul Walker

    “Hey Paul, could you come into my office for a moment? I’ve got something I’d like you to take a look at.”

    When I heard the Music Librarian at the University of Virginia, Rya Martin, call to me from behind her desk, I stepped into her office and watched as she pulled a slender, small volume off the shelf. I recognized immediately, based on cleffing, the first page’s elaborate T, and the language, that what she had was the tenor part to a print of twenty-three French chansons, bound in an elaborate nineteenth-century binding. Tipped into the volume, presumably by the person who had had it bound, was a page from a manuscript chansonnier of the time, showing on one side an attractive full-page painting of a shawm player outside a walled city. But what was it, exactly, that we had? Most of the pieces were anonymous, although Willaert, Sermisy, and Lhéritier were named for a few, and there was no title page or colophon, since those would presumably be in the first and last partbooks respectively. Little did I know just how important this small partbook would turn out to be, much less how much effort would be necessary to unlock its secrets.

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  5. September 09, 2020

    An Enlightenment Science Fiction Opera: Niccolò Piccinni’s Il regno della Luna

    By Lawrence Mays

    My Ph.D. dissertation was originally going to be about “exotic operas,” particularly those with allegorical Moon settings and those set in fantastical Amazon realms. While researching the topic, I read of a 1770 dramma giocoso by Niccolò Piccinni (1728–1800) titled Il regno della Luna. In contrast to the majority of “Moon operas”—which are really set on Earth—this work involves five Earth people actually traveling, in an unspecified future epoch, to the Moon, where they encounter a society radically different from that of late eighteenth-century Europe. They find a kingdom in which women have complete political power and may terminate marriage as they wish, and where relations between the sexes are flexible, with polygamy being condoned. Here was an exotic opera which aligned with my interests both in Moon settings and in societies dominated by women. Intrigued, I embarked on the preparation of a critical edition with exegesis, which became the focus of my dissertation and eventually the basis for an edition in the Recent Researches series.

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  6. July 29, 2020

    Michele Pesenti: Between Frottola and Madrigal

    By Anthony M. Cummings

    The thesis implied in the well-known phrase “from frottola to madrigal” has long been contested: Frottole and madrigals were different genres, with fundamentally different stylistic characteristics; they were cultivated by different composers, at different times in history, and in different centers of musical patronage and activity. But the profile of one composer, Don Michele Pesenti da Verona (ca. 1470–1528), complicates our current understanding. Unlike the vast majority of his fellow frottolists, Pesenti composed both frottole and madrigal-like compositions. He stood at a moment of transition between genres, and his career and creative output illuminate the complex dynamics of the moment. Along with my two distinguished co-editors, I am pleased to be able to present Pesenti’s complete surviving oeuvre in modern edition for the first time.

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  7. May 27, 2020

    Considering Antonio Rosetti and His Passion Oratorio

    By Sterling E. Murray

    Many years ago, while searching for a dissertation topic, I came upon a volume of five symphonies by the Bohemian composer Antonio Rosetti (ca. 1750–92). I had never heard of Rosetti, and I was quite surprised at the high quality of these works. This discovery served as the topic of my dissertation (“The Symphonies of Anton Rosetti,” University of Michigan, 1972). But more than that, it initiated what was to be a lifetime of research devoted to this composer and his musical world.

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  8. February 27, 2020

    The Forerunner in the Race: Struggles of a Victorian Woman Composer

    By Ian Graham-Jones

    It was nearly thirty years ago that a collection of manuscripts, together with a few printed editions, of the music of Alice Mary Smith (1837–84) came into my possession following the death of the composer’s grandson. They were in a haphazard state—some had been kept in an old garage, others, more damaged, in a leaking garden shed. Besides a number of full scores, there were bundles of complete sets of orchestral parts, miscellaneous drafts and scraps of manuscript, and even harmony and species counterpoint exercises. But it was not until after my retirement that I was able to spend time assessing the worth of the collection and realizing that Smith was the first British woman composer to have any success in writing in larger-scale forms and, moreover, in having her works performed.

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  9. December 11, 2019

    Looking Past the Scottishness: William McGibbon’s Sonatas

    By Elizabeth C. Ford

    William McGibbon (1695–1756) was once described to me as the best-known Scottish composer no one had ever heard of; I believe that’s a reasonably accurate assessment. When I first encountered his name in David Johnson’s monograph Music and Society in Lowland Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, I was left with the impression that his music had faded into well-deserved obscurity. At the same time, I noted that Henry George Farmer in A History of Music in Scotland (1947) spoke highly of McGibbon’s flute duets (published around 1748), though most musicians I spoke to only knew of McGibbon’s collections of Scottish tunes and the one trio sonata of his that has been published a few times in “greatest hits” collections (no. 5 from his set of 1734, headed “In Imitation of Corelli”). I knew that this wasn’t quite good enough for my studies on the flute in eighteenth-century Scotland, so I wanted to see what the rest of his music was like, and if he deserved the reputation he had. This edition is the result.

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  10. October 10, 2019

    Music, Spectacle, and Politics at the Court of Catherine the Great

    By Bella Brover-Lubovsky

    Catherine the Great (1729–96), Empress of All the Russias, was neither a devoted music lover nor a musical connoisseur. However, she assigned exceptional importance to dramatic performances that extolled her reign and policies, with a particular passion for spectacles based on her own literary production. Among these, Catherine especially favored the grandiose pageant Nachal’noe upravlenie Olega (The Early Reign of Oleg), based on one of her three historical plays elaborating on events from the history of ancient Rus. The music for Oleg, furnished collaboratively by composers from Catherine’s court, features choruses, instrumental entr’actes, and a melodrama based on a scene from Euripides’s Alceste. Staged during the Second Russo-Turkish War (1787–91) at both the Hermitage court theater and the public Kamenny Theater, the play praised Catherine as a worthy successor to one of the greatest early sovereigns of Rus. Its performance involved 800 persons in total: a variety of native and foreign actors and musicians, the court chapel singers, and extras from three military regiments.

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