17th century

By Estelle Murphy

My interest in John Eccles (ca. 1668–1735) began with my MPhil research on his court odes. Eccles began his career in London’s theaters around 1690, composing for the United Company at Drury Lane Theater, and then, when the company broke up in 1695, moved with Thomas Betterton to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The songs he composed were enormously popular, and he quickly became one of London’s best-known theater composers. He was appointed to a position as a violinist in the king’s band in 1696 and was made Master of the King’s Musick in 1700; in this position he continued to compose for the theater. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Eccles’s approach to the songs in his court odes echoed the style he used for his theater songs, and both types appeared in print as single sheets and alongside one another in collections.

By Jonathan Wainwright

Many years ago, as an undergraduate, I remember finding a couple of articles suggesting that Walter Porter was a pupil of the great Monteverdi, and thinking, “an English composer called Walter who studied with Monteverdi: a bit unlikely?!” As I continued my studies at the Ph.D. level and discovered more about the dissemination and influence of Italian music in England in the first half of the seventeenth century, I learned that Walter Porter didn’t need to go anywhere near Italy in order to study and get to know the most up-to-date Italian styles, and that all Monteverdi’s publications were easily available in London, but, I’m sad to say, my skepticism still shone through. Twenty years later, when editing Walter Porter’s collected works for A-R Editions, I had the opportunity to really get to know Porter’s music, and I’m now slightly embarrassed about my previous skepticism. I can now quite believe that Porter was a pupil of the great Monteverdi!

By Amanda Eubanks Winkler

John Eccles was one of the most popular composers working for the Restoration-era London stage, second only to Henry Purcell, with whom he briefly worked in 1693–95. Judging from contemporary reports, Eccles’s music often surpassed Purcell’s in terms of its crowd-pleasing qualities. Although he did write for professionals, Eccles spent most of his time composing for actor-singers, expertly devising music that suited their talents. Eccles gave his collaborators the space to add their own expression, which made his songs tremendously effective in the theater—even if they do not always reward modern musicologists keen on analysis.

By Louise K. Stein

Celos aun del aire matan (Jealousy, even of the air, kills), by the composer Juan Hidalgo (1614–85) and the dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), is the first extant opera in Spanish and the most significant musical-theatrical work to survive from the vibrant culture of the Spanish siglo de oro. Written to commemorate the marriage of the Infanta María Teresa to Louis XIV of France, Celos transformed the ancient myth of Cephalus and Procris so that chastity is dethroned by the power of womanly desire, while tragic consequences unfold when marital harmony is disturbed by neglect and jealousy.

Seventeenth-Century Italian Motets with Trombone

By D. Linda Pearse

The exact specification of instruments gained momentum in the final decades of the sixteenth century in Italy and early decades of the seventeenth. Trombones, in particular, were increasingly specified and were often used interchangeably with voices. The early Italian motets in this edition contain parts explicitly designated for trombones and document this tendency toward naming particular instruments and composing idiomatic parts for them. Of the more than hundred works that were identified, the nineteen works in this edition were chosen for the variety of textures and compositional styles represented, as well as for their inherent beauty.