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The use of the profits of slavery to fund musical activity during the 18th century in Britain and Europe has not generated much scholarship. Although this topic may elicit surprise, disgust or indifference among some readers, the present article will dispel the notion that the topic is of minor (if any) significance. By taking the Beckford family as a case study, I show how music was an active part of the lives and patronage of several generations and branches of Jamaica’s wealthiest absentee plantation and slave owners. Their chattel workforce toiled in appalling conditions to produce the sugar, molasses and rum that gave rise to the immense profits the owners spent lavishly on instruments, concerts and other performances, and, in the case of Muzio Clementi, purchasing the boy from his father in Rome. Whether it was through their friendships with the Burneys, the Mozarts, or the most notable castratos of the 1780s, or through the hiring of musicians for performances, or the purchase of top-of-the-line instruments from London makers, the Beckfords put to musical uses their slave-derived profits

Written in the form and style of the popular “novel of circulation” (or “itnarrative”), this article examines and provides an experience of the performance practices of eighteenth-century amateur music. It tells the typically complex history of a minor hit, “Come Haste to the Wedding,” a tune that was sung in a 1760s Drury Lane pantomime, rewritten as a rondeau for London publishers, danced as a jig in Irish and Scottish halls, transcribed as a fiddle tune by a captain in the Continental Army, circulated as a flute or guitar melody as far abroad as Calcutta, and collected by a young loyalist in Charleston, South Carolina. I argue that common to all these versions—and among many similar and neglected amateur genres, including sectional variation sets and dance collections—was the practice of desultory reading. The term “desultory” itself comes from the period, and the practice suggested here extrapolates from evidence of readers’ experience of approaching literature and periodicals out of order. Many musical texts asked readers to skip between pages and sections, rondeaux chief among them but also instructional treatises. Some of those same treatises, by C. P. E. Bach (1753–62) and Quantz (1752), hint at desultory reading in subtle admonitions. Through a lively engagement with period style, this article outlines a new definition of music reading informed by eighteenth-century language and practical context, a definition attuned to the ocular and physical habits of the era’s most plentiful practitioners: domestic performers of domestic music.

Everyone I knew in Los Angeles played on a Conn 8D, so I found the instrument on this album cover intriguing and curious. Taking the record home, I eagerly removed the plastic wrap and started listening to a player that would eventually become one of the greatest influences in my horn playing life. Hermann Baumann began playing the horn in his late teens, playing first an old righthanded B? single horn with the 1st and 3rd valves permanently fixed down, practicing only F-horn ral This was an old band instrument that his father had lying around the house and Baumann still has it. Leaving the orchestra in Stuttgart in 1967 for a teaching position in Essen gave Baumann time and new opportunities for a golden age of recordings.

Joseph Haydn's symphonies and string quartets are staples of the concert repertory, yet many aspects of this founding genius of the Viennese Classical style are only beginning to be explored. From local Kapellmeister to international icon, Haydn achieved success by developing a musical language aimed at both the connoisseurs and amateurs of the emerging musical public. In this volume, the first collection of essays in English devoted to this composer, a group of leading musicologists examines Haydn's works in relation to the aesthetic and cultural crosscurrents of his time. Haydn and His Worldopens with an examination of the contexts of the composer's late oratorios: James Webster connects theCreationwith the sublime--the eighteenth-century term for artistic experience of overwhelming power--and Leon Botstein explores the reception of Haydn'sSeasonsin terms of the changing views of programmatic music in the nineteenth century. Essays on Haydn's instrumental music include Mary Hunter on London chamber music as models of private and public performance, fortepianist Tom Beghin on rhetorical aspects of the Piano Sonata in D Major, XVI:42, Mark Evan Bonds on the real meaning behind contemporary comparisons of symphonies to the Pindaric ode, and Elaine R. Sisman on Haydn's Shakespeare, Haydn as Shakespeare, and \"originality.\" Finally, Rebecca Green draws on primary sources to place one of Haydn's Goldoni operas at the center of the Eszterháza operatic culture of the 1770s. The book also includes two extensive late-eighteenth-century discussions, translated into English for the first time, of music and musicians in Haydn's milieu, as well as a fascinating reconstruction of the contents of Haydn's library, which shows him fully conversant with the intellectual and artistic trends of the era.

Mozart's comic operas are among the masterworks of Western civilization, and yet the musical environment in which Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote these now-popular operas has received little critical attention. In this richly detailed book, Mary Hunter offers a sweeping, synthetic view of opera buffa in the lively theatrical world of late-eighteenth-century Vienna. Opera buffa (Italian-language comic opera) persistently entertained audiences at a time when Joseph was striving for a German national theater. Hunter attributes opera buffa's success to its ability to provide \"sheer\" pleasure and hence explores how the genre functioned as entertainment. She argues that opera buffa, like mainstream film today, projects a social world both recognizable and distinct from reality. It raises important issues while containing them in the \"merely entertaining\" frame of the occasion, as well as presenting them as a series of easily identifiable dramatic and musical conventions. Exploring nearly eighty comic operas, Hunter shows how the arias and ensembles convey a multifaceted picture of the repertory's social values and habits. In a concluding chapter, she discussesCos\" fan tutteas a work profoundly concerned with the conventions of its repertory and with the larger idea of convention itself and reveals the ways Mozart and da Ponte pointedly converse with their immediate contemporaries.