MTU Cork Library Catalogue

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Rotunda music in eighteenth-century Dublin / Brian Boydell.

By: Boydell, Brian [author].
Material type: materialTypeLabelBookPublisher: Blackrock, Co. Dublin : Irish Academic Press, [1992]Description: 240 pages : illustrations, facsimile, portrait ; 24 cm.Content type: text Media type: unmediated Carrier type: volumeISBN: 0716524872 (hardback).Subject(s): Concerts -- Ireland -- Dublin -- History -- 18th century | Music -- Ireland -- History and criticismDDC classification: 780.7841835
Contents:
Introduction and the laying of plans for the future, 1745-49 -- Uncertainties and rivalry, 1750-58 -- The sirens -- Male singers, boys and Italians -- A decade of consolidation and the building of the Rotunda, 1759-68 -- Six years of expansion, 1769-75 -- The peak of popularity with Thomas Pinto, 1776-82 -- Final years of decline, 1783-91 -- Music performed at the Rotunda concerts: changes in musical taste.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
General Lending MTU Cork School of Music Library Store Item 780.7841835 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Available 00205451
General Lending MTU Cork School of Music Library Lending 780.7841835 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Available 00102384
Total holds: 0

Bibliography: (pages 209-210) and indexes.

Introduction and the laying of plans for the future, 1745-49 -- Uncertainties and rivalry, 1750-58 -- The sirens -- Male singers, boys and Italians -- A decade of consolidation and the building of the Rotunda, 1759-68 -- Six years of expansion, 1769-75 -- The peak of popularity with Thomas Pinto, 1776-82 -- Final years of decline, 1783-91 -- Music performed at the Rotunda concerts: changes in musical taste.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Weber's complex and fascinating exercise integrates musical with social, intellectual, and political history, boldly breaking important ground. Its many theses are not always fully ventilated or proved, but it is wonderful in the intelligent breadth of its concerns and its truly impressive research. Weber argues that England's early development of a canon of musical classics, works of "ancient music" as opposed to newly-minted pieces, is explained by such things as England's need to stabilize a country wracked by civil war and revolution, the rapid rise of a sense of nation-state, an increasingly urbanized, consuming society, and the coalescing of an upper-class elite. Political faction early in the period, and even more so its diminution later, played important roles, as did institutions such as the Chapel Royal, the Academy of Ancient Music, the Concert of Antient Music, and provincial music festivals. The process was furthered by literary and philosophical fashions (especially empiricism), various sociomusical rituals, the writings of Hawkins and Burney, George III's fostering of "Handelmania," and a societal ideology that equated musical classics with moral uprightness. (This summary does scant justice to Weber's sophisticated, interlocking theses.) A delight for all serious students of 18th-century music and society. Boydell's Rotunda Music. . .is, coincidentally, an illustration of the absence of the idea of a canon of classics in the operation of an annual concert series held from 1749 to 1791 to benefit the Dublin Lying-In Hospital. Such programs, and program analyses, as Boydell provides show that these concert-givers were only too happy to program the latest inventions of composers worthy or otherwise: well before 1791 Handel's share of the "Rotunda" concerts' programs had almost wholly given way to music of Haydn, J.C. Bach, Stamitz, Gretry, Abel, and other far lesser lights. Geminiani had once figured in the lists, but Purcell had not, let alone the English madrigalists whose works persisted in the canonized repertoire of "ancient music" concerts in London. Boydell's text and appendixes are full of interesting business details of concert promotion which will interest researchers, but the text is generally devoid of analytical emphasis, and much of the work comes off as just "one thing after another," precluding recommendation except to specialists. Weber, however, is recommended to both advanced undergraduate and graduate collections. W. Metcalfe; University of Vermont

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