Henry Purcell

Matsumoto, Naomi. 'The Operatic Mad Scene: Its Origins and Early Development up to c. 1700' (PhD Dissertation, University of London, 2005).

This thesis investigates the origins of the operatic mad scene, its development up to c.1700, and questions of its definition and meaning. Chapters 1 and 2 trace the traditions behind musico-theatrical portrayals of insanity from ancient times through to the Renaissance, and in Chapter 3 seventeenth-century Italian examples of “mad” operas are codified and examined. Chapters 4 – 6 discuss the dissemination of the “mad” opera through France, England, Spain, Germany and Austria, and the relevant indigenous musical and theatrical conventions of each country are discussed.
        Having reconstructed the surviving repertory, in Chapters 7 and 8, the textual, prosodic, behavioural and musical topoi used in association with such works are examined. The difficulties of attempting to establish purely musical signifiers for operatic insanity are demonstrated, and other means of approaching a definition are suggested. In Chapter 8, the forms and uses of aria, recitative, recitative soliloquy and arioso are analysed, and their contributions to the musical characterisation of the insane explored. In Chapter 9 the insights already gained are brought together in a case study of Iro from Monteverdi’s Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria.
        The final chapter attempts to construct a typology of madness in seventeenth century opera based partly on literary criteria. It theorises the notion of fictive truth as a contract between the audience, the composer and librettist, and the protagonist on the stage. Next, the functions of mad characters within the plots are analysed in relation to the distinctive dramaturgical effects achieved by “fictive personalities”, “roles” and “character-types”. Finally, there is an attempt to locate our understanding of madness in opera within wider critical horizons, and to explain the cultural work that mad scenes do for us, as we listen to examples from the historically situated traditions of opera.

In this paper, I argue that through responding to Henry Purcell's choral anthem 'Hear My Prayer, O Lord' with a certain form of desire for God, one can come to knowledge about God in the capacity of providing satisfaction. Further, this knowledge is available even in the absence of satisfaction, and does not require belief in God's existence. It is thus possible for 'religiously minded' agnostics, and even atheists, to know about God in the way I describe.

This discussion outlines the poetical features of style and narrative technique which contribute to Virgil's psychological characterisation and considers the role of audience response - in terms of reception, intertextuality and ideology - in determining Virgil's characterisation.

Though Henry Purcell, as organist of Westminster Abbey, gave considerable attention to sacred music during his all-too-brief life, he also explored earthier topics in his catches. These brief vocal works focus primarily on wine consumption, unrequited love, and convivial music making. Though often textually lowbrow, these seemingly insignificant vocal works nonetheless display on occasion considerable contrapuntal skill and high musical style, an attention to musical detail that is seemingly at odds with the oft-indelicate subject matter.
This paper will explore Purcell’s musical technique in these works; in particular, the use of ground bass in “Fie! Nay! Prithee John,” the musical onomatopoeia in “Of All the Instruments,” and the careful placement of rests in “Tom Making a Manteau,” which permits a double-entendre that only becomes evident in performance. These catches, building upon an English tradition that dates back to Medieval days, are an interesting window into the diversity of Purcell’s musical interests, and exemplify the technical skill he lavished on even the basest of texts.

Didone, esule regina fenicia, fonda Cartagine, accoglie Enea, profugo da Troia, se ne innamora follemente e, abbandonata, si toglie la vita per aver tradito la fedeltà alla memoria del marito Sicheo. Questa è la storia che racconta Virgilio nel IV libro dell’Eneide: una commovente tragedia incastonata nell’epos, forse il testo più celebre e fortunato della letteratura di Roma. Esisteva però un’altra Didone,  l’eroina del mito – precedente all’Eneide – che si gettava tra le fiamme proprio per non venir meno al primo vincolo nuziale. Di qui il paradosso della sua fama: da eroina della fedeltà coniugale, Didone diviene, grazie a Virgilio, protagonista di una tragedia di amore e di abbandono. Ma, nelle riscritture del mito, il dialogo allusivo tra le “due Didoni” riaffiora, a partire da Ovidio, ogni qual volta un autore vorrà scontrarsi con Virgilio (e con la tradizione culturale “ufficiale” che si identifica con la sua poesia). Exemplum morale in Boccaccio, tormentata eroina intertestuale nelle rinnovate forme tragiche del Rinascimento, amante moderna che inaugura la rivoluzione del melodramma settecentesco, straziante simbolo o allegoria nello sperimentalismo della poesia del Novecento: infinite e sempre nuove le sfumature nelle quali Didone si rivela nei testi di questo volume. Poiché inesauribile è la ricchezza della poesia da cui proviene, e universale la sua tragedia d’amore.

Ce chapitre montre que le concept de timbre a émergé d'une pensée théorique et musicale de la seconde moitié du vingtième siècle, et examine également sa pertinence dans les répertoires historiques et ceux relevant d'autres sphères culturelles. Des exemples de Risset, Grisey, Beethoven, Purcell, du répertoire religieux tibétain et du groupe My Bloody Valentine illustrent le propos.

Composers working in England during the period c.1675–c.1705 showed an ongoing fascination with the technique of ground bass, that is, a repeating bass pattern forming the basis of relatively extended pieces of music. This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of such ground-bass movements from the period in question. A particular focus of this dissertation is the research into harmonic and contrapuntal implications and possibilities – some of which can be inferred from contemporary treatises – and their realisation in the actual music, thereby shining a light on the creative processes used by late seventeenth-century composers and on the importance of improvisational techniques during this period.
The total number of vocal grounds incorporated into the discussion is 166, of which eighty are by Henry Purcell, while six are by Continental composers with no connection to England other than that their music was copied here. A similar overview is much more difficult to give for instrumental grounds, for several reasons: first, different sources of the same ‘piece’ often give such different ‘versions’ that these can hardly be called concordances, though it is not always straightforward to draw the line; second, instrumental music from the Continent ‘travelled’ much more widely than vocal music, not least because of the absence of (non-English) words and associated functional contexts (for example, liturgical); consequently, a much greater number of instrumental grounds from the Continent was copied or published in England, and some of the many anonymous instrumental grounds may also not have been written in England. In other words, despite the geographical focus of the study on England (in reality mainly London and, to a lesser extent, Oxford), music produced here cannot sensibly be studied in isolation. The appendices contain 97 entries for keyboard, representing at least that number of keyboard grounds and chaconnes/passacaglias, as well as 250 for other instruments.
Differences of approach can be discerned not just between different composers, but also between vocal and instrumental styles of writing, as well as different genres and intended functions of music. Instrumental grounds belong to one of two traditions – division grounds or chaconnes – with some pieces relating to both. Vocal music generally makes more use of reharmonisation and interesting phrase structure, or transposes the ground. Particular bass patterns such as the descending tetrachord can sometimes be linked with the text used. A more wideranging discussion of links between music and rhetoric in seventeenth-century writings also reveals a fundamental kinship of these two disciplines in Humanist thinking. Lastly, gradual changes in composers’ approaches to the composition of grounds can be understood in light of an increasing understanding of tonality as an important tool with which more large-scale forms and tonal contrasts could be created.

In recent decades, psychologists have turned their attention to physiological correlates of emotional responses to music. The article describes and attempts to account for the author's response of "chills" to a song by Henry Purcell. Although the text of the song is reproduced, unfortunately the publisher of the musical score demanded an unaffordable fee to copy it into the article.

The Passacaglia from Henry Purcell’s King Arthur (1691) features some remarkable similarities with a number of works by Jean-Baptiste Lully, most notably with the Passacaille from Armide (1686) where there are clear parallels in the dramatic context as well as the sung text. John Dryden, the poet of the play text, is known to have been well-read and there is evidence that he was familiar at least with the text of Armide. However, several musical similarities point to the possibility that Purcell knew some of the music. Differences between the two works show distinct approaches to harmony, melodic writing, as well as form, although the latter is clearly guided by generic conventions. Another work that appears to have influenced some of the melodic writing in Purcell‘s Passacaglia is Scocca pur, which was widely disseminated amongst English musicians by the time of King Arthur’s composition.  Although Scocca pur is probably an early work by Lully, several of its features such as the strict ground bass actually owe more to the Italian style than to the French, which fits well with the growing popularity of Italian music in England during the 1680s. Purcell incorporates these diverse elements into his Passacaglia in a way recalling the later idea of a goûts réunis.

How did Shakespeare’s verses sound, as he and other actors of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men recited them on the stage of the Globe Theatre? New research into the performance practice of seventeenth-century music suggests that this question can now be answered in considerable detail.

On November 13th 1664, Samuel Pepys spent the afternoon reciting ‘To be or not to be’, and in the 1680s, guitarist Cesare Morelli set the soliloquy to music for him, as an
Italian-style Recitative.

Now opera director Andrew Lawrence-King applies to Morelli’s setting new insights into the performance of 17th-century Italian Recitative, in order to reveal for modern actors, directors and scholars hidden secrets of period declamation in Shakespearian speech.

Musical notation may be the closest we can ever approach to a recording of Shakespeare himself speaking.

This PhD project was made possible through the generous support (financial and otherwise) of the following institutions: • The North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council), which covered my university tuition fees, supported my participation in the 17 th Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music at

Here's a paper I delivered at the SSCM (Society for Seventeenth Century Music) conference in New York in April 2012 (an amazing conference with generous and positive participants and presenters). The paper argues for a new idea in the dating debate around Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas, seeing it as a centenary celebration of the defeat of the Spanish armada in July and August 1588. After the conference, I sent it to a journal and waited two years for any word. When they did get back to me at all it was to say that it could not be accepted (and with an apology for the delay). Reading the anonymous readers comments and re-reading my own work, I am still confident enough of my arguments. So here it is.

Fugal invention has proved a successful line of analytical inquiry in recent studies of repertoires from Josquin to J. S. Bach. Alan Howard brings similar insights to the music of Henry Purcell, and proposes the first analytical approach to his music to examine compositional methods alongside historically contemporary theory, focusing particularly on Purcell's 'artificial' approach to imitative counterpoint. Through this methodology Howard challenges previous responses to Purcell's music that portrayed him as fundamentally conservative. This study offers fresh insights into the musical world in which Purcell lived and worked and situates Purcell's compositional concerns in the broader context of notions of artifice in Restoration culture. Howard thereby offers both a fresh analytical approach - to Purcell's early instrumental works and to his later concerted vocal music - and a critique of the reception history surrounding the fantazias and sonatas in particular.

Don Quijote (1605) comenzaba a convertirse en un bestseller europeo llegando a ser una de las obras más traducidas, editadas y comentadas de la temprana modernidad. El caballero de la triste figura pronto pasó a ser epítome de disparatado aventurero, héroe romántico, o defensor del idealismo. A medida que términos como "Quixotic, Quixotism y Quixotry", entendido como idealismo utópico (Gnutzmann 1), se iban incorporando al léxico cotidiano, la obra cobraba una importancia determinante para el devenir la literatura inglesa. Don Quijote no corrió siempre por los mismos cauces. Como ya destacó Knowles, cada época lo aplaudió a su manera y, según el correr de los tiempos, hizo llorar y reír (103).

For many people, the phenomenon of divine hiddenness is so total that it is far from clear to them that God (roughly speaking, the God of Jewish and Christian tradition) exists at all. Reasonably enough, they therefore do not believe that God exists. Yet it is possible, whilst lacking belief in God's reality, nonetheless to see it as a possibility that is both realistic and attractive; and in this situation, one will likely want to be open to the considerable benefits that would be available if God were real. In this paper I argue that certain kinds of desire for God can aid this non-believing openness. It is possible to desire God even in a state of non-belief, since desire does not require belief that its object exists. I argue that if we desire God in some particular capacity, and with some sense of what would constitute satisfaction, then through the desire we have knowledge – incomplete yet vivid in its personal significance – about the attributes God would need in order to satisfy us; thus, if God is real and does have those attributes, one knows something about God through desiring him. Because desire does not require belief, neither does the knowledge in question. Expanding on recent work by Vadas and Wynn, I sketch the epistemology of desire needed to support this argument. I then apply this epistemology to desire for God. An important question is how one might cultivate the requisite kinds of desire for God; and one way, I argue, is through engaging with certain kinds of sacred music. I illustrate desire's religiously epistemic power in this context, before replying to two objections.

Launch of a series of annual collections of Baroque dances, notated in Beauchamps-Feuillet system. First volume containing 16 choreographies for the Restoration theatre by Ricardo Barros, set to music by Henry Purcell and Matthew Locke. Paperback, 124pp, printed on 120gsm textured paper.
Available at www.mercuriuscompany.com/ncd

To mark the 350th anniversary of Purcell’s birth in 2009, it was timely to undertake a study of this composer’s indebtedness to specific strands of contrapuntal practice evident among earlier generations of English composers. Purcell’s knowledge of earlier musicians’ output in the stricter forms of imitative counterpoint is well known: several of his autograph copies of canons and other types of counterpoint have been identified, and scholars have noted his keen interest in strict counterpoint across all of the genres in which he worked. Three Parts upon a Ground is an especially useful vehicle for examining in detail the particular procedures that Purcell is likely to have studied and incorporated into his compositional practice. In this paper, I identify possible precedents for the different kinds of canonic writing found in this work and demonstrate how the types of compositional challenges undertaken by composers such as John Bull, Elway Bevin and George Waterhouse may have stimulated Purcell’s creative outlook.

Gertrude (2013) is a show by Simão Do Vale (dramaturgy, staging and acting) created from William Shakespeare's Hamlet. The stage music was composed by the author of this text. The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon and expose the way in which this show was served by the stage music and the way in which the composition process was organised around the idea of referencing the music of the past in this music of the present. At the heart of this show is Hamlet's famous " closet scene " in which the Prince of Denmark confronts his mother, Gertrude, with her sins and Claudius' crimes. In the show there's an important moment when Hamlet greets the actors of the traveling theatre troupe. Hamlet says: " I heard thee speak a speech once, but it was never acted (...). One speech in't I chiefly loved —'twas Aeneas' tale to Dido. " These words, for me at least, point directly to Purcell's music and are at the core of the whole composition process: to use, to re-contextualise and to modify Purcell's music to suit the dramaturgical needs of the show. This became the main axiom. Thus, Purcell became the main musical thread, becoming a repository of materials that having a semantic charge, turned the composition process into an almost entirely " necrophagous " feast in which not a single sound was purposefully composed, by choosing a transformative methodology for the use of musical materials as diverse as Dido's Lament, the voices of David Tennant and Sir Lawrence Olivier, the choir of Winchester Cathedral, old electroacoustic sounds, a ghost that was a Portuguese guitar and bits of old BBC recordings. The materials were subject to a range of transformation from simple re-contextualisation in the editing process to extensive timbral transformations, completely masking the original source of the material.

An introduction to the special issue of Restoration on "The Intermedia Restoration" (Fall 2018). This special issue takes the interdisciplinary conversation in media studies back to the vibrant intersection of the English Restoration, c. 1600-1700, a period of media novelty upon media novelty, from periodicals and novels to genre painting, opera, and a newly cosmopolitan stage featuring female actors.

This publication features several essays spanning the gamut of musical styles and eras, from the Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Impressionist periods to the modern musicals of the West End and Broadway.  Each essay concentrates on a famous composer and a landmark composition or an important topic particular to each era.

This article investigates occasional anthems written for the Chapel Royal by Henry Purcell, John Blow, and William Turner in an attempt to understand the political work enacted through their texts and settings. The anthem’s place in the liturgy and its relationship to the sermon is considered, along with the ways in which anthem texts were selected, compiled, and adapted from source texts. Though occasional anthems usually served to interpret current events favourably for the regime, during the crisis caused by James II’s prosecution of the Seven Bishops Blow set texts that can be interpreted as challenging the king’s pro-Catholic policies. The article concludes by considering the extent to which the characteristics of an anthem text can be used to speculate on the occasion for which it was selected when that occasion is unknown, using the example of Purcell’s My song shall be alway.

In 1683 English court musicians and the Musical Society of London joined forces to initiate annual observations of St Cecilia's Day (22 November), celebrating the occasion with a feast and the performance of specially composed music. The works written for these celebrations were musical odes, a form appropriated from the English court where it served as royal panegyric. For this new celebration, poets replaced praise of the monarch with praise of Cecilia and music, and court musicians used the event as an opportunity to present in a semi-public arena a musical form hitherto restricted to court circles. The most prominent composers and poets of the age wrote for these occasions, including Henry Purcell, John Blow, John Dryden and William Congreve. The musical odes were lavishly scored, and the best musicians of the city, primarily drawn from the court music, undertook the performances. The stewards for the celebrations, chosen from the ranks of the Musical Society, included persons from differing social, political and religious backgrounds, demonstrating that the event was largely non-political and supported by a diverse range of wealthy London society. After a decade of celebrations, a church service was added before the feast, at which a sermon defending the use of concerted music in worship was preached, and elaborate vocal and instrumental music was performed. At the same time celebrations of St Cecilia's Day began to spread widely throughout the British Isles, where they were held by local music clubs, often with the support of cathedral musicians. Though the annual London celebrations came to an end after 1700 in the face of increasing competition from the city’s busy musical and theatrical offerings, Cecilian poetry continued to inspire new musical settings in the eighteenth century, including works by Pepusch, Greene, Boyce and, most notably, Handel.

This book examines the social, cultural and religious significance of celebrations of St Cecilia's Day in the British Isles, and explores the music and poetry that originated from them. The annual feasts of the Musical Society are analysed in detail, as is the role they played in the development of the ode from a form of royal panegyric designed for a specific occasion into a concert form without an occasional function.  The book considers how advances in musical culture in London were imitated in the provinces, and provides a detailed discussion of the variety of Cecilian celebrations held at provincial centres throughout the British Isles.

This draft article presents a feminist late-Foucauldian approach to Baroque lament as a confessional mode of theatrical song.  Lament is one of the great expressive modalities of seventeenth-century European musical theater, and in recent decades its ethics and politics have been vigorously debated, particularly in feminist music scholarship.  This debate generally assumes a repression-expression model of the political that values authentic individual expression as freedom and musical eloquence as power.  While this model highlights important aspects of lament, it cannot address the normative violence involved in singing the disappointed self of lament as an abject, feminized subject whose humiliation is, in many cases, associated with intense aesthetic gratification. Nevertheless, not all lament is confessional, and I also point to some marvelous examples from the repertory that present the lamenting self in ways that resist its normative definition, or that can be easily nudged in that direction in performance.  These include Méduse’s lament from Lully’s Persée and Dido’s two laments in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, as well as non-texted instrumental laments.  I conclude that Baroque lament is best understood in its full political ambiguity: as a tactical art of social governance that is also potentially, in Foucault’s words, a critical art “of not being governed quite so much.”

In his elegy for Mary II, O dive custos, for two sopranos and continuo, Purcell thematizes mourning according to long-standing conventions concerning the gendering and performative nature of grief: lamentation was primarily a female occupation, carried out collectively in groups defined through familial or social bonds—or indeed simply the sorrow of shared bereavement—and characterized by emotional excesses often strongly embodied in erotic terms.  This essay begins by exploring Purcell’s general approach to the setting of the text in O dive custos as a depiction of such female lamentation; I then go on to consider how Purcell heightens its expressive power by dramatizing the duet texture as an erotic encounter between the two singers, situating this analysis in the context of contemporary literary expressions of female same-sex desire. Finally, I consider the paradoxical relationship between the aestheticization of feminine grief—and its erotic expression—as a site of voyeuristic enjoyment on the one hand, and on the other its stigmatization by male authors in contrast with the more stoical, internalized grief associated with masculine attitudes towards death in post-Reformation society.

‘To judge from its one surviving part, Sampson Estwick’s A minor sonata ... is the only one in this edition that relates directly to Purcell’s sonatas’. So Peter Holman and John Cunningham introduce their remarks on the sonata that is the subject of this article in the Preface to their recently-published Purcell Society Edition Companion Series volume of Restoration Trio Sonatas. When I first encountered it in an earlier draft of that volume, my curiosity was sufficiently piqued by this observation and by the quality—evident even from its orphaned first violin part alone—of Estwick’s music, to want to know more. From this curiosity was born the re-creation of the sonata included as the supplement to this volume of EMP, together with the present discussion which aims to illuminate some of the reasoning on which it is based, and in turn what implications Estwick’s sonata might have for our wider understanding of the Restoration Trio Sonata: an attempt, in other words, to see just how much of the work can be ‘judged from its one surviving part’, and how the likelihood that it ‘relates directly to Purcell’s sonatas’ might help in this process.

See also Alon Schab’s companion article to this one in the next issue of EMP, which also includes the full text of his alternative re- creation as a supplement.

In the 1990s, Katherine Rohrer noted the prevalence of dance forms in Purcell’s vocal music, arguing that the dance chosen depended on the poetic metre of the text. Rohrer also observed that Purcell and his contemporaries employed local rhythmic effects for certain types of poetic line, but she described them as transcriptions of verbal stress into music, rather than theorising a set of stereotyped musical rhythms suited to specific types of poetry. In short, Rohrer offered a theory of large-scale English Baroque musico-poetics, but saw smaller-scale word-setting patterns as text-derived rather than musically systematic.

This paper expands upon Rohrer’s analysis, filtered through Robert O. Gjerdingen’s ‘schematic’ theory of eighteenth-century composition. It begins by examining three common, small-scale rhythmic devices, arguing that each was used exclusively to set a different type of poetic line. The unidiomatic accentuation that frequently resulted is further explained as part of the schemata’s aesthetic purpose. Following Grahame M. Boone’s and Lawrence Earp’s theories of medieval musico-poetics, I describe this as ‘recitational dissonance’, and argue that it offered the composer a means to produce musical variety while remaining recognisably faithful to poetic form.

The second part of the paper examines two frequently-used, large-scale formal types which encompass specific approaches to word repetition, melisma, and dance-derived structure. These too were used exclusively for specific poetic metres and stanza-forms. The paper suggests that poetic and musical form were far more closely connected than musicologists often suppose, and that schematic theory offers new insight into Baroque aesthetics and performance practice.

Palestine, from the end of World War I to the foundation of the state of Israel, had a vibrant concert scene led partly by local musicians (and from 1933 onwards, by an elite of leading performers and composers who fled from Europe), and partly by the cultural institutions of the British Mandate, including the Palestine Broadcasting Service. While the collaborations between these two forces often yielded inspired musical results, each had its own agendas and priorities. The music of Henry Purcell was perceived as a cultural asset of the British and, as such, its performance became the platform for tacit negotiation of local musical identity, as well as a means to communicate with the British administration. The present study examines how Purcell’s music was treated in Palestine, which works by Purcell were performed, which scores and editions were available to local musicians, how the 250th anniversary of his death (1945) was commemorated, what motivated musicians to perform Purcell in concert, and what happened to the performance of Purcell’s music in Israel after Britain withdrew its forces from Palestine in 1948.

Henry Purcell was the only composer of his generation to be honoured with performances of his music at both the Academy of Ancient Music and Concerts of Ancient Music in the 18th century. Both organizations also programmed 18th-century music for The Tempest, believing it to be by Purcell. Excerpts from Purcell’s theatre works were performed at the Noblemen and Gentlemen’s Catch Club too, where the Earl of Sandwich and Sir Watkin Williams Wynn introduced much of the Purcell repertory; Sandwich was also a key figure in the promotion of Purcell’s music at the Concerts of Ancient Music. Although the Academy of Ancient Music’s instrumental parts for King Arthur do not exhibit as many signs of modernization as do their manuscripts of Dido and Aeneas, some amendments to the musical text are found there, as well as in the Catch Club’s manuscripts of Purcell’s music. Purcell’s works were generally well received by the press, and newspaper reviews provide evidence of concerts of his music taking inspiration—and sometimes performers—from the Concerts of Ancient Music. The misattributed Tempest was seemingly one of the most popular ‘Purcell’ works with late 18th-century audiences; it entered the canon and remained there until Margaret Laurie made a conclusive case against its being by Purcell, and suggested John Weldon as the likely composer. Dr Laurie has also removed 18th-century accretions from the score of King Arthur, and we are at last seeing an end to the perpetuation of 18th-century tastes and prejudices in editions of Purcell’s music.

Singing spirits frequently appeared on the late 17th-c. English stage, especially in the works of John Dryden. Although these scenes have been widely studied, one element has puzzled musicologists: the gender ambiguity of these spirits fostered both by textual descriptions and also, sometimes, cross-gender casting. A typical line of thinking has held that Dryden, who famously proclaimed that spirits could not have sexes, purposely injected gender ambiguity into these scenes in order to suggest sexlessness or their supernatural status. Yet an analysis of the musical scenes in The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island; Tyrannick Love; King Arthur; The Indian Queen; and The Indian Emperour reveals how contemporary gender ideology shaped Dryden’s spiritual realm. Female sopranos frequently play airy spirits, which according to neoplatonic thought are higher on the spiritual ladder; however, these spirits generally use music as a tool of persuasion and seduction, just as offstage women were thought to do. Boy sopranos and countertenors sing in Dryden’s American plays as prognosticating spirits who are part of a disappearing pagan world that will soon be supplanted by Christianity. Within this dramatic context the falsetto or immature male voice was deployed to suggest the emasculation and impotence of these pagan spirits and deities, whose prophecies are met with derision and skepticism.

This article examines the sources of Purcell’s second three-part fantazia for evidence pertaining to Purcell’s creative process, both in the texts themselves and the details of the music they preserve. This method is proposed as a means of analysis for this repertoire with a demonstrable basis in historically relevant theoretical literature.

In the seventeenth century, the concept of creativity was far removed from most of the fundamental ideas about the creative act - notions of human imagination, inspiration, originality and genius - that developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Instead, in this period, students learned their crafts by copying and imitating past masters and did not consciously seek to break away from tradition. Most new material was made on the instructions of a patron and had to conform to external expectations; and basic tenets that we tend to take for granted-such as the primacy and individuality of the author-were apparently considered irrelevant in some contexts.
The aim of this interdisciplinary collection of essays is to explore what it meant to create buildings and works of art, music and literature in seventeenth-century England and to investigate the processes by which such creations came into existence. Through a series of specific case studies, the book highlights a wide range of ideas, beliefs and approaches to creativity that existed in seventeenth-century England and places them in the context of the prevailing intellectual, social and cultural trends of the period. In so doing, it draws into focus the profound changes that were emerging in the understanding of human creativity in early modern society - transformations that would eventually lead to the development of a more recognisably modern conception of the notion of creativity. The contributors work in and across the fields of literary studies, history, musicology, history of art and history of architecture, and their work collectively explores many of the most fundamental questions about creativity posed by the early modern English 'creative arts'.

Henry Purcell is considered among the most important composers in the history of English music. The article argues that Purcell’s posthumous fame is based in no small way on how his widow, Frances Purcell, and his publisher, Henry Playford, handled his musical estate and its publication during the first decade following his early death (1696–1706). I argue that the pace, order and contents of these posthumous publications containing Purcell’s music had enduring influence on the composer’s reception and the way his commemoration was tinged with mythical colors. 
The article outlines the dramatic changes in the English royal court, the London theaters and musical printing during the second half of the seventeenth century; it overviews Purcell’s published works both during his life and posthumously; and it discusses the patrons of several posthumous publications. The title of one song collection, Orpheus Britannicus, is discussed in light of its mythical imagery and its precedents in the history of English music and poetry. The contents of the various volumes of Orpheus Britannicus is then examined and compared with what is known about Purcell’s works, which circulated in manuscript form at that time. Finally, a comparison is drawn with the reception processes of two more recent musicians – Nick Drake and Jeff Buckley – who won great popularity only after death, and whose creative corpus was shaped posthumously by their close circle.

Issu de l’acte III scène 2 du semi-opéra King Arthur de Henry Purcell (1691), l’air du génie du froid « What Power Art Thou », ou « Cold Song », est un des airs les plus connus de la musique baroque. Considérablement relancée dans la culture populaire par la reprise de Klaus Nomi en 1982, sa célébrité tient aussi à sa présence remarquée dans le contexte cinématographique – documentaire ou de fiction ; parmi les longs métrages l’incluant au générique, À nos amours de Maurice Pialat (1983), Le Loup de Wall Street de Martin Scorsese (2013) ou encore Baccalauréat de Cristian Mungiu (2016). Or, les modalités d’utilisation de ce « Cold Song » sont variées, et se détournent le plus souvent d’une adéquation géographique ou chronologique (hormis peut-être le Molière d’Ariane Mnouchkine, 1978). Il apparaît alors que le pouvoir évocatoire de cet air de Purcell se met au service d’une multiplicité de situations et de contextes, que se propose de présenter cet article dans une perspective analytique.
Coming from Henry Purcell’s semi-opera King Arthur (III, 2; 1691), the air of the Cold Genius “What Power Art Thou”, or “Cold Song”, is one of the best-known airs in Baroque music. Strongly revived in popular culture by Klaus Nomi’s cover in 1982, its celebrity is also due to its remarkable presence within the cinematographic context – documentary or fictional. Among the films crediting it, À nos amours by Maurice Pialat (1983), Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) or Cristian Mungiu’s Baccalauréat (2016). However, the various uses of “Cold Song” often do not match with a geographical or chronological adequacy (except, perhaps, for Ariane Mnouchkine’s Molière, 1978). Therefore, it seems that the evocative power of Purcell’s air serves various situations and contexts, which this paper intends to present in an analytical perspective.

Explorations of English musical culture in the Restoration period have tended to focus on a rather narrow set of socio-economic groups. Understandably, composers and musicians have received the greatest attention; these are followed by members of the court, the aristocracy and gentry, and university-educated professionals, who have been seen as the most important employers, patrons, consumers and commentators in the musical culture of the period. However, at least one other group appears to have played an increasingly significant role in musical society during this time, those who may be described as merchants and businessmen.  These people, who were not usually university-educated, worked in overseas trade, banking, and a range of wholesale and retail activities, and their increasing wealth was, amongst other social diversions, spent on music: lessons, publications, concerts and patronage.  Musicians and publishers worked to meet the needs of this growing constituency by offering increasing numbers of concerts and musical prints that catered to their tastes.  Using diaries, account books, personal letters, wills and inventories, this essay will re-locate the musical activity of London to show the significant impact that merchants and other men of business had on the city’s burgeoning musical life.

Two letter books of Rowland Sherman, an English trading agent for the Levant Company in Aleppo, containing his correspondence with a number of amateur musicians in London, have been found to provide new evidence on the date of the performance of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Amongst Sherman’s letters is one to a James Piggott that specifically describes music from Purcell’s opera, and clearly links it with a performance at Priest’s school. The letter indicates that the opera was composed no later than July of 1688, the point at which Sherman left England for Aleppo. The letter describes the overture to the opera, and another movement that is probably the opening symphony to the Prologue. Sherman’s letter can be cross-referenced with correspondence between Edmund Verney in Buckinghamshire, whose daughter Mary attended Chelsea School, and his brother John in London, who visited Mary and saw her performances (including John Blow’s Venus and Adonis) at the school. These letters suggest the possibility of a performance of Dido in December 1687, while Thomas D’Urfey’s epilogue indicates a further performance in 1689. Sherman’s correspondence provides new information regarding Purcell’s acquaintance with London merchants, his activities as a teacher, and his practices of arranging theatre tunes for the keyboard. Sherman’s letter does not clarify whether or not Purcell composed Dido for performance at the royal court, but it does strongly suggest that, whatever the origins of the opera, the first performance took place at Priest’s school in Chelsea.