Rachel Cowgill is a musicologist and cultural historian specialising in British music and musical cultures c1760-1940 Address: Sally Baldwin Building D Wentworth Way University of York Heslington YO10 5DD
Extraordinary musicianship in children and notions of genius are closely entwined, but these conc... more Extraordinary musicianship in children and notions of genius are closely entwined, but these concepts need to be historicised if we are to understand how such connections came about. This chapter explores child performance in the increasingly competitive and commercial concert-life of eighteenth-century London, examining how juvenile musicians were presented and themes that characterised their reception. Mozart appeared before London audiences in 1764–65, as a cosmopolitan virtuoso from Salzburg, coached and promoted by his musician father as ‘a Prodigy of Nature’, a phrase then unfamiliar in English musical discourse. The chapter shows that while the Mozarts’ campaign in London did much to establish a new archetype of the ‘musical prodigy’, this developed in dialogue with local cultural, musical, and intellectual contexts, audience expectations, and the vagaries of the professional environment.
Extraordinary musicianship in children and notions of genius are closely entwined, but these conc... more Extraordinary musicianship in children and notions of genius are closely entwined, but these concepts need to be historicised if we are to understand how such connections came about. This chapter explores child performance in the increasingly competitive and commercial concert-life of eighteenth-century London, examining how juvenile musicians were presented and themes that characterised their reception. Mozart appeared before London audiences in 1764–65, as a cosmopolitan virtuoso from Salzburg, coached and promoted by his musician father as ‘a Prodigy of Nature’, a phrase then unfamiliar in English musical discourse. The chapter shows that while the Mozarts’ campaign in London did much to establish a new archetype of the ‘musical prodigy’, this developed in dialogue with local cultural, musical, and intellectual contexts, audience expectations, and the vagaries of the professional environment.
Broadcasting was one of the principal means by which the affective, social, and political meaning... more Broadcasting was one of the principal means by which the affective, social, and political meanings of Armistice Day were constituted in British culture, and music programming was crucial to that process. In the years leading up to its nationalization in 1927, the BBC was inventing itself; and its varying approaches to the selection and scheduling of specific musical repertoire for
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Broadcasting was one of the principal means by which the affective, social, and political meaning... more Broadcasting was one of the principal means by which the affective, social, and political meanings of Armistice Day were constituted in British culture, and music programming was crucial to that process. In the years leading up to its nationalization in 1927, the BBC was inventing itself; and its varying approaches to the selection and scheduling of specific musical repertoire for
When Luigi Bassi entered the stage of the Prague National Theatre in 1787 to create the title rol... more When Luigi Bassi entered the stage of the Prague National Theatre in 1787 to create the title role of Mo2art and Da Ponte's Don Giovanni, he could have drawn inspiration from a rich tradition of theatrical, pantomimic and marionette ...
Is a newly discovered manuscript a fifth Handel-Mozart ... TH HAT MOZART STUDIED the music of ear... more Is a newly discovered manuscript a fifth Handel-Mozart ... TH HAT MOZART STUDIED the music of earlier eighteenth-century masters, en- couraged by Baron van Swieten ('Lord Fugue' in Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus) has been well ...
Although the late Brian Boydell and TJ Walsh produced illuminating studies of opera and concert l... more Although the late Brian Boydell and TJ Walsh produced illuminating studies of opera and concert life in Georgian Dublin, for many of us knowledge of the city’s role in the musical culture of the British Isles is limited to the ...
The female singers who graced the nineteenth-century operatic stage were among the most celebrate... more The female singers who graced the nineteenth-century operatic stage were among the most celebrated women of their era, but they were also among the most transgressive. This book explores the means by which this preeminence was negotiated, traversing the musical, the dramatic, and the visual, while addressing more recognizably modern concerns, such as career management, literary representation, and image manipulation. A key theme is the emergence of the diva archetype over the course of the century—a new ideological discourse through which the extremes of operatic female vocality were reinterpreted. Chapters approach the prima donna from the perspectives of cultural history, musicology, gender/sexuality studies, theater and literature studies, and critical theory. Contributors: Gurminder Kaur Bhogal is Assistant Professor of Music at Wellesley College.; Joy H. Calico is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt University, where she teaches courses on music since 1800 and on opera.; Terry Castle teaches at Stanford University, where she is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities.; Susan C. Cook is Professor of Music and the Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities in the Graduate School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.; Rachel Cowgill is Professor in the School of Music at Cardiff University.; James Currie is Assistant Professor of Music History in the Department of Music at the University of Buffalo (State University of New York).; James Q. Davies is an Assistant Professor of Music at University of California, Berkeley.; Tracy C. Davis, Barber Professor of the Performing Arts at Northwestern University.; Sophie Fuller is a freelance musicologist.; Helen Greenwald has taught at the New England Conservatory since 1991 and was Visiting Professor of Music at the University of Chicago, winter-spring 2008.; Francesco Izzo is Lecturer in Music at the University of Southampton, and has also taught at New York University, East Carolina University, and the University of Chicago.; Grace Kehler is an Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario (Canada).; Roberta Montemorra Marvin is a Research Fellow at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at The University of Iowa, where she is also Director of the Institute for Italian Opera Studies and Associate Professor.; Hilary Poriss is Associate Professor of Music attern Northeastern University.; Julian Rushton retired from the West Riding Chair of Music at the University of Leeds in 2002.; Susan Rutherford is Senior Lecturer in Performance Studies at the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama, University of Manchester.; Mary Simonson teaches at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, and completed her doctorate at the University of Virginia in 2007.; Alexandra Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at Oxford Brookes University.
The increasing volume of digital material available to the humanities creates clear potential for... more The increasing volume of digital material available to the humanities creates clear potential for crowdsourcing. However, tasks in the digital humanities typically do not satisfy the standard requirement for decomposition into microtasks each of which must require little expertise on behalf of the worker and little context of the broader task. Instead, humanities tasks require scholarly knowledge to perform and even where sub-tasks can be extracted, these often involve broader context of the document or corpus from which they are extracted. That is the tasks are macrotasks, resisting simple decomposition. Building on a case study from musicology, the In Concert project, we will explore both the barriers to crowdsourcing in the creation of digital corpora and also examples where elements of automatic processing or less-expert work are possible in a broader matrix that also includes expert microtasks and macrotasks. Crucially we will see that the macrotask–microtask distinction is nua...
... Connections 1 'Hence, base intruder, hence'... more ... Connections 1 'Hence, base intruder, hence': Rejection and Assimilation in the Early English Reception of Mozart's Requiem Rachel Cowgill 9 2 ... Anne Widen 45 4 Promotion through Performance: Liszt's Symphonic Poems in the London Concerts of Walter Bache Michael Allis ...
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