Contributors and Abstracts
The following list of papers begins with the four invited speakers, after which it is arranged alphabetically by surname (the two poster presentations are placed at the end). You may also use the search function in your web browser to locate papers. Details are correct at time of publication.
James Winn (keynote speaker) Boston University, USA
Creativity on Several Occasions
For artists of all kinds in the seventeenth century, creativity was most often called forth by an occasion: a royal wedding, a political crisis, a birth, a death, or a new publication requiring a frontispiece or encomiastic poem. I shall argue that our modern readings of these works are still conditioned by a Romantic myth of creativity, in which the artist makes the work because of personal inspiration, not because of a command from a patron. As teachers, we tend to efface the fact that some poems by Dryden we like to praise as 'personal', such as the verses on the deaths of Oldham or Purcell, were occasional pieces, printed only once. We are in some sense embarrassed that Purcell wrote 'Welcome Songs' on occasions including the King's return to London from the horse-races at Newmarket, though the music is beautiful. And we still tend to think of portraiture as a lesser genre than some other kinds of painting - an opinion expressed for different reasons by Dryden himself.
In the first part of this paper, I analyze early and self-conscious works by artists in three media - a self-portrait by Godfrey Kneller, a dedication by Dryden, a fantasia by Purcell - all of which look to the past as a rich source of creative inspiration. I then show how skills and ideas developed in these works function in 'occasional' works, including the music Purcell wrote for the marriage of Princess Anne in 1683, selected portraits by Kneller, and some late prose and poetry by Dryden. All three artists demonstrated their creativity in works written for quite specific occasions; their astute awareness of the political significance of the occasions for which their arts were needed is a primary locus of that creativity. Dryden's poem to Kneller, with its odd combination of praise, jealousy, and thoughtful probing of aesthetic issues, will be one principle of continuity as I seek to call in question the stubborn binary opposing the 'occasional' to the 'creative'.
Linda Phyllis Austern (invited speaker) Northwestern University, USA
Music and Manly Wit in Seventeenth-Century England
[T]here are some who conceive in the soul more than in the body, what is proper for souls
to conceive and bear. And what is proper? - Wisdom and virtue in general - to this class
belong all creative poets, and those artists and craftsmen who are said to be inventive.
Plato, The Symposium
Seventeenth-century English ideas of creation were most often attributed to the divine act of bringing into existence, or, in the earthly human realm, to 'the very coinage of [the] brain', as Shakespeare puts it in Hamlet (III, iv, 156). The artist in particular had long been thought to imitate this aspect of divinity and to sublimate female [pro]creational power by using intellectual faculties to produce progeny through imagination, forming mental concepts of things not yet present to the senses. During the seventeenth century, music joined the other arts and sciences in England to provide a nexus for masculine self-fashioning and display. A plethora of treatises on composition and performance for gentleman amateurs, along with ever-increasing numbers of books of notated music in all genres, speak to the importance of acquiring and exercising musical skill. The era's attributes of manliness, as expressed in conduct manuals and collections of commonplaces, included self-control and wit, both aspects of musical creation through composition and closely-related skills of performance. At the same time, more women than ever before were encouraged to achieve musical competency, albeit in a comparatively narrow range of performing media and genres, and most often in domestic space.
Not coincidentally, the century 'when Celia was learning on the spinet to play' at home from numerous manuscripts also witnessed the rise of the catch, a form associated almost exclusively with men in convivial semi-public gatherings such as the tavern and barber-surgeon's shop. This deceptively simple genre has been largely overlooked by scholars for its evident lack of virtuosity, and was even dismissed for its lack of intricacy by Christopher Simpson in 1656. Nonetheless, the creation of a catch by its composer, and again by its performers, relies on witty juxtapositions of words and musical phrases that are absent at first sight and appear only when sung in parts as directed. Most often innocuous as printed but bawdy and 'unfit for modest ears' when performed, catches from one end of the century to the other and beyond also give voice to male codes governing drink and sexuality as discussed in books of advice for young men. This paper proposes to examine the catch as a vehicle for masculine self-invention and creativity in its double existence as composed and performed work.
Andrew Walkling (invited speaker) State University of New York at Binghamton, USA
'Big with new events and some unheard success': Absolutism and Creativity at the Restoration Court
In recent years, the historiography of later Stuart England has increasingly begun to turn its attention back to the arena of the royal court in an effort to understand and contextualise the political upheavals of the 1670s and 1680s. Out of this shift of focus has emerged a more nuanced understanding of royal priorities, in particular Charles II's and James II's aspirations to recast the British monarchy along lines of European absolutism. Essential to this 'courtly turn' in Restoration studies has been the 'cultural turn' that enables a cross-disciplinary approach to understanding the court through both its political and its cultural manifestations, and that allows for the reading of cultural materials - poetry, music, drama, painting, architecture - as political documents. In this context, we have become more aware of the ways in which the pursuit of unfettered royal power, beginning in the mid-1670s, exercised a profound effect on the nature and character of elite cultural production; at the same time, we can better understand how the court's cultural products served in turn to articulate and promote developments in royal ideology.
Given the court's power as a cultural and artistic patron, we might well expect the absolutist impetus to have provided an important stimulus to creativity, whether in the establishment of new generic forms or in the exploration of distinctive modes of expression. Indeed, such creativity can readily be demonstrated, for example in the reinstitution of the court masque, an important nexus of experimentation in the areas of both dramatic structure and allegorical discourse. Yet closer investigation reveals a striking disjunction between the nature of the court's cultural output in the 1670s, in which forms and practices relied heavily on imported French models, and that of the 1680s, where greater originality appears to have been in evidence. This paper will seek to understand the divergent nature of absolutist-inspired courtly cultural production in these two periods, situated on either side of the 'Restoration crisis' of 1678-82, and to explore in particular the role of creativity in the establishment of novel, distinctively English, modes of courtly expression. In examining not so much the mechanisms of creativity but its results, that is, how absolutism can be seen to function as an engine of generic and expressive innovation, I hope both to offer new insights into the nature of court-centred propaganda in the 1680s and to make a case for the centrality of the creative process to the development and dissemination of ideas of royal absolutism.
Amanda Eubanks Winkler (invited speaker) Syracuse University, USA
'Our Friend Venus Performed to a Miracle': Anne Bracegirdle, John Eccles, and Creativity
'Our friend Venus performed to a miracle'. So William Congreve describes Anne Bracegirdle's performance as the goddess of love in John Eccles's setting of his masque The Judgment of Paris. Congreve's description of Bracegirdle's singing and acting as a 'miracle' is telling'obviously Congreve wants to adequately describe Bracegirdle's wondrous abilities, but his use of the term 'miracle' also suggests that her abilities are almost supernatural in origin. Congreve's description dovetails neatly with contemporary discourses about the creative act. As Edward Phillips's A New World of Words, Or a General English Dictionary (1678) defines creation: 'a making or forming of something, as it were, out of nothing'. In creating, then, the creator assumes God-like (miraculous) powers, putting something into the world that had not previously existed.
But can we define Bracegirdle as a creator? After all, she was not an author or composer. Following a line of argument recently pursued by literary and theatre historians, this paper emphatically claims that Bracegirdle was a creator and, moreover, that her contemporaries would have understood her in this way; as a singer and actress she brought unsounded notes and texts to life. One need only consult the myriad printed songs from the period to see the importance of the performer for those in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. The name of the singer is placed side-by-side with that of the composer. Indeed, sometimes the singer's name gets top billing. By invoking the singer's name in this way the printer invites the consumer to remember or imagine the performance of the composer's song by that specific person. Restoration-era consumers did not just purchase notes on a page (which they might later perform at their leisure) but also a souvenir of an embodied performance: thus, composition and performance were mutually constitutive creative acts.
Beyond forwarding the general notion that actress-singer Bracegirdle was a creative agent, this paper also explores the specific creative relationship between Bracegirdle and composer John Eccles. Gilli Bush-Bailey and Elizabeth Howe have demonstrated the ways that actresses influenced the work of playwrights and Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson have engaged in meticulous research on Restoration-era singers and their abilities. But no systematic investigation has been made of the musical conventions and genres associated with Bracegirdle. This paper will fill this lacuna in our understanding, as I demonstrate how Bracegirdle's 'miraculous' abilities shaped Eccles' compositional practice.
John Cunningham
The considerable repertory of two-part music (Treble-Bass) is one of the most significant examples of interaction between amateur and professional musicians in seventeenth-century England. The dissemination of music in Treble-Bass format was largely due to the increased appetite of amateurs for sophisticated, fashionable music, easily playable in terms of technique and ensemble numbers. Playford's Court-Ayres (1655) and Courtly Masquing Ayres (1662) represent the culmination of that enthusiasm; however, many of the pieces in these collections do not survive in consort versions, disseminating only in two-part versions, re-enforcing their modern status as trivial amateur music. Nevertheless, there is evidence that composers used two-part outlines as the basis for creating consort pieces, through extemporization or by using parties de remplissage. In England, composition in Treble-Bass format appears to have developed from two main strands early in the seventeenth century: keyboard accompaniment of consort music and divisions, and theatre and masque music. By the 1620s composers appear to have been using two-part skeletons as the basis for larger consort ensembles. The main practical application of this was in the theatre, where music was needed in two stages: Treble-Bass for dance rehearsals, and a fully scored version for the public performance. However, court musicians also appear to have relied on improvisation on two-part outlines as part of their daily duties.
This paper explores the relationship between composition, arrangement and extemporisation within the medium of two-part music, and examines the significance of Playford's Court-Ayres in the dissemination of a largely professional repertoire of consort music among amateur musicians.
Marina Daiman New York University, USA
Originality and Repetition in Rubens's English Works
A painter may, like a useful bee that flies unto all kinds of flowers and sucks nothing but honey,
extract all kinds of useful things from the examples of others. To copy everything is too slavish,
even impossible: and to entrust everything to one's imagination really requires a Rubens.
Samuel van Hoogstraten, Introduction to the Academy of Painting, 1678
Today's notions of creativity are firmly bound up with the idea of imagination and originality, but was this the case in early modern England? This paper attempts to answer the question by considering the artistic activity of perhaps the most sought-after painter in seventeenth-century Europe - Peter Paul Rubens. Although Rubens's diplomatic career in England dates to 1629-30, his relationship with English patrons began in 1616 when he gave Sir Dudley Carleton a replica of a larger hunt scene in exchange for a diamond chain. Extolling the replica's virtues, Carleton's agent wrote that the piece '...is excellent, and perhaps preferable to the first, because when a master doth a thing a second time, lightly it is for the better'.
While replicas seemed to be an accepted and recognized practice, Rubens's patrons placed a very different value on autography. In a later transaction, brokered for Lord Danvers, but ultimately intended for the Prince of Wales, Rubens, in the words of Danvers himself, 'hath sent...a peece scarce touched by his own hand'. When Rubens discovered the painting was meant for the Prince, he readily agreed to send his self-portrait as a replacement, which arrived with a long inscription 'Petrus Paullus Rubens se ipsum expressit MDCXXIII', stressing its authenticity.
Focusing on these and other episodes linked to British patrons, and analyzing the works themselves (Lion Hunt for Sir John Digby, Glorification of the Duke of Buckingham for the Duke himself, and, finally, Peace and War and the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall for Charles I) this paper will explore how Rubens employed both copying and invention along with the relationship between creativity, originality, and repetition.
Bronwyn Ellis Scullin, Australia
'The Highest Degree of Excellency'? Sets of Divisions and Issues of Creative Concept
Sets of divisions were a prevalent form of seventeenth-century English instrumental music. Some were written by composers such as William Lawes and John Jenkins whilst others were improvised with the potential of reaching, as Christopher Simpson in The Division Violist (1659) put it, 'a Perfection, which few attain'. Nor were divisions the exclusive preserve of professional musicians or the wealthy: in 1656 Matthew Locke implored the consumers of his Little Consort of Three Parts to play the works therein 'plain, not Tearing them in pieces with division', declaring it to be 'an old custome of our Countrey Fidlers'. Yet what were the creative concepts surrounding this diverse genre? To what extent could some be considered as 'made or formed out of nothing' when there was, at least in most cases, a pre-existing ground to serve as a starting point? Furthermore, did creative ownership lie with the composer of the ground or the composer and/or improviser of the divisions, and where did the performer(s), publisher or copyist and listener fit within this framework? In seeking to address such issues, care must be taken not to superimpose twenty-first-century concepts and systems of thinking onto the body of knowledge and evidence we possess of seventeenth-century England - the early modern age was characterised by a political, social, economic, artistic, philosophical and aesthetic syntax far from identical with that of four hundred years later. With these aspects in mind, this paper will examine issues and concepts of creativity as they relate to sets of divisions, considering not only seventeenth-century thought and environment, but also the music itself and the historical context within which it deserves to be placed.
Tim Crawford Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK
Michael Gale University of Southampton, UK
Musical Composition as Re-creation: John Dowland's 'Lachrimae' pavan during the seventeenth century
In many ways, John Dowland's 'Lachrimae' exemplifies the flexibility of the 'work-concept' in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century musical thought. Three different forms of this piece originate from Dowland himself: a lute pavan composed c. 1590, the song 'Flow my teares' for two voices and lute accompaniment (Second Booke of Songs, 1600) and the consort version published as part of a cycle of seven pavans in Lachrimae or Seaven Teares (1604).
In this paper, we use this single work to explore some of the ways in which pre-existing musical material could be used as a foundation for further creative practices (such as elaboration, arrangement and re-composition). We begin by sketching the transmission of this piece in the English lute repertory to c. 1620 - a largely manuscript tradition characterised by a plurality of textual readings - whilst paying particular attention to the versions in sources that are directly associated with Dowland's own teaching activities.
We go on to consider the impact of the piece's publication in song form which, rather than fixing the identity of the work through print, apparently resulted in the widespread dissemination of a template for further adaptation. In particular we will focus on selected works from the keyboard repertory which use the vocal parts of 'Flow my teares' as a basis for virtuosic variation technique.
Finally, we will consider how selected versions of 'Lachrimae' were translated from one performance medium to another - from consort to keyboard, mixed consort to consort song, etc - and briefly reflect upon the work's significance as a fount of thematic material for more loosely derived compositions.
Kirsten Gibson Newcastle University, UK
Musician, Composer, Author: Creator? Figuring the Author in Early Seventeenth-Century Printed Music Books
Literary criticism has highlighted the 'appropriation' of print technology by early modern writers such as Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson in acts of 'textual self-monumentalization' (Montrose, 1996). The publication of Jonson's Workes (1616) has especially elicited much attention as, in Joseph Loewenstein's words, 'a major event in the history of what one might call the bibliographic ego'. The figure of the author was not, of course, entirely new with the dawning of the Renaissance, or with the establishment of print culture, and a longer cultural trajectory of various manifestations of what we might understand as 'authorial self-awareness' can be found in a number of earlier textual traditions. Yet, the particular circumstances engendered by early modern print culture - the relatively large public audience for which it was becoming available, and the social 'stigma' of appearing in print - all contributed to historically and materially specific articulations of a sense of 'authorship'.
Although in early seventeenth-century England composers such as John Dowland, William Byrd and Thomas Morley also clearly employed print as a means of authorising their works, and as aggrandising their socio-cultural status as musicians, the focus on interpreting figurations of early seventeenth-century English authorship within the printed book has remained predominantly literary. This paper will consider how such concepts as 'musician', 'composer' and 'author' were mediated by musicians and printers in the prefatory materials of their printed music books, and how, in the words of Thomas Campion, 'capturing the ephemeral sounds in type' might have impinged on the seventeenth-century imagination of musical creativity.
Raphael Hallett University of Leeds, UK
Printed Loci and the Re-invention of Knowledge
Late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century printing developments, working within a European-wide call for disciplinary and epistemological reform, facilitated the proliferation of innovative rhetorical handbooks and taxonomies. They were designed to offer frameworks within which scholars and readers could accumulate, arrange and express knowledge within any discipline, encouraging principles of methodical clarity, simplicity and universality. These 'virtues', most famously expressed through Ramist (Pierre Ramus 1515-1572) handbooks, were articulated not only by methodical guidelines within their narratives, but by the visio-spatial patterns of headings, 'loci' and networked taxonomies that offered new orders and sites for generating knowledge.
This paper, working through a series of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century taxonomies as case-studies, speculates on the way these printed innovations produced types of textual space, printed repositories and ordered 'lacunae' that invited novel inscriptions and incrementations of knowledge. Depending on the type of taxonomy, these could take the form of rhetorical arguments, theological marginalia, literary citations, experimental observations or collected 'commonplaces', allowing the individual reader to adapt and transform the content of his/her discipline.
Arguing counter to the claims that these handbooks were intellectually rigid and standardising, I will suggest that they operated in part as a printed form of 'productive void', encouraging epistemological creativity. I will also raise the possibility that these innovations in textual space anticipated theories of productive vacuums, capacious repositories and fresh territory that became so important to 17th century epistemological theory and practice.
Rebecca Herissone University of Manchester, UK
'To entitle himself to ye Composition': Investigating Concepts of Authorship and Originality in Seventeenth-Century English Ceremonial Music
The creative culture of the seventeenth century is difficult to penetrate from the perspective of modern times: while today our understanding of creativity assumes the primacy of the author, and privileges both imagination and originality, it is far from clear that such concepts were always relevant in the seventeenth century. Drawing on recent research in related disciplines, this paper seeks to examine some of the evidence about creative approaches taken by English composers during the Restoration and to reflect on what they can tell us about authorship and invention. It focuses on two intriguing case studies: the first traces the complex history of Carminum Praeses, an Oxford Act Song, which seems to have been adapted, extended, and recomposed by as many as three composers over twenty-five years; the second investigates two odes linked to the royal court - Welcome happy day and Welcome glorious day - which share an opening verse even though the musician who claimed ownership of the latter ode, Daniel Purcell, evidently did not compose the former. Whether such examples demonstrate collaboration, theft, or a kind of borrowing considered entirely acceptable during the period is a question rendered difficult to answer by a series of errors made by modern scholars in assessing the sources of these pieces. Such mistakes only serve to illustrate the conceptual difficulty we have today in understanding how music was created in the past, and highlight the need for us to reassess what it meant to be a composer in the seventeenth century.
Anne Hultzsch University College, London, UK
The 'artificial sceane': the Re-creation of Italian architecture in John Evelyn's Diary
Describing his visit to Genoa, diarist John Evelyn compares its centre with a theatre, 'the Streetes & buildings so ranged one above the other; as our seates are in Playhouses'. John Ray, another Royal Society fellow, uses the same metaphor for the same place in his Observations (1673). In Sienna, too, both writers describe the main square as resembling a shell. As others have proven, Evelyn, compiling his memoirs late in life, referred not only to his own notes and memories but copied generously from contemporary guidebooks.
How did Evelyn produce his text? This paper attempts a sentence-by-sentence analysis dismantling some short passages describing Italian buildings. What do his alterations of and additions to the previous texts tell us about what he saw and how he looked at it? Consulting 'bestsellers' among seventeenth-century guidebooks such as Raymond's Mercurio Italico (1648) or Lassels's The Voyage of Italy (1670), I will show how Evelyn's text mediates a specific subject-object relationship between observer and foreign city in which the later performs for the observer. I suggest that the aim of his writing was not to create an original text but to record the sights by verbally re-creating them striving for comprehensiveness rather than uniqueness.
In the seventeenth century, both travel diary and guidebook represent a recording of the seen while simultaneously directing the gaze of fellow travellers. The aim of this paper is to find historically specific modes of architectural perception reflected in these writings, addressing questions of originality as well as creativity.
Freyja Cox Jensen Christ Church, University of Oxford, UK
'Creating' Cato in early-seventeenth century England
Addressing questions of originality in the process of creative writing, this paper draws on printed prose and dramatic texts from 1600-1640 to examine how authors 'create' the character of Cato in their works. An important figure in the fall of the Roman Republic, Cato the Younger features in a variety of ways in early-seventeenth century writing, most often as a model of Stoic constancy in a turbulent society. The paper examines the extent to which ancient sources are used and imitated in the early-modern depictions of this political martyr, and what authors add to make Cato politically relevant to their own time. References to Cato in manuscript sources such as commonplace books and academic notebooks are also considered, and are compared with printed treatments of the character to gain a deeper understanding of what early-modern readers thought was significant about Cato. The reading of printed texts in an educational or private context, and the active making of notes, were important components of the authorial process of writing literature; the specific nature of an author's re-creation of a character already 'created' so many times in the past, further illuminates the writer's views both of history and of his role in contemporary society. In exploring the connections between print, manuscript notes and new writing, the paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of what authorship and creativity might have meant in early-modern England.
Elizabeth Kenny University of Southampton, UK
Learn to Speak Lute: Fret-Generated Harmonic Language in 17th-century English music for Lute and Theorbo
A keyboard-centred concept of harmonic theory has influenced musicological interpretation of seventeenth-century theoretical sources such as Thomas Campion, Christopher Simpson and the different versions of Playford's Briefe Introduction to the Skill of Musicke. This paper looks at the contribution made by lute and theorbo players to a vocabulary of harmonic realisations of a bass line, reflecting their experience of tablature notation. Although tablature was becoming obsolete as a method of transmitting harmonic ideas, to the dismay of a generation of amateur players who continued to rely on it to acquire solo and song repertoire, some professional players used the idiosyncrasies of an alphabet-based notation as a stimulus to harmonic creativity. I will look in detail at the realisations and tonal experiments of John Wilson in Bod. MS Mus.b.1, and the instructions in the Euing MS 25 (Glasgow University Library), as well as the relation ship between this and Nicola Matteis' False Consonances of Music. I will suggest that creative solutions to harmonic problems were derived from outside the conceptual framework of staff notation theory as often as from within it, as far as lute players were concerned. Given the primacy of training on plucked instruments for many of the century's leading composers, I will propose that this sort of creative use of a soon-to-be-abandoned technology has been undervalued as a source of much of the character of some seventy years of music.
Sarah Knight University of Leicester, UK
Continual plodders and the extemporal vein: scholarship and invention in early modern English satire
In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several English satirists with a vested interest in the topic argued for a distinction between the conspicuously if ponderously learned academic writer - called 'plodders at Ergo' by John Lyly and 'Athens Ape' by John Marston - and the creative, usually professional author, characterised by Thomas Nashe as one 'whose extemporall veine in any humour will excell our greatest Art-maisters deliberate thoughts'. For the first time in vernacular usage, such satirists used the verb 'to plod' to refer not to slow physical movement, but rather to a torpor of intellectual activity and literary expression. Michael Drayton writes of 'poor plodding schoolemen', William Warner of 'precisians and plaine plodders', and John Earle of the 'Plodding Student', while in Love's Labour's Lost Shakespeare's Berowne contends that 'Small have continual plodders ever won, | Save base authority from others' books.'
That 'authority' acquired 'from others' books' is 'base' compared with the writer's own inventions, 'quicker then his eye' (Nashe) is a central contention of these satirists. I will argue that this contention stemmed from the disillusionment of university graduates and their feeling that academic training had not prepared them to excel in the world outside university walls. Not all early modern English graduates went on to become satirists, of course, but the sense of frustration directed at the perceived inadequacies of a humanist education is striking among those who did: these satires collectively assert that higher education only equips the young man for a 'plod' through life. Opposed to the plodder is the 'extemporal' writer, a term which in these satires means original, spontaneous, creative.
Stephen Rose Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Plagiarism at the Academy of Ancient Music: a Case-study in Musical Authorship and Professional Scrutiny
In 1727 or 1728, Giovanni Bononcini introduced a madrigal 'In una siepe ombrosa' to the Academy of Ancient Music, claiming it as his own work. Subsequently another member of the Academy, Bernard Gates, encountered the same piece in Antonio Lotti's Duetti, terzetti e madrigali (Venice, 1705). To establish the true authorship of the piece, the Academy conducted a lengthy investigation that eventually concluded in Lotti's favour when he sent testimonies from the poet and original performers of the piece.
The efforts that the Academy invested in the investigation partly stemmed from the feuds between its members. But the Academy's correspondence on the matter also reveals the varied conceptions of musical authorship in the early eighteenth century. Whereas musical borrowings were acceptable for some genres and occasions, accurate attributions were expected if composers submitted their work for professional evaluation. On the Continent this act of evaluation was associated with the increasingly rare act of composers publishing their works in print. In England, where printed dissemination carried different connotations, the Academy itself scrutinised compositions as part of its efforts for 'the Improvement of the Science [of music]'. In its explorations of 'the Works of the Masters who flourished before, or about the Age of Palestrina', the Academy put considerable weight on the correct recognition of authorship (although it still performed misattributed works). With its emergent awareness of a musical canon, the Academy arguably helped change attitudes to musical authorship in the decades after the seventeenth century.
Kimberley Skelton Tufts University, USA
Creating in a National Architectural Practice: John Webb, the Patron, and the Craftsman
1650s England witnessed a sharp change in architectural practice and, consequently, in the process of creating - that is, designing and constructing - a country house. In the early seventeenth century, local master builders with a firsthand knowledge of construction but with little knowledge of architectural treatises had been responsible for country houses. During the 1650s, an architect who had studied treatises extensively but who had limited construction experience newly developed a national practice. John Webb, previously employed in the royal Office of Works, designed country houses across England after Parliament abolished the monarchy in 1649. He could offer his patrons unusually precise advice on Classical designs, yet could contribute little to structural decisions; he had limited experience, and his quickly growing national practice permitted infrequent travel. Architectural historians have yet to note this change in practice or to analyze dialogues among architect, patron, and craftsman; they have instead assigned agency solely to architect or patron. Through close study of John Webb's drawings and building correspondence, my paper will reintroduce these complex dialogues about creation into early modern English country house design. I will argue that Webb proposed and discussed multiple design options with patrons and instructed craftsmen about Classical design details, but that project-specific factors - from geographic location to the patron's social status - shaped interaction among patron, architect, and craftsman during construction. In so doing, I will reveal that the act of creation in seventeenth-century English architectural practice involved highly variable intersections among the abilities and opinions of three authors: architect, patron, and craftsman.
Stephanie Tritton University of Manchester, UK
Published Musical Variants and Creativity: An Overview of John Playford's Role as Editor
The English music-publishing industry in the latter half of the seventeenth century was dominated by multi-composer volumes aimed at a thriving amateur market. These books included music composed by a wide range of figures, from leading composers such as Henry Purcell and Matthew Locke, to minor characters and occasionally amateurs. Many of the publications, which were produced for an array of different individual instruments, were reprinted and appeared in several editions; subsequently a large amount of material was duplicated both between different editions and different series. The characteristics of this music are inconsistent: titles fluctuate between editions, tunes are transposed, ornamented or changed, note-values are halved or doubled, clefs are changed, and attributions are dropped or altered. John Playford makes an inconsistent attempt to conceal these variants, whilst at the same time openly advertising the evolving duplication of material, and therefore, by implication, unfinished state of the specific edition. This paper investigates Playford's multi-composer compilations to offer an exploration of print technology's inability to fix and stabilize musical texts. Through an overview of Playford's music books, I will examine the publisher's role as an editor, in order to further understand the relationship between creativity and how music was published, circulated and consumed in seventeenth-century England.
Andrew Woolley University of Leeds, UK
Restoration keyboard players and their manuscripts: A re-examination of the Purcell-Draghi manuscript, GB-Lbl MS Mus. 1
Over the course of research examining Restoration keyboard sources, I have uncovered several manuscripts that contain autograph material. These manuscripts shed considerable light on important questions such as what the function of written-down keyboard music was, how composers approached composition, and the apparent complexities surrounding the music's transmission. British Library MS Mus. 1, copied at one end by Henry Purcell, and almost certainly by the Italian expatriate keyboard player Giovanni Battista Draghi at the other, has been examined closely by a number of scholars since it was acquired by the Library in 1994. The manuscript was probably compiled by Purcell for an aristocratic pupil, and the Draghi part may have had a similar function. A number of puzzles remain, however, particularly concerning whether the Draghi part was copied by the composer and how the manuscript was compiled. Many of the pieces have unique texts, which differ in minor details from other authoritative sources. These variants, which are localised in character, suggest the likelihood that composers often worked from memory when compiling manuscripts of their pieces. Several pieces known from four-part consort versions in the Purcell part of the manuscript suggest an approach to composition using memorised outlines or 'gists'.
Carolyn Yerkes Columbia University, USA
Sir Thomas Browne's Whispering-Place and the Evolution of Diagrams
In the short tract 'Echoes', Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) imagined a 'whispering-place', an elliptical room where two distant speakers might converse without being overheard. The acoustical trick behind this auditory chamber would be revealed on its ceiling, as an etched 'mechanicall draught wherin lye the causes and reasons of the Admirable Effect, the figure being drawne in red or blewe extending the whole length of the arch'. With a few drawn lines, Browne sought to explain a natural phenomenon in visual terms, turning knowledge into a spatial experience. He attempted a similar move in The Garden of Cyrus, or the quincunciall, lozenge, or net-work plantations of the ancients, artificially, naturally, mystically considered (1658), compiling myriad examples of the quincunx, the configuration of five points typically found on dice. For Browne the quincunx was a totem, a figure found everywhere in nature and in art. Examined together, 'Echoes' and The Garden of Cyrus offer insight into Browne's diagrammatic thinking, an effort to illustrate systems rather than tangible objects in space. John Evelyn described Browne's whispering-place as an 'Acoustic Diagramme', enlisting a term whose precise meaning varied widely in scientific and artistic discourse. Using Browne's work as a touchstone, this paper will trace the idea of the diagram through its seventeenth-century evolutions, demonstrating how the peculiar marriage of contemporary science and ancient history resulted in new forms of abstract drawing.
Poster Presentations:
Alan Howard University of Manchester, UK
On the compilation of a pictorial catalogue of Restoration music hands
This poster introduces work I have been carrying out alongside the AHRC-sponsored project 'Musical Creativity in Restoration England' here at Manchester, to compile a pictorial guide to the copyists of Restoration music. Its aims are twofold: firstly, to collect representative samples of the work of known copyists, and secondly, to record unfamiliar or unidentified hands for comparison with similar work, as and when it is encountered. Although begun as a personal reference tool, I hope eventually to expand this into a web-based 'catalogue' of Restoration music hands. Such a resource would have obvious benefits to scholars of Restoration music. As a guide to known copyists, it would collect together information that is at present thinly distributed among numerous different publications; in keeping records of unidentified hands it might provide opportunities for user contribution of newly identified hands, variants, and instances of unattributed copying, and ultimately perhaps aid in the identification of the individuals responsible for them. As well as outlining the methodology behind the compilation of the catalogue, the poster demonstrates some of the ways in which the catalogue can be used, and some examples of further avenues of inquiry that it might stimulate in the future.
Return to symposium schedule: Saturday / Sunday
David Lewis, Tim Crawford and Geraint Wiggins Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Purcell Plus: Exploring an E-science Methodology for Musicologists
The Purcell Plus project is intended to be the starting point for an exploration of eScience methods for supporting musicological research. Centred around Henry Purcell's Fantasias and In nomines, all of which survive in an autograph manuscript at the British Library (Add 30930), our work embraces score transcriptions, sound recordings and literature (including modern discussions, whether scholarly or popular, as well as relevant contemporary texts).
An important part of our research consists of locating points of reference or association between signs in these domains, such as the connection between the word 'Brisk' in Purcell's manuscript and a corresponding tempo change in a performance or between a 'Rule' for treating 'discords' in Purcell's edition of 'The Art of Descant' and an instance of this treatment in the score. Once found, such signs can be studied, and means of their presentation and, perhaps, automated discovery can be explored.
Through a sensitivity to the nature of these connections, we not only build up a body of (contingent) 'knowledge', but can contextualise this in a variety of ways. We can explore both contemporary and modern meanings of the terminology of the creative process of composition, as well as constructing 'vocabularies of performance' - another kind of creative process; these may in turn be related to the verbal pronouncements of critics and scholars. We can use similar methods to study the responses of performers to the various sources of these works, whether in contemporary manuscripts (of which there are few) or modern transcriptions and editions.
In our poster, we illustrate some of the tools and approaches developed for Purcell Plus and also consider how these may be applied elsewhere both within the discipline of musicology and beyond.