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32 results

Page 1 of 2

  • Chapter 2 - Dance as ‘Other’: Contrasting Modes of Musical Representation

  • from Part I - Conceptual Studies
  • Edited by Davinia Caddy, Maribeth Clark
  • Book:
    Musicology and Dance
    Published online:
    09 September 2020
    Print publication:
    27 August 2020, pp 49-70

  • Summary

    With reference to an impressive range of examples from across European genres and repertoires, Suzanne Aspden illustrates ways in which dance has been embodied within Western ‘art’ music. Exploding the myth of ‘the music itself’, Aspden notes a significant historical swing in both aesthetics and compositional practice during the nineteenth century, as musical representations of dance gradually morphed from being overtly ornamental and elaborate to more straightforwardly transparent in their dependence upon a long-established vocabulary of musical topics. While tracing this historical shift, Aspden offers a nuanced critical commentary on some of the shop-worn assumptions about dance that have marked traditional textbook histories of European music, especially negative associations between dance and the anti-intellectual, the ‘low’, the feminine and the ‘Other’.

  • 3 - The Idea of the Past in Eighteenth-Century British Music

  • Edited by Sarah Hibberd, University of Bristol, Miranda Stanyon, King's College London
  • Book:
    Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture, 1680–1880
    Published online:
    30 April 2020
    Print publication:
    28 May 2020, pp 63-90

  • Summary

    Musical historicism developed earlier in Britain than, it seems, elsewhere in Europe, with a variety of institutions, traditions and politicised practices from the 1720s onwards cultivating a spirit of enquiry into and appreciation of the past. Seemingly ubiquitous in mid-century musical life, Handel was key to these developments in many ways. Unsurprisingly then, contemporary assessments sought to situate him in an implicitly historicist narrative. In so doing, these assessments often turned to the language of the sublime to place this ‘Man-Mountain’ of a composer in the sweep of history. Indeed, the rhetoric of the sublime seemed to enable and condition the historicist assessment of Handel, entangling musical sublimity with historical greatness. It follows that those composers who came after Handel, particularly in genres where he was pre-eminent, would also aspire to sublimity in order to achieve greatness. Because of the link between historicism and sublimity, they often did this, as examples from William Hayes, Thomas Arne and Thomas Linley (junior) show, by citing and thereby historicising Handel himself.

  • ‘Sancta Cæcilia Rediviva’. Elizabeth Linley: Repertoire, Reputation and the English Voice

  • Suzanne Aspden
  • Journal:
    Cambridge Opera Journal / Volume 27 / Issue 3 / November 2015
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    12 November 2015, pp. 263-287

  • In the early 1770s, Elizabeth Linley was, for a few short years, not just Britain’s most celebrated singer, but also the subject of almost cult-like devotion. Her brief career demonstrated a general awareness on the part of audience, singer and managers alike of the value of enmeshing of art, voice and life in the construction of a successful public persona. The extraordinary adulation she inspired suggests more than just canny use of publicity, however: her cultivation of an apparently distinctive sound and association with a particular repertoire – Handelian oratorio – at a time when Handel was particularly revered suggests British interest in the development of a national musical voice, as well as repertoire.

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