The Eighteenth-Century Origins of the Musical Canon

1989 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Weber
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early History ◽  
Critical Plane ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
Gradual Evolution ◽  
Musical Taste ◽  
History Of ◽  
Musical Canon ◽  
Modern Form

Joseph Kerman has suggested a distinction crucial in defining the meaning of ‘canon’ in musical culture: repertory, he argues, was simply the performance of old works; canon, by contrast, is their reverence on a critical plane and in a literary context. The distinction is a fertile one, for it challenges us to define when works were not just offered by convention, but when they functioned as models for musical taste critically and aesthetically. The distinction can be extremely fruitful in tracing the early history of the canon – its origins in repertory and gradual evolution into its modern form. What I would like to show here is how repertories grew up originally without true status as canon; before canon there was repertory, and that is where the whole tradition began. In inquiring just where the modern practice of performing old music regularly came about we can look into some of the most fundamental social and intellectual bases upon which the tradition was established.

What a History of the Encyclopaedia could Show

1964 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 398-401
Author(s):  
SIDNEY L. JACKSON
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Early History ◽  
Oxford English Dictionary ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
New York Public Library ◽  
Critical History ◽  
History Of

One of the most striking phenomena in the literature of bibliography is the absence of a comprehensive critical history of the encyclopaedia. Helpful summaries with supporting references can be found, as might be expected, in the 9th, 11th and 14th editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and in Enciclopedia Italiana. Certain encyclopedic works have been treated perceptively in studies focussed on other subjects, such as Thorndike's classic History of Magic and Experimental Science. And for a few particular titles, notably the Encyclopédic of eighteenth‐century France, there is a rather substantial body of published discussion. Occasionally the monographic contributions reach the heights of critical acumen displayed in Hans Aarsleff's essay, “The Early History of the Oxford English Dictionary,” in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library September, 1962 (66: 417–439). But that is not characteristic.

The Early History of the Sultanate of Angoche

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. D. D. Newitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Early History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Set Up

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.

C. P. E. Bach's Organ Sonatas: A Musical Offering for Princess Amalia?

1998 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darrell M. Berg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Musical Taste ◽  
History Of ◽  
Organ Works ◽  
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

This article presents a history of the prelude and six sonatas, Wq 70/1-7, that Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach reputedly wrote for Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia. As a musical patron of mid-eighteenth-century Berlin, the princess was second only to her brother, Frederick the Great. Her library of musicalia (the Amalien-Bibliothek), celebrated in her lifetime, is still of paramount importance to scholars. The present study offers solutions to two mysteries surrounding the works of Wq 70: the absence of all but one from the Amalien-Bibliothek and the conflict of late eighteenth-century accounts of Bach's solo organ works with the canon established in the catalogues of Alfred Wotquenne and Eugene Helm. It considers the role that the princess's conservative musical taste probably played in the acquisition of scores for her collection. It investigates the reception of the works of Wq 70, not only by Bach's royal patroness, but by publishers and a large clientele of keyboardists of his time, and considers the circulation of these compositions in versions for stringed keyboard instruments-far more fashionable in the second half of the eighteenth century than the organ.

The Price of Offices in Pre-Revolutionary France

1984 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 831-860 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Doyle
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Early History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
History Of ◽  
Local Courts ◽  
The Government

One of the most distinctive features of the French Ancien Régime was the sale of offices. Several European states resorted to this method of tapping the wealth of their richer subjects in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but nowhere did venality spread further through society than in France, and nowhere did its importance persist so long. Although the revolutionaries of 1789 abolished it, it reappeared for certain public functions in the early nineteenth century, and has not quite vanished even today. The origins and early history of the system have been authoritatively studied, but its eighteenth-century history has received very little attention. This is all the more curious in that France continued to be governed largely by holders of venal offices, they constituted the backbone of opposition to the government in the form of the magistrates of the parlements, and huge amounts of capital continued to be absorbed by office-buying. Even so, most historians consider that by this time the venal system was in decline. This seemed to be demonstrated by unsold offices remaining on the market, and above all by falling, office prices. For Alfred Cobban, indeed, these trends were symptoms of the decline of a whole class, the officiers. Here was ‘a section of society which was definitely not rising in wealth, and was barely holding its own in social status’ as falling office prices showed. ‘The decline seems to have been general, from the parlements downwards, though until the end of the eighteenth century it was much less marked in the offices of the parlements than in those of the présidiaux, élections, maréchaussées and other local courts.’ Resentment at this decline explained the revolutionary fervour of the officiers, whom Cobban had previously shown to be the largest bourgeois group in the National Assembly; and 1789 was largely the work not of a rising capitalist bourgeoisie, but rather of a declining professional one.

The Early History of Ethiopia's Coffee Trade and the Rise of Shawa

1988 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merid W. Aregay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Red Sea ◽  
Early History ◽  
The South ◽  
History Of

This article draws attention to the possible importance of coffee exports from Ethiopia before the mid-nineteenth century. They may well have been a factor in attempts by Ethiopian emperors in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to develop trade in Yaman, in India and with the Dutch in Java. By 1690, coffee was being exported from Zayla, and perhaps by other outlets. In 1705 and 1737 there were unsuccessful attempts by Europeans to obtain coffee direct from Ethiopia, though meanwhile the growth of plantations in European colonies had rendered such effort superfluous. Nonetheless, Ethiopia contributed to the Red Sea coffee trade during the eighteenth century, and it seems likely that coffee was exported from Enarya as well as from Harar. The kingdom of Shawa was well situated to exploit the development of coffee exports from the south-western highlands, and they would have assisted Shawa's efforts to distance itself from upheavals further north during the Zamana Masafent. The coffee trade may therefore have been more significant in the rise of Shawa in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries than historians have hitherto allowed.

THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE CELLO IN NAPLES: GIOVANNI BONONCINI, ROCCO GRECO AND GAETANO FRANCONE IN A FORGOTTEN MANUSCRIPT COLLECTION

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-97
Author(s):  
GUIDO OLIVIERI
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early History ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Critical Importance ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
The City

ABSTRACTThe analysis of a forgotten source sheds light on the early history of the cello in seventeenth-century Naples. The manuscript MS 2-D-13, held in the library of the Montecassino Abbey, dates from around 1699 and contains two unknown cello sonatas by Giovanni Bononcini, together with passacaglias, sonatas for two ‘violas’ and elaborations over antiphons by Gaetano Francone and Rocco Greco, two prominent string performers and teachers in Naples. A study of this remarkable source helps to clarify the nomenclature of the bass violins in use in the city and offers new evidence on the practice of continuo realization at the cello, as well as on the connections with partimento practice. This collection is thus of critical importance for a discussion of the technical achievements and developments of the cello repertory in Naples before the emergence of the celebrated generation of Neapolitan cello virtuosi in the early years of the eighteenth century.

scholarly journals Historical Gaps and Non-existent Sources: The Case of the Chaudrie Court in French India

2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 979-1006
Author(s):  
Danna Agmon
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Early History ◽  
The Body ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Court Records ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Archival History ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis article develops a typology of historical and archival gaps—physical, historiographical, and epistemological—to consider how non-existent sources are central to understanding colonial law and governance. It does so by examining the institutional and archival history of a court known as the Chaudrie in the French colony of Pondichéry in India in the eighteenth century, and integrating problems that are specific to the study of legal history—questions pertaining to jurisdiction, codification, evidence, and sovereignty—with issues all historians face regarding power and the making of archives. Under French rule, Pondichéry was home to multiple judicial institutions, administered by officials of the French East Indies Company. These included the Chaudrie court, which existed at least from 1700 to 1827 as a forum where French judges were meant to dispense justice according to local Tamil modes of dispute resolution. However, records of this court prior to 1766 have not survived. By drawing on both contemporaneous mentions of the Chaudrie and later accounts of its workings, this study centers missing or phantom sources, severed from the body of the archive by political, judicial, and bureaucratic decisions. It argues that the Chaudrie was a court where jurisdiction was decoupled from sovereignty, and this was the reason it did not generate a state-managed and preserved archive of court records for itself until the 1760s. The Chaudrie’s early history makes visible a relationship between law and its archive that is paralleled by approaches to colonial governance in early modern French Empire.

The Early History of Printing in the Ottoman Empire through the Prism of Mobility

DIYÂR ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-82
Author(s):  
Taisiya Leber
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Early History ◽  
Professional Life ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Legal Code ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
History Of

This paper aims to examine the early stage of printing in the Ottoman Empire, focusing on mobile actors, tools and ideas. Which role did mobility play in the life of printers? How did it influence their professional life and how was it reflected in prefaces or afterwords of their printed books? The first Jewish, Serbian, Armenian, Greek and Muslim printers in the Ottoman Empire were foreign-born (Spain, Italy, England, France). Many of them had to remain mobile within and beyond the empire in order to escape persecution, religious censorship, business competition etc. Where did the knowledge of printing come from and how did it circulate? Were there any contacts between printers of different religious backgrounds and what role did the question of language and multilingualism play? By introducing case studies that originate from the early phase of printing in the Ottoman Empire (Sephardic legal code ʾArbaʿa Ṭurim, Constantinople 1493) until the first decades of the eighteenth century (İbrāhīm Müteferriḳa’s printing activities), this article will mainly focus on the aspect of mobility in a Transottoman context. It will show the role of networks and connections between the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Europe for the development and spreading of book printing among Ottoman Jews and Christians.

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