"Rudimenti di Musica per Accompagnare del Sig. r Maestro Vignali, A. 1789 D."

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-206
Author(s):  
Sean Curtice ◽  
Lydia Carlisi

The recently discovered manuscript "Rudimenti di Musica per Accompagnare del Sig.r Maestro Vignali" (1789) merits a special place in the canon of eighteenth-century partimento sources, thanks to its illuminating music-theoretical perspectives and its remarkable collection of twenty-four annotated partimenti. This English edition marks the first appearance of this manuscript source in print, making it easily accessible to scholars and performers for the first time.

2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 544-571
Author(s):  
David Pullins

Abstract This article addresses in depth for the first time the irregularly shaped canvases known as tableaux chantournés (cut-out paintings) that were produced in vast numbers by leading academicians between the 1730s and 1750s and occupy a tenuous place between fine and applied or decorative arts. Through an examination of the term’s first uses in regard to painting and eighteenth-century critics’ responses to these works, tableaux chantournés are positioned as a means of rethinking the extraction of painting from a richer visual field and the relationship of this medium-specific agenda to the historiography of the rococo.


1981 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-39
Author(s):  
B. R. Rees

These are the opening words of Aristotle's Poetics, generally recognized as the most influential work in the history of Western European drama and poetic theory since the Renaissance. The initial statement of the scope of the inquiry is a formidable one; but a reader coming to it for the first time might well be forgiven for concluding that it promises far more than it achieves. Is it possible, he might ask, that all this is contained in a slim volume occupying no more than 47 pages in the Oxford Classical Text and 45 in the Penguin translation? Reading further, he might become even more disillusioned: what he discovers is that, after a very brief and perfunctory introduction on poetry as a form of mimesis or artistic representation, Aristotle limits himself to a discussion of tragedy, a cursory treatment of epic, and a few passing references to comedy, and that, even in the case of tragedy, by far the major part of the argument is devoted to an examination of plot. Can this really be the work which excited scholars in the Renaissance, inspired Milton to write Samson Agonistes, an Aristotelian drama if there ever was one, provided the structural pattern and dramatic conventions for the plays of Racine and Corneille, gave Fielding the principles on which he based his Tom Jones, influenced Goethe and Lessing and, through Lessing, Coleridge, and has won the attention and admiration of critics writing in English from James Harris at the end of the eighteenth century to Richard MacKeon in the second half of the twentieth? And, if so, why?


2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-502
Author(s):  
David Ross Hurley

In recent decades singers of Handel’s music have made great strides in recapturing the art of embellishing his music, thus breathing new life into forms such as the da capo aria. Yet Handel’s own “variations”—his development and transformation of musical material in his vocal music, important for understanding his compositional practice with borrowed as well as (presumably) original music—are not yet fully explored or appreciated. Admittedly, scholars have discussed musical procedures such as inserting, deleting, and reordering musical materials, as well as other Baroque combinatorial practices in Handel’s arias, but the musical transformations I discuss here are closer to a specifically Handelian brand of developing variation. To my knowledge, the concept of developing variation has never before been applied to early eighteenth-century music. I explore the relation of developing variation to drama (also rarely done) in two of Handel’s arias, providing a close examination of “Ombre, piante” from the opera Rodelinda and new thoughts about “Lament not thus,” originally intended for the oratorio Belshazzar. Although these arias belong to different genres and different stages of Handel’s career, they both exhibit material that undergoes a kind of progressive variation process that has tangible musical and dramatic ramifications, of interest to opera specialists and performers. Furthermore, both arias have a complicated compositional history; I offer fresh insights into the aesthetic qualities of each version, thereby throwing light on Handel’s possible compositional intentions. This article also discloses for the first time some recurring musical passages shared between “Lament not thus” and other pieces that could influence the listener’s interpretation of certain musico-dramatic gestures.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-88
Author(s):  
Sean Curtice ◽  
Lydia Carlisi

The partimento tradition of eighteenth-century Italy developed within a musical culture that prioritized oral pedagogy. While these teaching methods were successful in producing generations of great composers, they have left scholars with vexing questions concerning the precise manner in which partimenti should be realized. The recent appearance of a remarkable and previously unknown manuscript—"Rudimenti di Musica per Accompagnare del Sig. Maestro Vignali," dated 1789—promises to shed invaluable new light on the oral tradition of partimento instruction. The manuscript's likely author is Gabriele Vignali (c. 1736– 1799), a maestro di cappella active in Bologna; it is unique in the presently known canon owing to the detailed footnotes that accompany each of its twenty-four Bassi (one in each major and minor key). Vignali's annotations provide precisely the sort of commentary that was ordinarily restricted to real-time explanation, teaching the student to recognize keys, scale degrees, modulations, cadences, typical bass progressions, and significant motives. The present article and accompanying English-language edition examine this exceptional partimento collection in detail, offering modern partimentisti the opportunity for the first time to listen in, as it were, on a series of lessons between an eighteenth-century maestro and his student.


1987 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 829-837 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. E. Berrios

SynopsisAn historical analysis is made of the word and of the concept of ‘dementia’ before the nineteenth century. With regard to the word, it is shown that it had legal and medical meanings and that, while the former developed during the seventeenth century, the latter did so only during the eighteenth century (earlier than psychiatric historians have suggested). As evidence for the latter point, rare historical material on ‘Démence’ from the first edition of the Encyclopédie Française is presented for the first time in English. It is also shown that the legal meaning was finally enshrined in the ‘Code Napoléon’. With regards to the concept of dementia, it is shown that it took final shape in the work of Willis, Hartley and Cullen in whose view it was made to include terminal states of behavioural incompetence due to severe failure of almost any mental function. During this period, dementia was not yet associated with a particular age group nor was specifically defined in terms of cognitive deficit. The origins of the ‘cognitive’ paradigm of dementia and of the clinical boundaries of the future concept of dementia are briefly outlined.


2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 477-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nuno Palma ◽  
Jaime Reis

We construct the first time-series for Portugal’s per capita GDP for 1527–1850, drawing on a new database. Starting in the early 1630s there was a highly persistent upward trend which accelerated after 1710 and peaked 40 years later. At that point, per capita income was high by European standards, though behind the most advanced Western European economies. But as the second half of the eighteenth century unfolded, a phase of economic decline was initiated. This continued into the nineteenth century, and by 1850 per capita incomes were not different from what they had been in the early 1530s.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 792-804 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Price

Based on long term ethnographic work with the Saamaka, and with the benefit of hindsight, this paper unpacks the specific ways in which the descendants of these Suriname Maroons have constructed and transmitted the historical knowledge of their 18th-century ancestors, who escaped slave plantations and confronted the colonial powers from their new settlements in the depth of the forest. In the process, they created an original memory of these historical events— First-Time or Fesiten knowledge—and managed to keep it alive. The article explores the specific ontology, frames and idioms of this historical knowledge, as well as its ideological role, the (dis)connections to hegemonic colonial memory devices, its evolution in time, the ways of transmission, and the memory specialists that have kept and circulated it.


1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-371
Author(s):  
Frederick V. Mills

The American revolution caused the Anglican churches in America to separate from their parent body: the Church of England. This threw the Episcopalians upon their own resources to rebuild their church. In the process of reorganization, the former Anglicans accomplished an ecclesiastical revolution in respect to episcopacy. For the first time since the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Episcopalians in America made a bishop of a major religious body the elected official of a convention of clergy and laymen. In the second place, the office of bishop in a major denomination was completely separated from the state for the first time since Emperor Constantine officially recognized Christianity in 313 A.D.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-49
Author(s):  
Graham John Wheeler

This article seeks to shed new light on an unresolved question in modern religious history: how did classical traditions of paganism come to be revived in modern times in the form of neo-paganism? It seeks to contribute to addressing this question by identifying a hitherto overlooked individual who embraced revived paganism as a religious philosophy before other, better known figures who have been discussed by previous scholars. The individual in question was the teacher and writer John Fransham (1730–1810). This article seeks to elucidate the main tenets of Fransham's religious outlook and to locate him within the intellectual context of his time, as both a product of and a rebel against the British Enlightenment. It also publishes his most explicitly pagan piece of writing for the first time.


2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brita Brenna

ArgumentBy the mid-eighteenth century, governors of the major European states promoted the study of nature as part of natural-resource based schemes for improvement and economic self-sufficiency. Procuring beneficial knowledge about nature, however, required observers, collectors, and compilers who could produce usable and useful descriptions of nature. The ways governments promoted scientific explorations varied according to the form of government, the makeup of the civil society, the state's economic ideologies and practices, and the geographical situation. This article argues that the roots of a major natural history initiative in Denmark-Norway were firmly planted in the state-church organization. Through the clergymen and their activities, a bishop, supported by the government in Copenhagen, could gather an impressive collection of natural objects, receive observations and descriptions of natural phenomena, and produce natural historical publications that described for the first time many of the species of the north. Devout naturalists were a common species in the eighteenth century, when clergymen and missionaries involved themselves in the investigation of nature in Europe and far beyond. The specific interest here is in how natural history was supported and enforced as part of clerical practice, how specimen exchange was grafted on to pre-existing institutions of gift exchange, and how this influenced the character of the knowledge produced.


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