Issues in Scholarship in Music of the 17th and 18th Centuries: Sources, Editing, Performance

This two-day symposium was organized by Carrie Churnside under the auspices of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire's Forum for Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Music.Delegates assembled in person and online to hear a dozen or so papers and presentations of varying types, which covered an impressive range of topics spread across both centuries.A number of speakers set out expressly to address topics of relevance to the long eighteenth century.Adrian Powney (University of Birmingham) considered a particular idiosyncrasy in the notation of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's music whereby many pieces introduce a change of time signature right at the end, frequently as late as the penultimate bar.Local circumstances such as the prosody of literary texts, as well as performance-practice considerations (including the frequent likely implication of a slowing of tempo in such passages), often explain individual cases.However, Powney used the topic as a window onto Charpentier's wider practice in relation to metrea topic on which he has shed considerable light in recent years, and which underlines in its complexity the importance of the composer's contact with Italian music that is also obvious in so many other ways.Martyn Wilson (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire) drew welcome attention to the Op.7 violin concertos of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and in particular the problems of deriving a viable score from the engraved parts of 1782.The ostensible elegance and clarity of these mask a range of inconsistencies and errors that present a considerable obstacle to modern editors and performers.Having observed how modern players often treat parts in rehearsal, Wilson described how he was able to use such insights to explain many of the inconsistencies in these early printed parts, offering a neat demonstration of the benefits of a reciprocal (rather than more straightforwardly linear) understanding of the processes of scholarship, editing and performance.Stephen Rose (Royal Holloway, University of London) focused not on an individual composer but rather on the progress of the ongoing Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project to investigate and catalogue seventeenth-and eighteenth-century musical sources from English local archives and record offices.This work is bringing to light many previously unknown sources and drawing attention to the activities of little-known provincial musicians around the country; in the process it is also throwing up many challenges to methodologies for source evaluation that have been developed in conjunction with more familiar elite urban, court and church environments.Several speakers used their papers to highlight the music of lesser-known composers, with the avowed aim of increasing its accessibility.