HIP Department online Symposium:
Musical Highlights from the Years 1624-1625 & 1724-1725
Zoom link
PLANNING
16:00-17:00:
Couperin’s Les goûts-réunis (1724): More Than Meets the Eye (and the Ear)
By Don Fader
17:00-18:00:
Antonio Vivaldi’s Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (1725): an Essay in Italian
Program Music?
By Marc Vanscheeuwijck
18:00-19:00:
Axel Weidenfeld:
Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel’s Brockes Passion (1725)
By Axel Weidenfeld
ABSTRACTS
Couperin’s Les goûts-réunis: More Than Meets the Eye (and the Ear)
By Don Fader
What did Couperin mean by “Les goûts-réunis”? How is this reflected in the music, and how might that manifest itself in performance? The collection, whose title is probably best translated “the national styles brought together,” consists of 14 “Concerts” plus L’apothéose de Corelli. Each of these pieces reflects different facets of the composer’s life-long interest in combining French and Italian musical characteristics, which would, he said, achieve “the perfection of music.” These pieces bring together a kaleidoscopic diversity of musical and cultural currents whose complexity can make for a challenge to performers. An exploration of Couperin’s (few but remarkable) writings and the culture of the period helps to shed light on some of the major issues in these pieces, focusing on the complex interactions between their titles/genres, affect/tempo markings, and musical language.
Antonio Vivaldi’s Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione: an Essay in Italian Program Music?
By Marc Vanscheeuwijck
Compared to England and France, but particularly to Germany, early modern instrumental music of the Italian peninsula has neither shown a great fascination for what we ended up calling program music, nor a specific interest in aesthetic reflection about instrumental music. Even the theorists of the Arcadi, in their insistence that “good taste” needed to exclude all recent “baroque” excesses, only offered occasional hints at drawing a poetics of instrumental music, though primarily through the visual arts’ approach of “Ut picture poiesis.”
Antonio Vivaldi offered the world an innovative approach to representing nature in music with the publication of his twelve concertos Op. VIII in 1725, primarily in the four concertos representing the four seasons. In this presentation I will use Vivaldi scholar Cesare Fertonani’s work as a point of departure to consider both the aesthetic context in which Vivaldi’s collection originated, and its impact and influence on music history—including the fact that the four seasons are probably Vivaldi’s best known compositions today.
Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel: Brockes-Passion (1725)
By Axel Weidenfeld
The Passion poetry by Barthold Hinrich Brockes does not contain a literal biblical text from the evangelists, but rather transforms it poetically and freely. Its numerous 18th century settings thus belong to the genre of the “Passion oratorio”. The inclusion of such works in church services and liturgy was therefore actually ruled out. The performance of the Brockes Passion by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel on Good Friday 1725 in the church service at the Schlosskirche in Gotha is a special exception. The particular reasons for this will be outlined in the presentation. The sources of the work have survived thanks to a later performance in Sondershausen, but during the preparation of the edition of the Passion it became apparent that the surviving part material belonged to Stölzel's first performance in Gotha. It therefore allows numerous conclusions to be drawn about performance practice under the composer's direction.
BIOGRAPHIES
Don Fader is Professor of Musicology at the University of Alabama and also a professional recorder player and chamber music coach. His scholarly interests take in a broad spectrum of issues in 17th- and 18th-century French and Italian music. A recipient of the Bourse Chateaubriand, the Westrup Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is the author of numerous articles, essays, musical editions, and a book, Music, Dance and Franco-Italian Cultural Exchange c. 1700: Michel Pignolet de Montéclair and the prince de Vaudémont (Boydell & Brewer, 2021). His editions include newly discovered trios by Montéclair (AR Editions, 2024) and Antonio Biffi’s Miserere, which received its modern premiere at the Utrecht Festival in 2013. He is currently working on three new French cantatas by Philippe II d’Orléans, which will be the subject of several articles, an edition for the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, and a book on Philippe d’Orléans and the mixing of national styles in French court contexts, 1648-1723.
Marc Vanscheeuwijck (°1962) is a Belgian baroque cellist and a professor emeritus of musicology at the University of Oregon, where he taught music history courses in the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods, Performance Practice, Baroque Cello, and he co-directed the Collegium Musicum ensemble, which specializes in early music. He is currently on the faculty of early music department of the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles.
His research focuses on late 17th-century music in Bologna and on the history and repertoire of cellos and bass violins. He has written several articles for Performance Practice Review, Early Music, and elsewhere, and he has published various critical facsimiles of Bolognese 17th-century cello music (Gabrielli, Jacchini, Degli Antoni). His first book titled The Cappella Musicale of San Petronio in Bologna under Giovanni Paolo Colonna (1674-1695): History-Organization-Repertoire was published in 2003 by the Belgian Historical Institute in Rome. More recently, he co-edited a volume of studies on Corelli, titled Arcomelo 2013 (Lucca: LIM, 2015) with Guido Olivieri, and published a book with 5 CDs with Bruno Cocset and les Basses Réunies, Cello Stories. The Cello in the 17th and 18th Centuries for Outhere (Alpha 890) in Paris. In 2020 he edited a volume of essays on I Bononcini da Modena all’Europa (1666-1747) for LIM in Lucca.
As a Baroque cellist he regularly performs with ensembles in Europe, and North America, and has recorded CDs for Tactus, Passacaille, Ramée, Bongiovanni, Klara, Querstand, Ars Eloquens, CPO, and others.
Axel Weidenfeld
Born in 1957, Axel Weidenfeld studied guitar in Vienna (with Karl Scheit), musicology (with Hans-Joachim Marx) and philosophy in Hamburg. After visiting seminars with Hopkinson Smith and Paul O'Dette, he is mainly active as a lutenist. Until 2023 he was Artistic lecturer at the University of Oldenburg (Germany). He taught in the areas of music theory, ensemble for Early Music, and guitar. He performed as a soloist and with various ensembles of Historical performance practice. He published texts on music history of the 18th century, music for lute and guitar, and an edition of the Brockes-Passion by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (Leipzig: Hoffmeister 2010).
