Part II: Musical Institutions
This section of the book is devoting to musical institutions, conceived broadly: the public opera industry in Venice, the court of Louis XIV (where art, music, and literature were centralized), seventeenth-century England (a nation, indeed, but also an “institution,” separate from the rest of Europe); the final two chapters focus more broadly on social institutions that support music—education and musical clubs, concerts, and academies. The resources gathered here are intended to provided a more global perspective on these institutions—the ways in which they interacted, for better or worse, with the rest of the world. In some instances, the readings have only minimal emphasis on music, but they should help provide a better sense of who the consumers and producers of music might be and the ways in which they thought about their world.
Chapter six: Opera in Venice and Beyond
This chapter provides an opportunity to consider the cosmopolitan nature of the city of Venice and the Republic—its role within the very multicultural Mediterranean world and the complex relationship with the Ottoman Empire. This illuminates aspects of public opera in Venice, including questions of representation, and the ways in which contemporary opera productions grapple with these issues. Links to articles dealing with gender representation are included in the chapter.
- Eric R. Dursteler, “Speaking in Tongues: Language and Communication in the Early Mediterranean,” Past and Present 217 (2012), pp. 47-77. Although not dealing specifically with music or opera, Dursteler’s provides insights into the rich linguistic soundscape of Venice and the Mediterranean.
- Irene Alm, “Dances from the “Four Corners of the Earth”: Exoticism in Seventeenth-Century Opera.” In Musica Franca: Essays in Honor of Frank D’Accone, edited by Alm, Reardon, and McLamore. Stuyvesant and New York: Pendragon Press, 1996, p. 233-257.
- Wendy Heller, “Venezia in Egitto: Egyptomania and Exoticism in Seventeenth-Century Opera.” In L’arte della scena e l’esotismo in età moderna / The Performing Arts and Exoticism in the Modern Age, ed. Francesco Cotticelli and Paologiovanni Maione. Naples: Turchini Edizioni, 2007, pp. 107-121.
- Wendy Heller, “Pleasurable Passions on the Modern Stage: Cavalli on Video,” Journal of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music 23 (2017). Although this article doesn’t deal specifically with global issues, it touches on some of the ways in which we might approach contemporary productions of baroque operas and discuss issues having to do with race and gender.
All aspects of life in the Venetian Republic were influenced by the various wars with the Ottomans, most notably the war with Candia in 1669 (Crete). This album by the Ensemble Animatica (directed but Stefano Rossi) imagines some of the music in the period in the context of this war.
See below for a sample from Youtube.
Chapter seven: Power and Pleasure at the Court of Louis XIV
This chapter focuses on the special qualities of French music, art, dance, and theater within the court of Louis XIV and in Paris. It is important to underscore, however, the fact that Louis XIV’s concern with controlling art domestically was part of a larger plan to increase France’s global power, as described in this essay from the BBC History Magazine. We might want to ask how music fit into these global ambitions, the role it played in diplomacy, or the ways in which travelers facilitated transmission of styles and ideas across the ocean. A consideration of the Turkish scenes in Lully and Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme raise a host of fascinating issues—did the French see the Ottomans the way the Venetians did?
- Ellen Welch, “Exotic Audiences (1668-1715).” In A Theater of Diplomacy: International Relations and the Performing Arts in Early Modern France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, pp. 156-184
- Ellen R. Welch, “The Specter of the Turk in Early Modern French Court Entertainments,” L’Esprit Créateur 53 (2013), pp. 84-97
- David. R. M. Irving, “Lully in Siam: Music and Diplomacy in French-Siamese Cultural Exchanges, 1680-1690,” Early Music 20 (2012), pp. 393-420.
- Jittapim Yamprai, “Michael-Richard de Lalande and the ‘Airs of Siam,'” Early Music 41 (2013), pp. 421-437.
Chapter eight: Music in Seventeenth-Century England
This is an excellent opportunity to consider music in the American colonies, particularly the Puritans, Native American song, or explore the many writings published by British travelers to all parts of the world that reflect British sensibilities, values, and prejudices.
- Olivia A. Bloechl, “Protestant Imperialism and the Representation of Native American Song,” The Musical Quarterly 87 (2004), pp. 46-86.
- Erich Nunn, “‘A Great Addition to their Harmony’: Plantation Slavery and Musical Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Barbarados,” The Global South 10 (2016), pp. 27-47
- Robin A. Leaver, “More than Simple Psalm-Singing in English: Music in Early Colonial America,” Yale Journal of Music & Religion 1 (2015), pp. 63-80. (This article would also work well with Chapter 5).
- Glenda Goodman, “‘The Tears I Shed at the Songs of Thy Church’: Seventeenth-Century Musical Piety in the English Atlantic World,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65 (2012), pp. 691-725.
- Katherine Brown, “Reading Indian Music: The Interpretation of Seventeenth-Century European Travel-Writing in the Re(construction) of Indian Music History,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 9 (2000), pp. 1-34. (This article could also be introduced at the beginning of the course or as part of a unit on travel writing).
Broadside ballads, discussed in this chapter, were also popular in Colonial America.
Chapter nine: Music and Education and Chapter ten: Academies, Salons, and Music Societies
Chapters nine and ten relinquish the chronological-geographical-genre organization used earlier in the book to consider two areas rarely considered in surveys: children’s musical education in church schools, convents, orphanages, and noble households; and various music clubs, societies, salons and academies that often (though not exclusively) offered amateur musicians an opportunities to make music or exchange ideas about music. I am including materials related to these two chapters together, as there are somewhat fewer resources specifically devoted to these topics outside of Europe, and they often overlap. I am also including below several articles that touch on the latter part of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, since—in many instances—we find parallels to European music-making activities somewhat later. Included
- Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell, “Music, Letters, and the Clerical Path.” In Playing the Cathedral: Music, Race, and Status in New Spain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
- Glenda Goodman, “Learning Music.” In Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. (Other chapters of this wonderful new book are also relevant, although they focus on a somewhat later period.)
- Patricia Robertson, “Early American Singing Organizations and Lowell Mason,” The Choral Journal 42 (November 2001), pp, 17-22, 24.
- David R. M. Irving, “Music in the Global Jesuit Missions, 1540-1773,” The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits, edited by Ines G. Županov (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
- Piotr Nawrot, “Teaching of Music and Celebration of Liturgical Music in the Jesuit Reductions,” Anthropos (2004), pp. 73-84.
- John Ogasapian, Music of the Colonial and Revolutionary Era. Westport, CT: Greenword Press, 2004. Accessible overview of music-making in the United States, including the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Music in the Baroque: Companion Website by Wendy Heller 