Abstract The music of Paolo Papini (d. 1603) has gone almost unnoticed in spite of the existence of over forty liturgical pieces by him, located primarily in five large manuscript choirbooks with a provenance from the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia, Rome. These choirbooks are otherwise known for their manuscript copies of music by Palestrina. This article examines the sources, provides new biographical information about Papini, and evaluates the function of his music within the Ospedale. It argues that, together with documentary evidence such as inventories and financial records from Santo Spirito, Papini’s music throws new light on our understanding of the reform of liturgical music in the decades following the final session of the Council of Trent in 1563.
This article re-evaluates the late seventeenth-century operatic culture of the Savoy court in Turin through the lens of newly examined archival material, the Avvisi di Torino preserved in the Medici archive in Florence. These handwritten newsletters, covering the years 1688–99, offer unprecedented insights into the musical and theatrical life of the Savoy capital, a court that stood at the crossroads of the Italian and French traditions. Previous scholarship has often overlooked this period or has relied primarily on printed librettos that provide only a partial view of operatic production. By integrating the avvisi with other sources, this study reconstructs the repertory, organization, and sociopolitical function of operatic spectacles under Victor Amadeus II of Savoy.
Much has been written about women as composers, performers, or teachers around the turn of the twentieth century. Less attention has been paid to how women could build portfolio careers by weaving musical practices together. This article focuses on a group of Scottish women who did not make their names solely as art music composers or stellar performers, and for whom piano teaching was only part of their musical work. Four were related to the Scottish music publishers Mozart Allan, James Kerr, and the Logan brothers; the fifth published with Allan and Kerr, and also self-published. All but one made their careers in Scotland. Their lives and achievements reveal the range of musical occupations open to upper working- or lower middle-class women in this era, and also provide insights into musical scenes beyond the English cities more typically the focus of British music histories.
Cullen Maiden was a bass opera singer, poet, actor, composer, and teacher born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932. After serving with the US military in Korea and postgraduate study at the Juilliard School, he toured with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company and the Belafonte Folk Singers before travelling to Europe — Stockholm, Rome, London, Munich — for further study and professional engagements in the early and mid-1960s. His move to Europe was motivated by racist barriers in the music industry which, while still inescapably present in Europe, seemed more navigable than those in the United States at the time. 1 Maiden therefore belongs to a multi-generational cohort of African American musicians who made similar moves to German-speaking Europe, as outlined in Kira Thurman’s landmark study Singing like Germans. 2 A successful audition for the Komische Oper in East Berlin led to stable employment in the house’s ensemble, and Maiden later rose to prominence as a popular Porgy in productions of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Maiden lived in West Berlin for over thirty years, regularly crossing the border for work, and he pursued many independent artistic projects there, some in collaboration with political and aid organizations. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, while still living in Berlin, he made a professional return to the United States to give a series of recitals and to perform with the Black-led company Opera/South. By the early 1990s, Maiden was experiencing difficulties singing due to a medical condition, so took on increasing teaching work during his final decade in then-reunified Germany. Maiden and his British wife, Chris Hall-Maiden, moved to London in 2000, from which point he focused his multifaceted creativity on composition. He died in 2011.
It no longer seems eccentric to suggest that the guitar merits a place in any balanced account of British musical life during the nineteenth century. This article concerns three previously unknown manuscript guitar books of that period, discovered serendipitously in bookshops or auction catalogues. None has ever figured in an institutional collection or bibliographical record hitherto. After a succinct introductory account, which surveys the books in relation to aspects of guitar history that are still largely unknown to most modern players of the ‘classical’ guitar (and are usually overlooked by many scholars of nineteenth-century music in general), there is an inventory of all three. Of particular interest is the range of places where these manuscripts were copied or used, which include Trincomalee in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Jabalpur in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, as well as Kempsey in Worcestershire and Dover in Kent. British guitar history in the nineteenth century has a global context that encompasses distant corners of the Empire.
