|
|
|
Save the Date
Open Rehearsal Thursday, Nov. 6
4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
McCallum Fine Arts Academy
A Neapolitan Revival Concert
Sunday, Nov. 9
6 PM
The Long Center
|
Benefiting
|
 |
|
A portion of every ticket goes to the McCallum Orchestra Performance Fund, supporting deserving orchestra students in their goal to perform at Carnegie Hall in New York City
|
|
|
Music Lost for Two Centuries
The Story of the Neapolitan Masters
|
Imagine if someone suddenly discovered a vault in Italy with 10,000 paintings in it by Italian Masters from Naples, all wildly famous in their own time but somehow virtually forgotten today. Imagine if hardly any of their works could be found in a modern museum and that the few respected art history books that did mention them simply shrugged, "It could fairly be said that the Neapolitan School of Artists did not exist."
That is what happened to the Neapolitan Masters of 18th-century music and the above quote is what the Oxford History of Music (Volume 7, (1975)) says about the Neapolitan School of Music. Literally an entire school of music that existed for more than 200 years and produced some of the greatest classical music compositions was simply written out of existence. There are tens of thousands of concertos, symphonies, operas, and sacred music pieces in the Naples Conservatory archive alone -- stacked in dusty piles floor to ceiling.
Prof. Robert Gjerdingen, the Neapolitan Music Society's music historian from Northwestern University in Chicago put it this way: "Suppose in 50 years, someone is writing the history of rock-n-roll and they conclude: "The french rock scene was where it all began...they were the best and developed the whole genre." Obviously, that would be completely absurd, but it's the sort of distortion that has marginalized the Neapolitans.
The Neapolitan Masters were the most famous classical musicians of the 17th and 18th centuries. They were hired and traded, Gjerdingen says, "like star baseball players between the competing royal courts in Europe." There are many reasons why the Neapolitans became overshadowed, but all stem, in modern terms, from the shift in geo-political power in Europe. The French, Austrian, German, and English gained ascendancy in the late 1800's compared to the Italians, who had yet to so much as form a national boundary until the 1860s. The Italian Republic -- the country we know today -- was not formed until 1946. In effect, as other European nations grew more powerful, they promoted their own artistic traditions over those from Italy, and the Italians just did not have the resources to compete.
|
|
Meet the Professor
 Robert Gjerdingen
Professor of Music
Professor of Music at The School of Music, Northwestern University, Gjerdingen was trained at the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D, 1984) under Leonard B. Meyer, Eugene Narmour, and Eugene K. Wolf. He is the author of Music in the Galant Style: Being an Essay on Various Schemata Characteristic of Eighteenth-Century Music for Courtly Chambers, Chapels, and Theaters, Including Tasteful Passages of Music Drawn from Most Excellent Chapel Masters in the Employ of Noble and Noteworthy Personages, Said Music All Collected for the Reader's Delectation on the World Wide Web (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), A Classic Turn of Phrase: Music and the Psychology of Convention (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), and translator of Studies on the Origin of Harmonic Tonality [an English translation of Carl Dahlhaus's Untersuchungen über die Entstehung der harmonischen Tonalität ] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). His current research focuses on the methods for training composers in the conservatories of Naples, Italy, during the eighteenth century. Professor Gjerdingen is the editor for the Monuments of Partimenti website project.
Dr. Gjerdingen will present notes and introduce the program from an historical point of view at the concert on Sunday, November 9 at the Long Center.
|
|
|
|
Next week: Program Notes and Meet the Virtuoso, Alberto Vitolo.
|
|
|
| Save 15% |
Group rates are available for the Neapolitan Revival Concert!
Groups of 15 or more can save 15% of the purchase price of each ticket. Great for student groups or clubs. Purchase online or by calling 512.474.LONG. Save even more by purchasing your tickets at the 3M Box Office located at the street-level of the Long Center, 701 West Riverside Drive. Open daily and through intermission during performances. Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, Cash and Personal Checks are accepted for payment.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
)
){kind=link}