Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Few eighteenth-century musical accounts have enjoyed such wide-ranging influence as Charles Burney's travelogues and A General History of Music (London: author, 1776-1789). While Burney's descriptions of musical life in Europe in the 1770s and 1780s have proven valuable for scholars researching topics across the spectrum of eighteenth-century music, his role as performer-composer and man of letters more generally has often garnered less attention. An interest in devoting critical study to Burney himself and the contexts in which his writings were produced was the impetus behind a seminar taught by David Yearsley at Cornell University in the autumn of 2007. This in turn inspired a gathering of musicologists interested in Burney's works, and in larger questions surrounding musical travel and the birth of modern music history and criticism in the eighteenth century. Organized by Ellen Lockhart, Annette Richards and David Yearsley (all of Cornell University), the conference was hosted by the Cornell Department of Music. The event took place in conjunction with a production of The Cunning Man, Burney's 1766 adaptation of Rousseau's opera Le devin du village.
The three-day conference included thirteen papers on a variety of topics, ranging from Burney's role as musical tourist and proto-musicologist to his political, social and scientific inclinations. The first session, in tandem with the weekend's musical performances, centred on The Cunning Man. Suzanne Aspden (University of Oxford; 'The Cunning Man: Burney as Student and Historian of National Opera'), whose paper was read by Annette Richards, explored Burney's perception of opera, not just as a pan-European aristocratic phenomenon but also as a potentially nationalist endeavour. She examined both the reception of Burney's adaptation of Le devin du village in Britain and the changes Burney made to the opera that moved it distinctly away from the pastoral genre. Jacqueline Waeber (Duke University; 'Recovering Le devin du village from Its Adaptations') traced the shifting conception of the opera's generic identity, arguing that its radical simplicity permitted it to be malleable on the stage. She considered changes of tone introduced in the opera's many adaptations, including the idea that Burney's description of The Cunning Man as a 'Musical Entertainment' may have resonated with the tradition of the English burletta.
Many of...