June conferences

Although I haven't been posting recently- I am heavily occupied with the writing up and my rapidly-approaching deadline- I did however present at two conferences last month, both of which covered subjects closely aligned to my research. 

 

The first, Musica Mercata at the 7th Sibelius Academy Symposium on Music History, was titled Finance, Commodity and the Music Industry from Antiquity to the Present. A very friendly conference, with speakers covering a broad range of topics from court entertainment in the 16th century to the Australian art music market in the 1960-1990s. The keynote presentations were enjoyable and thought-provoking: I found Gundula Kreuzer's discussion of vignettes of opera from the nineteenth century and today of particular interest and drew parallels with Richard Leppert's work on music and image. My talk, 'Patronage, commerce, and copyright: the development of the music business in eighteenth-century London', was good training for the write up of my dissertation. It was a very helpful exercise- the need to condense my thoughts into a 3,000-word presentation obliged me to think more clearly about my thesis and to shape the overall conclusions of my dissertation. 

 

The second conference, Economy, Management, and Staging of performances in the 17th and 18th centuries, was held in Lisbon. A smaller-scale conference, the main focus was on opera and performance in Italy and Portugal, although there was also a number of presentations on opera performers in London and Paris and some discussion of performance at court in eighteenth-century Vienna and Munich. Unfortunately, for me at any rate, much of the conference was in Italian and Portuguese which somewhat limited my involvement. My paper, 'The transfer of power from patrons to composers: a study of the Bach-Abel concert series', concentrated on aspects behind the commercialisation of the famous West End subscription concert series. 

 

So back to the writing now ...