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Lizzy Buckle, Caroline Lesemann-Elliott, Alexander Norman, Adrian So, Virtual Baroque in Birmingham, Early Music, Volume 49, Issue 4, November 2021, Pages 634–636, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/caab066
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Extract
On 15 July 2021, delegates logged on to the 19th Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music, which was hosted online by the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Already postponed from July 2020, the conference took to Zoom as ongoing coronavirus restrictions required attendees to swap balmy Birmingham for their computer screens. Presentations were pre-recorded and available in advance of the live discussion sessions, which were held in three simultaneous streams over three days.
Conference papers covered a great variety of topics, from Cathal Twomey’s study of rhetorical parallelism in Handel’s librettos to Bruce Alan Brown’s work on the remedial gargling that was prescribed to 18th-century singers in Tuscany. Session themes were equally diverse, with discussions covering, among others, musical aesthetics, modes of hearing and understanding in German music, and 16th- and 17th-century Italian approaches to music theory. Nevertheless, a large number of contributors opted to explore networks of material objects, people or more ephemeral phenomena (tunes, anecdotes, etc.). The French-themed sessions particularly demonstrated the extent to which the musical scenes in Paris and London were a melting pot of influences. Andrew Walkling, for example, demonstrated cross-fertilization between French and English music dramas, while Graham Sadler discussed how Charpentier interpreted and adapted aspects of Italian music, often in connection with Jesuit cultural networks in Paris. Maria Schildt explored the unauthorised editions and arrangements that contributed to the spread of Lully’s operatic melodies across Europe, including the role of aural transmission in this process.
