Musical Creativity in Restoration England is the first comprehensive investigation of approaches to creating music in late seventeenth-century England. Understanding creativity during this period is particularly challenging because many of our basic assumptions about composition – such as concepts of originality, inspiration and genius – were not yet fully developed. In adopting a new methodology that takes into account the historical contexts in which sources were produced, Rebecca Herissone challenges current assumptions about compositional processes and offers new interpretations of the relationships between notation, performance, improvisation and musical memory. She uncovers a creative culture that was predominantly communal, and reveals several distinct approaches to composition, determined not by individuals, but by the practical function of the music. Herissone's new and original interpretations pose a fundamental challenge to our preconceptions about what it meant to be a composer in the seventeenth century and raise broader questions about the interpretation of early modern notation.
During Purcell's lifetime the music-publishing business in England flourished, thanks mainly to John Playford. Since intellectual property rights did not yet exist, Playford and his successors were able to select music they were confident of selling, predominantly producing multicomposer anthologies of popular tunes. Composers may have benefited little from these publications so it is significant that some took the financial risk of printing their music without an established publisher's support. Analysis suggests that musical self-publication was undertaken for several quite specific purposes. Three self-published books stand out as the only operatic scores published in seventeenth-century England: Locke's The English Opera (1675), Grabu's Albion and Albanius (1687), and Purcell's The Vocal and Instrumental Musick of the Prophetess (1691). These substantial volumes had no obvious practical use and all sold poorly; put into political context, however, they reveal how printed music in England was developing from a purely practical performance tool into a medium through which statements could be made and musical works given monumental status. Yet Purcell's own management of the printing of The Vocal and Instrumental Musick of the Prophetess suggests that he was confused about the distinct and mutually exclusive functions of music printing in the period, which led him to misunderstand the nature of the market and how he might appropriate the medium for his own benefit.
Evidence of reworkings by Restoration composers of their own pieces is not difficult to find, but inevitably such material has survived in a haphazard fashion. Only rarely does one come across examples like Matthew Locke's scorebook of consort music, London, British Library (GB-Lbl), Add. MS 17801, where alterations have been made systematically. Even where such examples do exist, the common contemporary practices of cutting out rejected leaves or of scraping away the original notes on a page often make it impossible to analyse the revisions made: of course the composers themselves could never have imagined that anyone would be interested in their cast-offs and made no attempt to preserve them. It is something of a stroke of luck, then, that three distinct and almost complete versions of an anthem by William Turner should be extant: they allow an unusually detailed study of the revision processes of a successful Restoration composer. What emerges as most important from such a study is the fact that Turner's reworkings of each section of the piece appear to show a consistency of purpose that one simply cannot search for in the odd revised phrases and bars which survive for most other composers of the period.
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