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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Western music, periods & styles > Classical music (c 1750 to c 1830)
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The Theatre Career of Thomas Arne (Hardcover)
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The Theatre Career of Thomas Arne (Hardcover)
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This book concerns the life and theatrical career of the great
native-born English composer and musician of the eighteenth
century, Thomas Augustine Arne (1710-1778). Its purpose is
three-fold. First, it provides a comprehensive biography and
account of the performance and publication of Arne's works during
his lifetime. Although Arne's childhood years get some attention,
the book focuses on the period from 1732 to 1778, a time of great
innovation for English opera and related genres. Second, it
considers Arne's social context: his relationships with the many
dramatists, actors, singers, and fellow composers and
instrumentalists-including many members of his own family-with whom
he collaborated on the London and Dublin stages as well as at the
London pleasure gardens. Third, it offers analysis of eighty
musical illustrations drawn from vocal works for the theatre
spanning Arne's career, and readers can simultaneously study and
listen to the musical examples on a companion web page that hosts
media files produced using music notation software. The audio
component constitutes a crucial supplement to a study of Arne
because so much of his extant theatre music cannot otherwise
readily be heard. Arne was the leading figure in English theatrical
music of his day. Dr. Charles Burney, the great eighteenth-century
historian of music, had a high opinion of the composer, especially
of Arne's setting of Milton's Comus (1738): "In this masque he
introduced a light, airy, original, and pleasing melody, wholly
different from that of Purcell or Handel, whom all English
composers had hitherto either pillaged or imitated. Indeed, the
melody of Arne at this time . . . forms an era in English Music; it
was so easy, natural and agreeable to the whole kingdom, that it
[became] the standard of all perfection at our theatres and public
gardens." Yet Burney's greatest compliment concerns Arne as a
composer of secular vocal music: "He must be allowed to have
surpassed [Purcell] in ease, grace, and variety." During his
forty-six-year career Arne composed music for over 100 stage
works-to say nothing of his myriad single songs, cantatas, and
instrumental compositions. Yet despite a relative wealth of source
material, scholars of theatre, drama, and music in our own time
have almost completely ignored him. As a consequence,
musicologists, theatre historians, and laypeople alike tend to
evince a detrimentally limited sense of the magnitude of Arne's
contribution to English music and especially to the history of
English opera. To listen to musical examples that accompany The
Theatre Career of Thomas Arne, please visit
http://www2.lib.udel.edu/udpress/thomasarne.htm
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