Department of Music

Although the activities of the Concert Spirituel are usually studied through the concert programs compiled by Constant Pierre in 1899 and emended by Antoine Bloch-Michel in 1975, the data they provide about individual pieces of music are sketchy. Eight inventories of Concert Spirituel music, two published here for the first time, are more specific. They generally give title and composer, and they also include works that were acquired but not performed.
    The Concert Spirituel did not have a single music library: instead, each entrepreneur built his own, treating it as a commercial asset that could be leased to his successors. Changes in repertoire usually ascribed to changing musical taste (the querelle des bouffons in the 1750s and the révolution musicale circa 1770) can be linked to these lease agreements (which kept older works in the repertoire) and to refusals to make these agreements, which caused old music to be replaced with new works. Taken together, the inventories form a chronicle of changing musical taste in Paris from 1734 to 1778.
    Appended to the article are transcripts of the Paris Opéra’s 1748 inventory of Concert Spirituel music, and a newly discovered inventory of music that Pancrace Royer assembled between 1748 and 1755. The latter is particularly valuable for studying the early history of the concert symphony in France, since it contains a list of the French, Italian, and German symphonies that Royer played.

A recently discovered street poster advertising the Concert Spirituel performance of August 15, 1754, when compared with the previously known ones from 1779 and 1787, sheds light on the efforts by Parisian concert entrepreneurs to build a paying audience for public concerts, in an era when the means of communicating with that public were extremely limited. Analysis of the corresponding concert reviews in the Mercure de France and other publications shows that these early examples of published music criticism were essentially transcriptions of the posters. “Critics” simply amalgamated the texts of the posters with pithy observations by acquaintances who had attended the concert; there was no expectation that the writer would have been present in person. The considerable time and money that the entrepreneurs spent on creating and distributing street posters demonstrate the commercial imperatives that shaped the programs of the Concert Spirituel

The Concert Spirituel was the first public concert series in Europe. Its repertoires, which produced some of music's earliest canons, were shaped more strongly by bricolage (creative appropriation of available pre-existing works) than by deliberate artistic vision on the part of the concert entrepreneurs. Out of these repertoires grew a canon of composers, described by such terms as immortel, génie, and grand maître. This unusual example of an eighteenth-century canon of great music vanished in the last quarter of the eighteenth century because it was generated and supported by individual writers, rather than being perpetuated by formal organizations such as the Paris Conservatoire. Evidence for these ideas comes from 1,200 concert programs, a printed repertoire from 1753, seven Concert Spirituel music library inventories-one newly discovered-and 250 manuscript scores and parts used by its soloists, orchestra, and chorus.

Syllabus for a graduate seminar. Music in commercials helps create desire and loyalty; in political ads, it may do the same, or create fear and unease. Through detailed study of assigned readings and video archives, and weekly presentations and discussion sessions, we will (a) deepen our understanding of music as a rhetorical device; (b) analyze 20 th-century use of common-practice period music theory; (c) hone research skills and critical thinking; and (d) practice persuasion orally, visually, and in writing.

The querelle des bouffons was nearly over when Pancrace Royer, a French composer with a fondness for Italian music, made his contribution: a choral version of Pergolesi’s Stabat mater that became one of the most frequently played pieces in the history of the Paris Concert Spirituel. Other choral arrangements followed by Hiller, Vogler, Eybler, Salieri, and Lvov. Royer’s score, had it survived, could have told us much about why the Stabat appealed to broader audiences than had La serva padrona.
A choral version of the Stabat survives in Lyon, written in the hand of Nicolas-Antoine Bergiron de Briou, who was active in the Concert de Lyon for almost half a century. Is it a copy of Royer’s work? Two newly identified chorus parts from the Concert Spirituel music library suggest that it is, but there are discrepancies that cannot, as of yet, be explained.
My research on the filiation issue generated insight into a broader question: how did French arrangers modify the new Italian style to make it more attractive to French audiences? The adjustments were remarkably few: restructuring the work to fit into a familiar genre; increasing contrast between movements by inserting choruses; replacing alien castrato voices with more familiar ones; cutting out phrase repetitions; deemphasizing fast movements in sacred music, and shortening a lengthy work. These changes gave the galant style a broader base in France, and within twenty years, the long reign of seventeenth-century operas and motets came to an end there.

During the French Revolution, important music collections were seized and sent to literary depots, housed in Paris's former monasteries and convents. I never found time to turn this conference paper into a published article, but I'm posting it here as the information may be useful to researchers interested in French ancien regime music.

Review of an edited essay collection on 18th century French musical patronage by the royal family, nobles, and upper bourgeois outside of the royal court at Versailles. The essays come from a 2015 colloquium at Versailles; most of the essays are in French.

A conference on ‘Global Intersections in the Music of the 18th Century’ had been planned by the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music for March of 2020 in Stockholm, in collaboration with the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. It was postponed just days before its opening in response to increasingly grim news about the Covid-19 pandemic. Deferring it to a videoconference in August 2021 forced the cancellation of plans to hold paper sessions and a reception at the Academy’s headquarters in the Gamla Stan (Old Town) and enjoy backstage tours of Drottningholm and other historic opera venues, but had the positive outcome of making the conference part of the celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Academy in 1771. More than fifty dix-huitièmistes from all over the world gathered on four half-days to hear a total of twenty-eight papers.

The other papers were a smorgasbord that included English and French luxury goods at London pleasure gardens that were produced by slave labour in the West Indies (Ashley Greathouse, University of Cincinnati), the unpublished music treatise of the musician-turned-astronomer William Herschel (Sarah Waltz, University of the Pacific), early London musical-miscellany publications that presented excerpts from Handel's operas in new and surprising ways (Alison DeSimone, University of Missouri–Kansas City) and my own paper concerning a satire on French provincial orchestras (Beverly Wilcox, California State University Sacramento). Faith Lanam (University of California Santa Cruz) gave an update on her latest research on the Vezerro de lecciones manuscript, a collection of solfeggi by Feo, Leo and Ignacio Jerusalem that was used to train lower-status girls to enter high-status Mexico City convents as choir nuns. [...]Louise K. Stein (University of Michigan) presented new documentation about the first opera productions in the Americas, La púrpura de la rosa (Lima, 1701), Celos aun del aire matan (Mexico, 1728), El Zeleuco (Mexico, 1710) and La Partenope (Mexico, undated), explaining how they travelled via Spanish diplomatic networks from Naples and Madrid to the colonies and observed a number of typically Spanish performance conventions. Most used the Zoom desktop client, but a few relied on mobile phones, and about half left their cameras off during the talks, so that the audience conserved bandwidth while still giving speakers the sort of visual feedback that a live audience normally provides.

Mozart's "Paris" symphony was composed in 1778 for the Concert Spirituel and performed in the Chateau des Tuileries. A sketch by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin has recently been recognized as a representation of the Concert Spirituel in that year. This paper, written jointly by an art historian  and a musicologist, brings together data in Mozart's letters, sketches by three different artists, architectural plans, inventories, and an unpublished maquette , calculates the capacity of the venue, and illuminates the transition from aristocratic patronage to public concerts that affected the lives of Mozart and every other composer of his generation.