The performance and reception of Handel’s music in revolutionary North America

Thesis

This thesis explores the performances of, and responses to, the music of George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) in late colonial and early republican America. Scholarship has demonstrated how the fact that Handel’s music continued to be performed and thought about in Britain following the composer’s death – a unique occurrence in a musical culture which overwhelmingly valued the new – was deeply intertwined with local social and political developments. This study explores how Handelian performance traditions were transported across the Atlantic, and how they interacted with the very different social, political and religious dynamics of revolutionary America. It does so through three case-study chapters, each focussing on a cluster of Handel performances in a single location within a tightly-draw time frame: New York City in 1770, Boston in the early 1770s, and Boston again in the late 1780s. Understanding these performances as instances of the phenomenon of Cultural Transfer, the case studies show how Handel’s music was imported for reasons connected to the distinctive dynamics of colonial society in this turbulent period. In addition, they explore how Handel’s music emerged as a site of contention between the opposing political and social factions of the late colonial period: the music spoke by turns on behalf of clashing ideological commitments in a divided pre-war society. The thesis also shows how citizens of the early republic negotiated Handel as an authoritative cultural figure of the colonial past, again appropriating his music in the service of republican statecraft. In the central chapter in particular, the study attends to the sound of Handel’s music as well as its texts, exploring how its contested meanings were created through the sonic intertexts of the soundscape of colonial society and culture, and the urban geography of the colonial port city.

Authors: Lockwood, J

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-9raomeawv
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: American Revolution; Handel; cultural transfer; reception
• Subjects: Music; History