Samuel Wesley as an antiquarian composer
Samuel Wesley's unusually diverse compositional style was in part a reflection of London's uniquely eclectic musical life. As a child, he experienced the best modern music at the Bach-Abel concerts as well as several centuries of early music at the Concerts of Ancient Music, mixing the two...
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| Format: | Print Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Illinois Press
2010
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| In: |
Music and the Wesleys
Year: 2010, Pages: 183-199 |
| Summary: | Samuel Wesley's unusually diverse compositional style was in part a reflection of London's uniquely eclectic musical life. As a child, he experienced the best modern music at the Bach-Abel concerts as well as several centuries of early music at the Concerts of Ancient Music, mixing the two repertories together in the family concerts. He used both styles with assurance in his early music, but as an adult he began to see the possibilities of combining them in large-scale works, following the precedent established by Thomas Arne, Benjamin Cooke, and Thomas Linley, among others. However, he seems to have been the first person to combine old and new in single movements. In his later instrumental works he showed his enthusiasm for J.S. Bach by combining elements of Bach's contrapuntal musical language with large-scale classical patterns. Stylistic diversity of this sort was an expression of London's advanced cultural life, where the past had been discovered and embraced in most intellectual and artistic fields earlier than in other European centers. Samuel Wesley's fruitful engagement with the past certainly anticipated similar things in Mendelssohn, Schumann, and other 19th-century German composers and produced a number of fine, distinctive works that deserve to be better known today. (AN: 2010-9478) (RILM) |
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| ISBN: | 0252077679 |
| Contains: | In: Music and the Wesleys
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