Music and the Benefit Performance in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Description

In the early eighteenth century, the benefit performance became an essential component of commercial music-making in Britain. Benefits, adapted from the spoken theatre, provided a new model from which instrumentalists, singers, and composers could reap financial and professional rewards. Benefits could be given as theatre pieces, concerts, or opera performances for the benefit of individual performers; or in aid of specific organizations. The benefit changed Britain's musico-theatrical landscape during this time and these special performances became a prototype for similar types of events in other European and American cities. Indeed, the charity benefit became a musical phenomenon in its own right, leading, for example, to the lasting success of Handel's Messiah. By examining benefits from a musical perspective - including performers, audiences, and institutions - the twelve chapters in this collection present the first study of the various ways in which music became associated with the benefit system in eighteenth-century Britain.

Matthew Gardner holds a Junior Professorship in Musicology at the Eberhard-Karls-Universitat Tubingen, Germany in association with the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz. He has published widely on Handel and his English contemporaries, including Handel and Maurice Greene's Circle at the Apollo Academy: The Music and Intellectual Contexts of Oratorios, Odes and Masques (2008). In 2014, his edition of Handel's Wedding Anthems for the Hallische Handel-Ausgabe received the International Handel Research Prize. Alison DeSimone is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. A recent publication, 'Equally Charming, Equally Too Great: Female Rivalry, Politics, and Opera in Early Eighteenth-Century London' in the Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal won the 2018 Ruth Solie Prize for an Outstanding Article on British Music from the North American British Music Studies Association. DeSimone's work has been supported by grants from the American Musicological Society, the American Handel Society, the Handel Institute, and the University of Missouri Research Board.