Walsh in Europe and Beyond: Dissemination and Reception of English Music Prints in the 18th Century

Abstract

Music manuscripts and prints from the eighteenth century have increasingly been regarded by scholars of early-modern music historiography as integral components not only of musical performances, but also of music-based sociability and various forms of exchange and reception. Two historical figures who relate to all of these issues are the London publishers John Walsh (1665/1666– 1736) and his son of the same name (1709–1766), who printed and distributed dances, instrumental pieces, selected arias and entire aria corpuses from operas and oratorios between 1694 and 1766. Research on their prints has so far taken place largely in Britain, and has focused for the most part on George Frideric Handel and on printing techniques. The conference ‘Walsh in Europe and Beyond’, held at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald and at the Universität Greifswald, extended this field through a systematic investigation of European and international sheet-music collections, their provenance and the traces of their use. Its aim was to uncover Europe-wide and global distribution channels, user groups and the aesthetic or political functions of eighteenth-century music. The papers presented over the two and a half days were mainly grouped into regional areas. In our introduction, we (Gesa zur Nieden (Universität Greifswald) and Berthold Over (Universität Greifswald)) pointed to several points of departure when investigating the distribution and function of Walsh’s prints in Europe. The presence of these publications in the British Isles and Continental Europe offers many hints: frequent maritime trade facilitated the shipping of these prints, while individuals and diplomatic networks functioned as intermediaries and conduits for transmission. The uses of the Walsh prints are difficult to define with certainty; they seem to flow between categories of material for domestic music-making and objects for remembering performances, promoting celebrity and sharing in contemporaneous discourses about opera. In his keynote address ‘Cultural Transfer in Music in the Age of Enlightenment: Methodology and Research Questions’Martin Eybl (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien), starting with Gottfried van Swieten’s order for English prints, painted a cultural-historical picture that linked dissemination to the concepts of influence, cultural transfer, reception and mobility/migration, as well as discourses on translation studies and histoire croisée. He identified several aspects and agents related to the distribution of music: the buying public, cultural localization, mediators of musical material (arrangers, compilers) and limitations (such as regions not using Roman typeface, as in the case of Russia). In his paper ‘The Music Editions of John Walsh Junior and His Successors: Working Practices, Publishing Strategies and Reception’, Donald Burrows (The Open University, Milton Keynes) offered a comprehensive insight into Walsh’s operating principles and policies. The younger