My lecture recital will explore the beginnings of the English cantata by presenting portions of three of the earliest known cantatas, all composed "after the Italian manner": Love I defy thee by D. Purcell, 1706; Alexis by Pepusch, 1710 (both the Purcell and the Pepusch cantatas have texts by Hughes); and They say you're angry by Eccles, 1708. In addition, I will address the use of English texts in the Italian cantata form; contrast the use of recitative and aria in the Italian and English cantata; and analyze the use of melodic motives in both types of cantatas.

Homer Rudolf, Professor of Music Emeritus, Department of Music.
"18th Century Musical Traditions in the 19th and 20th Century Culture of the Germans from Russia"

The Russian Crown succeeded in defeating the Turks and acquiring vast areas of uncultivated steppe land in the second half of the 18th century.   Interested in having the land cultivated, Catherine the Great and her grandson, Alexander I, invited foreigners to settle in the Volga River and Black Sea areas.   In 1769, the Volga area reported a total of 6,433 German immigrant families, and the Black Sea area reported 3,640 by 1810.

Residents in German lands at that time had many reasons to be dissatisfied with their state in life: a lingering feudal system, war, religious persecution, high taxes and scarce land.   In contrast, they were promised free land, local self-government, freedom of religion, and exemption from military service.   Settled in villages based upon their religious affiliation, they brought along and sustained a variety of musical traditions: religious, folk song and instrumental.

In the 1870s, they began to lose their special rights.   That factor plus a lack of available land for their growing population prompted many to emigrate to North and South America. Settling in large concentrations in Kansas, Nebraska, eastern Colorado and the Dakotas, they again took their traditions with them -   some newly established in Russia, but others still be traceable to 18th -century German lands.   Here their extended isolated existence allowed for the retention of many cultural traditions.

This paper will present and discuss 18th -century musical traditions of the German Russians that can be documented during their residency in Russia and the U.S .

Raymond F. Hilliard, Professor of English, Department of English.
"An Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Novelistic Myth"

In Edmund Burke's well-known depiction of Marie-Antoinette in the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), he portrays the queen's "suffering" as the product of symbolic ritual sacrifice and cannibalism, and links both of these to tragedy as a literary genre or mode.  In doing this, Burke draws in extensive detail upon contemporary novelistic discourse, in particular upon a myth of persecution that informs narratives by a broad array of significant writers from Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding to Charles Robert Maturin, who in Melmoth the Wanderer makes even more explicit a relation between cannibalism and tragedy as a literary mode.  There are numerous instances in such narratives of the "spectacle" that Burke depicts--the spectacle of an assault in which a "wretched" or "devoted" or "unfortunate" female "victim" is sacrificed and symbolically consumed by a throng comprising, or spurred on by, fierce, sometimes openly cannibalistic women, a version of what Elias Canetti designates as the "baiting crowd" or "hunting pack," which forms for the purpose of tormenting and killing a victim and then of eating or incorporating it, often symbolically.  Though the most common female victim is young and unmarried, an adolescent, she is, like Marie-Antoinette, identified with the figure of the mother, often explicitly but sometimes by implication (e.g., through references to her breasts, through her striking resemblance to her own mother or a mother figure, or through an emphasis on her possible loss of "bloom," which signifies a prospective fertility); and so too is one or another variant of the femme cannibale, who inflicts or inspires the persecution, a prominent instance being Mother Sinclair in Richardson's Clarissa.  In tragic versions of the myth like Burke's (most notably, Clarissa, Melmoth the Wanderer, William Beckford's Vathek, and William Godwin's Caleb Williams), the victim is persecuted unto death--this in fact is the very essence of the tragedy.  In comic versions (for instance, Fielding's Tom Jones and Frances Burney's Evelina), the assaulted woman is "repaired" and "restored to life," the very essence of the comedy.  In tragic renderings she is a queen or "saint" or similarly idealized woman who is brought down (the phrase "fallen in sacrifice" is often used); in comic renderings she is eventually granted an apotheosis as a goddess, a queen, a  saint, etc., the reverse of a tragic outcome.  As in Burke's account, the final disposition of the persecuted woman implicitly determines the fate of an entire social order; and more broadly, through the typical text's attention to her "bloom," it determines the wellbeing of an implied natural order.   Especially in texts with tragic endings, the persecutory violence, in effect spilling over from the situation of the central female victim, is shown to characterize major social institutions--courtship and marriage, the family, the church, the law, politics, and so on.  In tragic narratives like Burke's the topos of cannibalism is much more overt and insistent than in comic narratives.  Though metaphorical cannibalism (or less extreme modes of oral aggression) bears the same essential meanings in the different instances of the enveloping myth, writers are consciously prompted to pursue it as a theme by a variety of sources--contemporary travel books, classical mythology, an early Orientalist study of India, the novels of other authors, and, in Burke's case, a missive from a French marquis.    

Charles Johnson, Professor of Art History, Emeritus, Department of Art and Art History.
"The Prints of William Hogarth "

The lecture, part of the Rococo Festival, relates to the Hogarth prints in the exhibition, Rococo to Revolution: European Prints of the Eighteenth Century on view from February 11 to May 7, 2005, in the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art at the University of Richmond.

The lecture explores three themes: religion--the challenge of emerging Methodism to the Church of England; politics--the controversy between William Hogarth and John Wilkes; and morality--as shown in Hogarth's 'Modern Moral Subjects' specifically his series, 'A Harlot's Progress' where there may be, according to contemporary scholars, an interesting   "mixture of pity, tenderness, and prurience."