TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
9th Biennial Conference on Baroque Music
ABSTRACT
Trumpet music in John Walsh's Harmonia Anglicana
Alexander McGrattan
Between 1701 and 1710 the London music publisher John Walsh published around
fifty suites of act music for four-part strings in the series Harmonia
Anglicana or the Musick of the English Stage. The majority of
these comprised the act music from theatrical productions presented at
the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. From 1705, Walsh issued a complementary
series, from plays presented at the Queen's Theatre. Concordances have
been made between two of the publications in these series, the overture
to the play 'Tunbridge Walks' by John Barrett (1703) and 'A new Set of
Tunes … for the Theatre' by William Corbett (1708), and works by the same
composers which include solo parts for trumpet: Sonata No. 1 by Barrett
in Lbl. Add. MS 49599 and the 'Overture and Aires' from Corbett's Six
Sonatas with an Overture and Aires (London & Amsterdam, c.1708).
Significantly, Walsh did not issue the trumpet pieces as arrangements for
four-part strings, but merely supplied the string parts of the full versions,
while omitting the trumpet parts.
In this paper, I will identify other suites published by Walsh in these
series that appear to have been issued incomplete and which may have originally
contained parts for one or more trumpet. The implications of the publication
of these pieces for contemporary performances will be considered, and recorded
audio extracts of a realisation of the overture to one of the plays will
be presented.
Last updated on 22 March 2000 by Yo
Tomita