Abstract:
By the end of the eighteenth century a fascination with Turkey and all things Turkish had spread across much of Europe. This fascination was felt most strongly in Vienna but also extended as far as Stockholm, Paris and London, and embraced art, literature, fashion and music. In its musical manifestation the role of so-called Turkish percussion instruments is reasonably well-documented, and this has served to create a rather distorted picture of the use of percussion during this period. As this thesis demonstrates, timpani and percussion instruments were also used by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century composers in novel ways that owed little or nothing to the Turkish tradition; this music has been largely ignored by scholars. There were many other ways in which some composers incorporated percussion instruments in their works in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My first example explores a tradition that developed in certain European courts wherein composers wrote concertos for multiple timpani, intended to provide a form of visually spectacular entertainment. The second example observes how simple, rustic percussion instruments, such as the xylophone, became popular with the Austrian and Bohemian aristocracy, particularly in the years following the French Revolution. These instruments were used in a wide range of musical genres including opera, orchestral music, chamber music and the cantata. The third example notes how the tambourine became fashionable among young upper- and middle-class girls in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century. This thesis considers whether these three relatively unknown examples of percussion usage during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were viewed as mere curiosities, serving to satisfy individual tastes for the exotic or novel; or whether they might be viewed, in retrospect, as contemporaneious representations of technological, historical, social and political changes. At the turn of the nineteenth century all the European powers were still coming to terms with the shock of the French Revolution, whilst the Enlightenment spirit continued to dominate science, philosophy, society and the arts in an effort to sweep away the last vestiges of medieval ideology. I argue that these works reflect, albeit modestly, the culmination of an era of power and prestige and constitute a turning point for musical, social and political developments in the early nineteenth century.