Book Review: Child Composers in the Old Conservatories: How Orphans Became Elite Musicians

Abstract

since the author engages head-on with an issue that historians of all persuasions must confront when studying past cultural events: those inevitable gaps left by the surviving textual evidence. Her solution is promising, grounded in recent work by Carolyn Abbate and Elisabeth Le Guin, among others, emphasizing the corporeal and experiential dimensions of music-making. Stressing the physical and performative aspects of the musical and dramatic occasions identified, the author usefully evokes Gertrude Stein’s concept of ‘syncopated time’ – whereby the “past collapses into present; present collapses into past” (p. 63) – and shows how ongoing continuities within these performance traditions can forge links between early-modern and present-day events. By examining sung services at Christ’s Hospital school from the seventeenth century to the present, or interrogating recent school-based performances of Dido and Aeneas, the author argues that we reanimate the past by re-enacting these cultural practices. Using present-day experiences – as a participant, as a listener and viewer, and as a parent of school-age children – the author is able to nourish and inform the work as a historian, fleshing out the bones of the narrative tentatively reconstructed from textual sources. This book thus offers a skilful model of how to engage with past culture, despite the inevitable challenges posed by lacunae in available sources. The work will be of enormous value to scholars working across a wide spectrum of early modern cultural discourses, including gender identity, social hierarchy, the development of the professions, religious and confessional practices, etc. It is a bold and provocative study and should appeal to a range of readers far greater than its rather functional, descriptive title suggests.