Date/Time
Wed, Sep 10, 2025
4:30 pm EDT - 6:00 pm EDT
The 2025–2026 season of Encounters with Eighteenth-Century Music will open with a panel discussion addressing the variety of challenges that arise when editing critical editions. Jason B. Grant (moderator) will be joined by panelists Bruce Alan Brown, Paul Corneilson, Drew Edward Davies, and Nancy November.
Registration:
Please click here to register for the event. Registration is free but required.
Bios:
Jason B. Grant (PhD, University of Pittsburgh, 2005) joined the Editorial Office of the Packard Humanities Institute in 2006. For Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: The Complete Works he served as a contributing editor for several volumes of keyboard concertos, cantatas, and Passions. For Johann Christian Bach: Operas and Dramatic Works he has edited the essay collection The Operas of Johann Christian Bach: An Introduction (2023) and two of the operas, Carattaco (2024) and La clemenza di Scipione (2025). He is currently editing the opera Adriano in Siria. His articles on the music of C.P.E. Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann have appeared in Bach-Jahrbuch, BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute, and Magdeburger Telemann-Studien. Previously he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh.
Bruce Alan Brown (PhD 1986, University of California, Berkeley), Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of Southern California, specializes in later eighteenth-century opera and ballet, in particular the music of Gluck and Mozart. His publications include Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna (Oxford, 1991); the critical report for Mozart, Idomeneo (ed. Daniel Heartz), in the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (2005); critical editions (Kassel: Bärenreiter) of Gluck’s Le Diable à quatre (1992), L’Arbre enchanté (Versailles version, 2010; Viennese version. 2015), and Cythère assiegée (1759 version, in preparation); W. A. Mozart: Così fan tutte (Cambridge, 1995); The Grotesque Dancer on the Eighteenth-Century Stage (ed., with Rebecca Harris-Warrick; Madison, WI, 2005); and numerous articles. From 2005 to 2007 he was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and he served as President of the Mozart Society of America from 2019 to 2023. He is a member of the editorial board of the Gluck-Gesamtausgabe (Mainz) and of the Akademie für Mozart-Forschung (Salzburg).
Paul Corneilson is managing editor for the Packard Humanities Institute, including Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: The Complete Works (2000–2024) and Johann Christian Bach: Operas and Dramatic Works (2020 to the present). After earning his PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1992), he worked on Recent Researches in Music at A-R Editions (1993–99), and commissioned the five-volume set, Ballet Music from the Mannheim Court. He has published articles and essays in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Musicology, Early Music, Current Musicology, BACH: Journal of the Riemenscheider Bach Institute, Bach-Jahrbuch, Mozart-Jahrbuch, Mozart-Studien, The Cambridge Companion to Mozart and Mozart in Context (both edited by Simon Keefe). He is also author of a two-act play, Hector & Felix, and The Autobiography of Ludwig Fischer: Mozart’s First Osmin (published by the Mozart Society of America). He edited several volumes in CPEB:CW, including the five St. John Passions; an opera seria by Gian Francesco De Majo, Ifigenia in Tauride; and Christian Cannabich, Ballet Music Arranged for Chamber Ensemble. He is currently working on a critical edition of J.C. Bach’s Temistocle, having completed editions of four other works by the composer: Lucio Silla, Zanaida, Amor vincitore, and most recently Orione, ossia Diana vendicata.
Drew Edward Davies, professor of musicology at Northwestern University, specializes in early modern church music from New Spain and Mediterranean Europe. He serves as Academic Coordinator of the Seminario de música en la Nueva España y el México Independiente (Musicat) in Mexico City and President of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music (2021-2025). Among his publications are Forging Repertories: Cathedral Music in New Spain and Its Performance (Oxford University Press, 2024), critical editions of Manuel de Sumaya, Santiago Billoni, and Ignacio Jerusalem, and thematic catalogues of the music archives of Durango and Mexico City cathedrals.
Nancy November is a Professor of Musicology in the University of Auckland’s School of Music. Combining interdisciplinarity and cultural history, her research centres on chamber music of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, probing questions of historiography, canonization, and genre. She is the recipient of a Humboldt Fellowship (2010–12) and three Marsden Grants from the New Zealand Royal Society. Recent publications include Opera in the Viennese Home from Mozart to Rossini (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and Haydn Studies 2 is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press this year.
Abstracts:
Christoph Gluck’s Cythère assiegée (Vienna, 1759): Issues and Strategies in Editing the Vaudevilles
(Bruce Alan Brown, University of Southern California [emeritus])
The Viennese version of Cythère assiegée exemplifies a mid-century hybrid form of opéra-comique: it consists of 30-some orchestrally accompanied numbers newly composed by Gluck, plus 60 or so vaudevilles—popular tunes (both old and recent), retexted so as to carry the dialogue, most of them stemming from the 1748 all-vaudeville original version of the opera (Brussels, 1748) by Charles-Simon Favart. The two types of numbers are transmitted through quite different sorts of sources, and are subject to quite different editorial techniques and standards of fixity. Gluck’s airs nouveaux, the only music contained in scores of the opera, can be edited the same way as in any modern critical edition. But the vaudevilles circulated largely through the oral tradition, which is unstable by definition; when notated (with or without texts, almost always just monophonically), in manuscript or printed chansonniers and/or in supplements to librettos, the tunes display a wide range of variability. Integrating the vaudevilles’ music into a critical edition poses numerous questions: What sources should be preferred, and why? Should vaudeville airs be transposed with respect to the keys in which they are found in the sources, and if so, according to what criteria? Is it appropriate to add editorial bass lines or other accompaniments? What principles should guide the underlaying of text (taken from the printed libretto) to the vaudeville tunes? What sorts of guidance for users of this new edition are appropriate for the preface and critical apparatus? I will illustrate my strategies in confronting these and other issues by way of examples from Favart and Gluck’s witty and charming opera.
J.C. Bach’s Orione (London, 1763): How to Reconstruct an Incomplete Opera from Various Sources
(Paul Corneilson, The Packard Humanities Institute)
Only four of Johann Christian Bach’s dozen operas survive in more-or-less complete autograph scores, and another three in partial autographs. Fortunately, all but one of the other operas also survive in complete secondary copies or contemporaneous editions. The only exception is his first opera for London: Orione, ossia Diana vendicata. Approximately two-thirds of the music survives for this opera, which is also the only opera of Bach’s that was revived at the King’s Theatre at a later date (1777), including manuscript copies in Oxford and London, while four arias are found only in the “Favourite Songs” edition. This talk explains how the work was reconstructed and recently published in a critical edition by the Packard Humanities Institute.
Ignacio Jerusalem Selected Works: Priorities, Publics, and a Puzzle
Drew Edward Davies (Northwestern University)
Soon to reach ten volumes, the series Ignacio Jerusalem: Obra Selecta – Selected Works, published in Madrid by Dairea Ediciones, aims to create editions that encourage performance of music by Ignacio Jerusalem (1707–69), a Leccese composer active in Mexico City whose works achieved the widest dissemination of any composer in New Spain. One editorial challenge encountered in this project concerns how to prioritize types of source material that result from that early dissemination: autograph scores from the metropole may contain different information than sets of parts or contrafacts preserved in peripheral locations that were copied over the course of nearly a century. A more philosophical challenge involves the impact of a print edition on the practical early music environment, including at what stage the edition reaches its intended public and via what medium. Finally, a challenge raised by a specific articulation marking that seems to indicate repeated notes can be discussed by the group.
Reconstructing Beethoven’s Eroica Quintet: Making Choices, Preserving Performer Agency
(Nancy November, University of Auckland)
When the first violin part is missing from a nineteenth-century chamber arrangement, an editor faces a central question: should the gap be filled, or left open for performers to interpret? This paper examines that question through the reconstruction of the first violin part in an early string quintet arrangement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.
The arrangement, created in Beethoven’s lifetime, reduces a thirteen-part orchestral score—rich in obbligato wind and brass writing—into a double-viola string quintet. My editorial process began with colour-coding the orchestral score to track each instrumental line through the surviving quintet parts, identifying how the arranger redistributed melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material. Analysis revealed a clear strategy: the core string texture often remained intact, while inner voices took on wind parts via double stops, leaving the (missing) first violin to carry the oboe or violin melodies.
These findings not only guided the reconstruction but illuminated why quintets were a favoured medium for symphonic arrangements in the early nineteenth century: the extra voice allowed arrangers to capture more of the orchestral palette while maintaining a manageable texture for domestic music-making. In this case, “manageable” also meant that some passages were intentionally left open to performer decision-making—register adjustments, octave shifts, and contrabass doubling choices—reflecting a collaborative ethos between arranger and players.