Alfred Hook Lecture 2022: "The Sovereign Ghost: Antonio Caldara and the Eclipses of Cultural History"
Thursday 22 September 2022
Professor Harry White (University College Dublin) presents the Conservatorium's prestigious Alfred Hook Lecture for 2022.
The Venetian composer Antonio Caldara (1670-1736) was one of the most eminent composers of his generation. Favourite court composer to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, he was at least as famous and respected as contemporaries such as J.S. Bach, Handel and Vivaldi. Yet despite his enormous output and the prestige he was accorded during his lifetime, he has been almost entirely forgotten.
In this lecture Professor Harry White (University College Dublin) explores the reasons for Caldara's eclipse and reveals why reinterpreting his role at the imperial court in Vienna is crucia to our understanding of the development of European music in the late Baroque.
About the lecturer
Professor Harry White
Harry White is Professor of Music at University College Dublin and a Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy of Music. From 2003-6 he was inaugural President of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, and served thereafter as a council member of the society until May 2021.
He is perhaps best known as a cultural historian of music in Ireland, on which subject he has published over eighty papers and book-chapters and three monographs: The Keeper's Recital, (1998), The Progress of Music in Ireland (2005), and Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (2008). He has also published extensively on music in early eighteenth-century Austria, and on the history of Anglo-American musicology since 1945.
He was general editor (with Barra Boydell) of The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (Dublin, 2013), and his most recent publications include The Musical Discourse of Servitude (Oxford and New York, 2020), The Well-Tempered Festschrift (Vienna, 2020) and Music, Migration and European Culture (Zagreb, 2020), the last of which he edited with Ivano Cavallini and Jolanta Guzy-Pasiak. Professor White was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2006, the Academy of Europe in 2015 and the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2018.
Location and dates
Recital Hall East, Sydney Conservatorium of Music
Thursday 22 September 2022
6pm-7pm
Register to attend in-person via the Sydney Conservatorium of Music Box Office.
Join the livestream via YouTube.
