... Press 2020 musical elegy popular balladry female warrior heroine musicology folklore Eighteenth- Century Life Volume 44, Number 2, April 2020 doi 10.1215/00982601-8218591 Copyright 2020 by Duke University Press 1 7 Transcendent Ephemera: Performing Deep Structure in Elegies, Ballads...

..., and J. W. von Goethe s Sorrows of Werther, and fans embellished with 2 Eighteenth-Century Life engravings depicting William Collins s ode to music, The Passions. 1 These different media ranging in their materiality from fabric and por- celain to paper familiarized the buyers of these objects...

... search reveals hundreds of such volumes across the humanities, sciences, and social sci- ences, from the Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music and Cambridge Com- panion to Quakerism, to the Routledge Companion to Urban Regeneration, most from the last f ifteen years. At a time when the halls of academe...

... in the early poems, Dryden relies heavily on astrology and alchemy, which he tends to weigh against the competing “sciences” of astronomy and chemistry, and, to a lesser extent, on demonology and other folk beliefs.12 Dryden’s earliest published poem, the elegy “Upon the Death of Lord Hastings...

... on the potential for cre- ative play that this figure-ground relationship creates in music and poetry, the literary theorist Reuven Tsur also alludes to the old Soviet joke about the worker stealing wheelbarrows from a factory in plain sight because the guard charged with protecting the property is focusing...

... was in a precarious state and needed deliberate rescue. Hence the conclusion of “Elegy, on the Death of Scots Music”: O Scotland! that cou’ yence afford To bang the pith of Roman sword, Winna your sons, wi joint accord, won’t To battle...

... an aspect of schol- arship, as Alden Cavenaugh notes in her introduction. But what precisely does “culture of genre” mean: genre painting in culture? Or perhaps the everyday as part of the culture of representation? While there are many genres in music, there is nothing called “genre music...

..., Hackett planned to present Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” alongside other pieces (including Gray’s “Churchyard Elegy Soon after, it appears that Hackett became a fully fledged member of the profession playing Othello opposite Theophi- lus Cibber in September 1755.20 Another such volume...

....” In the Celtic peripheries of Britain, antiquarians and poets were recovering and renewing native oral traditions, notably in popular song collections such as David Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scots Songs (1769) and Burns and Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum (1787 – 1803), and were producing vernacular...

... College” (1747) and “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” (1751).5 An 1860 letter men- tions him finishing the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, “which I had commenced a few days before from curiosity and had continued from interest.”6 And in his very early criticism, we find James formulating...

... of the text and lends another level of order and stability to the collection. The euphony of the poems, which are predominantly classical in form—odes, elegies, epistles, and epigrams—is echoed in this balanced structure. The editorial voice is quiet and unobtrusive. Here, enlightenment is to be found...

..., Blacklock became a focus for amateur liter- ary and musical activity, and he sought to encourage the type of convivial, intellectually “improving” sociability to which he had become accustomed in Edinburgh by forming a debating club; his circle included his child- hood friend, the poetically minded...

.... Or, indeed, of current events in the case of his Ode, Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746, a minor triumph of lyric concentration in two brief stanzas of Marvellian tetrameter, composed while the rebellion was in the ascendant. Though generally read as an elegy for the Hanoverian fallen, notably...

..., and hymns. There were also songs and ballads, which were given their own set of instructions for spoken delivery, suggesting that musical forms were not always sung, but often read in performance. Would- be speakers here were told to avoid all that was “laboured or heavy” and to learn to distinguish...

... then turns to an idea made famous in Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard : the rural youth whose genius cannot flower because of deprivation and poverty. In Falconer, the poet both mourns, and offers these passages as a compensation, for those sailors whose youthful potential for learning...

... MacFlecknoe and The Dunciad lie endless obscurer exercises in wit: long burlesques of Gray’s Elegy or The Essay on Man, mock-pastoral dialogues between rustic idi- ots, little tercets about boxing or throwing up. Beyond the cheerful ballads and drinking songs lie all sorts of oddities: lines...

... delight or joy, often associated with the effects of music, and Pope often equates Muse, music, and “sacred Fire” (as in his Ode for Musick, written in 1708, published in 1713) in his early poetry. It cannot be stressed enough, especially for the study of Pope, that “rapture” and its cognates...

... as they did a hundred years ago; and a poet today would no more think to versify a farming manual (as Virgil did) than a composer would wish to set to music a telephone directory. The word “didactic” itself generally retains the pejorative connotations it acquired...

... Overwhelm’d Parnassus with their Tide. The Madrigal at first they overcome, And the proud Sonnet fell by the same Doom; With them grave Tragedy adorn’d her Flights, And mournful Elegy her Funeral Rites.18 Gildon’s summary judgment on this passage, which he quotes in its entirety...

... use of the imperative here seems inconsistent with definitions suggesting that the robin’s “payment” in song is an optional or incidental response to the speaker’s hospitality. In the fourth, and last, stanza, claiming that the robin’s music inspires “Unchangeable Friendship and Love” (28...