Janet K. Page

Bio: Janet K. Page is an academic researcher from University of Memphis. The author has contributed to research in topics: Oratorio & Procession. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 4 publications receiving 17 citations.

Convent Music and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Vienna

Abstract: Janet K. Page explores the interaction of music and piety, court and church, as seen through the relationship between the Habsburg court and Vienna's convents. For a period of some twenty-five years, encompassing the end of the reign of Emperor Leopold I and that of his elder son, Joseph I, the court's emphasis on piety and music meshed perfectly with the musical practices of Viennese convents. This mutually beneficial association disintegrated during the eighteenth century, and the changing relationship of court and convents reveals something of the complex connections among the Habsburg court, the Roman Catholic Church, and Viennese society. Identifying and discussing many musical works performed in convents, including oratorios, plays with music, feste teatrali, sepolcri, and other church music, Page reveals a golden age of convent music in Vienna and sheds light on the convents' surprising engagement with contemporary politics.

Transgressive Gestures: Women and Violin Performance in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Abstract: iii

Dressing Angelo Soliman

Abstract: Angelo Soliman, a black African, conveyed his heritage and his full participation in eighteenth-century Habsburg society through a mixture of eastern and western dress. As a freemason, Soliman's costume evoked popular conceptions of 'blackness' while asserting his equality within his lodge. Yet the costumes Soliman wore in the service of Prince von Liechtenstein or in the imperial natural history collection, where his stuffed body was placed after death, displayed political power by symbolically subjugating the African. Soliman's daily, Freemasonic, state ceremonial, and post-mortem dress reveal the complex layers of African identity in eighteenth-century Europe.

Music-Making Women-Aristocrats: in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. 6 Arias for Soprano, Strings and Basso Continuo by Maria Antonia Walpurgis

Abstract: Abstract The present article reflects on the shortage of studies concerning music-composing women in the 18th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and focuses on one unique figure among those female musicians – Maria Antonia Walpurgis, an aristocrat of Polish descent, who demonstrated versatile talents. Thoroughly educated in her childhood, she was a poet, composer, singer, and director of her own stage works. This paper discusses the aristocratic artist’s most important experiences and achievements in the field of music, as well as analysing her earliest surviving work, the cycle of 6 Arias for Soprano, Strings and Basso Continuo (1747), which Walpurgis may well have performed herself. The arias have been preserved in a manuscript kept at the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden, shelf mark Mus.3119-F-11. My analysis assesses their style and aesthetic.