Astronomer William Herschel's concertos resound with the
Music of the spheres
Archived article from Oct 1, 1999
By Douglas Frank
Talk about a career change!
For nearly 30 years, William Herschel (1738-1822) was a resourceful and respected professional musician, earning a livelihood by composing, teaching, and performing on the oboe, violin and other instruments, according to W. Davis Jerome, professor of music on the Camden campus.
But a Haydn or Mozart he wasn't, and so he turned full attention to his beloved avocation and became the most famous astronomer of his time, discovering the planet Uranus in 1781 with a telescope of his own making. The feat earned him the post of astronomer to King George III of England, a knighthood and a handsome annual pension.
His scientific achievements are well documented in numerous biographies and studies. Teamed with his sister, Caroline, who often sang with him in concerts, Herschel discovered satellites of Uranus and Saturn, the direction of solar motion, infrared radiation, hundreds of double stars and thousands of nebulae. Considered the father of modern astronomy, he became the first president of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Herschel the musician, however, is the subject of particular interest to Jerome, who has compiled modern transcriptions of his three complete oboe concertos and part of a fourth. These concertos, along with a preface dealing with the artistic life of this Anglicized, German-born composer, were published for the first time last year by the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, the nation's oldest and most prestigious learned society. Herschel himself was a member of the society, having been recommended by Benjamin Franklin.
"The Oboe Concertos of Sir William Herschel" was painstakingly edited over some 10 years by Jerome and his wife, Frances, who worked from manuscripts in the composer's own hand that were acquired by the music library of the University of California-Berkeley in 1958.
Jerome, an oboist himself, conducted the Mozart Orchestra in a performance of two of the oboe works, which were recorded for the first time in a 1995 Newport Classic CD titled "Sir William Herschel: Music by the Father of Modern Astronomy." The soloist in the recording, the first performance of these pieces since Herschel's death, is Richard Woodhams, principal oboist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The liner notes include comments by Jerome about Herschel the musician and by Harvard astronomer Owen Gingrich about Herschel the scientist.
According to Jerome, Herschel's oboe concertos "cannot be classified as great music in the tradition of Haydn or Mozart, but they are arresting, innovative works, the product of a superb analytic mind driven by an obsession for order and coherence. Stylistically individual and harmonically idiosyncratic, they were written to display Herschel's ingenuity as a composer and his virtuosity as a performer."
But perhaps a more compelling reason for studying Herschel's work today is the glimpse it offers into 18th-century performance practices. The manuscripts of the oboe concertos contain "unique and precise written indications for many of those hidden performance practices employed by the great virtuosion the oboe," Jerome writes, noting these are particularly evident in the written-out cadenzas found near the ends of movements.
"One should not be surprised by Herschel's precision in his musical indications, since he seems to have applied the same meticulous effort in these as he did in annotating his astronomical observations," Jerome observes.
Herschel evidently believed that the performer should follow the composer's directions literally, says Jerome, which might have been considered musical heresy at that time, when performers considered themselves the "supreme interpreters and elaborators of the music." His detailed instructions have given us "a useful pedagogical tool in our efforts to recapture something of the musical aesthetic of his time," Jerome says.
Herschel was born in Hanover, Germany, on Nov. 15, 1738, the second son of Isaac Herschel, an oboist in the Hanoverian Foot Guards. In 1756, the year of Mozart's birth, Herschel moved to England and found a job as a music copyist. In 1760 he was appointed director of the Durham Militia Band and through the decade enjoyed his most productive years, composing most of his 25 symphonies and numerous concertos, sonatas and other works. Despite this impressive output, only six sonatas for harpsichord and a work known as the "echo" catch, a round, appeared in print during his lifetime.
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