Musical Festivals Database

Musical Festivals Database This page provides information and occasional updates about the Musical Festival Database (www.musicalfestivals.org). Welcome!

The Musical Festivals Database (MFD) is a fully-searchable index of programs, personnel, ensembles and venues of musical festivals held between 1695 and 1940. Musical festivals (sometimes called choral festivals) were one of the most important means of concert music production in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. While the repertoire of such festivals began centered around choral performance

, particularly as a celebration of Handel’s oratorios (particularly Messiah), festivals reflected contemporary British tastes with increasing selections from opera in the late 18th century and instrumental music by the mid-19th. Festivals also became an important proving ground for composers, since they offered regular commissions (from the 1830s forward), and the largest immediate audience that many could hope for, until the advent of radio broadcasting. This page will serve as a site to share news about the MFD.

How much do nineteenth-century festivals show up in the biographies of composers written in the twentieth- and twenty-fi...
09/04/2017

How much do nineteenth-century festivals show up in the biographies of composers written in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries? In the case of Henry Bishop, not much. Details can be found at the latest post, here: http://musicalfestivals.org/news/

Apologies for the late post: last week was the first week of classes, and things have been a little busy! The next few weeks of posts will likely be somewhat shorter.

How stable was repertoire at festivals in the 1790s? The new post at http://musicalfestivals.org/ discusses some interes...
08/24/2017

How stable was repertoire at festivals in the 1790s? The new post at http://musicalfestivals.org/ discusses some interesting programming choices at Liverpool and Manchester.

The Musical Festivals Database (MFD) is a fully-searchable index of programs, personnel, ensembles and venues of musical festivals held between 1695 and 1940. Musical festivals (sometimes called choral festivals) were one of the most important means of concert music production in Britain in the 18th...

05/30/2017

One of the great things about the MFD has been working with a number of fantastic Oberlin College & Conservatory undergraduates and Duke University graduate students on the project. Tomorrow, Meredith Graham, a Ph.D. candidate in the Music Department at Duke University, finishes her work on the MFD. She has written a short response to working in the project, which you can read here: https://sites.duke.edu/digital/2017/05/25/learning-together-in-digital-humanities/.

Thanks, Meredith, for all of the work you have put in on the project over the years!

Research Assistant, I quickly found out that my role was a bit undefined. I remember sitting in my first meeting as I was learning about the project thinking, “what exactly should I be doing?” As a part of the

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