March 14 From Stage to Page Book Talk by Jennifer Williams Brown

What: From Stage to Page: Making a Musical Edition of Francesco Cavalli's Opera "Scipione Affricano" (1664)
When: 4 p.m., Tuesday, Mar, 14, 2023
Where: Burling First Floor Lounge

Join the Grinnell College Libraries for a Faculty/Staff Research Series book talk with Associate Professor of Music Jennifer Williams Brown, entitled “From Stage to Page: Making a Musical Edition of Francesco Cavalli’s Opera Scipione Affricano (1664)”. Prof. Brown will discuss the tortured genesis of Cavalli's opera: how it changed in rehearsal and two aborted productions, and how she reconstructed preliminary versions from a single post-production source. 

Jennifer Williams Brown (musicology) is a specialist in the history and performance of Baroque music, particularly 17th-century Italian opera. Her research focuses on decoding clues in 17th-century manuscript and printed sources, then making the results accessible to modern performers, students, and scholars. In 2008 her edition of Francesco Cavalli’s opera La Calisto (A-R Editions, 2007) won the Claude V. Palisca Award, given annually by the American Musicological Society for the best scholarly edition or translation in the field of musicology. Her research has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Delmas Foundation, and in 2013 she was named Frank and Roberta Furbush Faculty Scholar. Scipione Affricano was published in August of 2022 by Baerenreiter Verlag, in the series The Operas of Francesco Cavalli.

Prof. Brown joined the music faculty of Grinnell College in the fall of 2005; she teaches music history and directs the Collegium Musicum. Prior to arriving at Grinnell, she taught at the Eastman School of Music, the University of Rochester, and Louisiana State University, where she directed the Collegium Musicum for seven years. She studied harpsichord with George Hunter (University of Illinois), Christopher Kite (Guildhall School of Music, London), and Malcolm Bilson (Cornell University) and continuo accompaniment with Arthur Haas (Eastman).

Prof. Brown is also a specialist in historical dance (Renaissance, Baroque). She trained in classical ballet at the National Academy of Dance (Champaign, IL) and studied Baroque dance in Boston with Margaret Daniels and Ken Pierce. She taught three courses on historical dance at the Eastman School of Music and University of Rochester and has given numerous workshops and guest lecture-demonstrations around the country. She directed dances for several historical theatre productions at Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Rochester. In 2007 she was dance director and co-music director (with John Rommereim) of Grinnell’s production of The Beggar’s Opera, for which she prepared a new musical edition. In 2012, she taught dance at the Baroque Performance Academy of the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival.

Refreshments will be served.