Chapter 29 - Music and Song

Summary

Music and Song’ considers the range of music with which Goldsmith engaged and argues that he always recognized the ways in which music could be repurposed, could be poignant and moving or farcical and absurd, and could transcend even the most apparently secure of generic and cultural boundaries. Goldsmith’s tastes were eclectic in terms of music as in so much else and this eclecticism could lend itself readily to hybrid forms: the publication of the earliest surviving record of the life of the Irish harpist-composer, Turlough Carolan (1760), who fused Irish traditional harping with baroque traditions; the reworking of the sung ballad ‘Death and the Maiden’ as a formal oratorio, Threnodia Augustalis, to commemorate the death of Augusta, Princess Dowager; the idea of a comic ‘epilogue in singing’.