Robert Gjerdingen, Northwestern University, USA: "Building Musical Minds in 18th-Century Naples"

ABSTRACT:

The orphans and their teachers at the eighteenth-century conservatories in Naples, Italy knew that learning music was serious business. Society at that time had no "plan B" for an orphan who failed to acquire the needed skills. Necessity was, indeed, the mother of invention as the Neapolitan teachers devised a plan of study so successful that their Naples-trained students nearly took over all the important music jobs in Europe. Even the 14-year-old Mozart made the long trip to Naples to size up his formidable competition. Today most of the Naples methods have been forgotten. But they offer not only a remarkable set of historical documents but also a blueprint for how music education might be restructured if, once again, we recognized it as serious business (and great fun too). 

 

ABOUT ROBERT GJERDINGEN:

Robert O. Gjerdingen was trained at the Univ. of Pennsylvania under Eugene Narmour, Leonard B. Meyer, and Eugene Wolf. He has published a number of books and articles in the areas of music psychology and eighteenth-century music. His most recent book, _Music in the Galant Style_, was awarded the Wallace Berry Award of the Society for Music Theory. During the first Dot-Com boom, he was an executive with a music software company in Silicon Valley. Currently he serves as Professor of Music and coordinator of the program in music theory and cognition at Northwestern University, near Chicago. 

 

VIDEO ARCHIVE - ROBERT GJERDINGEN: 

 

APA video citation: 

Gjerdingen, R. (2012, October 22). Building musical minds in 18th-century Naples -
CIRMMT Distinguished Lectures in the Science and Technology of Music. [Video file].
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii6VtnUVsok