Bach and Concepts of Musical Creativity

How did people around 1700 explain the power of musicians to compose or improvise? This lecture explores ideas of musical creativity in the age of J.S. Bach, including Lutheran beliefs that God was the author of all music, humanist views that music arose from innate talent, and an artisanal outlook on music as a product of manual skill. The tensions between these historic notions of musical creativity offer new ways to interpret Bach’s music today.

Stephen Rose joined the Royal Holloway Music Department in 2005, previously holding a Research Fellowship at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He specialises in music between 1500 and 1750, particularly in German-speaking lands and in England. His research focuses on five areas:

• music-printing, including the circulation, use and symbolic meanings of printed music; he has published seven refereed articles on aspects of musical print culture, and he is Director of Early Music Online, a JISC-funded collaboration with The British Library that has digitised over 320 books of 16th-century printed music. 
• the social history of music: his book The Musician in Literature in the Age of Bach (Cambridge University Press, 2011) uses hitherto overlooked novels to uncover social attitudes towards musicians in Bach's Germany.
• music in cultural exchange, the topic of a collaborative research network with Uppsala University and the Bach-Archiv Leipzig, funded by the Swedish Foundation for International Co-Operation in Research and Higher Education. Publications in this area include an edition of Leipzig church music collected by an English apothecary and amateur musician, James Sherard: Leipzig Church Music from the Sherard Collection: Eight Works by Sebastian Knüpfer, Johann Schelle and Johann Kuhnau (A-R Editions, 2014).
• musical authorship, creativity and subjectivity, a topic addressed in a forthcoming book, Musical authorship from Schütz to Bach for Cambridge University Press. 
• digital musicology; he leads an AHRC-funded project A Big Data History of Music, a collaboration with the British Library which analyses musical-bibliographical records as Big Data.