Doctoral Colloquium (Music) | Sarah Waltz

Doctoral Colloquium: Prof. Sarah Waltz (Musicology, University of the Pacific)

Title: "What Caroline Herschel’s Music Notebook Reveals"
Caroline Herschel (1750–1848), sometimes accounted the first professional woman astronomer, was brought to Bath in 1772 by her brother William (1732–1822) to learn to sing and perform in oratorios; both Herschels left professional music-making behind after William discovered the planet Uranus in 1781. Historians of science have often followed Caroline’s late autobiographies unquestioningly with respect to her musical development. Biographies, paradoxically, use her own modest language to downplay her training while also using her regret over leaving music to impute a lost musical “career” to her that would be impossible even for women of much greater ability. Caroline’s unexamined music notebook c.1773 (housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Library) holds significant possibility for reinterpreting this story. It demonstrates William’s vocal and keyboard pedagogy, positively refuting assertions that she was “not taught” the keyboard. It includes tips for accompanying, tuning her instrument, and, unusually, conducting. Moreover, it contains not just favored musical souvenirs but includes—I suggest—her own compositions, set as exercises by her brother.

Biography:
Sarah Clemmens Waltz is professor of music history at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, currently residing in Windsor, ON. A scholar of German and British musical circles of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, she holds undergraduate degrees in physics and music history from Oberlin and the Ph.D. from Yale. Apart from research on the Herschels, she has recent publications on Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Ossianic text-settings, and topical analysis (including a just-published article on E-flat Minor with Journal of the Royal Musical Association).

The Doctoral Colloquium is open to all.