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New Perspectives on Marc-Antoine Charpentier, ed. Shirley Thompson

This edited volume evolved from the international conference ‘Charpentier and His World’, hosted at Birmingham Conservatoire in April 2004, organized by Thompson as part of the Charpentier tercentenary celebrations, and supported by a British Academy conference grant.

Featuring a Foreword by the conference’s keynote speaker and the founding father of modern Charpentier studies, H. Wiley Hitchcock, this volume brings together the work of French Baroque scholars from across the world. It provides a snapshot of Charpentier scholarship at the start of the 21st century, illustrating the variety of research pursued while also allowing connections between different areas of study to emerge. It is ‘the first volume in English covering such a wide field of enquiry about Charpentier’ (Sawkins, _Early Music_ 39 (2010), 270).

Thompson’s contribution to this volume is threefold: (i) The standard editorial work required in preparing a volume of this kind, including co-translation of three chapters, authorship of the Preface and compilation of the Bibliography; (ii) Thompson’s own chapter (‘Charpentier’s _Motets melêz de symphonie_: A Nephew’s Tribute’, pp. 287–314: the research here was not the subject of Thompson’s Birmingham conference paper (submitted here as Thompson_02), but was first delivered at the 14th Annual Conference of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music (Toronto, 2006)); (iii) Co-authorship with Patricia Ranum of Appendix 1, a 24-page contextualized, diplomatic transcription of the inventory prepared prior to the sale of Charpentier’s manuscripts in 1727. While many of the chapters make direct reference to the document, it has even greater significance as a tool for future research.

As demonstrated by all four submissions, Thompson’s research forms part of the Conservatoire’s newly-formed French Music Research Hub, and is central to the Conservatoire’s cluster of activity in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Music Studies. Thompson_01 also contains a chapter by Graham Sadler (q.v.).