The chatty and highly informative memoirs of the musician and composer Giacomo Gotifredo Ferrari (1763-1842) have remained inaccessible to the English-reading public since their original appearance in Italian in 1830, although there were two republications in Italy in the 20th century. This is the first translation into any other language.
Ferrari was the son of a silk merchant in northern Italy, and went south to Naples to study composition with Paisiello and Latilla. From there he headed northwards, arriving first in Paris, where he met Dussek and Steibelt, and played for the unfortunate royal family, and later relocated to London, meeting Haydn and Clementi. His Anecdotes paint lively portraits of Ferrari's friends and acquaintances, with considerable space given to conversation. As a composer Ferrari produced operas, ballets, as well as both accompanied and unaccompanied sonatas for piano. As writer he also left treatises on Italian singing and on practical and theoretical music.
STEPHEN THOMSON MOORE holds degrees in music from Harvard and Stanford and studied traverso with Sandra Miller. He is presently Head of the Sound & Image Department of the Green Library, Florida International University, Miami, Florida.
Author Biography:
Deborah Heckert Adjunct Lecturer, History/Theory deborah.heckert@stonybrook.edu Deborah Heckert was awarded a Ph.D. from Stony Brook University, where her dissertation explored the British revival of the masque in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has contributed essays to the recent volumes Elgar and His World and British Music and Modernism, 1895-1960 and has presented papers at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, the Biennial Conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, and the biennial NABMSA Conference. She is a recipient of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Fellowship and of a fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art. Her current research interests focus on British modernism in the early decades of the twentieth century, the role of history in the identity politics of the English Musical Renaissance, and the intersections between British music and the visual arts. The publication of her monograph Composing History should appear from Boydell and Brewer in Spring 2016 and she prepared an English edition of the memoires of the late eighteenth-early nineteenth century Italian composer and teacher Giacomo Ferrari. Deborah has taught at the University of Virginia, Utah State University, and Brooklyn College-CUNY before returning to teach at Stony Brook, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate seminars on 19th and 20th century topics, and courses for general students on women and music, opera, Baroque and Romantic music, as well as the department's Introduction to Western Music. Deborah also teaches in the Stony Brook Program of Writing and Rhetoric.
Tom Moore holds degrees in music from Harvard and Stanford and studied traverso with Sandra Miller. He is presently Head of the Sound & Image Department of the Green Library, Florida International University, Miami, Florida. Before moving to Miami he was a freelance translator from Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, and Italian, doing scientific and technical translation in a wide variety of subject areas. His translation from the Italian of Why We Like Music, by Silvia Bencivelli, was published by Music Word Media in 2012. From 2004 to 2007, he was visiting professor of music at the University of Rio de Janeiro (UniRio), where he co-directed the early music ensemble, Camerata Quantz. On traverso he has recorded with Kimberly Reighley and M???lomanie for Lyrichord (USA), and with Le Triomphe de l'Amour for Lyrichord and A Casa Discos (Brazil). He participated as flutist and interviewer for the CD released in Oct. 2006 marking ten years of music for flute by Sergio Roberto de Oliveira. Dr. Moore writes about music for Flute Focus, Flute Talk, Flutist Quarterly, BrazilMax, Musica Brasileira, 21st Century Music, Opera Today, and other journals. He contributes a composer interview to each quarterly issue of Sonograma, published in Barcelona, and has been the CD Review Editor for Early Music America since 2008. He has also sung professionally with the Symphonic Chorus of Rio de Janeiro, including performances of the Mahler symphonies no. 2 and 8 under Karabtschevsky, and with Concert Royal and Pomerium Musices of New York.
