Conference Agenda

Spanish opera was born in the early eighteenth century amidst a context of cultural exchange, confrontation, and rivalry. New Italian operas and artists sponsored by the court and supported by Madrid’s elite audiences presented novel and exciting performative models, at times forcing local playwrights, composers, and performers to the sidelines. Locals responded by modernizing the zarzuela, Spain’s quintessential form of musical theatre, and developing an indigenous type of opera, a genre that had not yet been cultivated in Madrid. A distinct style of opera, as José Máximo Leza has shown, finally emerged in Madrid in the 1730s because of to the collaborative effort of Spanish playwrights, composers, theatre companies, and city administrators. Yet while the narrative of these events has traditionally favored the perspective of the men who created the innovative style and genre, it has partly glossed over the women who executed it. Spanish women, and not men, performed these new musical dramas, and their contribution to the establishment of opera merits more attention.

This paper examines the creation of Spanish opera from the perspective of the actress, singer, and theatre director Juana de Orozco (d. 1751). Based on primary sources and the research of José-Máximo Leza, Caroline Bec, José Pedro Sousa, José Camões, and others, I present a brief reconstruction of Orozco’s life and career, which have hitherto remained fragmented and incomplete. This biographical approach allows us to observe the personal and professional networks that Juana and other women formed to support their careers and respond to the artistic demands of their day, including the production of opera in the 1730s. It shows that most of the women involved in the operas performed during this decade were strongly connected, as many were related to Juana or had previously shared the stage with her. Importantly, it places Juana at the center of these productions. I will suggest that Juana de Orozco was a leading figure in musical theatre of the early eighteenth century. As theatre director, producer, and singer, she played a key role in establishing the new genre and in leading the group of women who would participate in its formation. Finally, through the lens of this artist, a bigger picture is revealed: eighteenth-century Spanish women were agents of change and not simply among the periphery of great artistic transformation.

The New York Philharmonic was founded by a group of local musicians, the Philadelphia Orchestra and Boston Symphony were established by entrepreneurial conductors, and the Chicago Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra were established by businessmen and philanthropists. In stark contrast to these major metropolitan orchestras, the Amarillo Symphony, located in the heart of the Texas Panhandle, was the brainchild of the Amarillo Philharmonic Club, one of at least three women’s music clubs active in the town in the 1920s.

Today the Amarillo Symphony is, like so many orchestras throughout the United States, a relatively male-dominated enterprise. Women play in the orchestra and serve on the office and administrative teams, and once in a blue moon, the orchestra will program a work by a female composer. This current composition of the organization, however, obscures a crucial characteristic of the orchestra’s earliest history: the Amarillo Symphony, unlike most other American symphonies, was formed and fueled by the work of women in the opening decades of the twentieth century.

The organization was born out of a women’s music club, women served as the organization’s earliest conductors and performers—both in the orchestra and as guest artists, women wrote music for the orchestra to perform, and key women were responsible for financially supporting the organization throughout its early history. In this rare look into the history of a regional American orchestra, this paper calls on primary sources to recount this “hidden” history of the Amarillo Symphony and present a case study of the multi-faceted work of women in shaping American musical culture in the first half of the twentieth century.

Upon the death of composer and soprano Elizabeth Turner (d.1756), The London Evening Post wrote that her “extraordinary Genius and Abilities in Musick, make her justly lamented by all Lovers of Harmony.” Turner’s significant contributions to mid-century London’s musical landscape include published collections of songs (1750) and harpsichord lessons (1756) and performances of works by George Frideric Handel and William Boyce at prominent festivals and concert series. Laudatory odes published after her death describe her as a beloved musician, and several of her songs were reprinted in The Lady’s Magazine more than thirty years posthumously. Despite these accomplishments, Turner and her musical works have largely been overlooked in contemporary scholarship, perhaps in part because the sole scholarly article on her work dismisses Turner as a second-rate composer. Additionally, the critical gaps in Turner’s biography have likely further disconnected her from historical narratives, as she cannot be definitively placed into a musical family nor connected to a particular teacher.

My presentation situates Turner into the musical landscape of mid-century London by tracing her professional connections through the subscriber lists to her publications, concert notices, and musical clues in her compositions. While we may never know when Turner was born nor the identities of her parents and teachers, a close examination of her published musical collections reveals the vast reaches of her professional network. Each of Turner’s books had more than 350 subscribers, including many professional musicians who are listed with her in concert notices, aristocrats, lawyers, doctors, and individuals from across social classes, thereby connecting her work to a broad audience. Further evidence of Turner’s immersion in the rich cosmopolitan musical culture of mid-century London can be found in her music, which depicts clear influences from her London contemporaries and from composers working on the continent, including Domenico Scarlatti and Jean-Philippe Rameau. As I will demonstrate, tracing Turner’s professional network codifies her position in the historical narrative and points to the ways women’s professional connections were vital to eighteenth-century London’s musical economy. Ultimately, my work also provides a methodological framework for reconstructing an early modern biographical narrative from scant sources.