“The Copyist[‘s] Processes” (Professor Rebekah Ahrendt, Utrecht University)

“My dear and well-beloved son, William Babell,” wrote bassoonist-copyist-arranger Charles Babel (d. 1716) in his will. The two must have been close: Charles trained William in the arts of performance from a young age; the two played together in major London orchestras; and together they formed part of London’s finest band of foreign performers, which enabled the institution of opera in the first decade of the eighteenth century. Yet little is known about the Babels before their arrival in London in 1699. Documents I have discovered help to clarify the roots and routes of the family and can lay to rest certain myths perpetuated in historiography. Beyond biographical detail, these documents speak of Babel’s deep connection to the musical communities he inhabited, of the processes of transposition he underwent as he proceeded from place to place. Yet Babel himself, like many “average” musicians of the time, has no personal voice; there are no letters or personal notes beyond the text of his will.

In this talk, I would like to take a cue from object biography and begin to write a biography through objects. What if we were to consider Babel’s manuscript copies themselves as biographical objects, even as egodocuments? The thirteen known manuscripts in Babel’s hand document how his copying process changed over the course of time and across geographical space. While some basic aspects of Babel’s process remained constant, alterations in his hand, his repertoire, and in the selection of original bindings permit speculation (following Carla Perkins) regarding the extent and nature of Babel’s musical network.

Of particular interest in constructing this object-biography are two large collections of Italianate vocal music, which have not previously received scrutiny. My comparison of GB-Ob MS Mus Sch E393 and F-Pn Rés. Vma MS 967 indicate that Babel’s time in the Low Countries, particularly in The Hague, was essential to the acquisition of his repertoire, and that his connections to Hanover and other Germanic centers remained strong after his departure from the European continent. Tracing the musical and physical associations between Babel’s aria collections and related materials, exploring the routes that the family took and the experiences gained along the way, can reshape our understanding of the institution of opera in London, which perhaps owes far more to a member of the band like Charles Babel than it ever did to Handel.

Rebekah Ahrendt is Associate Professor of Musicology at Utrecht University. She trained in viola da gamba at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague (NL) and in musicology at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining Utrecht’s faculty, she was Assistant Professor in the Yale University Department of Music and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Tufts University. A specialist in music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but with interests across the longue durée, Ahrendt’s scholarship proposes thinking about mobility musically, by tracing the processes by which ideas, people, and practices are transposed. She has a knack for locating unusual sources, including a now world-famous trunkful of undelivered letters from the turn of the eighteenth century. In 2021, Ahrendt became the first historical musicologist with a byline in Nature Communications thanks to her team’s groundbreaking article on the Brienne Collection. As Vice Chair of the current COST Action EarlyMuse, Ahrendt combines her experiences as both a researcher and a performer in order to chart new paths for music scholarship from a historical perspective. She is currently Director-At-Large of the International Musicological Society, and recently featured in an episode of the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are? with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber.