Tag Archives: Handel

Why Would a Folklorist Write a Book about Handel?

Always a Folklorist, ,

    ~Handel ≠ Folklore~

In the “Preface” to The Handel Letters, I cited the field of folklore research for its role in guiding my way of living a life of learning, teaching, and writing. But why exactly would a folklorist choose to study Handel and write a ‘biographical conversation” based on his life? I suspect that those who have studied folklore will be less mystified by this question than those who have not. The great appeal of the field of folklore study is that you really can study just about anything you want and consider it a part of the discipline. But even more than this, the field of folklore study teaches a line of questioning, an approach, a variety of methodologies, a history of research, and a set of tools that can enliven and bring a satisfying relevance to the exploration of any topic. So, the life and music of George Frideric Handel is just another of the many topics a folklorist might choose to study. I feel lucky to have learned early on about this field of study and the people and materials that are its focus.

Still, I agree that the reasons why a folklorist might choose to study Handel may not be immediately apparent. And, in fact, the question might more logically be: What in this book about Handel can be traced in some clear way to the author’s background in the discipline of folklore studies? Yes, that would be a harder question to answer, but let me take a stab at it.

First let me say a little about what popular notions of “folklore” as a topic do not really interfere with writing a book about Handel. Folklorists are not concerned only with a group of people called “the folk.” Folklorists do indeed often study individuals rather than groups of people. Folklorists are not prohibited from studying anything to do with classical rather than folk music. Folklorists must not work only with people who are now living. And folklorists do not necessarily have to do fieldwork, although it is generally a great asset if they can. So, while Handel may not be recognized as a typical subject for a folklorist to take on, the field is in no way so restrictive as to discourage one from writing a book on Handel.

Other folklorists would very likely choose to write about Handel in quite a different way than I have in The Handel Letters—if at all.   Nevertheless, most folklorists will easily see the influences of the field in the book. So, let me point out some of these influences for those not so familiar with the field. Writing a kind of historical fiction is not a typical form of folklore study, but I doubt that any folklorists would consider it a radical departure, more likely simply a rarely invoked mode of writing in the discipline. But, it is this mode of writing that has, in fact, allowed me to include many issues that are typically highlighted by the field of folklore study. By moving back and forth from Handel and his era to some fictional characters and the current time period, I have, I would argue, been able to explore at least seven typical and important themes of folklore research.

Primary among these, for me at least, is the folklorist’s attention to the creative process. Handel, after all, was creating music within a tradition, but even more telling, I think, was his conscious use of earlier musical material that he adapted, reused, and expanded in new musical compositions. While some music critics faulted him for this practice, my folklorist’s antennae were excited to see this “creative use of traditional resources.” In any case, it was a fair point for discussion by people looking back at Handel’s many compositions and considering his creative process.

A second common theme in folklore studies is conflict between differing culture groups—basically us versus them. This theme comes up many times, both in Handel’s day and in ours. A third theme is worldview. Handel was alive during the Age of Reason, the beginnings of the Enlightenment, and yet, of course, Christianity was the dominant belief in his world. Religion and secular belief were at odds then and are yet today. Another very common topic in folklore research is folk medicine, even today with modern medicine making such strides. And yet both then and now, issues tied to health, belief, and behavior abound in daily life. I was surprised to see how prominently the issue of health arose in Handel’s biography.

A fifth topic that is increasingly a part of folklore studies is that of social activism or applied folklore. In Handel’s day, notions of acting against poverty and especially against childhood suffering were just emerging. Handel’s early performances of Messiah were offered as a kind of applied service in support of prisoners. Today, performances of Messiah are often still used to gather food and money for those in need. A sixth topic that might seem surprising is the folklorist’s attention to perceptions of gender. It definitely does show up as a topic in Handel’s life and in his music, and of course it is still an issue for us today.

Finally the abiding question of how an individual—even a famous individual like Handel—learns what he knows, how he came to have the identity he had, what influences were at work in his life—that question arises throughout the book just as it intrigues folklore scholars in every realm yet today. These and many more topics characteristic of the field of folklore study show up in this book on Handel. As a folklorist, I could not escape being drawn to such themes. And that is why this folklorist chose to write a book about Handel.

Thanks for your interest and for dropping by.

Introducing This Blog about Handel and Books and Folklore

The Handel Seminar Continues, ,

A Blog about Handel and Books and Teaching and Folklore

February 5, 2018

I may eventually move on to another task in writing this blog, but for now my aim is to expand upon some of the content and ideas in my recently published book, The Handel Letters: A Biographical Conversation, and, hopefully, to stimulate thoughts and responses from you who take the time to read these short essays. I plan to move through the book from beginning to end. As Maria says in the “Do-Re-Mi” song in The Sound of Music, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.” She then proceeds to teach the von Trapp children the musical scale, using the sol-fa syllables for the major scale. I suppose I will never escape being a teacher, so I will follow Maria’s teaching practice and start at the very beginning.

First, I invite you to purchase or borrow the book. It is available in paperback or as an ebook, and by now I hope libraries have a copy available. Please ask them to order it if they don’t. The ISBN is 9781977669179. I like the paperback, and my first order of business will be to describe how the physical entity—the 626-page book—came to be.

Throughout my career as a professor, I was expected to write “scholarship”—books and articles that added in some way to our understanding of my chosen academic field. And those scholarly works were published by university presses (books) or peer-reviewed journals (articles). My Handel project was not that kind of writing. It did involve research, certainly, but I decided to write with a different audience and objective in mind. I may say more about that later, but for now, the related decision I made that I want to share here is the decision to self-publish, to not seek out a publisher but instead to have everything pretty much under my own control. It was an exhilarating experience. It’s not that I regret having published through traditional presses and journals, but this time, it was fun, as a retired professor, no longer worrying about tenure or promotions, to simply see what could be done without a publisher—or, as one Handel biographer would say about Handel’s efforts to compose without a patron, I chose to undertake this publication “on my own bottom.”

I didn’t just jump into the process blindly. I read lots of blogs online on how to self-publish. I researched the various possibilities—Amazon’s CreateSpace, BookBaby, and other resources. And I watched one very informative Great Courses course on “How to Publish Your Book [ https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/how-to-publish-your-book.html ]. The person giving the lectures was Jane Friedman, a professor and publishing professional. I found her advice very helpful. Self-publishing was only one possibility she presented, and she was very clear about the potential down side of deciding to self-publish. As I said, my own decision was influenced very much by my own situation. I wanted to do something quite different from the kind of writing and “publish or perish” activity that dominated my career as a professor.

In the end, I decided to go with Amazon’s CreateSpace paperback publishing enterprise and then add the ebook format afterwards. If you are a skilled formatter, you can do all of the preparations yourself and set up publication on demand through Amazon for free. I knew that the formatting tasks were beyond me, so I opted to pay for that service, letting their professionals format the content following my directions. I was very pleasantly surprised at how easily this was done and with how good the final product looked. I did not use their paid editing or cover design services, but I thought the interior design service was well worth the money. Sadly, just this month CreateSpace has announced that they will no longer offer that service, though they will continue to publish books already formatted and ready to print.

As I was preparing my manuscript, I consulted again several online sources, and I bought a helpful guide, CreateSpace for Beginners, by M. L. Humphrey. The guidebook would be especially helpful if you planned to do the formatting yourself, but I found it useful in others ways as well. The author even addressed the differing advantages and disadvantages in creating a print copy for book of fiction or a nonfiction piece. For my book, I wasn’t quite sure how to categorize the work. Is The Handel Letters a biography of Handel and thus a work of nonfiction, or is it a work of historical or literary fiction? I would be curious to know how you might categorize it after you have read it.

Let me finish this essay with a quick comment on the cover and illustrations. Again, part of the reason I chose to self-publish was that I wanted to decide on the cover and if and when I would insert illustrations. For years I have admired the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century fairy tale collections that offered wonderful illustrations. The Dover version of George Webbe Dasent’s translation of the Norwegian tales, East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon, is one of my favorites, in part because of the wonderful illustrations. More recently, I liked the way J. K. Rowling included illustrations at the head of each chapter in all seven of the Harry Potter books.

I did not want anything like a graphic novel, but I did like the idea of having some memorable image from each chapter heading up the writing, along with a paragraph of slightly off-subject narrative. So, I opted for selecting a kind of icon from each chapter and discussed the possibilities with my artist/illustrator—my daughter, Alexis Stahl. She created the illustrations from my suggested ideas, and she designed the cover using some of those same illustrations. I couldn’t be more pleased with the end product. Next time I will say a little more about the illustrations and ponder further the category into which we—or libraries—might place the book.