'JUPITER: Mozart in the 19th-Century Drawing Room'

'JUPITER: Mozart in the 19th-Century Drawing Room' challenges our preconceptions about the way in which Mozart's music was consumed in the early 19th century in two important ways: it confronts us with arrangements for piano, flute, violin and 'cello (the 'JUPITER' ensemble) of Mozart's best-known symphonies, concertos and overtures and sets them in the performance context of the 19th-century drawing room. The project takes the knowledge that has been gained from the AHRC-funded 'Mozart's Ghosts' (three related projects), and engages with communities on which the original project had little or no opportunity to make any impact. The original research undertook a wide-ranging approach to questions of Mozart reception, and along the way identified a repertory of Mozart's large-scale concerted music (concertos, symphonies and overtures) that was arranged and published, almost exclusively in London, for the JUPITER ensemble. The music thus arranged was the basis of the ways in which these works were experienced in early 19th-century Britain, whether in luxurious townhouses or the provincial homes of the more modest gentry. 'JUPITER' takes the opportunity to reveal to beneficiaries and user-groups a musical culture that is completely unknown today, and to explain how Mozart's large-scale works were consumed outside the rarefied, and largely urban culture of the city concert. With a project team consisting of PI Everist, RA Hewlett and four artist-researchers, 'JUPITER' will take AHRC-funded research and transform the experience of a variety of beneficiaries.

The original project made its impact via conventional verbal presentations, largely in response to requests to speak rather than as a coherent project of engagement; it uncovered significant amounts of material that revealed a key question that should be legitimately asked of early 19th-century musical culture: how was Mozart's large-scale concerted music performed beyond the simple piano arrangement? The answer emerged in the form of the 'JUPITER' ensemble. The ensemble takes its name from the edition of Mozart's last symphony that first used the now-unassailable title 'Jupiter'; the print was published in London in 1822 and the work arranged by Clementi for the JUPITER ensemble. A tiny number of these arrangements have been published in modern times, but the performance medium has yet to make any impact, a situation that the current project transforms.

The key pathways to impact consist of a network of partnerships, a series of innovative and interactive workshops, together with audio and video engagements. All our concert promoters or festival managers have responsibilities both for developing audiences and for promoting public engagement with other bodies. A series of workshops will explore various routes to engage with communities that extend beyond those who consumed the textual outputs produced by the original research. To do this we will approach questions of comparison (between originals and arrangements), organology and cultural environment, as well as presenting introductions that characterise the current form of lecture recitals and similar events. While this part of the project will engage in depth with some of our user groups, a commercial CD recording will increase the reach of the impact, and a web-mounted video will further explain the nature of music-making and the audience in the early 19th-century drawing room to further groups of beneficiaries.
We will monitor, evaluate and document the impact that the research makes. Our central tools are the anonymous questionnaire, the one-to-one interview, the CD and the video recording; these documents and their analysis will form the lasting legacy of the project, and will be mounted on its website to serve as materials and a prompt for other ensembles wishing to undertake similar work, or will be made commercially available.

BENEFICIARIES. We see five related sets of beneficiaries for the project: (1) The first are those who will participate in workshops and attend related concerts. Levels of reach here will be modest, but the significance of the impact will be high. This group will be sufficiently musically engaged to be regular attendees at concerts and festivals as well as those with enough of an interest to deepen their understanding through interactive workshops. This group will be developed via directors and managers of festivals (our partners), and will appreciate what the research offers but may not yet understand how to benefit from it. (2) The second group will be those who gain access to their music via CD, and we will ensure that the CD is supported not only by liner notes but by additional online material which will go some distance to bridging the gap between this group and those who have experienced the interactive workshops. (3) The third group will be those who will engage with the research via the video; we envisage this group - as well as overlapping with the first two - to be also interested in more general questions of heritage (space, material culture, costume, contemporary behaviours), and it is very much to them that the video will be addressed in terms of its content and supporting material. (4) We will aim to be making an impact on heritage professionals for whom developing music dimensions to historic-house experiences is becoming more and more important. (5) Finally, we will reach into the secondary school environment through heads of music and of regional music hubs via the Southampton Music Learning Network.

BENEFITS. The experience of user groups with be transformed in two ways.

1. Beneficiaries will be helped to understand that most 19th-century audiences did not experience Mozart's music through performances of fully-scored works, but through such arrangements as those for the JUPTER ensemble, and will have structured opportunities of considering the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities such arrangement offered.

2. Members of user groups will have their expectations of the modern concert hall - with its coercive etiquette and conventions - challenged, and they will be invited to consider the experience of this music in the context of the 19th-century drawing room.

We will approach these benefits from three directions: Comparison (the examination of what will be well-known works in both their original and 19th-century drawing room versions). Organology: (the significance of using early nineteenth-century keyboards, strings and winds, especially in the context of an arrangement of a larger work). Cultural environment: (spaces; acoustics; audience behaviours; the concept of the 'work', of 'performance', of the 'concert'). Orientation for the workshops will encompass a summary account of repertories, aesthetics, functions, styles, transmission and reception.
The benefits of the CD release will be to those who seek to understand the differences between the fully-scored original versions of Mozart's works which occupy their CD shelves and the types of arrangements through which our early 19th-century ancestors understood the same music. The video will demonstrate the cultural and material conditions in which the arrangements of Mozart's music were heard and consumed in the early nineteenth century. Work on 'context' will be critical to the work of heritage professionals, and we expect our relationship with this group to generate benefits that will outlast the project.