Vol. 8: Inflection Point
Today I find myself packing up sweaters on a sweltering +33C day in Cambridge. It’s the last day of my research trip, and, much as my daily clothing has evolved over these past two months, so have the ways I think about my research, its goals, and its possibilities.
The title page of F.W. Rust’s 1775 autobiography (Stadtarchiv Dessau-Roßlau)
The idea of visiting archives and consulting with some of the best musical minds was to make discoveries. In archives, I hoped to find documents that shed new light on Friedrich Wilhelm Rust, and I did: early sketches of his Violinsonaten, surprisingly vivid teaching worksheets in Rust’s hand, some new pieces, and a trove of textures, objects, and traces that brought my corporeal existence momentarily into intersection with Rust’s. For all of these insights, I must profusely thank the Cambridge University Library, Cambridge Pendlebury Library, British Library, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Stadtarchiv Dessau-Roßlau, Bach-Archiv Leipzig, and the Bibliotheek Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel.
King’s Parade, Cambridge
From my consultations with performers, scholars, and performer-scholars on this trip, I was reminded—explicitly and organically—of the challenges and responsibility of my work as an artist-researcher. As an artist, I owe it to myself and my audiences to trust my instincts, hone my skills, and search for all the best, most elusive qualities of music—those which cannot be written in ink or even spoken in words. As a researcher, meanwhile, my duty is to find knowledge which serves something other than itself; something which doesn’t just gaze wistfully at the past but provides something for living people to build living ideas on. For their help in these pursuits, I am indebted to the baroque violinists Adrian Butterfield and Lucy Russell, and the Cambridge faculty Dr. John Rink and Dr. Bettina Varwig; last but most certainly not least, I am very grateful to Dr. Martin Ennis, who acted as my host supervisor at Cambridge University.
Trinity College, Cambridge
The research blog will be pausing here at this natural inflection point. I hope you will forgive me for providing this prosaic acknowledgements post rather than some unifying grand conclusion of my findings: rather, I suspect that my findings on this trip will be inspiring my future projects for many years to come, and I don’t presume to know where they will go.
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My time as a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge was generously supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, with additional research funding from the Mitacs Globalink Research Award. The continental European portion of my research was supported by the American Bach Society's William H. Scheide Research Grant.
I am profoundly grateful to all of the above funders for making this extraordinary trip possible.