Giordani undoubtedly contributed to the spread of Italian music in Britain and Ireland, leaving the most significant expressions of his intense compositional activity in the theatrical field.Queen Mary’s Lamentation
Played by: John Gibbons Source: Soundcloud Image: Tommaso Giordani (Napoli c. 1730 – Dublin 1806).
Scottish, Air (3/4 time). G Major. Standard tuning (fiddle).
AAB. The air was published in several late 18th century sources, including Benjamin Carr’s The Caledonian Muse (Philadelphia, 1798).
It was a composition of Tommaso Giordani (1730–1806), a Neapolitan composer who spent much of his mature career in London and Dublin.
He came to London with his father’s opera company, where he presented his first opera in 1756.
In the next twenty years, still based in London, he composed three other operas, plus arranged other works; he then removed to Dublin and produced seven more operas.
His output included sacred music, songs, cantatas, canzonets and chamber music, and his keyboard music was very popular in his time, rivaling J.C. Bach’s, particularly with amateur musicians.
Although we are not trained musicologists and make no pretense to the profession, we have tried to apply such professional rigors to this Semantic Abc Web as we have internalized through our own formal and informal education.
This demands the gathering of as much information as possible about folk pieces to attempt to trace tune families, determine origins, influences and patterns of aural/oral transmittal, and to study individual and regional styles of performance.
Many musicians, like ourselves, are simply curious about titles, origins, sources and anecdotes regarding the music they play. Who, for example, can resist the urge to know where the title Blowzabella came from or what it means, or speculating on the motivations for naming a perfectly respectable tune Bloody Oul' Hag, is it Tay Ye Want?
Knowing the history of the melody we play, or at least to have a sense of its historical and social context, makes the tune 'present' in the here and now, and enhances our rendering of it.
Andrew Kuntz & Valerio Pelliccioni
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