Owens, Samantha The Well-Travelled Musician: John Sigismond Cousser and Musical Exchange in Baroque Europe (review)

Abstract

SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 774 part V. I. Lenin”’ (p. 17). In his second novel, Absurdistan (2006), Shteyngart ‘present[s] a burlesque of Russian character, along with Russian and American ways of conceiving that character, giving us a series of comic identities that nevertheless lay claim to some essential plausibility’ (p. 41). Thus, by creating hybrid versions of identifiable contemporary worlds, Shteyngart is able, from his perspective of wry detachment, to create the environments in which the weak and the abject emerge as the most unlikely heroes, much in the vein of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, or Goncharov’s Oblomov. Building on Adrian Wanner’s Out of Russia (Evanston, IL, 2011), Geoff Hamilton gives us the first serious full-length study of the foremost émigré, or rather, transnational, writer of his generation. Interestingly, as if in response to a fourth wave of Russian-American writers emerging from the post-Soviet era, still very much preoccupied with the experience of emigration, Shteyngart continues to set himself apart by taking a bold step away from previous concerns in his most recent novel. What Hamilton’s study attests to is that no single perspective can or will dominate this new émigré fiction, and that figures like Shteyngart should be studied and understood not only for the ways in which their work is determined by its past and present contexts, but also in all its future divergencies. UCL SSEES Barbara Wyllie Owens, Samantha. The Well-Travelled Musician: John Sigismond Cousser and Musical Exchange in Baroque Europe. Music in Britain, 1600–2000. Boydell Press, Woodbridge and Burlington, VT, 2017. xvi + 385 pp. Tables. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. £60.00. Born in Bratislava (then part of Hungary) in 1660 and died in Dublin in 1727, Johann Sigismund Kusser (rendered as ‘Cousser’ in Britain and Ireland) traversed and engaged in nearly all aspects of public musical life in between. Both as an historical figure and as a composer-performer Cousser had, before now, largely fallen between the cracks. Samantha Owens has taken larger strides than any other scholar to rectify that lacuna in this beautifully presented and neatly-organized book. In addition to the nine central chapters are five useful appendices (the chapters and the appendices each constitute about half of the book). The latter are a particularly welcome inclusion as they often invite further scholarly engagement and are certain to further research into Cousser, his music and his eventful life. The most usual way for Cousser to appear in modern scholarly discourse is via his so-called ‘Commonplace Book’. This was a notebook kept by Cousser REVIEWS 775 during the last thirty years of life — and the introduction of this fascinating document forms the opening pages of this monograph. The notebook contains all manner of details about the life a working musician: a diary of sorts without parallel of scale or detail for its time. At the heart of Owens’s book is the exploration of contacts and exchange: social, cultural and musical. In addressing the notebook, Owens tips her hat at the modern social media phenomenon to capture something of the importance of social and business contacts for a musician working, as it were, across cultures. Here Owens is keen to make clear that she does not merely mean national cultures, but that in terms of professions that either allowed or even demanded international travel and networks, musicians were amongst the earliest of the labouring classes note just to move around Europe, but also to move across boundaries of class that were otherwise unnavigable. Chapter one (‘Hungarian Beginnings and Adoption of the French Musical Style’) deals as best as can be done with such fragmentary source materials and how Cousser fell under the sway of central European devotees of Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87) at a time when Italian musical style dominated most central European courts. Like so many other composers of his time, Cousser’s fluency in different musical styles shifted both with the spirt of the age and with the demands of employers. This is dealt with especially well in chapter four (‘“The incomparable director” in Hamburg, Nuremberg and Augsburg’); at Hamburg’s Gänsemarkt opera house in particular, Cousser made a...