Jeremy Barlow's interest in John Rich springs from his work on The Beggar's Opera: an edition of the music for Oxford University Press, a complete recording which he directed for Hyperion Records (it won an Edison award), and a musical arrangement for the BBC television production directed by Jonathan MIller. His recent book The Enraged Musician: Hogarth's Musical Imagery (Ashgate) includes a substantial chapter on the ways in which Hogarth made use of allusions to The Beggar's Opera and Italian opera in his satires. He is currently writing a book for the Bodleian Library Oxford on the illustration of social dance over the centuries, A Dance through Time.
Vanessa L. Rogers is Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of Music at Wabash College in Indiana, USA. She received her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 2007 with a dissertation entitled Writing Plays "in the Sing-Song Way": Henry Fielding's Ballad Operas and Early Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century London. Her areas of research include eighteenth-century English stage music and theatre orchestras, and she is currently working on a book on music in English stage works, for which she received a Folger Library Fellowship in 2007. Vanessa is also assisting Berta Joncus as Researcher for Ballad Operas and the London Stage Song Industry, 1728-1760: An Electronic Catalogue at Oxford University. This project seeks to record both the total number of ballad operas produced and their musical content of over 3,000 airs.
Berta Joncus is Personal Tutor and Director of Studies in Music at St Anne's College and St Hilda's College, Oxford. A historical musicologist, she specializes in the music and practices of the Georgian London stage, European popular music before 1750 and eighteenth-century vocal music. As part of her research, she traces how a performer's star persona, once formed in the public sphere, may come to co-author his or her music. While drawing on perspectives from theatre and cinema studies, she also relies on the methodologies of anthropology, linguistics and popular music to grasp the meaning and genesis of the repertories she studies.
She has published articles in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Eighteenth-Century Music, The Cambridge History to Eighteenth-Century Music, and has co-edited, with Melania Bucciarelli, Music as Social and Cultural Practice: Essays in Honour of Reinhard Strohm (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007). Dr. Joncus is currently preparing a monograph titled Kitty Clive, Goddess of Mirth: Creating a Star through Song (1728 -1765) to be published by by Boydell & Brewer. Besides having co-organized the John Rich 2008 conference - the first interdisciplinary conference on the eighteenth-century London stage - she will, together with Jeremy Barlow, edit the proceedings. She is also designer and co-investigator, together with Michael Burden, of the pilot project, Ballad Operas and the London Stage Song Industry, 1728-1760: An Electronic Catalogue (www.odl.ox.ac.uk/balladopera ) funded by the John Fell OUP Research Fund.
For further details, please visit her homepage under 'People' at: www.music.ox.ac.uk