Georg Friedrich Händel (1685 – 1759) was a German,
later British, baroque composer who spent the bulk of
his career in London, becoming well known for his
operas, oratorios, anthems, and organ concertos. Handel
received important training in Halle and worked as a
composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London
in 1712; he became a naturalised British subject in
1727. He was strongly influenced both by the great
composers of the Italian Baroque and by the
middle-German polyphonic chora...(+)
Georg Friedrich Händel (1685 – 1759) was a German,
later British, baroque composer who spent the bulk of
his career in London, becoming well known for his
operas, oratorios, anthems, and organ concertos. Handel
received important training in Halle and worked as a
composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London
in 1712; he became a naturalised British subject in
1727. He was strongly influenced both by the great
composers of the Italian Baroque and by the
middle-German polyphonic choral tradition.
In the eighteenth century there was a big market for
music for keyboard music, and so it is not surprising
that Handel's publisher sold three times as many copies
of the organ reduction (probably the work of Handel
himself) than the originals of Handel's organ
concertos. Similarly there was a ready market for
transcriptions of the overtures and other selections
from Handels operas and oratorios. Again, many of these
transcriptions may have been the work of Handel
himself. Another of Handel's ventures was to write two
sets of pieces for "Mr. Clay's Musical Clock." Some of
these were transcriptions from Handel's operas, while
others such as the Voluntary on a Flight of Angels were
original compositions.
Handel wrote and arranged at least one set of tunes for
the musical clock and is not mentioned in Chrysander's
life of the composer, nor are the tunes to be found in
the incomplete edition of his works issued by the
Handel-Gesellschaft. Their existence only came to light
on the disposal of Lord Aylesford's collection of
musical manuscripts. This collection was bequeathed to
an ancestor of the present Earl's by Handel's friend
Jennens. It consisted of a very large number of copies
of Handel's music, mostly in the writing of John
Christopher Smith. The copies seem to have been made in
the most indiscriminate fashion and Smith filled his
volumes with the first thing that came to hand, with
the result that their contents are often very confusing
and difficult to identify. At the sale the larger part
of the collection passed into the hands of dealers, but
I was fortunate enough to secure a number of
miscellaneous volumes containing a quantity of
unpublished compositions which seem never to have been
seen by Chrysander. In two of these volumes there are
two sets of tunes for a musical clock. The first set is
entitled "Ten [there are really eleven] Tunes for
Clay's Musical Clock." The second set begins with this,
the "Sonata for a Musical Clock" (HWV 578) followed by
five other pieces evidently also written for the same
purpose.
Source: Miscellaneous
(http://spellerweb.net/poindex/organmusic/HandelClay.ht
ml).
Although originally written for Musical Clock, I
created this Interpretation of the Sonata for a Musical
Clock (HWV 578) for Flute & Classical Guitar.
