Of Priests, Fiends, Fops, and Fools: John Bowman's Song Performances on the London Stage, 1677-1701
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Referred to as Henry Purcell's "favorite baritone," the actor-singer John Bowman (ca. 1655-1739) became the leading baritone on the London stage during the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Centering on the career and song performances of Bowman, this dissertation provides a fresh perspective from which to view Restoration music theater, a reorientation that shifts the spotlight away from the works themselves—the plays and their music—and away from composers and playwrights, to one that focuses on performers and their concerns. The purpose of this work is to provide an account of the performance practice of Restoration theater song using Bowman as a case study. Bowman is an excellent subject for a case study for several reasons. He sang in Purcell's first stage commission and went on to sing many more songs by Purcell, as well as music by other significant composers of the era, including John Blow and John Eccles. As an actor, Bowman performed roles written by virtually every playwright of the late seventeenth century in England and worked with such actors as Thomas Betterton and Anne Bracegirdle. A desired outcome of this project is that singers wishing to cultivate their adeptness in historically informed performance of Restoration song will find this a helpful resource. To this end, Chapter II focuses wholly on performance practice in Restoration theater, covering both vocal production and acting, and concludes with a very detailed application of these to a song Bowman performed. This chapter also includes a guide outlining a practical approach for historically informed performance of Restoration theater song. As this guide shows, the initial step in the process, after having located the music, is to determine how each song fit into the larger dramatic context. Subsequent chapters are thus devoted principally to uncovering and reproducing all extant, unpublished songs Bowman performed, and to describing Bowman's characters and the contexts in which their song performances occurred.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".