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Happy birthday Charles Burney! 🎻🥂 Composer: Charles Burney (1726-1814) Work: Sonata VI for two violins with accompaniments, Op.1 (1748) Performers: Ensemble BаrіAntіqua Sonata VI 1. Largo 0:00 2. Presto 5:17 3. Andante 8:56 4. Capriccio 13:10 Painting: Claude Joseph Vernet (1714-1789) - Morning (A View of a Port at Daybreak) HD image: Painting: Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) - Charles Burney (1781) HD image: Further info: Listen free: --- Charles Burney (Shrewsbury, 7 April 1726 - Chelsea, London, 12 April 1814) English musician, composer and music historian. His father, James Macburney, was a dancer, violinist and portrait painter who dropped the prefix from his surname about the time that Charles was born. Charles and his twin sister Susanna, born to Macburney's second wife, were the last of 20 children in the family. He attended the Free Schools at Shrewsbury and Chester, eventually becoming an assistant organist in the first city in 1742. In 1744 he became a protégé of Thomas Arne, who provided further education leading to membership in the Freemen of the Musicians Company in 1749. He directed and provided music for several staged works, most significantly The Cunning Man, a translation of Le devin du village by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In 1770 he began a series of musical tours, first to Italy and France and in 1772 to Germany and Holland, which resulted in published diaries that are significant descriptions of the music and musicians of the period. In 1776 he published his first volume of the General History of Music (two other volumes followed in 1782 and 1789), which gained him prominence in English society, as did his work as official chronicler of the Handel Centenary Festival in 1785. By 1801 he had taken on additional work writing music articles for Reese’s Encyclopedia. Burney was known during his lifetime and afterward as one of the first major historians of music, though he also wrote on scientific matters such as astronomy. Although trained as a composer, his works are modest in number; qualitatively they follow the style of his contemporaries and teachers such as Arne. Late in life he described his own music as negligible. His works include three operas, two odes, 12 canzonetts, 16 trio sonatas, 21 keyboard sonatas and other works, six violin duets, and a number of songs, catches, and glees.
