ABSTRACT
Written and iconographical references to the tambourine were especially prominent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One particular artistic trend around this time was the frequent depiction of the tambourine being held by young women. However, by the late 1790s the role of the tambourine shifted from its use as a mere accessory in the portrayal of female gracefulness in artwork to being treated as a serious instrument that could be incorporated into a girl’s music education. Clementi was aware of this growing trend, and he clearly sensed an opportunity to capitalise on its popularity by incorporating tambourine and triangle parts into his opus 38 waltzes, which was entered at Stationers Hall on 30 June 1798 and printed by Longman and Broderip shortly before he officially joined the business. The second set of waltzes, opus 39, were announced in the Morning Herald on 14 May 1800 and this time they were published by Longman, Clementi and Company, not long after Clementi had taken over the company. Although present-day music histories by and large ignore these works, it is surely significant that Clementi used them to launch his foray into the publishing business. His motivation must have been that he felt that the unusual scoring of the waltzes gave them a broad appeal to potential customers. A closer examination of surviving instruments, iconography, manuscripts and instruction manuals indicates that the musician would incorporate a variety of quasi-virtuosic techniques known as flamps, travales, gingle notes and bass notes in performances. This chapter considers how and why a fashion for the tambourine grew to prominence in the late eighteenth century, the role the instrument played in domestic musical life, and the reasons why the fashion was relatively short-lived: by the 1820s no London-based music publisher was issuing works that included virtuosic tambourine parts.
