ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with what we can know about the genesis of Purcell’s music: what evidence survives concerning his creative strategies, how we can recover and interpret this evidence, and indeed why we might be interested in so doing. Scholarly interest in such matters relates closely to the branches of musicological study usually referred to as ‘sketch studies’ and the investigation of ‘compositional process’; the broader term ‘creativity’ reflects more recent thinking which has called into question a number of the basic assumptions of these subdisciplines – particularly concerning the nature of musical texts and the functions of their sources – such that it is beginning to be acknowledged that the study of the creation of a seventeenth-century musical work cannot simply seek to account for a putative process of ‘composition’. it must equally consider the work’s various notated guises, how they relate to one another and to the music as it may have been performed, how and why its sources were originally produced, and, above all, what impact all of these factors may have had upon the music as it is known today.1 Thus to stress the term ‘creativity’ in this connection is to reject the caricature of the composer spending his days writing music for others to distribute and perform (a caricature which is in any case far from the reality for virtually any composer, for all that this is sometimes forgotten), and instead to approach Purcell’s music as the product of a musician active in musical performance, improvisation, notation, criticism, teaching, editing, arranging, distribution and any number of other activities alongside his composing.
