Colloquium: Luke Howard

 For most of its nearly 300-year performance history, Handel’s beloved oratorio Messiah has been performed with unusually large ensembles: massive orchestras and choirs numbering in the hundreds or even thousands. Experiencing a performance of Messiah on this kind of scale (as was common especially in England during the 19th century) was clearly more momentous than attending a regular musical event. It was a visceral, multi-sensory, full-body encounter, a low-tech 19th-century version, perhaps, of a modern arena concert. The music, already filled with powerful spiritual impressions in its text and setting, was both literally and metaphorically amplified in these ‘gargantuan’ performances in ways that left critics and audiences grasping for superlatives to account for it. This presentation examines how audiences have grappled with the sensory implications of massed Messiah performances, and how they struggled to translate those ineffable impressions and sensations into words.

Luke Howard earned his bachelor’s degree in music education and piano at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 1991, and an M.A. in music history at Brigham Young University in 1994.  He received the Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in 1997.  After teaching at Minnesota State University Moorhead and the University of Missouri Kansas City, Dr. Howard returned in 2002 to the School of Music at Brigham Young University where he teaches music history and Western cultural history.  His research focuses on appropriations of classical music in popular culture and reception histories of well-known works from the classical canon, especially Handel’s Messiah. A former member of the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, Dr. Howard has performed in numerous large-scale concerts and recordings of Messiah and still thinks it’s a pretty amazing piece of music.