Maria Hester Park - Park's Music

Park's Music

It has been said of Maria Hester Park that she was "hugely popular in the elegant drawing rooms of eighteenth century England" and that she "made her living composing the sort of music performed by Jane Austen heroines.". She has been described as "one of the most prolific of the 18th century women composers." Her works are varied, competent, and professionally arranged. Her sonatas, according to The Norton/Grove dictionary of women composers, are "varied and spirited." Her Sonata in C is stylistically close to Mozart, pleasant to the ear without being overly challenging either to the performer or the listener. Mozartean features apparent in her Sonata in F include a constant bass line of straight eighth notes that form the outlines of chords, and a distinct melody with ornamentation. There are also many basic scale patterns and simple arpeggios, and the majority of her pieces are clean, lacking the melodrama of later romantic works. Her surviving music spans a quarter of a century.

Read more about this topic:  Maria Hester Park

Famous quotes containing the words park and/or music:

    The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public igominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.
    Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)

    For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.
    Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)