MAA 1:4 Six Easy Evening Entertainments, Op. 3 by Giovanni Gualdo da Vandero (c. 1730-1772): Score and Parts

Giovanni Gualdo (? -1772) stands as a seminal transitional figure in British colonial musical society. Transforming himself from gentleman amateur to a musical retailer, composer, teacher, and impresario, his concert activities in Philadelphia and musical compositions published in London reveal more ambitious efforts in raising the standards of public performance in the Middle Atlantic and their audience’s exposure to the fashionable Italian galante style that became popular in Great Britain beginning in the late 1730s. Gualdo’s surviving chamber music reflects his knowledge of and proficiency in the then contemporary Italian style and is among the earliest surviving examples of galante-style chamber music connected directly to a resident musician in the British colonies. In this respect Gualdo was preceded only by his Italian contemporary Giovanna Palma active in Philadelphia and the eastern shore of Maryland in the late 1750s. Newly discovered details about Gualdo’s life and ancestry reveal him to be a direct ancestor of the dynastic Fonda family of the Hollywood film industry.