David Hunter (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1989) is Music Librarian and Curator of the Historical Music Recordings Collection. While Dr. Hunter’s duties at the Fine Arts Library currently preclude a regular teaching assignment he has in the past taught the Reference and Research Materials class and a freshman seminar on George Frideric Handel. He continues to serve on Ph.D. and D.M.A committees.
Dr. Hunter has published articles in numerous musicology and historical journals since 1985. His book, Opera and song books published in England, 1703-1726: a descriptive bibliography was published by the Bibliographical Society in 1997. He has also contributed to the major music encyclopedic dictionaries Grove Music Online and Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. He edited the volume Music Publishing and Collecting: Essays in Honor of Donald W. Krummel issued in 1994. He has been the Book Review Editor of Notes and currently serves on the Editorial Board of Libraries & the Cultural Record (published by the University of Texas Press).
Since 1996 Dr. Hunter has been assessing the validity of Handel biographies, testing numerous claims and assumptions. The results of the research have been published in Early Music, Music & Letters, Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, the Newsletters of Handel Institute and the American Handel Society, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, Theatre Notebook, Musical Times, and two festschriften Encomium Musicae: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert J. Snow, and For the Love of Music: Festschrift in Honor of Theodore Front on His 90th Birthday. Eventually these papers—and others unpublished and unwritten—will form a book provisionally titled Handel’s Enemies.
The audience that attended or declined to attend Handel performances during his years in England and Ireland (1711-1759) are of particular interest. In order to uncover the individuals who did and did not go, Dr. Hunter is engaged in a long-term research project that involves examining archives held at more than 100 sites in the U.K., Ireland, and the U.S.A.
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