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Georg Berg

vn, *1720 DE
Musician / Composer

George Berg, Amateur Chemist-Composer (~1720-1775) Although the exact date is not known, George (or Georg) Berg was born about 1720 and as some sources suggest in Germany. He was an organist and a teacher of violin and harpsichord. At the Ranelagh Gardens in the late 1750s he probably played either the organ or the violin. He was elected a member of the Royal Society of Musicians in 1763, and was listed in Thomas Mortimer's The Universal Director as ‘composer & teacher on the harpsichord, Lincoln's Inn Fields.’ In the same year he won a gold medal from the Gentlemen and Noblemen’s Catch Club (5). Although publication of his songs continued into the nineteenth century, the last book of his music appeared in 1769. He was elected a member of the Society of Arts in 1769 and served on the Polite Arts, Mechanical Arts, and Chemistry committees. By 1771 he was organist at St Mary-at-Hill, Billingsgate, London, where he remained until his death. He was a composer of instrumental and vocal music, including a collection of songs, especially those he wrote for entertainments performed at the Marybone, Ranelagh, Spring Gardens, and other pleasure gardens (entertainment complexes) in London. He published six books of Ranelagh songs; but nothing survives of his operas, his oratorio, The Cure of Saul, or of his ode, The Invitation. In 1763 he won a prize with one of his glees, On Softest Beds. A glee is an unaccompanied song for three or more solo voices in harmony. In 1759 he was the first to use the word sonatina in his Twelve Sonatinas or Easy Lessons. His galant works are considered cliché. Galant is a musical style featuring a return to classical simplicity after the complexity of the Baroque era. He was best known for his catches and part-songs, many of which were published in anthologies. Catch is a type of round in which the lines of music often interact so that a word or phrase is produced that does not appear if it is sung by only one voice. Part-songs written for multiple voices may be performed with or without instrumental or orchestral accompaniment. He also wrote an opera Antigno that was performed at Spring Gardens in London in February, 1764. His more than 672 experiments in glassmaking were described in his “Experiment Book”. He was interested in learning chemistry, as it appears that he had no formal education in chemistry or glassmaking. Other objectives of the experiments were to prepare a clear glass melt, produce colored glass, some of which would be imitations of natural gemstones, and make glasses for enameling metals. He was able to make colored glasses that could be ground and used to color enameled wares. He made gem-like glasses, either for the carved or molded “cameos and intaglios” that imitated antique stones or for the more prosaic false stones set into buckles, jewelry, picture frames, or other small metal wares. The Falcon, Salpetre Bank, and Whitefriars glasshouses allowed him to use their muffle or wind furnaces. These furnaces were found in the workshops of goldsmiths, watchmakers, and other artisans who might regularly use enameling colors. He probably used a smaller version, a kiln, for most of his experiments. For some of his products, he calculated the proportional gravity ratio of weight of glass in air to its weight in water for some of his products in 1766. In 1765, Delaval suggested that proportional gravity or specific gravity was related to the color of glass. Perhaps Berg did not find this helpful as he did not use it after this year. Berg died in 1775, between April 17 and May 4. Source: www.scs.illinois.edu/~mainzv/HIST/bulletin_open_access/v33-1/v33-1 p35-43.pdf

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