The North American British Music Studies Association
CFP: Midwest Victorian Studies Association 2017: Victorian Taste
Oberlin College & Conservatory, Oberlin, Ohio, April 28-30
What was Victorian taste? How did British Victorians at home and abroad discuss, theorize, market, judge, and consume taste? How was taste imagined and envisioned in relation to literary, visual, and musical arts? How did new knowledge of Britain’s historical and aesthetic past impact tastes of contemporary Victorians? MVSA’s 2017 conference invites papers that reflect fresh and current thinking about taste and the Victorians. Proposals are sought from scholars working in art history, musicology, history, science, philosophy, theater, and literature. We particularly encourage presentations that will contribute to cross-disciplinary discussion.
The 2017 conference will be held at Oberlin College & Conservatory, in the 1963 Minoru Yamasaki-designed buildings that reflect the neo-gothic splendor of some of the college’s oldest buildings. Aside from attending panels, seminars, and the Jane Stedman plenary lecture, conference participants will have the opportunity to tour a special Victorian exhibit at the Allen Memorial Art Museum and attend “What the Victorians Heard,” a concert by Oberlin’s Collegium Musicum (directed by Steven Plank), as well as dozens of other ongoing musical and theatrical performances.
MVSA’s 2014 Jane Stedman Lecture will be given by Candace L. Bailey of North Carolina Central University. Professor Bailey is a leading social and cultural musicologist, and an expert on music in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. She is a past president of the North American British Music Studies Association.
For the fourth year, MVSA’s conference will feature three seminars open to graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars led by senior scholars on topics related to the conference theme. Participants pre-circulate 5-to-7 page papers. Stay tuned for the forthcoming seminar CFP on the MVSA website.
The deadline for proposals will be September 30, 2016. The official call for papers and additional information about the conference will soon be available.
King’s College London, 2–3 June 2017
Call for Papers
Music was everywhere in early nineteenth-century British politics. Coronations, commemorations, marches, protests, dinners, toasts, rallies, riots, festivals, dances, fundraisers, workplaces, streets—all hummed to the sounds of music. It provided anthems for anointing and songs for sedition, rhythms for rituals and ballads for ballots, chants for charters and melodies for militaries. In all these spaces, media, and fora, radicals, reformers, loyalists, and conservatives all competed for the best tunes. And they did so because of their belief in music’s capacity to affect its listeners—to arouse joy and indignation, sadness and sympathy, merriment, mischief, and mirth—and its ability to bind participants together in new visions of community, nation, and identity.
Yet, for all its omnipresence, music often struggles to be heard in the dusty silence of the archive. Music’s evanescence and impermanence defies established, text-based methods of historical enquiry. Indeed, most historical analysis of music and political culture has focused exclusively on song lyrics. We need a much broader frame of analysis to understand how music connects to the political. Music, text (if present), and the circumstances and social dynamics of performance, all combine to generate a range of meanings for those taking part—one person’s pleasant entertainment might be another’s call for revolution, and for some, both at once. This multiplicity of meanings projected by musical performance is at once challenging and beguiling, precisely for the ways in which it variously circumvents, contradicts, reinforces, or interweaves with the textual elements of political discourse. Bringing music to the centre of analysis has rich potential to offer fresh insight into political traditions, symbols, divisions, and struggles. An explicit aim of this conference is to facilitate this by promoting a deeper interdisciplinary exchange between historians, musicologists, and scholars of visual, literary, and theatrical culture.
To these ends, we invite proposals for papers from scholars in any discipline that address the role of music in political culture in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Chronological boundaries are flexibly conceived, and proposals for papers which address earlier and later periods but which overlap with 1780–1850 are welcome.
The conference will consist of a series of roundtable discussions among all participants of pre-circulated papers. Papers will be circulated by 12 May 2017. Once revised, these will form the basis of a collection of essays on the intersection of music and political culture in this period. The conference is supported by the ERC-funded project ‘Music in London, 1800–1851’ led by Professor Roger Parker. There is no registration fee, accommodation and dinner will be provided, and travel costs will be reimbursed where possible.
Abstracts (max. 500 words) for 5,000 word papers should be sent, with a short biography, to david.kennerley@history.ox.ac.
For more information please contact the organisers, Drs David Kennerley (Oxford) and Oskar Cox Jensen (King’s College London) at david.kennerley@history.ox.ac.
Potential themes for papers include:
The politics of opera, theatre, melodrama, and concert music
Political movements and musical creativity
Gender, race, participation, and exclusion
Four nations/archipelagic perspectives
Occasion and commemoration
Music and the politics of space
Communities and sociability
Political songs and melodies
Bands, choirs, ensembles
The politics of dance
Class and citizenship
State/official music
Music on trial
Nationalism
Pedagogy
Empire
Labour
Conference
July 29-31, 2016
Downing College, University of Cambridge
Scholars will present papers exploring the period’s dance, music and drama from a wide range of historical and methodological perspectives. The keynote address, ‘London as Theatre: Entertainment for Free in the Regency City’, will be given by Celina Fox (The Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment), and historical gesture specialist Jed Wentz (Conservatorium van Amsterdam) will present a lecture-performance on ‘Reconstructing Late Eighteenth-Century Acting’. In addition, the conference will open with an introduction by Iain Mackintosh (Architecture, Actor and Audience) at the remarkable Cambridge Festival Theatre (built in 1814), providing a rare opportunity for conference attendees to see an original surviving Regency three-level horseshoe auditorium.
For further details and to book your place, please see: www.regencytheatre2016.com
Hurry! Early Bird rates expire on 31 December!
Convenors: Michael Burden, Michael Gaunt, Sarah Meer, Marcus Risdell, Vanessa L. Rogers, Barry Sheppard
Call for Papers
The London Stage and the Nineteenth-Century World
14-16 April 2016, New College, Oxford
‘Plurality’ might be the most accurate description of the London stage in the nineteenth century: plurality of genre, of style, of theatre buildings. There were new dramatic forms, new technological advances, and new styles of management, not to mention new audiences and ways of attending the theatre.
We welcome contributions on all aspects and forms of drama and theatrical practice, from plays and operas to pantomime and puppetry. Subjects might include: theatrical resources, including collections; the constitution and history of theatrical genres; publishing and circulation; stage biography; music and musicians; scenography and spectacle; and theatrical spaces of all kinds. The ‘London stage’ should be interpreted as inclusively as possible, and we particularly seek papers on such topics as criticism, dance, the staging of the exotic, music hall entertainments, and international influences on London theatre. The meeting will provide an opportunity to take stock of the range of research currently being undertaken in the field as well as a chance to consider the place of London in the broader theatrical and political world.
All sessions will be held at New College, Oxford, with a keynote address by Daniel O’Quinn (University of Guelph) at the Bodleian Library’s new Weston Research Library. The conference is timed to lead up to the Bodleian Library’s exhibition ‘Staging History’, which will be held in the new Weston Research Library in October 2016.
Those wishing to give formal 20-minute papers should submit an abstract of no more than 200 words, and a biography of 100 words. However, we also encourage submissions for discussion panels, and are keen to receive proposals for other formats. The panel for paper selection will be Michael Burden, Jim Davis, Jonathan Hicks, David Francis Taylor, and Susan Valladares.
All proposal are due by midnight on 11 December 2015, and should be submitted to Jacqui Julier at:
Inquiries to the organisers, Michael Burden (michael.burden@new.ox.ac.uk) or Jonathan Hicks (jonathan.1.hicks@kcl.ac.uk)
http://www.new.ox.ac.uk/call-papers
CFP Deadline: 31 Oct 2015
The Midwest Victorian Studies Association [MVSA] will hold its 2016 annual conference at the University of Missouri–Columbia, April 8-10. Taking as its starting point the remarkable explosion in the periodical press and the availability of cheap print in the Victorian Era, the conference aims to attract papers that reflect fresh and current thinking about the topic.
Proposals for papers of twenty minutes in length are sought from scholars working in musicology, history, art history, science, philosophy, theater, and literature. The deadline for proposals is October 31, 2015. For further details, please see http://www.midwestvictorian.org/p/conference.html
MVSA’s 2016 Jane Stedman Plenary Speaker will be Leanne Langley, Associate Fellow at the University of London’s Institute of Musical Research, social and cultural historian of music, and leading authority on music journalism in nineteenth-century Britain. Her talk is entitled “Musical Times: The Achievement of the Musical Press in Nineteenth-Century England.”
The conference will also feature three seminars open to graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars led by senior scholars on topics related to the conference theme. Seminar participants pre-circulate 5-to-7 page papers. This year’s topics are “Print Culture and the Mass Public,” led by Julie Codell; “Finding/Creating a Voice in the Periodical Press,” led by Leanne Langley; and “The Transatlantic Periodical Press,” led by Jennifer Phegley. The deadline for submitting a seminar proposal is October 15, 2015.
MVSA is an interdisciplinary organization welcoming scholars from all disciplines who share an interest in nineteenth-century British history, literature, and culture.
