The North American British Music Studies Association

The North American British Music Studies Association

CFP: Music in Nineteenth Century Britain (University of Birmingham, June 2017)

The eleventh Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain conference will take place at the University of Birmingham from 28 to 30 June 2017.  The Programme Committee invites proposals for presentations as follows:

• Individual papers up to 20 minutes and lecture recitals up to 45 minutes in length (with additional time for questions and discussion).
• Group presentations (e.g. round tables) up to two hours in length (depending on the number of participants).

Papers and presentations may focus on any aspect relevant to the conference’s over-arching remit, i.e. to present research into musical texts, performers and performances, and culture, and the social and economic uses of music in Britain, in the long nineteenth century (approximately 1789 to 1914).  We particularly welcome proposals that focus on the first of these areas.   We also invite proposals for papers and presentations that examine the influence and impact outside the then United Kingdom of musical texts, performers and cultures originating in the British Isles.

Please send proposals to the Programme Committee Chair, Dr Paul Rodmell (p.j.rodmell@bham.ac.uk) in the following format:

• Individual Papers: abstract up to 300 words and autobiography up to 100 words.
• Lecture recitals: abstract up to 300 words, autobiography up to 100 words, and sample recording (e.g. via youtube link)
• Group Presentation: overall rationale up to 450 words, individual abstracts up to 300 words each, and individual autobiographies up to 100 words each.

Please include a note of any specialist technical needs (a piano, and audio visual equipment for powerpoint, sound and video recordings, will be provided as standard).

The deadline for submissions is Monday 12 December 2016.  A draft conference programme will be published in mid-January 2017.
Conference bookings will open in February 2017.

Programme Committee:
Dr Paul Rodmell (Chair, University of Birmingham)
Professor Rachel Cowgill (University of Huddersfield)
Professor Fiona Palmer (Maynooth University)
Dr Matthew Riley (University of Birmingham)
Dr Aidan Thomson (Queen’s University, Belfast)

Articles

Atkins, Peter. “‘An Ireland Built Anew’: Bax’s ‘Tintagel’ and the Easter Rising.” Music & Letters 97/1 (1 February 2016): 100-135.

Bowers, Roger. “Thomas Tallis at Dover Priory, 1530–1531.” Early Music 44/2 (May 2016): 197-205.

Braae, Nick. “Keeping themselves alive: Identifying and analysing Queen’s musical development, 1973–1980.” Popular Music History 9/3 (2014).

Burrows, Donald. “Handel, Walsh, and the Publication of ‘Messiah’.” Music & Letters 97/2 (May 2016): 221-48.

Butler, Katherine. “Changing Attitudes Towards Classical Mythology and their Impact on Notions of the Powers of Music in Early Modern England.” Music & Letters 97/1 (1 February 2016): 42-60.

Chowrimootoo, Christopher. “‘Britten Minor’: Constructing the Modernist Canon.” Twentieth-Century Music 13/2 (September 2016): 261-90.

Cichy, Andrew. “Music, Meditation, and Martyrdom in a Seventeenth-Century English Seminary.” Music & Letters 97/2 (May 2016): 205-20.

Duncan, Cheryll. “Henry Purcell and the construction of identity: iconography, heraldry and the Sonnata’s of III Parts (1683).” Early Music 44/2 (May 2016): 271-88.

Fleming, Simon D.I. “The myth of the forgotten composer—the posthumous reputation of Charles Avison.” Early Music, Christopher Hogwood Memorial Issue, 44/1 (February 2015): 105-17.

Johnstone, Andrew. “Thomas Tallis and the five-part English Litany of 1544: evidence of ‘the notes used in the king’s majesty’s chapel’.” Early Music 44/2 (May 2016): 219-32.

King, Richard G. “Who does what? On the roles of the violoncello and double bass in the performance of Handel’s recitatives.” Early Music, Christopher Hogwood Memorial Issue, 44/1 (February 2015): 45-58.

Leistra-Jones, Karen. “‘The Deeps have Music Soft and Low’: Sounding the Ocean in Elgar’s Sea Pictures.” Music & Letters 97/1 (1 February 2016): 61-99.

McCarthy, Kerry. “A late anthem by Tallis.” Early Music 44/2 (May 2016): 191-95.

McGreary, Thomas. “Handel in Rome: the homosexual context reconsidered.” Early Music, Christopher Hogwood Memorial Issue, 44/1 (February 2015): 59-75.

Miller, Rebecca S. “Hucklebucking at the tea dances: Irish showbands in Britain, 1959–1969.” Popular Music History 9/3 (2014).

Milsom, John. “Tallis, the Parker psalter, and some known unknowns.” Early Music 44/2 (May 2016): 207-18.

Pont, Graham. “Some questions concerning Handel’s early London copyists.” Early Music 44/2 (May 2016): 289-305.

Robinson, Suzanne. “Popularization or Perversion? Folklore and Folksong in Britten’s Paul Bunyan (1941).” American Music Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring 2016): 1-42.

Roche, Elizabeth. “‘Coming events cast their shadows before’: Christopher in Cambridge, 1960–67.” Early Music, Christopher Hogwood Memorial Issue, 44/1 (February 2015): 11-20.

Rogers, Vanessa L. “Haydn as a London “Star:” Thoughts on Using Material Culture to Teach Eighteenth-Century Music at a Liberal Arts College.” Haydn: The Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America 6/1 (Spring 2016): http://www.rit.edu/affiliate/haydn/ .

Skinner, David. “‘Deliuer me from my deceytful ennemies’: a Tallis contrafactum in time of war.” Early Music 44/2 (May 2016): 233-50.

Talbot, Michael. “Thomas Bowman, Vicar of Martham: evangelist and composer.” Early Music, Christopher Hogwood Memorial Issue, 44/1 (February 2015): 77-88.

White, Harry. “The Lexicography of Irish Musical Experience: Notes towards a Digital Future.” Fontes Artis Musicae 63/3 (July-September 2016): 192-201.

Williamson, Magnus. “Queen Mary I, Tallis’s O sacrum convivium and a Latin Litany.” Early Music 44/2 (May 2016): 251-70.

 

Books

Brocken, Michael. The Twenty-First Century Legacy of the Beatles: Liverpool and Popular Music Heritage Tourism. Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015.

Butler, Katherine. Music in Elizabethan Court Politics. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2015.

Carnelley, John. George Smart and Nineteenth-Century London Concert Life. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2015.

Daub, Adrian and Charles Kronengold. The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Furhmann, Christina. Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses: From Mozart to Bellini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Greer, David. Manuscript Inscriptions in Early English Printed Music. Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015.

Hall, Michael. Music Theatre in Britain: 1960-1975. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2015.

Lew, Nathaniel G. Tonic to the Nation: Making English Music in the Festival of Britain. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Mangsen, Sandra. Songs without Words: Keyboard Arrangements of Vocal Music in England, 1560–1760. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2016.

Mullen, John. The Show Must Go On!: Popular Song in Britain during the First World War. Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015.

Ó hAllmhuráin, Gearóid. Flowing Tides: History and Memory in an Irish Soundscape. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 344

Rupprecht, Philip Ernst. British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and Their Contemporaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Stroeher, Vicki P., Nicholas Clark, and Jude Brimmer, eds. My Beloved Man: The Letters of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. Aldeburgh Studies in Music, Film & Theatre, Music. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2016.

Waldrep, Shelton. Future Nostalgia: Performing David Bowie. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

Watt, Paull and Anne-Marie Forbes, eds. Joseph Holbrooke: Composer, Critic, and Musical Patriot. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

 

Scores

Eccles, John. Incidental Music, Part 1: Plays A-F. Edited by Amanda Eubanks Winkler. Recent Researches in Music of the Baroque Era, 190. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2015.

Handel, George Frideric. Coronation Anthems, HWV 259, 258, 260, 261. Edited by Stephn Blaut. Hallische Händel-Ausgabe, III/10. Leipzig: Breitkopf, 2015.

Handel, George Frideric. Lucio Cornelio Silla. Edited by Terence Best. Hallische Händel-Ausgabe, II/7. Leipzig: Breitkopf, 2015.

MacMillan, James. The Keening for large orchestra. London: Boosey, 2015.

MacMillan, James. The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ According to Luke. Vocal score. London: Boosey, 20015.

MacMillan, James. Stomp (with Fate and Elvira): Concert Overture for Orchestra. London: Boosey, 2015.

MacMillan, James. Tryst for chamber orchestra. London: Boosey, 2015.

Vaughan Williams, Ralph. Four Hymns for Tenor, Solo Viola & String Orchestra. London: Boosey, 2015.

Vaughan Williams, Ralph. Richard II. Incidental Music for a Radio Production of William Shakespeare’s Play. Edited by Nathaniel G. Lew. Willington, New Zealand: Promethean, 2014.

NABMSA is pleased to announce that the winner of the biennial Temperley prize for the outstanding student paper at the Seventh Biennial Conference in Syracuse is Christy J. Miller. Miller, a doctoral student at the University of Kansas, presented a paper entitled ““If They Can Do It, I Guess That We Can, Too”: Folk and “Folk-Styled” Music as Propaganda in The Martins and the Coys.” The abstract is below. Congratulations to Ms. Miller and all of the excellent student papers!

The Martins and the Coys is one of three ballad operas the BBC commissioned from American writers and musicians for radio broadcast in England in 1944 and 1945. The productions were modeled on the tradition of English ballad opera: they were plays with spoken dialogue, and popularly known songs and contrafacta were interpolated throughout. However, each uses an archetypal American topic: the Harlem Renaissance, a cattle drive across the untamed frontier, and—in The Martins and Coys—an Appalachian family feud. In addition to popular songs, they utilized folk, blues, and “folk-styled” songs not only because they were stylistically appropriate to the subject matter but also for the purpose of representing the American experience to English audiences. These ballad operas were part of a discreet propaganda campaign to encourage mutual understanding and solidarity between English and American citizens on the home front, and to promote transcultural understanding between England and the U.S. during and after the war.

Documentary evidence from the BBC Written Archives, Listener Research reports, and critical reviews reveal how The Martins and the Coys was received, and additional planning documents and correspondence help to reconstruct ideology surrounding the three ballad operas. Musically, I analyze performative aspects of the radio productions using extant recordings, considering how the choice of repertory, performers, and arrangement styles were intended to influence perceptions of international camaraderie. Through analytical strategies of propaganda theory and psychological warfare, I investigate American intentionality and English response to the ballad opera’s message of reconciliation and solidarity. Ultimately, examining the ballad opera with these frameworks contributes to our understanding of the relationship between the United States and England during World War II, and it adds to the scholarly body of knowledge concerning American radio propaganda as a part of British musical life.

The new issue of NABMSA Reviews is now posted, with reviews of:

  1. Michael Brocken, The Twenty-First-Century Legacy of The Beatles: Liverpool and Popular Music Heritage Tourism 
  2. Lewis Foreman and Susan Foreman, eds., Felix Aprahamian: Diaries and Selected Writings on Music
  3. Lee Marshall and David Laing, eds., Popular Music Matters: Essays in Honour of Simon Frith
  4. John Mullen, The Show Must Go On! Popular Song in Britain During the First World War
  5. Thomas Schuttenhelm, The Orchestral Music of Michael Tippett: Creative Development and the Compositional Process
  6. Peter Wiegold and Ghislaine Kenyon, eds., Beyond Britten: The Composer and the Community
  7. Sarah F. Williams, Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads

Check it out here, along with all the past issues: http://nabmsa.org/nabmsa-reviews/

Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies One-Day Conference
21 January 2017
Durham University, UK
CFP Deadline: 1 September 2016

Conference website: https://www.dur.ac.uk/cncs/conferences/musicbritainww1/

Keynote Address

‘Disruption or Continuity? Elgar’s Cello Concerto and the Modern Romantic Ideal’
Charles Edward McGuire (Oberlin College)

Call for Papers

Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) casts the First World War as the birth of the Modern psyche for Britons. Through analysis of war literature and soldiers’ life writing, he argues the cataclysm of the war evinced a rupture with the clear moral standards, innocence, traditional artistic representations, and ways of constructing memory of pre-1914 Britain. In his “Modern” post-1914 Britain, disorientation, alienation, and irony become the dominant modes of representation. In contrast, Jay Winter, in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995), argues historical inquiry into the responses to the First World War have over-emphasized the progressive, Modernist responses, and in the process have ignored the traditional motifs in the myriad of responses to the war. He writes ‘this vigorous mining of eighteenth and nineteenth-century images and metaphors to accommodate expressions of mourning is one central reason why it is unacceptable to see the Great War as the moment when “modern memory” replaced something else, something timeworn and discredited, which (following contemporaries) I have called “tradition.”’  These two influential viewpoints have structured much of the subsequent discourse on the First World War coming from the disciplines of literature and history in the last several decades; it however has received little attention within music.

This conference aims to bring to music this crucial framework for understanding artistic and cultural responses to the First World War. We seek papers that explore these themes of rupture/ disillusionment and “mining of nineteenth-century” modes of representation/ tradition within the context of musical life throughout the British Empire. Participants from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives that engage with music are particularly welcome.

Possible topics on these rupture/ tradition themes are (but are not limited to):

1. How did British art music composers react to the war? Do we see rupture with the past or continuation of nineteenth-century practices?

2. How can we understand British Musical Modernism within this dichotomy of rupture/ tradition? How does it compare with European Musical Modernism? In what ways can we understand the Pastoral in these contexts?

3. What bearing does this rupture/ tradition dichotomy have on the historiography of British music and the notion of the long nineteenth-century?

4. In what ways did popular music—whether repertoire, performers, or the industry—change because of the war? In what ways did it carry on Edwardian and Victorian traditions?

5. In what ways did musical life in Britain help define, blur, or shatter traditional boundaries between
•    the home and war fronts?
•    wartime public and private spaces?
•    civilians and soldiers?
•    within the army (officers and non-ranking men, wounded and healthy)?
•    social classes?
•    men and women?
•    the motherland and dominion countries?

6. How does music contribute to Britain’s commemoration of the war and those lost and wounded? Do the modes of remembrance used indicate a break with the past, or do they carry on traditional mourning practices?

Abstract Submission Information

Abstracts are invited from academic staff, postgraduates, and other researchers for 20-minute individual papers and panels of three (90 minutes) or four papers (120 minutes).

All abstracts should be no longer than 300 words. Please also include your name, institutional affiliation or city, and a bio of up to 100 words.

Papers accepted will be considered for inclusion in a future edited collection.

Please send abstracts by 5pm (GMT) on 1 September 2016 to Michelle Meinhart at cncs@durham.ac.uk Acceptance decisions will be made by 1 October 2016.

This conference is supported by the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and the US-UK Fulbright Commission.