The North American British Music Studies Association
Conference Program 2014
University of Nevada, Las Vegas, July 31 – August 3, 2014
Thursday, July 31
From 2:00 – Registration – Beam Music Center, Recital Hall Lobby
3:30-5:00pm – Paper Session 1A & 1B
Songs: Love, Melancholy, Sympathy – Ham Fine Arts 147
- Chair: Derek B. Scott (University of Leeds)
- Jason Rosenholtz-Witt (Northwestern University), “William Byrd’s Cupid Songs and the English Emblem Tradition”
- Samantha Bassler (The Open University & Westminster Choir College of Rider University), “John Dowland and Constructions of Melancholy as Disability in Early Modern England”
- Bethany Cencer (Stony Brook University), “From Mourning to Moralizing: Elegiac Partsong, Masculinity, and the Rhetoric of Sympathy.”
The University of Oxford (3:30-4:00) – Ham Fine Arts 212
- Chair: Aidan Thomson (Queen’s University, Belfast)
- Rosemary Golding (The Open University), “Musical Samplers: Oxford Degree Exercises in the Nineteenth Century”
5:15-6:15pm – Dance Workshop – Ham Fine Arts 111 (Dance Studio)
- Chair: Stacey Jocoy (Texas Tech University)
- Christopher J. Smith (Texas Tech University), “‘One of the First Refinements of Polished Societies’: Dance as Social Engineering in Regency England”
6:15-7:30pm – Welcome Reception – Beam Music Center, Recital Hall Lobby
Sponsored by the UNLV College of Fine Arts and Dean Jeffrey Koep
9:00pm – Informal drinks – The Crown and Anchor, 1350 E Tropicana Ave
Friday, August 1
From 8:00am – Registration – Beam Music Center, Recital Hall Lobby
8:45-9:45am – Paper Session 2A & 2B
The BBC – Ham Fine Arts 147
- Chair: Aidan Thomson (Queen’s University, Belfast)
- Emily Hoyler (Northwestern University), “Masculinity, Musicality, and ‘Englishness’ at the BBC in the Interwar Years”
- Benjamin Wolf (Regent’s University, London), “Professional Capital, the BBC, and ‘Poor Old English Opera’–Examining the Life of Alick Maclean”
The Musical Sherlock Holmes – Ham Fine Arts 212
- Chair: Alyson McLamore (California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo)
- Kristi Brown-Montesano (The Colburn School, Conservatory of Music), “The Secret of Sherlock’s Violin: A Study in (Musical) Motives”
- Emily Baumgart (Michigan State University), “‘His Addiction to Music at Strange Hours’: An Exploration of Sherlock Holmes as Musician”
10:00-11:00am – Paper Session 3A & 3B
Sounds of “Englishness” – Ham Fine Arts 147
- Chair: Nathaniel G. Lew (Saint Michael’s College)
- Ceri Owen (University of Oxford), “Vaughan Williams’s ‘Meta-Songs’: Harry Plunket Greene, Singing Lessons, and the Performance of English Voices in Songs of Travel and The House of Life.”
- Grant Olwage (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg), “Paul Robeson and the Performance of Englishness”
Women “Pioneers” – Ham Fine Arts 212
- Chair: Elizabeth Morgan (Saint Joseph’s University)
- Jenna Bailey (University of Lethbridge & University of Sussex), “‘The Melodic Minors’: An Exploration into the Lives of the Musicians in the Ivy Benson Band”
- Rachel Lumsden (University of Oklahoma), “Oliveria Prescott, Music Theorist?”
11:00-11:30am – Coffee Break – Beam Music Center 160
11:30am-12:30pm – Paper Session 4A & 4B
Criminal Intents – Ham Fine Arts 147
- Chair: Amanda Eubanks Winkler (Syracuse University)
- Andrew McIntyre (Northwestern University), “‘A strange inhumane Murther’: Husband Murderers in English Broadside Ballads of the Seventeenth Century.”
- Ann van Allen-Russell (Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance), “Imaginative Territory: J. C. Bach, C. F. Abel, and the Rise of Intellectual Property”
Britten and Opera – Ham Fine Arts 212
- Chair: Vicki Stroeher (Marshall University)
- Eric Saylor (Drake University), “‘No more fear and no more storm’: Peter Grimes and the Utopian Pastoral”
- Danielle Ward-Griffin (Christopher Newport University), “Realism Redux: Staging Billy Budd in the Television Age”
12:30-1:45pm – Break for lunch (on your own)
12:30-1:45 – Board Meeting – Ham Fine Arts Conference Room
1:45-2:45pm – Paper Session 5A & 5B
Virtuosity, Retrospection, Reformation, Modernism I – Ham Fine Arts 147
- Chair: Julian Onderdonk (West Chester University)
- Victoria Bernath (University of York), “‘Middle Fiddle’ No More: The Edwardian Viola Concerto and the Development of Viola Virtuosity in Britain”
- Thomas Schuttenhelm (The University of Hartford, Hartt School of Music), “‘Visions and Revisions’: Retrospection and Illumination in Michael Tippett’s Fifth String Quartet”
Imports and Exports I – Ham Fine Arts 212
- Chair: Joice Waterhouse Gibson (Metropolitan State College of Denver)
- Catherine Tackley (The Open University), “Encountering a Tiger: Responses to Jazz in Britain, c. 1917-1945”
- Jennifer Oates (Queens College & The Graduate Center, City University of New York), “‘Fling off the yoke of German music’: Provincialism, Identity, and Art Music in Edinburgh, 1900-1917”
3:00-4:00pm – Paper Session 6A & 6B
Virtuosity, Retrospection, Reformation, Modernism II – Ham Fine Arts 147
- Chair: Julian Onderdonk (West Chester University)
- Erica Siegel (University of California, Riverside), “Vaughan Williams and the Reformation of Ballet in Britain”
- Anthony Barone & Timothy Hoft (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), “‘Painful and Sinister Abstractions’: The Vexed Modernism of Alan Bush’s Early Piano Works”
Imports and Exports II – Ham Fine Arts 212
- Chair: Joice Waterhouse Gibson (Metropolitan State College of Denver)
- Emily Hopkins (McGill University), “Examinations Go Abroad: The ABRSM in Ceylon/Sri Lanka, 1956-1974”
- Adèle Commins (Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland), “Watchmen on the Walls of Music Across the Atlantic: Reception of Charles Villiers Stanford and His Music in the American Press”
4:00-4:30pm – Coffee Break – Beam Music Center 160
4:30-5:30pm – Paper Session 7A & 7B
The Loder Family: Musicians of Bath – Ham Fine Arts 147
- Chair: Stacey Jocoy (Texas Tech University)
- Nicholas Temperley (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), “The Loder Family: Musicians of Bath” (assisted by Alison Leigh Mero, soprano, and Justin Vickers, tenor)
Music and the Sea – Ham Fine Arts 212
- Chair: Christopher Scheer (Utah State University)
- Louis Niebur (University of Nevada, Reno), “The Sea through a Seashell: Two Musical Depictions of the Sea in BBC Radio Drama”
- Hilary Seraph Donaldson (University of Toronto), “Frank Bridge, the Sea, and the Ebb of the English Romantic Imagination”
5:45-7:00pm – Keynote Address – Barrick Museum Auditorium (Map bldg 29)
- Chair: Candace Bailey (North Carolina Central University)
- Michael Pisani (Vassar College), “British Film Music before Film: Reconstructing Music in Popular Dramas”
7:30-9:00pm – Committee on Career Development and Graduate Student Concerns – Ham Fine Arts 212
Saturday, August 2
From 8:00am – Registration – Beam Music Center, Recital Hall Lobby
8:00 – Continental Breakfast – Beam Music Center 160
9:00-10:30am – Paper Session 8A & 8B
Opera in Nineteenth-Century England – Ham Fine Arts 147
- Chair: Walter Clark (University of California, Riverside)
- Alison Leigh Mero (Indiana University), “Victorian Opera Ballads on the Stage and in the Drawing Room”
- Chloe Valenti (University of Cambridge), “Throats, Ears and Force-Pump Operas: ‘Sick’ Audiences and Singers in Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera”
- Tommaso Sabbatini (University of Chicago), “‘Château d’Astolat’ and ‘Jardins de Kenilworth’: Foreign-Sounding Britishness in Two 1890s Operas for Covent Garden”
Death, Monsters, and the Succession – Ham Fine Arts 212
- Chair: Linda Austern (Northwestern University)
- K. Dawn Grapes (Colorado State University), “Above the Firmament: Elizabethan Musical Elegies as Commentaries on the Afterlife”
- William Ross Hagen (Utah Valley University), “‘The great abuse and vice that here in England doth reign’: Succession Anxiety and Monstrous Birth Ballads in Elizabethan England”
- Jeremy L. Smith (University of Colorado at Boulder), “Musical Depictions of Mary Queen of Scots as Susanna by William Byrd”
10:30-11:00am – Coffee Break – Beam Music Center 160
11:00am-12:00pm – Paper Session 9A & 9B
Music Festivals – Ham Fine Arts 147
- Chair: Lisa Scoggin (Boston, MA)
- Muriel Smith (University of York), “Shaping Musical Taste: The Competition Music Festival in Winnipeg, Canada, 1919-1945”
- Charles Edward McGuire (Oberlin College Conservatory of Music), “Minding the Middle Classes: John Crosse’s Account of the Grand Festival and British Historiographical Triumphalism”
Benjamin Britten: Campaigner and Composer I – Ham Fine Arts 212
- Chair: Philip Rupprecht (Duke University)
- Kate Guthrie (King’s College, London), “Instruments of the Orchestra (1946): Music Education in Post-War Britain”
- Thornton Miller (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), “Benjamin Britten and the Anglo-Soviet Cultural Exchanges of the Early 1960s: The Days of British Music Festival (1963) and the English Opera Group’s Tour of the Soviet Union (1964)”
12:15-1:15pm – Paper Session 10A & 10B
Psalms and Folksongs – Ham Fine Arts 147
- Chair: Justin Vickers (Illinois State University)
- Andrew Cheetham (University of Huddersfield), “Porter’s Psalm Settings and Paradoxes”
- Dorothy De Val (York University, Toronto), “No More ‘Watered Mendelssohn’: Percy Grainger as Innovator in his Early British Folk Song Settings”
Benjamin Britten: Campaigner and Composer II – Ham Fine Arts 212
- Chair: Philip Rupprecht (Duke University)
- Imani Mosley (Duke University), “Britten’s Churches: Acoustic Space, Mysticism, and Community”
- Stuart Paul Duncan (Yale University), “Benjamin Britten’s Metric and Hypermetric Experiments in the 1930s and 1940s”
1:15-2:30pm – Break for lunch (on your own)
2:30-4:00pm – Paper Session 11A & 11B
Theory, Pedagogy, and Politics in Early Modern England – Ham Fine Arts 147
- Chair: Amanda Eubanks Winkler (Syracuse University)
- Joseph M. Ortiz (University of Texas at El Paso), “Playing the Devil: John Bull and Musical Obscurity in Early Modern England”
- Megan Kaes Long (Oberlin College Conservatory of Music), “Cadential Syntax and Tonal Expectation in Seventeenth-Century Homophony”
- JoAnn Taricani (University of Washington, Seattle), “Playford’s Shadow: Images and Ciphers of the Interregnum”
Musical Misfits, Commentaries, and Controversies – Ham Fine Arts 212
- Chair: Virko Baley (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
- Ryan Ross (Mississippi State University), “Malcolm Arnold, Anti-Symphonist? Reassessing a Misfit Composer’s Most Controversial Music”
- Karen Olson (Washington University of St. Louis), “Black Pentecost, Green Politics: Peter Maxwell Davies and Environmental Protest”
- Christopher Holmes (Anderson University), “‘We are born with the dead’: T. S. Eliot’s Idea of Tradition in Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King”
4:00-4:30pm – Coffee Break – Beam Music Center 160
4:30-5:30pm – Paper Session 12A & 12B
Musical Venues – Ham Fine Arts 147
- Chair: William Weber (California State University, Long Beach)
- Christine Kyprianides (IndyBaroque Music, Inc., Indianapolis), “The Forgotten History of St. Martin’s Hall, 1850-1867”
- Michelle Meinhart (Martin Methodist College), “Singing Tommies and Their ‘Stourhead Mother’: An Unlikely Musical Family in the English Country House during the First World War”
Critical Reflections: Burney and Tovey – Ham Fine Arts 212
- Chair: Alyson McLamore (California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo)
- Thomas Irvine (University of Southampton), “Charles Burney and the Sounds of China”
- Robert D. Pearson (University of North Texas), “Tovey’s Renaissance”
6:30pm – Bus departs for conference banquet – Student Union (Map bldg 38)
7:00pm – Conference banquet – Gordon Biersch, 3987 Paradise Rd
9:00pm – Bus departs for UNLV campus – Gordon Biersch
