The North American British Music Studies Association
2025 Colloquium
NABMSA is excited to announce the spring 2025 colloquium:
Wednesday, March 26th, at 11 AM CST / 5 PM UK
“Resistance and Utopia in Interwar English Choral Music: How Vaughan Williams, Bush, and Britten Responded to Uncertain Times By Composing”
Dr. Stewart Duncan
Wednesday, April 23rd, at 12 PM CST / 6 PM UK
Tentative title: “Avoiding National Essentialism in Music History Pedagogy”
Panel of guest speakers
Co-sponsored by the North American British Music Association and AMS Pedagogy Group
The North American British Music Studies Association is proud to present the first in a new series of lectures from NABMSA prize winners. We begin with the 2024 Ruth Solie Prize winner for Outstanding Article on British Music , Dr. Stewart Duncan of the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Stewart’s article “‘An Excellent Piece of Propaganda’: The British Council’s Use of Choirs as Cultural Diplomacy in the 1930s” was published in Musical Quarterly in 2022.
Stewart will present further research in a talk titled “Resistance and Utopia in Interwar English Choral Music: How Vaughan Williams, Bush, and Britten Responded to Uncertain Times by Composing.” This talk will explore three major works from English composers who turned to choral forces to articulate specific reactions to political events in the 1930s. First, is Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Dona Nobis Pacem, a 1936 cantata for soprano and baritone soloists, choir, and orchestra that enshrines Vaughan Williams’s passion for federalism and European cooperation in musical form. I show that Dona Nobis Pacem stands more resolutely as an antifascist alternative vision for Europe than the simple pacifist warning it is often characterized as today. Second, is Alan Bush’s 1937 Piano Concerto, which employed a male chorus in the final movement to stage a complex and self-referential commentary on concert hall traditions under capitalism. The choir is central to Bush’s anticapitalist and antifascist program: the singers arrest the attention of the audience by rupturing the concerto’s textural continuity, speak directly to the audience through the “fourth wall,” and then articulate the very political and aesthetic concerns that the disruption is meant to highlight. Finally, I place the young Benjamin Britten’s 1939 cantata Ballad of Heroes in the context of his emerging pacifism and communism, perspectives which sprang directly from his association with leading left intellectuals from 1936 forwards. The Ballad shows Britten navigating a developing worldview amid worrying political news from around the world, to which he reacted strongly in his diaries and correspondence.
This event will occur via Zoom at 11 AM Central US/5PM UK time on Wednesday 26 March. To receive Zoom information, register for a free ticket using this link.
If you are interested in supporting future lectures and presentations like these or are interested in NABMSA’s work, please visit nabmsa.org for more information. Consider becoming a member and enjoying all that the association has to offer!
