Midwest Victorian Studies Conference
CFP – Victorian Health and Wellness
Saint Louis University
April 20-22, 2018
What did it mean to be healthy in nineteenth-century Britain and its empire? What practices and policies shaped soundness of body, mind, and spirit? Just how well (or unwell) were the Victorians? The Program Committee for the 2018 MVSA conference invites proposals for papers and panels on the subject of Victorian health and wellness. Submissions are welcome from scholars working in art history, musicology, history, science, philosophy, theater, literature, and other fields of scholarly endeavor. We encourage proposals that will contribute to cross-disciplinary discussion, which is a special feature of MVSA conferences.
The Jane Stedman Plenary Speaker will be Dr. Carolyn Day of the Department of History at Furman University. Professor Day is an expert on perceptions and experiences of disease in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, and is the author of Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease.
The 2018 conference will feature seminars led by Dr. Carolyn Day, Dr. Christopher Ferguson, and Dr. Anne Stiles.
More information can be found on the conference CFP (deadline Sept 30th), the seminar CFP (deadline Oct 31st), and the MVSA website.
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)
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.
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