The North American British Music Studies Association

The North American British Music Studies Association

CFP: A Great Divide or a Longer Nineteenth Century? Music, Britain and the First World War

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.

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.uk by 1 June 2016.

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.uk or oskar.cox_jensen@kcl.ac.uk.

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 title: “Arts + The Inklings” Verge Conference
CFP deadline: May 15, 2016
Conference dates September 28 – 30, 2016
web site: http://www.twu.ca/vergeconference
venue: Trinity Western University, Langley, BC, Canada

This interdisciplinary arts conference invites presentations on topics relating to and stimulated by the work of the group of Oxford authors known as The Inklings—including C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and J.R.R. Tolkien, as well as friends such as Dorothy L. Sayers, and their literary mentors, earlier writers such as George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton. We invite presentations on such topics as…The Inklings authors’ contributions to the arts; translating their work into other media–film, theatre, music, visual art; the relationship between faith and story; the Inklings’ legacy as culture critics; and other topics related to the theme. Keynote speaker is Dr. Michael Ward, Senior Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, and author of Planet Narnia (Oxford University Press, 2008). This conference welcomes submissions from any discipline that explore the topic under consideration. Proposal deadline is May 15, 2016. For more conference information visit www.twu.ca/vergeconference.

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:

Jacqui.julier@new.ox.ac.uk

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

23-25 June, Senate House, University of London

Deadline for Submissions:  Monday, 4 January 2016

Notifications as to Inclusion:  Friday, 22 January 2016

This is the call for papers for the ninth annual Britain and the World Conference, which will be in London in June 2016. Paper and panel proposals should focus on Britain’s interactions with the world from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the present.  Established scholars, scholars at the beginning of their careers, and graduate students are all equally welcome to apply and present at the conference.

The keynote speaker is Professor Catherine Hall (University College London), and the three plenary speakers are Professor Stephen Conway (University College London), Professor Margaret Hunt (Uppsala University), and Professor Philip Murphy (Institute of Commonwealth Studies).

The Britain and the World Conference is always a very sociable conference, and the 2016 conference will be no different, with the Conference Icebreaker on the Thursday evening, the Dinner Party on the Friday evening, and a post-conference night out in Soho beginning on the Saturday evening.

The conference accepts both individual paper and complete panel submissions. Submissions of individual papers should include an abstract of 200 words as well as a few descriptive keywords. Panels are expected to consist of three to four papers and should be submitted by one person who is willing to serve as the point of contact.  Complete panels must also include a chair.  In addition to abstracts for each individual paper, panel submissions should also include a brief 100-150 word introduction describing the panel’s main theme. The conference does not discriminate between panels and individual paper submissions.

All submissions for inclusion in the Britain and the World Conference must be received by Monday, 4 January 2016. Submissions should be made electronically to editor@britishscholar.org. Updates regarding the conference will be periodically posted to the Society website. It is hoped that participants will be able to call upon their departments for hotel and transportation expenses if necessary.

Britain and the World is the annual conference of The British Scholar Society. Our peer-reviewed journal – http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/brw – is published by Edinburgh University Press, and our book series – http://www.palgrave.com/series/Britain-and-the-World/BAW/ – with Palgrave Macmillan. Submissions are encouraged to each, and representatives of both publishers will be present at the conference. To receive the Society’s free monthly newsletter please sign up by visiting www.britishscholar.org, and please consider following @britishscholar on Twitter, and joining our Facebook group.

Information on hotel accommodation and conference registration will be forthcoming. It should be noted that becoming a member of The British Scholar Society entitles you to a discounted registration rate. We also offer a discounted registration rate for students.  Membership in The British Scholar Society for 2016 will be available on The British Scholar Society website by visiting our membership page at www.britishscholar.org/british-scholar/membership/ beginning on 1 October.  If you have any questions about the forthcoming conference, please contact the Conference Organizing Committee.

Best wishes,

Michelle Brock

Martin Farr

Robert Whitaker

Conference Organizing Committee 2016

The British Scholar Society