The North American British Music Studies Association
CFP: Music and Politics in Britain, c.1780-c.1850
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
Conference
July 29-31, 2016
Downing College, University of Cambridge
Scholars will present papers exploring the period’s dance, music and drama from a wide range of historical and methodological perspectives. The keynote address, ‘London as Theatre: Entertainment for Free in the Regency City’, will be given by Celina Fox (The Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment), and historical gesture specialist Jed Wentz (Conservatorium van Amsterdam) will present a lecture-performance on ‘Reconstructing Late Eighteenth-Century Acting’. In addition, the conference will open with an introduction by Iain Mackintosh (Architecture, Actor and Audience) at the remarkable Cambridge Festival Theatre (built in 1814), providing a rare opportunity for conference attendees to see an original surviving Regency three-level horseshoe auditorium.
For further details and to book your place, please see: www.regencytheatre2016.com
Hurry! Early Bird rates expire on 31 December!
Convenors: Michael Burden, Michael Gaunt, Sarah Meer, Marcus Risdell, Vanessa L. Rogers, Barry Sheppard
Society for Eighteenth-Century Music
Seventh Biennial Conference
Deadline: 9/15/15
25-28 February 2016
Austin, TX
For more information, see: http://www.secm.org/
The Society for Eighteenth-Century Music will hold its seventh biennial conference at the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas, Austin, 25–28 February 2016. We invite proposals for papers and other presentations on any aspect of eighteenth-century music. Presentations may be traditional papers of 25 minutes (35-minute slot), work-in-progress presentations of 10 minutes (20-minute slot), panels (45 minutes) or lecture-recitals (up to 45 minutes). Preference will be given to those who did not present at the 2014 meeting. All presenters must be members of SECM.
Submit your proposal (250 words) as an e-mail attachment to the chair of the program committee, Dianne Lehmann Goldman [secm2016 -at- gmail.com]. The deadline for proposals is September 15, 2015. Only one submission per author will be considered. Please provide a cover sheet and proposal in separate documents. The cover sheet should contain your name, e-mail address, phone number, and proposal title. The proposal should contain only the title, abstract, and audio-visual requirements. The committee’s decision will be announced in mid-October. Several period keyboard instruments will be available. For information, please contact local arrangements chair Guido Olivieri [olivieri -at- austin.utexas.edu]. Students are encouraged to apply for the Sterling E. Murray Award for Student Travel; the application form and information may be found below. The application deadline is November 1, 2015. The SECM Student Paper Award will be given to a student member for an outstanding paper presented at the conference.
A proposed North American British Music Studies Association (NABMSA) session at the annual conference of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) will have as its focus Anglo-American musics during the long eighteenth century. The conference will occur Mar. 31-April 3 in Pittsburgh. We invite scholars from a wide variety of disciplines (musicology, historical ethnomusicology, history, literature, cultural studies, anthropology, economics, and folklore studies) to submit proposals that examine interrelationships between British and American music over this period. Building on recent postcolonial inquiry in musicology and British history, we seek to fashion a panel that will examine how music functions in the circulation of cultures, commodities, and identities across the Atlantic. Appropriate topics might include: British music in American and Caribbean colonies; influences of and references to colonial music in British musical life; postcolonial perspectives on British and American identities (gender, race, nation, religion, and class); transatlantic musical correlations between Britain and the United States in postcolonial and early Federal period; and intersections between Anglophone musics and those of other cultures. Three presenters will be selected through blind review of abstracts by a program committee consisting of scholars who specialize in Anglo-American music. We will entertain individual proposals as well as submissions of unified three-person panels.
Please include your name, institutional affiliation (if applicable), contact information, and the title of your paper in the body of an email. Abstracts of no more than 250 words should include the title of the paper and no other identifying information. Please send abstracts as Microsoft Word attachments to Bethany.Cencer@stonybrook.edu by Friday, September 12.
