Friday, 18 June

1:30 pm - 3:15 pm

Vaughan Williams

Folk Song and Theatricality in Hugh the Drover and Sir John in Love
Eric Saylor (Drake University)
Vaughan Williams's operas tend to be overshadowed by many of his other works, but were important personal accomplishments that encompassed wide expressive and dramatic ranges. Two of his operas, Hugh the Drover (1910-14) and Sir John in Love (1924-28) prominently feature folk songs; however, the manner in which they are presented differs significantly between the two works. Hugh is a picturesque ballad opera that tends to use folk tunes in a self-consciously performative manner, preserving their original texts and functions in ways that segregate them from the larger musico-dramatic layout. In Sir John in Love, a work more closely aligned with Verdian opera, folk tunes are frequently employed for dramatic ends that may have little to do with their original function, but reinforce important plot points.

This paper will consider some examples of Vaughan Williams's use of folk and traditional music in the two operas, showing how their application was affected by his musical and dramatic goals for each opera. This not only requires examining the dramatic circumstances under which the songs appear, but also whether they have been altered (musically and/or textually) from their original form, why particular songs are assigned to particular characters (and what they reveal or imply about those characters), and to what degree the songs retain their original function. Critical study of the folk songs used in the operas reveals much about Vaughan Williams's conception of folk song as an expressive force, as do his own public statements and private correspondence, but it also indicates a profound shift in his conception of opera that has gone largely unacknowledged. The generally understated integration of folk songs into the larger musical texture of Sir John in Love, as well as their dramatic propriety when present, suggests that Vaughan Williams was moving beyond the conspicuous quotation or imitation of indigenous English music that characterized many of his pre-World War I works, including Hugh the Drover, indicating its decreasing importance in defining his mature style.

Vaughan Williams, The Poisoned Kiss, and the Legacy of the Savoy Operas
James Brooks Kuykendall (Calvin College)
In the late 1920s, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Evelyn Sharp collaborated on THE POISONED KISS, a "romantic extravaganza" in the general tradition of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. THE POISONED KISS was not performed until 1936, and it was received with mixed reviews. Subsequent criticism has tended to cast the blame for the work's failure on Sharp's too-clever-by-half dialogue; after her death, the composer bought out her rights to the work and revised it, replacing the dialogue with a new text by Ursula Vaughan Williams. Significantly, this change has not redeemed the work, and comparatively few productions have been mounted subsequently. The failures within THE POISONED KISS are not as superficial as dialogue, but rather fundamental structural problems. Some of these were evident to the collaborators even in the 1920s, as their correspondence shows. This paper seeks to illumine some of these problems from the perspective of the Savoy operas, and to seek the source of these problems in the complicated conception and revision of this marginal(ized) work.

The Middle Years: Vaughan Williams, Art Song Composition, and the Development of a Style
Renée Chérie Clark (Hillsdale College)
Scholarship on Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Music has paid comparatively little attention to his art songs. Among the works that have suffered particular neglect are *Two Poems by Seumas O’Sullivan*, *Three Songs from Shakespeare*, *Four Poems by Fredegond Shove*, *Three Poems by Walt Whitman*, and the A. E. Housman cycle *Along the Field*. Even those scholars who have discussed Vaughan Williams’s work in this genre (e.g. Banfield 1985; Savage 2002; Hallmark 2003; Clark 2003) have ignored these particular compositions. This paper will outline the qualities of these songs that make them so distinct from the art songs written during other periods of the composer’s career, specifically the more famous songs or song cycles like ‘Linden Lea’, *The House of Life*, *Songs of Travel*, *On Wenlock Edge*, and *Four Last Songs*.

In support of my argument, I will point to a variety of features that set these art songs apart: two groups set texts by non-British poets, one sets test from a larger, non-poetical work, one uses text by an unknown poet, one has accompaniment that is not the piano, and those that do employ the piano have accompaniments that are seemingly absurdly simplistic compared to the composer’s previous work in the genre. Chronologically also these works can be assigned to a distinct and short period. All were composed between 1925 and 1927. It is striking that these pieces should be so different from the rest of his song composition since much greater continuity is apparent in his activity in other genres. This middle group of art song compositions serves, as I will argue, to further his development as one of the major English nationalist composers of the twentieth century.

The music of these particular songs functions as a reading of the poetic texts that they set. As such, I will be paying special attention to how the musical reading of the text constructs a particular sense of English national identity. In this regard, it is especially notable that one of the groups of songs sets work by the Irish poet Seumas O’Sullivan, and the other, even more interestingly, sets work by the quintessentially American poet Walt Whitman. I will draw contrasts between Vaughan Williams’s handling of these texts and his treatments of English poets, both in songs from this period, and throughout his career. I will also point out connections that can be drawn between Vaughan Williams’s nationalist composition in these art songs and the ideas he expresses about national identity in National Music. In this respect my approach compliments recent work by Frogley (e.g. 1996; 2001) on other compositions by Vaughan Williams, such as the Ninth Symphony, and Heckert (2003) on the English masque.

Opera and Renegotiation of Continental Models

Subtext and Subversion: The Hidden Parody of the Dragon Wantley (J.F. Lampe, 1737)
JoAnn Taricani (University of Michigan)
In Britain, Parliament enacted the Licensing Act of 1737 to prohibit productions of plays presenting allegories or over criticism of a corrupt government.

Subverting the intentions of this Act, however, was the opera "The Dragon of Wantley," which cleverly presented a number of political, allegorical references, while masking the subversiveness of the libretto with a parody of Italian opera. The political allegories had flourished after the execution of Charles I, and re-emerged with a vengeance during the 1730s in reaction to the corrupt practices of Prime Minister Robert Walpole.

The corrupt Rump Parliament of seventeenth-century England was satirized in hundreds of "Rump poems," in which depictions of the posterior and its effusions came to symbolize the stench of government. Many poems attached the posterior to a ravaging dragon, from whom General Monck delivered England with the 1659 Restoration. Imagery in the well-known poem/ballad "The Dragon of Wantley" of the late 1600s directly echoes this literature.

The 1737 opera, "The Dragon of Wantley," enjoys a reputation as a brilliant parody of the stereotypes of Baroque opera, but its overt lampoon of Italianate styles has obscured the subversive political satire it contains. The comic libretto, based on the earlier ballad, centers upon a dragon, killed by a kick to its backside by the hero Moore, resulting in an odoriferous and excrement-filled finale.

This opera, with its the symbolism of dragons and excrement, was the final new production of Fielding's theatre prior to its closure by the government. Yet, the protective mask of its Italianate veneer allowed the opera to survive in other theaters, and to continue to satirize the British government even after the passage of the Licensing Act of 1737.

Scott Repatriated? La Dame Blanche Crosses the Channel
Christina Fuhrmann (Ashland University)
Scotland, close enough to visit, far enough to seem untamed and mysterious, enthralled nineteenth-century composers. Fascination fixated on Sir Walter Scott, whose works spawned hundreds of foreign operas. When these musical mutations migrated across the channel, however, they often collided with Britain’s vision of her ‘national’ author. Nowhere is this more evident than with Boieldieu’s La Dame blanche (1825). A mélange of Guy Mannering and The Monastery, the opera drew acclaim throughout continental Europe, but in London, two separate productions failed.

What stymied this metamorphosis, as Scottish novels transformed into French opera ran aground in English re-translation? As I argue, Londoners’ collective memory of Scott’s novels and their English stage renditions haunted Boieldieu’s work. Adapters assembled uneasy hybrids of Scribe’s libretto, Scott’s originals, and previous English dramatizations that choked on competing strands of authentic and altered Scott. The title of the opera also fixed its doom. The supernatural white lady had elicited bewilderment and disgust from London critics, and adapters scrambled either to bolster this apparition with spectacular stage effects or to explain her away entirely. Finally, although Boieldieu’s score fared better, its Scottish tunes were too familiar, its ensembles too numerous, and its vocal demands too great to suit these theaters’ resources and taste. La Dame blanche’s foreign acclaim and native subject had seemed certain to spell success in London. As I demonstrate, however, the dense, divergent layers of meaning Scott’s works had accrued in England ultimately made the white lady one citizen the English could not repatriate.

Socialist Realism in England: The Case of Alan Bush’s Wat Tyler
Nathaniel Lew (St. Michael’s College)

Although we rarely associate socialist realism with England, the works of the communist composer Alan Bush (1900-1995) offer an exception. In 1949,Bush published articles in the Anglo-Soviet Journal justifying the 1948 Soviet Resolution on Music. Taking to heart the criticisms meted out to his Soviet colleagues, Bush attempted to expunge his own "formalist" leanings. As a result, Bush's first opera, Wat Tyler, composed in 1949, is a unique hybrid of Soviet socialist-realist and English nationalist operatic tendencies. Critics at the work's semi-amateur British stage premiere in 1974, misunderstanding the aesthetic implications of Bush's "progressive" politics, puzzled over the opera's "old-fashioned" music and dramaturgy. In fact, as I demonstrate through a discussion of the opera's plot and style and an examination of several excerpts, the work hews closely to operatic strictures promoted by Stalin and Zhdanov, reinterpreted for an English context and occasionally overlapping with the nationalist preoccupations of earlier English composers. The opera is emotionally inspiring, with a national, historically accurate, and socialist subject (the 1381 English peasants' rebellion), a socialist hero, and a focus on the English people. The melodious and accessible musical idiom avoids chromaticism and employs modernist techniques judiciously, borrowing the inflections of English folksong and emphasizing choruses. Ironically, the 1948 crackdown, while ruinous for Soviet music, inspired Bush. Although never produced professionally, Wat Tyler won a British opera competition in 1951. The work's aesthetic success owes much to Bush's freedom to interpret socialist-realist theory in a personal manner outside the repressive sphere of Soviet criticism.

3:30 pm - 5:55 pm

Music and Social Improvement

Morris and ‘Merrie England’: Mary Neal and the Espérence Club
Dorothy De Val (York University)
The formation of the Espérance Club for working-class girls in London by Mary Neal and Emmeline Pethick in 1895 marked a significant event in the age of Victorian philanthropy. This paper will explore the ideals and activities of the Club against the background of the developing philanthropic and women’s movements in late Victorian and early Edwardian London. Neal and Pethick began their Espérance Club as a social experiment for working girls but, influenced by the pioneering work of Cecil Sharp, expanded it to include morris dancing. Choosing the vigorous, traditionally masculine morris dance for the girls to learn instead of the usual ‘country dancing’, Neal scoured the country for ‘authentic’ dancers to teach the urban girls, who soon became proficient performers and teachers, travelling all over the country and abroad, much to Sharp’s consternation. Using primary sources including Neal’s unpublished autobiography, this paper will show how Neal broke new ground in her methods and fieldwork. Although Sharp’s aesthetic eventually prevailed, it can be said that Neal, who remained controversial, was ahead of her time in her approach to music and dance transmission, as well as in her ideas on social reform for women.

‘Tunes Appropriate and Devotional’: Tonic Sol-fa and British Missionary Control in Madagascar
Charles Edward McGuire (Oberlin Conservatory of Music)
The goal of John Curwen and other nineteenth-century promoters of the Tonic Sol-fa sight-singing notation was to form a stronger Christian community through singing. Promoting such singing to both improve worship and as a rational recreation would lead to social control: a distraction from working- and middle-class vices such as drinking, smoking, and gambling. But such aims were only the beginning of Curwen's program. By the early 1870s, Curwen attempted to link the method to the great moral philanthropic movements of the day, including Temperance, the Ragged Schools movement, and Protestant evangelism undertaken by foreign and domestic missionaries. While promising ecumenical equality in the promotion of the movement, in reality Curwen used the power of Tonic Sol-fa for Evangelical Dissenting causes.

A case in point is the use of Tonic Sol-fa by missionaries in Madagascar. Closed to European evangelization for several decades after 1836, when the mission field reopened there in 1862, Dissenting missionary societies, such as the London Missionary Society (LMS), moved in quickly. The missionaries immediately seized on the power of Tonic Sol-fa, using it as a to instigate ritual and musical control over the indigenous Malagasy Christians and converts, attempting to force them into a method of religious self-expression that agreed with their British notions of propriety in worship and moral s. For both Curwen and the LMS missionaries, this control also ensured that the Malagasy Christians would remain Dissenting Protestants, and not convert to Anglicanism or Catholicism. Through an examination of Curwen's editorials in The Tonic Sol-fa Reporter, as well as articles from contemporary missionary magazines and annual reports of the LMS missionaries currently held in the School for Oriental and African Studies archives, this paper will examine Curwen’s promotion of the LMS's Madagascar mission and his celebration of the controlling "civilizing power" he envisioned Tonic Sol-fa to have on the Malagasy Christians and converts.

Music as Social Organizer: The Brass Band Movement of Nineteenth-Century Britain
Denise Odello (UC-Santa Barbara)
Popular music often reflects the society that created it, and thus becomes a means of understanding that society in a new way. This is the case with the brass band movement of nineteenth-century Britain. These bands counted thousands of amateur, working-class performers in its ranks and performed for audiences numbering in the tens of thousands, constituting a meaningful social phenomenon. Their repertory included art music that was originally the exclusive domain of the upper classes and later came to represent the working classes themselves, as demonstrated by their presence in worker strikes at the beginning of the twentieth century. This movement had a profound effect on its social environment, acting as a catalyst for the formation of a group identity among the working classes while reinforcing class and social distinctions. The significance of such a musical phenomenon and its ramifications in the society that produced it can only be adequately investigated through an interdisciplinary approach. In my paper I will examine this movement using theories of the formation of national consciousness as put forth by Anderson and Hobsbawm in order to not only illuminate the role that this music played in the formation of a large group identity, but also to demonstrate how the movement reflected back upon the society which created it.

Sites of Modernity and the ‘History of Today’: English fin-de-Siécle Anxieties and the Case of the Music Hall
Deborah Heckert (Stony Brook University)
Imitating the scenes of Parisian cabarets and café-concerts by Impressionist painters such as Degas and Manet, several British artists produced paintings of London music halls during the 1880s and 90s. Answering the Impressionists’ call to paint the scenes of modern life, artists such as Sickert, Steers and Gore found in the music hall a manifestation of contemporary urban existence and a spectacle of working class, popular culture. Against charges these paintings were ugly and unnecessary, Sickert argued that their modernity was enough. “We don’t go back to other days, our history is of today,” he wrote. This approving rhetoric of artists, however, hid very real anxieties over class and popular culture that are revealed in the problematic renderings of the space of the halls in their paintings. This anxiety over the music hall is even more pronounced in writings from the English musical establishment at a time when there was a growing concern to create a modern, English musical style.

Focusing on the music hall as a conflicted site of modernity, my paper explores the ambivalence of the cultural establishment towards the challenge of the music hall. I will argue that sites of modernity such as the music hall were explored and then discarded by the English art and music establishment because of their relationship to aspects of class and urban culture. Central to my investigation will be the contrast between the theoretical approval of the music hall in art and music criticism and the assertion of hidden ideology in actual practice.

3:30 pm - 4:40 pm

Laments and Ballads

Singing in a Mournful Key: English Laments
Jessie Ann Owens (Brandeis University)
English composers, working outside of the system of modes or church keys prevalent on the Continent, found their own ways of expressing grief. An examination of English laments from ca. 1580 to ca. 1680 reveals a predilection for certain keys and certain kinds of tonal gestures. A clear connection between key and affect reflects prevailing belief systems about the power of music to affect human emotion.
The topos of the lament was clear to writers about music such as Thomas Morley, who described the style appropriate to “graue and sober musicke” in his Plaine & Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597). It is also found not only in free-standing laments and elegies but also imbedded within compositions. Thus, a madrigal by Thomas Vautor, celebrating Elizabeth I as Oriana, written in the spritely key of Gamut in the duralis scale (a predecessor of our G major), contains an eight-measure phrase in Elami (E minor) at the words, “Why sit you dead and drooping?” Laments serve as an entrée into the system of tonal gestures understood by English composers, performers and listeners.

The Interrelation of Texts and Tunes in Early Modern Broadside Ballads
Stacey Jocoy-Houck (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Ballads were simultaneously the most ubiquitous and yet the most ephemeral musical works of mid-seventeenth century England. Broadside ballads functioned as early modern newspapers, communicating current events as well as gossip and scandal through a combination of text and tune. However, while texts of broadside ballads from the mid-seventeenth century have been studied by literary historians for over a century, the tunes have received little attention. Apart from the collection and categorization of the collected tunes, study of them has been limited. Understood solely as vehicles for the circulation of texts, ballad tunes were not seen as integrally related to the textual message.

Contemporaries, however, thought otherwise. One mid-century author commented, “If you read these Ballads (and not sing them) the poor Ballads are undone.” Working from this perspective my investigation of this repertory has revealed musical subtexts operating in the ballad tunes of the Civil War period. It is clear from the study of all extant texts set to the most popular tunes within the period c. 1620-1660 that thematic considerations as well as metrical concerns governed ballad-writers’ tune choice – either to reinforce the message of the text, or in some cases, to subvert it. This paper will consider two of the most important tunes of the period, "Greensleeves" and "Welladay," to show both their inherent thematic associations and the operation of these themes as intentionally-chosen subtexts; set but still flexible, these subtexts created new socio-political reinterpretations that influenced the contemporary reception of these popular works.

4:45 pm - 5:55 pm

Sacred Music and Class Identity

Class Distinctions in Eighteenth-Century Church Music
Nicholas Temperley (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
The large and wealthy bourgeoisie generated by the beginnings of free-market capitalism included an unprecedented number of people who could afford to pay for professional music-making. Hence the development, in the early eighteenth century, of such novel institutions as the public concert, the English oratorio, publication by subscription, and engraved sheet music. Those who couldn’t pay were for the most part excluded, and continued to make their own music in the form of ballads, dances, and the like.

The one place where all classes supposedly shared the same music was in church, where the scriptures (as interpreted by most Christian denominations) required that all should sing psalms together. In the new context of enlightened theology and liberal religion, there was a sustained effort to rationalize the music of worship by attempting to reform it according to the canons of art music. But a rural movement to resist these efforts also took root. The contrast of styles reveals and illustrates the difference in goals, social class, and cultural tradition between the two movements.

Interestingly enough, this dichotomy has come to life again in the recent revival of 18th-century psalmody. Two opposing schools of thought have formed regarding the appropriate way to perform the music. One, represented by the West Gallery Music Association, sees it as a cultural expression of the laboring country folk, and performs it accordingly. The other, exemplified by such groups as Psalmody and The Parley of Instruments, is intent on gentrifying the music. This paper explores contrasts both in musical styles and in modes of performance.

From the Stage to the Cathedral: Cultural Mobility of English Oratorio in Mid-18th-Century Britain
Ilias Chrissochoidis (Stanford University)
English Oratorio is the first genre in music history to have traversed the extremities of public space, theater and church. Its use of sacred themes and deployment of anthem music were crucial for this crossover to happen. Such intrinsic features, however, cannot by themselves explain why it took 15 years for the genre to be fully established in London and even more time to be accepted at sacred venues. A move from oratorio text to context is necessary. This paper addresses the cultural mobility of English Oratorio in the years between 1732 and 1759.

The genre's mutation from commercial entertainment to sacred performance owed to several factors. Handel's artistic pride kept the oratorio away from the pernicious influence of star singers and their imposing patrons. His political and financial resources allowed him to withstand commercial failure and to continue to fine-tune the genre. Risky as his decision to severe ties with the Italian Opera party may have been, it fully paid off in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745-46. The charitable use of his music helped him accumulate enough social capital to justify the commercial nature of his Lent season. Above all, Handel commanded the services of influential admirers, who supported him financially, creatively and ideologically. I conclude by proposing the year 1739 as the turning point in the reception of English Oratorio. The concerted effort by Handelians to defend _Israel in Egypt_ against the opera party led to the projection of sacred claims on the work and to public prescriptions of "oratorio going." This championing the genre as a moralizing agent created a conceptual framework for its eventual transplantation into sacred ground.

8:00 pm

Concert

Saturday, June 19

9:00 am - 11:25 am

Technology and the Canon: BBC

The Dancing Front”: Manliness, Dance, and “BBC Dancing Club” in World War II
Christina Baade (McMaster University)
The radio programme, “BBC Dancing Club,” helped crystallize the popularity of Victor Silvester, who was arguably the most popular bandleader in World War II Britain. The half hour programme, which was extended to an hour in 1942, featured five minutes of dance instruction followed by continuous strict tempo dance music. “Strict tempo” was a subgenre designed with dancers in mind: it presented popular quicksteps, waltzes, foxtrots, and tangos in arrangements that featured clear melodies and obvious rhythms, rather than imaginative scoring or improvisation. One critic complained, “This particular form of dance music is duller and musically stupider than any other,” but Leonard Feather observed, “The whole problem of strict tempo dance music resolves into that of whether you want your jazz for listening or dancing.”

Indeed, “BBC Dancing Club” highlighted wartime physicality through the disembodied medium of radio. There were real dancers in the BBC studio when Victor Silvester and his Ballroom Orchestra broadcast, and BBC Listener Research found that many listeners followed Silvester’s instructions. The programme referenced the popular activity of public dancing and the national importance of physical fitness. Nevertheless, many enjoyed listening to the programme for its “non-vocal rhythmic melody” that was “easy on the ear.” As the Daily Mail declared, “The people of Britain are looking for what is simple and honest.”

Professional dancing had long carried dubious associations with effeminacy and foreignness: this paper will consider how Silvester positioned himself as manly in his advocacy for the “English style” in ballroom dance, how strict tempo dance music came to embody a British aesthetic of the popular, and why the BBC so energetically promoted both man and music during the war. To do so, this paper will examine the ways in which “BBC Dancing Club” evoked the bodily and promoted social dance as beneficial to physical health, mental fitness, and the nation’s war effort. In conclusion, this paper will grapple with the aural appeal of strict tempo dance music while reflecting on the issues
associated with considering aesthetically underwhelming subjects.

‘Virtual Concerts’ – the BBC’s Transmutation of Public Performances
Jenny Doctor (Trinity College of Music)
As time takes us further into the 21st century and we observe the effects of the latest technologies – the internet, video walls, interactive digital television – on BBC music broadcasts, our comprehension of what comprises a ‘concert’ is constantly redefined. Interestingly, this process occurred no less momentously in the 1920s, with the advent of the BBC itself. Interwar technological developments transformed the British music industry, and the BBC Music Department played a significant role in this process. Bouyed by its own conviction that broadcasting served as ‘the next logical step in the democratisation of music’, the BBC did not merely invest heavily in music programming as a primary feature of its daily transmissions: it adopted the concept and format of ‘concerts’ in general, and public concerts in particular, as a conduit for disseminating certain music programmes and signifying their perceived cultural significance.

This paper will consider the ‘logic behind’ early BBC decisions to feature broadcasts of public concerts. Given the infinite possibilities of this new medium, why did early programme planners choose to adopt such traditional approaches to music performance? How successfully did they transfer the concert-going experience from the concert hall to domestic headphones? What impact did these events have on the organization’s identity and image? Looking at the BBC’s takeover of the Proms as a particular case, did broadcasts also have an impact on the scope and nature of public performances? It was not long before the BBC attained a position as the leading British impresario, a position it retained throughout the remaining decades of the 20th century. As recent technological developments – in conjunction with the changing nature of arts economics, accessibility issues, ‘elitist’ labelling, not to mention political disagreements – threaten to rock not only the purpose and means of broadcasting music but the foundations of the BBC itself, it is instructive perhaps to recall the issues that characterized the first assault of technology on ‘established’ music practices of the day.

Orpheus, Orphèe, Orfeo: the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the Reprocessing of Reinterpretation
Louis Niebur (UCLA)
In 1961 the BBC’s Third Programme broadcast a radio adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s 1949 film, Orphée. Producer Douglas Cleverdon worked with the BBC’s electronic music studio, the Radiophonic Workshop, to provide Orpheus with an aural interpretation of Cocteau’s distinctive visuals cinematic style. Adapting a film so dependent on visual novelty for radio presented the Radiophonic Workshop, particularly composer Maddalena Fagandini, with a unique challenge. An ongoing shift in the Workshop's output from abstract musique concrète to more tonally and rhythmically precise compositions guided Fagandini's decision to combine tape and electronic music in this production. More than rethinking Cocteau’s film in an electronic music idiom, Cleverdon and Fagandini abandoned Georges Auric's original score, instead choosing to incorporate portions of Gluck’s 1762 opera, Wagner, and jazz.

Fascinatingly, the radio play deploys these musical elements as if they were signs of the things themselves, cultural ubiquities that need no further explanation: if Gluck's Orfeo et Euridice once depicted Orpheus's descent into the Underworld, then now all that is needed are a few chords from the recorded opera to effectively symbolize the same. Newly composed melodies weave fragments of Tristan und Isolde into their texture, and all elements are susceptible to tape manipulation techniques. In addition, Fagandini composed new, interval-obsessed, electronic melodies ostensibly derived from Ancient Greek models, but equally indebted to her experience with Hindemith's composition textbooks.

The Radiophonic Workshop's contribution to the world of electronic music has yet to be adequately assessed. This paper begins that effort by discussing Orpheus as demonstrating some of the possibilities available to composers outside the domain of the academy and high modernism in Britain in the early 1960s.

‘A Whole Scene Going’: Criticism of BBC Music Programming during Progressive Rock Era, 1964-1976
David Simonelli (Youngstown State University)
The British Broadcasting Corporation was formed, and still exists, to inform and direct the tastes of the British public. The basic tension in BBC programming has always been between an institutional desire to teach the British people what a “proper” middle class culture ought to be, yet still program enough of what the public wants to hear or see in order to get people to listen or watch. The shaping of the British public’s tastes has long been considered essential in the development of a respectable middle-class culture.

Rarely has BBC policy been so roundly criticized as it was during the years between the advent of the Beatles and the subsequent rise of punk rock, roughly the era between 1964 and 1976. On both radio and television, the BBC was challenged repeatedly to open up its programming policy to play more rock ‘n’ roll acts. The challenge was especially extended when so-called commercial, or “pirate”, radio stations were established to give the British youth audience a wider variety of pop music in an all-day format. The BBC was actually forced in 1967 to establish its own 24-hour popular music channels, Radio One and Radio Two, to accommodate this audience.

However, at the same time that the BBC was forced to widen its program offerings, the ambitions and pretensions of rock artists grew as well. Bands like the Beatles, the Moody Blues, the Who and later artists like Pink Floyd, Yes, Fairport Convention, Genesis the Soft Machine and others expanded the boundaries of rock music from its largely working-class origins in Britain to accommodate classical and jazz influences. This “progressive” version of rock music was rooted heavily in influences associated with middle-class culture in Britain: Anglican church music, folk music, medieval, Renaissance, neoclassical and Romantic sources, exotic musics from old colonial sources, and the like. The rock music press demanded that these new rock bands be heard even as Radio One tried to accommodate a wider pop music audience, claiming that the music heard on the British pop charts was drivel in comparison to the work of these progressive artists.

In essence then, the progressive rock press and audience proved that the BBC had done its educational job far better than might have been expected. The BBC intended to expose listeners to a wide array of influences, and thus defined mass commercial popular music as beneath the tastes of a discerning audience. In the process of bringing these influences forward to the British audience, however obliquely, it had bred a youth community which created its own rock music, heavily influenced by these same music sources. That same audience, largely made up of university-educated youth, asserted that its tastes were superior to the popular tastes the BBC catered to with Radios One and Two. As such, the BBC had unwittingly produced the very audience it had always tried to create – and paradoxically found itself under permanent fire for broadcasting pop music that a much wider audience liked.

This paper proposal is a part of a larger manuscript that chronicles the changing of the rhetoric of class in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s through the medium of pop and rock music. It will be constructed using research culled from a number of British music journals, histories of the BBC and the broadcasting industry in Britain, and general works on popular culture in the twentieth century. It will thus illuminate how the BBC’s role has changed in the latter half of the twentieth century, and introduce rock music as a major cultural medium worthy of more intense study by historians interested in the transformation of British culture, society, economics and intellectual thought in the same period.

Female Voices

Lady Nairne and the Song Culture of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Scotland Anita Gorman (Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania)
In eighteenth-century Scotland, vocal music was so highly prized that numerous song collections were published during the period. Often, these song lyrics were also printed (without music) in anthologies of poetry published during both the eighteenth and nineteenth century. A number of these songs were written by women lyricists. According to Marion Lochhead, Scots women were more adept at vocal than instrumental music, and they readily participated in a largely forgotten custom of Elizabethan England which, in the eighteenth century, still persisted in the country to the north: after the evening meal, when conversation was waning, singing prevailed. Scottish lyricists, men (such as Robert Burns) and women alike, often built on a foundation of folk song, rewriting old lyrics for moral, political, or artistic reasons. This paper will focus on Lady Nairne (aka Carolina Oliphant and Baroness Nairne, 1766-1845), a prolific lyricist whose anonymously published songs were at times attributed to Robert Burns. George Eyre-Todd, a nine­teenth-century anthologist, writes of her, "For the number and beauty of her lyrics of all kinds, among the song-writers of Scotland Lady Nairne is excelled only by Burns and rivalled only by Tannahill." An aristocratic woman of intense piety, Lady Nairne set out to purify and make more respectable some of the racier old lyrics of her country; still, her piety did not obscure her wit, which she employed in a number of songs, including the well-known "The Laird o' Cockpen," a lyric which itself was revised by Scottish novelist Susan Ferrier, whose final two verses of Lady Nairne's comic lyric dramatically changed the poem's effect and made it more"respectable."

This paper will examine revisions Lady Nairne made to certain older lyrics, her original lyrics, her motivations, and the results.

Queen Victoria as Musical Hostess: The Royal Salon
Michael J. Budds (University of Missouri-Columbia)
On 15 July 1837, a matter of days after Victoria’s ascension to the throne, the pianist Sigismund Thalberg, then at the height of his fame, was summoned to Buckingham Palace in the name of the new Queen. His recital became the first of an unusually large number of distinguished performances sponsored by Victoria in her palace homes over the course of her lengthy reign. With it, a pattern was set: the Queen would invite musicians to Court to perform for her, her family, and her guests; she would give them her rapt attention; she would engage the artists in animated conversation; and she would register the event and her opinion in her journal. The eminence and variety of guests featured in the royal salon—ranging from the most celebrated composers, singers, and instrumentalists in Western Civilization to various ethnic ensembles, opera troupes, child prodigies, and several bona fide curiosities—testifies faithfully to the admirable scope of Victoria’s—and, during her marriage, Albert’s— musical appetite and experience. In many instances, details of the program were dictated by the Queen herself. An emphasis on musical entertainments in the royal precincts, moreover, had already become a characteristic aspect of Victorian court life before the Prince Consort was given the opportunity to make his influence felt.

The present survey of the Queen’s soirées musicales is based on period accounts from three categories of sources: Her Majesty’s published journals, newspaper reports, and the memoirs and correspondence of participating musicians. The value of this form of royal patronage to both native and foreign artists and the “legitimizing” influence of her example on her own subjects were widely appreciated by the contemporary musical establishment. This impressive series of command performances can be understood, in a real sense, as a record in microcosm—during its own time—of the significant developments and leading personalities of European music. Such efforts by Britain’s music-loving sovereign were not, perhaps, epoch-making, but they do represent a colorful, memorable, enlightened, and estimable contribution to the musical life of the nineteenth century.

George Eliot and the Victorian Amateur
Juliette Wells (Manhattanville College)
Cyril Ehrlich has identified George Eliot, eminent Victorian novelist and enthusiastic amateur pianist, as “representative of a great body of amateur musicians who, without gramophones, radio, or even, outside a few metropolitan centres, frequent public concerts, experienced music with great thoroughness.” Eliot’s musical life has been sketched by Beryl Gray, and the importance of music-making to Eliot’s novels—in the contexts of Victorian scientific discourse and views on “accomplished women”—has received recent attention from several literary scholars.

Eliot’s practice of, views on, and fictional representations of music-making have yet, however, to be fully considered in light of the Victorian period’s developing conception of amateurism. As I will show, Eliot, like her contemporaries, understood and practiced amateurism in relation to and as distinct from professional music-making, an increasingly respected and respectable career, rather than, as in previous eras, defining amateurism by the practice of gentleman-amateurs and accomplished women. Referring to the Victorian education and conduct literature, I will demonstrate that Eliot’s own piano-playing evolved from a faultlessly correct accomplishment to a cherished pursuit that exceeded even the most progressive Victorian conceptions of amateurism. I will investigate the relationship between Eliot’s attitude towards musical amateurism and her views on amateur and professional authorship, a connection most explicitly visible in her 1856 essay “Silly Novels and Lady Novelists.” Finally, I will examine the philosophy of unambitious, pleasurable amateurism that Eliot develops in her novels, principally Middlemarch (1871-72) and Daniel Deronda (1876), a philosophy that, while directly informed by her own experience as a musician, is most wholeheartedly embraced and enacted by her male characters.

Penetrating the Recesses of their Genius: Artistry and Artistic Temperament in Henry Handel Richardson’s Maurice Guest
Donna Parsons (University of Iowa)
During the latter decades of the nineteenth century British music students flocked to the Leipzig Conservatory in hopes of launching their professional music careers or adding teaching credentials to their resumes. In 1889 Henry Handel Richardson, the pseudonym for Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, began her quest for a career as a concert pianist by enrolling at the conservatory. Although her musical ambitions did not survive past her student days, Richardson's love of music found another outlet in the gripping plots of her novels.

_Maurice Guest_ (1908), which is set in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, chronicles the lives of several British and American students who seek advanced musical training at the Leipzig Conservatory. The plot provides a rare glimpse into the musical life of British musicians outside England, and the harsh realities male and female students faced when competing with their peers in a cosmopolitan environment. While the narrative is constructed largely from Maurice Guest's point of view, the musical ambitions of Madeleine Wade, Louise Drufrayer, Avery Hill, Ephie Cayhill, and Mr. Schilsky are examined at great length. In this talk I present case studies of these fictional characters and detail the artistic and personal traits they possess which in part determines their musical futures. I also explore published histories of the Leipzig Conservatory and memoirs of musicians who had studied there as a means to frame the autobiographical elements of Richardson's fiction.

11:30 am - 12:15 pm

Lecture Recital

Music, Morals, and Metanoia in ‘The Awakening Conscience’
Julia Grella (CUNY Graduate Center)
A great deal has been written about William Holman Hunt's 1853 painting "The Awakening Conscience." The painting's critics span time, place, and ideology, and include writers as divergent as John Ruskin, an early champion of Hunt's work, and Richard Leppert, who called the painting "an economic scandal as well as an ethical one." "The Awakening Conscience" shows a young woman rising from the lap of her lover, as he sings and plays on the piano Thomas Moore's ballad "Oft in the Stilly Night." In the act of hearing a parlor song, her heart is changed.

In this lecture-recital, I will discuss the iconography of "The Awakening Conscience" in the tradition of images of musical metanoia, including paintings of St. Cecilia and Mary Magdalene by Raphael, Murillo, Artemisia Gentileschi, and others, and also in the historical context of the Victorian movement for the reform of fallen women. In addition, I will perform the two identifiable songs in the painting, "Oft in the Stilly Night," and "Tears, Idle Tears," as well as Victorian songs on the trope of the fallen woman by Julian Holmes, Joseph Skelly, and Liza Lehmann.

1:30 pm - 3:15 pm

Politics and Drama

Musical Characterization in Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko
Anne F. Widmayer and Peter W. Gibeau (University of Wisconsin at Washington County)
Thomas Southerne's adaptation of Aphra Behn's tragic novel, Oroonoko, or the History of the Royal Slave (1688) as a hugely successful tragi-comedy, Oroonoko: A Tragedy (1695), owed some of its enduring popularity on stage to the musical characterization of the two major characters: Oroonoko, the slave prince, and his wife, Imoinda. Southerne's most significant change when adapting Behn's novel concerns Imoinda's race: in Southerne's play, Imoinda is characterized as the daughter of a white man instead of an African general. This change may partly account for the strangely pastoral songs the slaves sing about Imoinda in Act II by Raphael Courteville. On the other hand, the incidental music by Jacques Paisible for the brief intervals between the acts appears to characterize Oroonoko as a regal yet sympathetic character. The differences between these two composers' jarringly different musical styles are mediated by Henry Purcell's song for a "he" and a "she," which was probably sung by the actors representing Oroonoko and Imoinda. We will also be accounting for shifts in musical taste-and thus the musical characterizations of Oroonoko and Imoinda-by comparing Courteville's songs to John Frederick Lampe's 1749/50 settings of the same words. As part of our paper, we will have a singer performing sections of the songs, and we may have a string quartet perform examples from the act music.

‘A Most Excellent Moral’: The Beggar’s Opera and Its Stories of Law and Society in Early Eighteenth-Century London
Ian Gallacher (Syracuse University School of Law)
John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera” is peopled by the highwaymen, prostitutes, petty criminals, and corrupt jailors of 1728 London. On its face, the play tells a simple, if cynical, love story. But the play also contains numerous additional layers of meaning, each with its own story to tell of London’s political and cultural life during Gay’s lifetime.

Although the play is frequently quoted when the politics of the period are studied, it is less often referred to as a source for the study of legal history. Yet The Beggar’s Opera, and the story of its success and aftermath, offers a convenient gateway into the study of law and society at a time when many problems familiar to us today were being addressed.

This paper seeks to locate The Beggar’s Opera in its social and legal context and examines what its study can tell us about the role the law played in the lives of the ordinary people of its time. In particular, the paper looks at the development of the Bloody Code – the series of sanguinary criminal statutes that was, in 1728, at an early stage of development – and to the use of the law to suppress political opposition to the reigning Whig government. The lamentable results of these laws and their application suggest that contemporary society would benefit from learning some of the lessons The Beggar’s Opera can teach us.

‘Staging’ the French Revolution in London: Two Musical Treatments
Paul Rice (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
Texts with strong patriotic and/or political overtones were a prominent feature of eighteenth-century British vocal music. While much of this repertoire is representative of long-standing traditions such as court odes and other celebratory works, there is a second body of works which contain topical texts, and were not composed under the aegis of the court. These works reflect then current issues of national interest. Taken as a whole, this little-studied repertoire might be viewed as a barometer for public opinion.

A recurring theme in this body of music is the relationship between France and England. This relationship came under even greater scrutiny at the time of the French Révolution and musicians were quick to respond to the events in France as they unfolded. Both the patent and minor theatres in London showed great interest in mounting productions which represented aspects of the events taking place in Paris. Because of the theatre licensing laws, the patent theatres were forbidden any presentations which contained sensitive political content by the Office of the Lord Chamberlain, who had the right approve works to be performed at the patent theatres. Only one script dealing with an aspect of Revolutionary France, A Picture of Paris, taken in the Year 1790, was given approval. The minor theatres, on the other hand, did not have to submit their scripts to the Lord Chamberlain, and were able to provide a "running commentary" on the events in France, as long as all dialogue was sung.

This paper will examine two London productions: John Dent's The Bastile (presented at the Royal Circus in 1789, music by Richard Chapman), and A Picture of Paris taken in the year 1790 (Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, 1790, music by William Shield). These works reveal the repressive nature of the theatre licensing laws, and the ways that music could be used to subvert the restrictions.

Music and Nationalism

The Ship o’ the Fiend: Hamish MacCunn as Scottish Bard
Jennifer Oates (Queens College, CUNY)
The majority of Hamish MacCunn’s compositions incorporate some aspect of Scottishness, whether it be Scottish topic, text, or traditional music. Most of his symphonic works are based on Scottish stories or themes. Some have a Scottish title while the Scottishness of others goes beyond the name of the work. MacCunn’s orchestral ballad The Ship o’ the Fiend falls into the later category.

The Ship ‘o the Fiend is based on the Scottish ballad “The Daemon Lover,” which tells the story of a married woman who is coaxed aboard a ship by a mysterious seaman, the demon lover. The sailor questions her dedication to love and her husband before sending her to a terrifying death at sea. MacCunn depicts this dialogue through the interplay of the solo oboe (the woman) and the solo horn (the sailor). During the exposition of the sonata-form, the dialogue between the demon lover and woman establish the principal theme as the woman boards the ship. As the work progresses, the dialogue continues but is no longer in the forefront as the music turns to telling the story. The stormy seas, the woman’s rising terror, and the destruction of the ship are depicted.

Rather than recounting the ballad line by line, MacCunn relies on narrating the dialogue, conveying emotions, actions, as well as general impressions. Through the musical dialogue and storytelling in The Ship o’ the Fiend, MacCunn becomes a Scottish bard by telling the story through music.

Sir Frederick Bridge and the Musical Furtherance of British Imperialism: The 1902 Coronation
David C.H. Wright (Royal College of Music)
The Coronation of King Edward VII was a meticulously constructed event, designed to impress the world (and European rivals in particular) by the splendour of British majesty to symbolize the nation’s own power and influence. Edward’s projection of imperial glister was far removed from the dowdy image of the ‘Widow of Windsor’, even as rehabilitated by her Golden and Diamond Jubilees. This new imperial image was stage-managed by Viscount Esher, working closely with the King himself, and they made clear the musical outcome that was required. Frederick Bridge, the Organist of Westminster Abbey, was to devise and perform a concert package for the Coronation whose magnificence, pomp and grandeur would help to make the ceremonies as a whole unparalleled in history.

This paper interprets the musical situation, setting it in relation to the wider historical frames of David Cannadine and Jeffrey Richards, to propose a contextual reading of the Coronation music and the organisation behind it. The account looks at the music’s carefully drawn symbolism, its manner of performance and the attitudes of those responsible for its delivery by making important comparisons with Queen Victoria’s Coronation. The paper also looks at the way the music was treated in the press and explains the use of military metaphors and gendered language in the journalistic descriptions. Finally, it identifies the commercial exploitation of this Coronation as a significant factor behind its enthusiastic reception across British society.

‘The old sweet Anglo-Saxon spell’: Racial Discourses and the American Reception of British Music, 1895-1945
Alain Frogley (University of Connecticut)
The power of what Henry James described as 'the old sweet Anglo-Saxon' spell is all but taken for granted in a world still shaped by the extraordinary Anglo-American military and political alliance forged in World War Two, and by the broader cultural intertwining of the two countries which that alliance cemented. Yet James was writing at a time when the Anglo-Saxon origins of the United States seemed to many to be in severe danger of being submerged. In the early years of the twentieth century the entrenched Anglo-Saxon elite became increasingly fearful that widespread immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, along with internal demographic shifts following the abolition of slavery, were eroding their traditional power-bases, and fatally compromising the hard-won identity of American society. Music was especially vulnerable to such anxieties, as an Anglo-Saxon Establishment, centred in East Coast universities, reacted to various strains in musical modernism, and in particular to the increasing influence and prestige of popular styles, most notably jazz, that were dominated by black or Jewish musicians.

While scholars of American music have begun to recognise that such racial anxieties were not limited to an extremist fringe, there has been little attention paid to their broader ramifications, most importantly to their role in shaping responses to music from Europe, Britain in particular. Yet as early as the turn of the century an influential figure such as Horatio Parker, Charles Ives's teacher, was comparing the virtues of various national European schools in terms of inherent racial temperamental traits rather than musical techniques, and extolling Britain as that most worthy of imitation by American composers, precisely because of shared racial origins. Prominent composers, academics, and writers such as Daniel Gregory Mason, David Stanley Smith, and John Powell developed further this discourse of musical Anglophilia during the 1920s, a decade in which racial concerns reached new heights. Mason and Powell in particular railed against the 'abandonment to excess' supposedly induced by the influence of Jewish musicians and the 'miscegenation' involved in the cross-fertilization of black and white musics. As an antidote they prescribed the example of Anglo-American folk music, and the music of certain modern English composers, Elgar and Vaughan Williams in particular, as the embodiment of traditional Anglo-Saxon virtues of emotional restraint, ruggedness, and sincerity; music shaped by such models could help restore and revitalize the roots of American character and culture. This discourse was unstable, expanding at times to embrace a broader 'Nordic' concept of historic racial hegemony in the US, at others narrowing to make subtler national or regional distinctions, and was complicated by the emergence of the broader, and primarily leftist, folk-song movement of the 1930s and 1940s. It nevertheless constituted an important underlying theme in the reception of major composers such as Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, and Aaron Copland, and helped shape the course of American music in mid-century.

3:30 pm - 5:15 pm

Music and Popular Culture

From New Jerusalem to the Babylon of the Apocalypse: The Musical Poetics of Social Critique in British Progressive Rock of the Early 1970s
Jeremy Smith and Jay Keister (University of Colorado, Boulder)
Progressive rock of the 1970s was a movement founded by an ambitious group of musicians of the British counter-culture inspired by the experimental and psychedelic rock of the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Cream, among others. Reviled since its inception by rock music critics and recently rehabilitated by some musicologists, this movement took the lead in developing a musical language to address certain key political viewpoints of Post-War Britain. Critics of progressive rock have not appreciated this political aspect of their work. Instead they propagated the notion that these groups were imbuing their music with artistic ambitions in order to gain acceptance among an unspecified upper-middle class artistic elite, or, alternatively, they have understood such ambitious musical endeavors, especially in the music of Yes, as individual quests for spirituality related only distantly to actual social movements.

But Yes’s intentions may well have been misunderstood and many more progressive groups’ music and lyrics featured visions of fatal dystopia (King Crimson, ELP, Van der Graaf Generator, Genesis, Jethro Tull) that betray a deep concern with contemporary political realities. Drawing on poetic models of William Blake and T. S. Eliot, bands such as these created artistic visions in their music that featured blistering critiques of English society. And as they turned their attention to the military-industrial complex of the United States, the temperature of their scathing assessments in music approached levels reached hitherto only by the avant-garde expressionism of composers such as Penderecki and Crumb. In this paper we focus on this ‘nastier’ side of the progressive movement. We will study certain key works of progressive music to show how a particular brand of politics was voiced through utopian and dystopian musical poetics and how this illustrates once again the Freudian observation that however escapist or irrelevant a utopian vision may seem, the imagination behind it remains “incurably earthbound.”

Richter and Rita: Art Music and Satire in Monty Python
Kendra Leonard
From their very first show, aired on 10 May 1969 and beginning with “It’s Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,” the comedy troupe of Monty Python’s Flying Circus made a point of referencing and using classical music within a variety of contexts, with the underlying presumption that the viewing audience would be sufficiently educated in the arts to understand the satirical inferences these allusions and actual pieces made. Through enjoyable but still intellectual analysis of the use of classical music in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, it is possible to discern three primary treatments employed by the Pythons in using classical music.

The first of these is to mock the stereotype of the male artist as homosexual. Sometimes viewed as bigoted, the sketches employing art music in conjunction with effeminate or gay characters are often actually ironic, with the writers pointedly exaggerating “gay behaviors” accompanied by musical selections underscoring the overall camp. A second use of art music is to satirize the view of classical music as elitist by placing it in contexts that are clearly proletarian, much in the same way that use of figures from literature and philosophy are used, with “Mrs Premise and Mrs Conclusion Visit Jean-Paul Sartre” as an example. Finally, classical music functions as a catalyst to heighten the irony of particular skits by using art music to lampoon individual characters or actions. A synthesis of these techniques can be found in several segments of the episodes, culminating with the “Life of Tschaikowsky” sketch from the third season.

Elgar and Holst

‘The Soul in Anguis’: Elgar’s Wagnerian Dialectic of Shame and Grace
Byron Adams (UC-Riverside)
Following the turbulent première of The Dream of Gerontius, Elgar conceived of a massive trilogy of oratorios based on the calling of the apostles by Christ and the establishment of the early Church. The two completed oratorios of this projected cycle, The Apostles and The Kingdom, have been dismissed by several influential commentators as capitulations to Anglican respectability, and thus of less importance within Elgar’s oeuvre than the controversial and overtly Catholic Gerontius. This reductive view is contested by illustrating how Elgar compiled his text for The Apostles. Elgar drew this libretto from biblical sources wrenched from their original context and molded into a new entity redolent of the decadent aesthetics of fin de siècle authors such as Dowson and Wilde. By adorning the libretto of The Apostles with music influenced by Wagner’s Parsifal, Elgar continued an engagement with the Wagnerian dialectic of shame and grace that was begun with Gerontius. Elgar provided a further nexus for his preoccupation with shame by focusing upon the biblical characters of Judas, Peter and, especially, Mary Magdalene, whose legend exercised a potent fascination for Wilde. In addition, this paper delves into how The Apostles and The Kingdom were identified as part of a larger Wagnerian project through the manner of their presentation at the Three Choirs festivals, which in turn illuminates how deeply Elgar’s inability to complete his original design affected both his conflicted religious beliefs and his subsequent career.

‘The Feminine Element Inside’: J.B. Priestly’s Elgar and the Topography of ‘Deep England’
Matthew Riley (University of Birmingham)
J. B. Priestley (1894–1984), left-wing social critic, prolific man of letters, wartime broadcaster, avuncular Yorkshireman, and long-time expositor on British society and character, had a rare understanding of Elgar’s music and a gift for responding to it with engaging prose, both fictional and otherwise. The most eloquent advocate of the sympathetic critical position on Elgar that emerged in Britain in the 1960s in answer to the composer’s scathing detractors of the inter-war period, Priestley’s writings are valuable for the light they shed on the ways Elgar’s music speaks to listeners in Britain today. His reaction to Elgar draws together some key components of the troubled modern British historical consciousness: the trauma of the Great War and the sense of an idyllic pre-war past irretrievably lost; disenchantment with the altered, post-war world; confusion at the crumbling of Empire and the loss of Great Power status; and the ever-present tug of the countryside as a repository of enduring values. Yet Priestley’s Elgar is no political reactionary. Just as Priestley the progressive Social Democrat dismissed the Establishment concept of Englishness (as represented by the stoic, phlegmatic products of the Public Schools) as the antithesis of the true character of ‘the People’, so he insisted that listeners delve beneath Elgar’s bluff persona to discover a visionary poet of melancholy tenderness. This sense of an ersatz identity concealing an authentic one is central to Elgar’s recent reception and increasing popularity in Britain, but has never been more eloquently articulated than by J. B. Priestley.

‘Savitri, Savitri, I am Death’: The Conquest of Wagnerian Influence in the Music of Gustav Holst
Christopher Scheer (University of Michigan)
Gustav Holst’s Savitri is a seminal work, a one-act opera lasting only 20 minutes and scored for minimal forces. It is one of the 20th century’s first chamber operas, predating Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung by two years. Both Imogen Holst and Edmund Rubbra cite Savitri as an important turning point in Holst’s development, where he discovered English folksong and began to clarify and streamline his compositional voice from the Wagnerian excesses of his early works. This paper will provide a complementary analysis, examining the context surrounding the composition of Savitri, and the musical structure of the work, to show that Wagner is still present especially in the construction of the libretto, but that Holst has learned to control and subsume Wagnerian techniques into his own musical style. In doing so, creating another resource from which he could draw rather than a force he had to overcome.

The failure of Holst’s first significant opera, Sita, which was Wagnerian in both size and conception, led Holst to consider alternative models when he wrote Savitri. While the libretto of Savitri retains Wagnerian features, the music employs two distinct sound worlds to represent the two main characters, Death (chromatic) and Savitri (modal); both the characters and the sound worlds vie for dominance throughout the opera. From these considerations, I will propose a new interpretation of the work, suggesting that Savitri is a personal statement in which Holst unequivocally signals, through the medium of Eastern thought, that the dominance of Wagner over his musical style is over.

Conference webpage

NABMSA home

Last updated 9 June 2004