2012 Conference Abstracts (In Order of Presentation)
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2012 Conference Abstracts (in order of presentation) Thursday afternoon Session 1a: Mapping Musical Modernities at the BBC (3rd Floor) Vaughan Williams, Boult and the BBC JENNY DOCTOR, SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY Much scholarly discussion in recent years has focused on re-mapping notions of biography, exploring in music not only composers, performers and librettists, but also patrons, concert organizers and programme builders. In parallel with this emerged new ideas of institutional biography, opening up questions that contextualized the institution in terms of its cultural role. With such expanded impressions of biography, identity and contribution in mind, I explore Ralph Vaughan Williams and the BBC, considering the composer’s broadcasting activities and opportunities in relation to his Corporation contacts, in particular his interactions with BBC Music Director and Chief Conductor Adrian Boult. “The Best Possible Performance”: The BBC’s 1942 Music Policy and the Problem of Swung Classics CHRISTINA BAADE, MCMASTER UNIVERSITY This paper examines the BBC’s 1942 ban on swung classics, locating it at the nexus of three strands of British cultural expression during the Second World War: 1. the vogue for Russian (and Soviet) culture; 2. the expansion of American-style popular music in Britain; and 3. the development of People’s War discourses of democracy, populism, and tolerance. This paper argues that the ban represented a direct attempt to combat the commoditization of music and to develop a more musical citizenry. The BBC’s adoption of repressive means for democratic aims demonstrated the challenges of music broadcasting in modern mass culture. “The Machine Stops” and the Musical Acousmêtre LOUIS NIEBUR, UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, RENO In 1966, BBC Television broadcast an adaptation of E.M. Forster’s 1909 science fiction novella, “The Machine Stops.” In tone, the production clung faithfully to the Edwardian attitudes of the author, but in terms of sound design, it is a perfect window through which to view changing attitudes towards the role of music, sound effects, and electronics in mid-1960s Britain. In this 2012 NABMSA Conference Abstracts, p. 2 paper, I explore the electronically-generated score, which challenges the traditional notions of “music” and “sound effect,” submerging the audience into an utterly convincing, and increasingly prescient, dystopic future. Session 1b: Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies (1st Floor: Reading Room) Outlandish Authors: Musical Integration at the Stuart Court in London 1660-1689 NICHOLAS EZRA FIELD, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Henry Purcell’s contemporaries were impressed by his fluent use of French and Italian musical idioms, and Purcell himself advocated the adoption of foreign styles for the improvement of English music. The hybridity of Purcell’s music is symptomatic of a tendency to admire the musical excellence of foreigners that was part of the way the Stuart court imagined their cultural relationship to the continent; they consumed music that they felt able to expropriate and brandish as a badge of sophistication. This paper argues that Stuart patronage of foreign music became a signal of confessional sympathies that would ultimately contribute to the downfall of the dynasty. Caccini’s Graces, Playford’s Ayre: Cultivating English Musical Identity in An Introduction to the Skill of Musick BETHANY CENCER, STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT STONY BROOK In 1654, John Playford authored and published the first of twenty-three editions of his pedagogical text, An Introduction to the Skill of Musick. Editions published between 1664 and 1694 include an anonymous English translation of the preface to Caccini’s Le Nuove Musiche. What was this translation’s musico-cultural significance for Restoration English amateur musicians? I suggest that it functioned as an assimilation of European, specifically Italian musical tastes, in conjunction with the cosmopolitan aura of Restoration London. Through examining the translation and its accompanying two-part English ayre, I demonstrate how the translation represents a nostalgic, Royalist representation of English national identity. “Forgotten almost before he was called to the doom of us all:” Queen Charlotte of England’s Patronage of J. C. Bach MICHELLE MEINHART, XAVIER UNIVERSITY The published memoirs of Lady Charlotte Papendieck offer an eyewitness account of J. C. Bach’s association with George III and Queen Charlotte’s court. Besides detailing Bach’s concerts and tutelage there, she insightfully predicts his legacy, recognizing his important role in bringing modern German music and serious listening to a conservative English upper-class entrenched in Italian opera—where socializing and hob-knobbing were its main attractions. Ultimately, the memoirs illuminate the tenuous position of the musician in late-eighteenth- century England, revealing the careful balance of fulfilling the expectations of high profile patrons while pursuing free-lance opportunities in a growing public musical life. “The business as to finding out chords”: Practical music performance and Vinculum societatis CANDACE BAILEY, NORTH CAROLINA CENTRAL UNIVERSITY Restoration sources suggest that keyboard study was for accompanying: Pepys bought a spinet for “finding out chords;” Locke’s “desired end” in Melothesia was learning to accompany. North comments that many people sought out Prendcort for instruction, “especially the through-bass,” and Prendcort wrote that first one studies “through-bass” and later “lessons upon the 2012 NABMSA Conference Abstracts, p. 3 harpsichord.” The implications for solo performance are significant, for if one can improvise, one has less need of transcribed lessons. This approach helps clarify why manuscripts—even those copied for professionals—contain such simple music. People learned to play the keyboard for “Vinculum societatis, The tie of good company”—not solo performance. Session 2a: Transatlanticism (3rd Floor) The Blockheads; or Fortunate Contractor: The Revolutionary War from a Loyalist’s Pen* ELISSA HARBERT, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY The Blockheads, a satirical ballad opera written in British-occupied New York in the midst of the Revolutionary War (c. 1780), speaks from a precarious moment when the outcome of the conflict had yet to be decided, and reconciliation seemed possible. Written anonymously by a Loyalist or British soldier, this ballad opera reveals a view of the fledgling United States in which America is a dependent infant. This paper examines the play’s Anglo-American theatrical context and performance history. The Blockheads offers a window into musical theater during the American Revolution from the perspective of the side that might have won. The Same and Yet Different: Borrowed Tunes in Inkle and Yarico from England to America* JOICE WATERHOUSE GIBSON, METROPOLITAN STATE COLLEGE OF DENVER Inkle and Yarico (1787), a pastiche comic opera by George Colman and Younger and composer Samuel Arnold, was an immediate success in London and performed in New York less than two years later. The creators employed several popular tunes, including “Last Valentine’s Day” (AKA “Black Sloven”), the first musical instance of the hunt trope that pervades the opera. The song’s appeal to American audiences, however, was owed to more than its British origins. Reworked with lyrics reflecting both sides of the American Revolution, this borrowed tune provided a similar—yet somewhat different—frame of reference for American audiences. The Sash Someone Else’s Father Wore, or the Transformation of an Ulster Loyalist Flute Band in Toronto, Canada* ALIXANDRA HAYWOOD, MCGILL UNIVERSITY Founded in 1908 by Northern Irish immigrants, the Derry Flute Band was one of many fife-and- drum bands located in “the Belfast of North America.” By 2008, the band had morphed from a culturally unified group of men celebrating their identity as members of the Orange Order, to a multicultural, gender-equal group unified primarily by musical enthusiasm and geography. By tracing these transformations, this paper outlines one way this musical tradition is currently maintained outside of Northern Ireland, and explores their effect on the band’s identity as a musical organization largely independent from, but still connected to, the Orange Order. Session 2b: Britten Studies (1st Floor: Reading Room) “Some quite nice little tunes”: investigating Britten’s juvenilia JONATHAN MANTON, BRITTEN–PEARS FOUNDATION A recent survey of the approximately 731 works Britten wrote before the age of 18, conducted as part of the Britten Thematic Catalogue Project, has provided an unrivaled insight into Britten’s compositional development during his formative years. Supported by archival materials and audible examples from a draft version of the Britten Thematic Catalogue, this paper considers the composer’s juvenilia chronologically, leading up to Sinfonietta, Britten’s Opus 1. This 2012 NABMSA Conference Abstracts, p. 4 analysis will notably focus on the impact, from Dec 1927, of Frank Bridge’s influence on Britten’s compositional methodology and style. Britten’s Harmonic Stasis DAVID FORREST, TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY Leading analyses of Britten’s music seem largely incompatible with each other. Authors have suggested a variety of methods for explaining Britten’s harmonic syntax. While the variety of approaches provides us with an appreciation for Britten’s rich technique, the disparity between them fails to capture the unity in his oeuvre. This paper will thread together seemingly contradictory analyses