IHR seminars > Music in Britain
Music in Britain
Convenors: Prof Simon McVeigh (Goldsmiths), Mr David Wright (Royal College of Music), and Dr Leanne Langley (Goldsmiths)
Secretary: Dr Ann van Allen-Russell (Trinity College of Music)
Venue: Wolfson Room, IHR
Time: Monday, 5.15pm
Secretary: Dr Ann van Allen-Russell (Trinity College of Music)
Venue: Wolfson Room, IHR
Time: Monday, 5.15pm
| 1 February | Leanne Langley (Goldsmiths, University of London) Women in the Band: Music, Modernity and the Politics of Engagement, London 1913 In October 1913 six women string players joined the Queen's Hall Orchestra of London, making headlines as well as history. No other fulltime professional British symphony orchestra allowed women at that date except as harpists. One version of this event has been on the record since 1938, in Henry Wood's autobiography My Life of Music. Later writers agree that Wood's bold action, reputedly indebted to Belgian precedent, created a breakthrough for British women. In reinscribing the episode as essentially a women's performing landmark, however, commentators have missed its significance in wider period debates, from evolving labour practices and the provision of high culture for all economic groups, to modern music's aesthetic demands and the implications of female suffrage. My talk offers a revisionist view of the 1913 hire, its circumstances and outcomes. Using newly discovered letters, memoirs, photographs, press reports and management strategies behind 'Queen’s Hall Orchestra Ltd' (1902-15), I argue that the employment of these women fulfilled clear objectives in expressing the orchestra's progressive identity by its farsighted Liberal owner, Sir Edgar Speyer. Particularly relevant in 1912-13 were restive male orchestral players seeking to combine against effective performance of challenging new works, including Schoenberg's, on QHO programmes; the stunning international rise of Thomas Beecham as Wood's younger rival in modern European music from Strauss to Stravinsky; and a Liberal prime minister notoriously opposed to female suffrage (Herbert Asquith), engendering suffragette militancy that made socialist politicians increasingly electable. At a stroke, on the highly visible platform of London's premier concert hall, six female colleagues were seen, and heard, to cut across these battles by engaging both public and professional attention. Embodying modernity, they contributed to an orchestra that in quality Schoenberg himself ranked with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and the Vienna Philharmonic, in January 1914. I further trace the important role of women in the BBC SO (1930, an advanced ensemble indebted in many ways to the old QHO), and uncover the roots of historiographical confusion around the 1913 episode. |
| 15 February | Richard Witts (University of Edinburgh) The capital city's symphony orchestra: Tovey's Reid Symphony Orchestra, 1917-1940 In the middle of World War I, Donald Francis Tovey, Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University, created a symphony orchestra for a capital city. The ensemble comprised 60 to 90 players. He ran it and conducted its concerts at Edinburgh's Usher Hall. The BBC regularly broadcast these events. Tovey's programme notes for these concerts became his Essays in Music Analysis. The soloists he booked included Casals, d'Aranyi and Serkin, while Bantock, Smyth, Foulds and Holst numbered among the living composers he featured. Yet while looking at a photograph of a rehearsal with the hall’s empty seats in the foreground, Tovey called the picture 'a very good likeness of our audience'. He battled throughout against indifference and disbelief, and got entangled in the politics of national assets. He continued even when the BBC assembled an orchestra of its own in Edinburgh in 1935. This paper makes use of letters, minutes and accounts so far overlooked in Edinburgh’s Tovey Archive. It attempts to explain how an exceptional, unsubsidised venture of this kind - with modest box-office income and petty patronage - existed for so long, secured broadcasts, and gained the support of international artists. |
| 1 March | Sophie Fuller (Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance) A temple of glorious music-making such as the world has not known: the musical salon in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain One commonly told account of British music and music-making in the period from the late nineteenth century through to the First World War is of the big names and the prestigious music spaces of the so-called English Renaissance - Edward Elgar, Henry Wood, the Royal College of Music, the Queen’s Hall and the Three Choirs Festival. This is the story of the mainstream, of oratorios, cantatas and symphonies. Another story of music in Britain at this time is that of the musicians and impresarios who turned Britain, and in particular London, into a vibrant centre for the latest European music - of Thomas Beecham, Strauss, Debussy, Diaghilev and Stravinsky; of opera and ballet. Yet another story - one that remains largely untold - is that of the music, musicians and hosts of society music parties - Frank Schuster, the Speyers, Mabel Batten, Maude Valérie White and Muriel Draper; of chamber music and songs. The stories and people intertwine - Elgar and Schuster, Debussy and the Speyers, Wood and White. In this seminar I will begin to tell the stories of Frank Schuster and other well-to-do music lovers and of the place their musical salons offered those who were in many ways set outside the musical mainstream with its drive to create a virile British musical culture. Acknowledging the significance of these temples of glorious music-making enriches our understanding of British musical life at this pivotal moment in the history of music-making in this country. |
| 15 March | Aidan Thomson (Queen's University Belfast) National opera in Britain, 1902: new schemes, new works Ethel Smyth's Der Wald was added at the last minute to the Covent Garden summer season in 1902, where it was one of only two British works performed that year, the other being Herbert Bunning's La Princesse Osra. How and why was it added? In answering this question, I aim to examine the broader issue of 'national opera' in Britain, both stylistically and institutionally, and the extent to which Smyth's and Bunning's works played a part in the discourse on this term. In particular, I shall consider two proposals that appeared more or less simultaneously early in 1902 for a new British opera house: one, somewhat speculatively, by the Earl of Dysart; the other, in much more detailed terms, by a Conservative MP, William Johnson Galloway. Please note: this session takes place in room ST275 2nd Floor, Stewart House |
IHR seminars | back to the top
| 10 May | Extended Summer Seminar, Details tba |