RMA Conference Report: Dowland's Anniversary

NewsletterVolume XVII, Number 2 November 2013

Mark Everist President [email protected]

Jeffrey Dean Executive Officer [email protected]

David Roberts-Jones Hon. Treasurer [email protected]

Simon KeefeChair, Publications Committee Editor, RMA Monographs [email protected]

Katharine EllisChair, Proceedings [email protected]

Professor Jan SmacznyChair, Awards Committee [email protected]

John IrvingChair, Search Committee [email protected]

Laura TunbridgeEditor, JRMA [email protected]

Paul WattEditor, RMA Research Chronicle [email protected]

Michael BydeMember Communications Officer (Newsletter, website and social media) [email protected]

Helen Thomas Membership Development Officer [email protected]

Amanda Hsieh Student Representative [email protected]

Emily Payne Student [email protected]

Susan Bagust Student Liaison Officer [email protected]

Marija Duric Speare Copy Editor, RMA Newsletter Proofreader, JRMA [email protected]

RMA Officers

RMA online: www.rma.ac.uk News | Publications | Conferences | Students

ISSN 1461-9717

From the President:

I hadn’t quite realized that when the Royal Mu-sical Association moved its Annual Conference from the summer to September I would be writ-ing my text for the Newsletter only days after the end of the conference. It was truly a remarkable event, and more than repaid the investment the Association has made – through its Conferences Sub-Committee led by Warwick Edwards – to re-view the way in which our annual conferences work. It was certainly a challenge to try to get a sense of the event as a whole when so much was going on simultaneously, but I enjoyed papers on my favourite indie band and on music and dance. I was particularly impressed by the paper delivered by a member of HM Armed Forces who confessed to being in the middle of equitation training for the Cold-stream Guards (now that was a first), and a paper on Messaien’s Les canyons aux étoiles that actually showcased a small part of Bryce Canyon on the desk in front of the speaker. But I was most struck by the range of scholarship on display: with popular music studies; ethnomusicology; analysis of all types; studies of all forms of cultural musicology from source studies to psychoanalysis; and of course the usual acknowledgements of anniversaries (Verdi, and to a lesser extent Wagner and Britten), which we hope to interrogate in a session at next year’s con-ference in Leeds. Highlights were the Dent Medal address by Michel Duchesneau and the Le Huray lecture by Gianmario Borio (Dent Medal winner 1999), as well as a session on revisiting the concept of the implicit listener which picked up on the special issue (2010) of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association dedicated to just that subject. It was a great event, and the Association is especially grateful to the Institute of Musical Research and its director Paul Archbold, ably assisted by the indefatigable Valerie James.

I was re-elected for a second term as President at the Annual General Meeting of the Association, and it is of course an honour and a privilege to serve again. I stood again for election largely because I was doubtful that we could achieve all the promises I had made two years ago in what would have been the remaining year left to me. But I can report that the negotiations with sibling organizations that occupy themselves with research in music (19 in total now) have proceeded very well, and they have now formed themselves – under the RMA’s leadership – into the Music Research Consortium UK; you can see a list of the organizations at their website at www.music-research.ac.uk. There’s still more work to do here, but progress has been good, and largely trouble-free; it’s now time to move on to the questions of practice-led research (composition in particular) and relations with our European colleagues (it was good to see a French delegation leading on Messaien at our Annual Conference; and one, Yves Balmer, will be writing up his impressions of the event for our next Newsletter).

As we look forward to the Research Students’ Conference in Birmingham in January, we could just reflect on the – as ever – wide range of events the RMA has supported since the appearance of the last Newsletter: Music Since 1900; Hearing Landscape Critically; Music and Philosophy Study Group; Benjamin Britten on Stage and Screen; Twentieth-Century

Connect

www.rma.ac.uk

facebook.com/RoyalMusicalAssociation

@RoyalMusical

British Poets in Music; Ninth Biennial Conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain; Rethinking Poulenc; Stud-ying the ‘Tonal’ Avant-Garde; Richard Wagner’s Impact on His World and Ours; Performing Medieval Text; Cel-ebrating John Dowland’s 450th Anniversary. The range of subjects matches the breadth of ambition both of our An-nual Conference and of the Association as a whole, and it is very good to see.

In the April Newsletter, I had to report on the difficulties we had experienced with subscription renewals, and how the RMA Council had resolved to take back the manage-ment of memberships. This began on the 1 October for 2014 renewals, and has already been trialled by mem-bers of Council; it seems to be extremely flexible and working very well. I’m very grateful to the membership of the Association who have been so patient, and espe-cially to Executive Officer Jeff Dean, Membership De-velopment Officer Helen Thomas, and Member Website Manager Mike Byde, who put in an immense amount of work over the summer to ensure that we now have a

workable system of which the Association can be proud.

The Royal Musical Association is in good health and – if the Annual Conference is anything to go by – good spirits. And while the path ahead seems reasonably clear for the foreseeable future, there remains much to be done. If members – or members to-be – would like to suggest ways forward, my email inbox is always ready to receive suggestions ([email protected]).

2013 Annual ConferenceThe 2013 Annual Conference hosted by the Institute of Musical Research in London was a very well attended event. The papers presented provided a unique opportunity within the UK for delegates to gain a wide-ranging view of the current issues in music research. A photograph gallery of the conference is available on the RMA web-site http://www.rma.ac.uk/conferences/2013-annual/. A full review will appear in the next edition of the Newsletter.

Photograph: Andy Catterall

ROYAL MUSICAL ASSOCIATION50TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE, LEEDS, 4–6 SEPTEMBER 2014

CALL FOR PAPERSDeadline: 5:00 PM (GMT), Saturday, 30 November 2013

The Royal Musical Association will assemble for its Annual Conference at the School of Music, Univer-sity of Leeds, between 4 and 6 September 2014. It will be a special event for a number of reasons: not only is it the RMA’s 50th annual conference, but also it marks the 140th anniversary of the Associa-tion’s foundation and the 70th anniversary of its designation ‘Royal’. The occasion will be a meet-ing point for all to celebrate the achievements of the RMA and the breadth and depth of current re-search into the science and practice of music. The Peter Le Huray lecture will be given by Alexander Rehding (Harvard University) and the Dent lecture by Elizabeth Eva Leach (University of Oxford).

The programme committee invites proposals for individual papers (20 minutes) and themed sessions (90 minutes). Any session format – including sound installations, performance-based presentations, or work-shops – may be proposed, as long as it fits into a 90-minute slot. The committee welcomes proposals from early-career researchers as well as leading scholars and practitioners. The aim is to represent the wide inter-ests of the RMA’s membership at this milestone conference.

Submission of proposals and abstracts should conform to the following rules:

• Individual papers: two copies of an abstract of no more than 250 words to be sent in pdf format. One should be attributed and one anonymous to enable anonymous review. An indication should be given of equipment required.

• Themed sessions: abstracts (as above) for each of the contributions to the session. In addition, a 400-word rationale (also pdf format) that makes clear the purpose of the session, its theme and the ways in which the individual contributions relate, both thematically and in terms of organization and timing (for example, four 15-minute position papers followed by a half-hour discussion). Please include full contact details of the convenor, and indicate what equipment is needed.

The programme committee comprises Anastasia Belina-Johnson (Leeds College of Music), Kevin Dawe (University of Kent), Warwick Edwards (RMA/University of Glasgow), Andrew Kirkman (University of Birmingham) and Derek Scott (Annual Conference Chair; University of Leeds).

Proposals for individual papers and themed sessions should be sent to: [email protected]

They must arrive no later than 5.00pm (GMT) on Saturday 30 November 2013. The committee aims to notify proposal authors of its decision by early February 2014. Those selected will be asked to confirm their ac-ceptance and may make revisions to their abstract and (where applicable) timings. The full programme will be announced and booking will open by Easter. Abstracts will be published on the RMA’s website in July.

Note: All participants (save Le Huray and Dent guests and designated conference organizers) are required to register and pay the applicable fee. Registration fees cannot be guaranteed at this stage, but are expected to be no more than £65 for RMA members and £75 for non-RMA members, with concessions available at half-price and a discount offered for early-bird registration.

You do not have to be an RMA member to propose a session or a paper, or to participate. However, you will find it well worth joining at www.rma.ac.uk. It will entitle you to a discount on the conference registration fee, free hard-copy and online access to the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and the RMA Research Chronicle, exclusive discounts on a wide range of publishers’ books, professional news and views in the monthly e-bulletin and twice-yearly printed newsletter, and much more besides.

Enquiries about exhibition space, leafleting, and advertising in the conference programme book are wel-come at any time. Enquiries are also welcome regarding closed meeting-room facilities for members of the Music Research Consortium UK, though a small charge may be payable.

Conference reports: Conference organizers are invited to submit reports for the Newsletter. The Association encourages organizers to nominate research students to write reports. Guidelines are available on the website.

Leaflet mailings: We also provide a service by which leaflets may be mailed with the Newsletter. There is a fee of £80.

See www.rma.ac.uk/publications/ for full details or contact [email protected].

AwardsAward of the Dent MealFor 2013, the Dent Medal is awarded to Professor Eliza-beth Eva Leach of St Hugh’s College and Exeter College, Oxford.

With four books – two monographs and two edited vol-umes – and a host of distinguished articles, Professor Leach has established herself as one of the foremost authorities on the music and poetry of the fourteenth century. Her most recent monograph, Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician (Cornell University Press, 2011), a broad-ranging interdisciplinary study, was awarded the 2012 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize of the Renaissance Society of America. Her edited volume Machaut’s Music: New Inter-pretations (Boydell and Brewer, 2003) gained her the Sarah Jane Williams Award of the International Machaut Socie-ty (2002), and her article ‘Gendering the Semitone, Sexing the Leading Tone: Fourteenth-Century Music Theory and the Directed Progression’, Music Theory Spectrum, 28/1 (2006), was winner of the Outstanding Publication Award of the Society for Music Theory (US, 2007). From the firm foundation of scholarly endeavour in the fourteenth cen-tury, her writing has extended inter alia to later centuries in the articles ‘Unquiet Thoughts: Spenser, Scudamour, and John Dowland’s First Booke of Songes’, Musicology, Medieval to Modern (2012), and ‘Vicars of Wannabe: Au-thenticity and the Spice Girls’, Popular Music, 21 (2001).

Apart from her remarkable and extensive publication re-cord, Professor Leach has served the scholarly communi-ty as co-editor of the journal Plainsong and Medieval Music (CUP) and as chair and council member of the Plain-song and Medieval Music Society. In addition, she was a founder member of the Medieval Song Project (Institute of Musical Research) and is a director of the Digital Im-age Archive of Medieval Music. Her teaching is character-ized by a lively engagement with not just the history and techniques of medieval music, but, as in her research, also broader cultural, historical and philosophical contexts.

MUSICA BRITANNICALOUISE DYER AWARDS 2014

The trustees of the Musica Britannica Trust invite ap-plications for the Louise Dyer awards, the purpose of which is to assist postgraduate students researching British music. Applicants must be full-time or part-time students of a British university or equivalent in-stitution of higher education, registered for a higher degree by research. Awards may be made for neces-sary research expenditure for which the applicant has no alternative source of funds, such as the purchase of books, music or microfilms, or essential travel. They are not available for purchasing computer equip-ment or for ordinary maintenance or conference ex-penses. The closing date for applications is 14 Decem-ber 2013. The application form and full details are at www.musicabritannica.org.uk/LDawards.html. Fur-ther information may be requested from the secretary ([email protected]).

Call for Papers: Music and Mathematics An RMA Study Day

12 April 2014, University of Leeds Keynote speaker: Alan MarsdenFrom the fundamental mathematics of sound to a wide variety of high-level theoretical and compositional sys-tems, mathematics has frequently shown itself to be a compelling, fruitful, and provocative discipline from which to approach the study of music. This one-day conference aims to bring together scholars whose work takes inspiration from both fields and present a snap-shot of the different ways that the affinities between music and mathematics are being explored today.

Proposals are invited for papers of 20 minutes, lecture recitals of c.30 minutes, and themed sessions/panels/roundtables of up to 90 minutes that address, in any way, the broad theme of music and mathematics.

Possible topics include:

• Mathematical music theory and analysis

• Compositional uses of mathematics

• Composers whose creative processes might have involved mathematics and/or number

• Present-day and historical mathematical perspec-tives on tuning

• Philosophical and historical perspectives on the re-lationship between music and mathematics

• Methodological issues in translating between mathematics and music

• Quantitative studies of musical scores and perfor-mances

Abstracts of up to 250 words (750 words for themed sessions), with titles, should be sent to Daniel Holden ([email protected]) no later than Friday 6th De-cember 2013. Please also include a cover sheet detailing your name, institutional affiliation (if any), email ad-dress, AV requirements, and any other special requests.

Conference ReportsEnvoicing the OtherDebussy’s Chansons de Bilitis and Ravel’s Chansons madé-casses were the prompt given to participants – composers and scholars – in this symposium to articulate their reflec-tions around the notion of ‘envoicement’ in music. How has music envoiced cultural ‘others’ over time, and what moral, political and methodological questions arise from this? These were some of the issues that were tackled during the symposium Envoicing the Other held on 10 November 2012 at the University of Glasgow, hosted by the Scottish Chapter of the Royal Musical Association, and the School of Culture and Creative Arts, University of Glasgow.

The symposium’s scheduling was exemplary: the morn-ing and early-afternoon sessions included six papers discussing a number of case studies, followed by two papers and a response which delved deeper into the methodological implications of ‘envoicing’, and a con-cert in the evening. The first block showed how the con-cept of ‘other’ has been broadly understood in different historical and cultural contexts: from the less surprising indigenous peoples of the Americas (in the papers on In-dianist opera in the US from Robert F. Waters at Seton Hall University, NJ, and the use of indigenous material in Brazilian modernist music from Kassandra Hartford at Stony Brook University, NY), or gendered voices (Cath-erine Nolan – University of Western Ontario – on Hilde-gard Jone; Emma Adlard – King’s College London – on Ida Rubinstein), to unexpected ‘others’ such as ancient music (David Kjar from Boston University on Wanda Landowska and Sting) or Debussy himself (Teresa Da-vidian – Tarleton State University, TX – on Debussy’s re-ception in Japan). With regard to theoretical reflections on the concept of ‘envoicing’, David J. Code (University of Glasgow) and Jonathan Hicks (University of Oxford) took, respectively, Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis and street musicians in late nineteenth-century Paris as their start-ing point to explore broader questions such as: who is do-ing the envoicing – is it the composer or the performer? And does envoicement equate with enfranchisement?

The evening concert offered an opportunity to revisit the two above-mentioned works by Debussy and Ravel and to listen to six other pieces inspired by them in different ways. Approaches ranged from creatively reusing materi-al from Debussy or Ravel (such as Louis Johnson’s A Med-itation on Fear, based on three bars of Ravel’s ‘Méfiez-vous des blancs’), to using the original works as an inspiration for exploring new ways of setting poetry to music (Richard Peat’s Shepherd’s Purse, Caroline Wilkins’s Carte du tendre and William Sweeney’s Casida de la muchacha dorada), to broader explorations of what ‘envoicing’ or ‘other’ might mean, such as Caroline Kraabel’s exploration of recording technologies in Recording the Other or Drew Hammond’s ‘animal’ other in Coyote Nocturne III. The concert was per-formed by Taylor Wilson (mezzo-soprano), Ruth Morley (flute), Robert Irvine (cello) and Scott Mitchell (piano).

Eva Moreda Rodríguez is Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Re-search Fellow in music at the University of Glasgow. Her cur-rent research focuses on music and exile in Francoist Spain.

Performing Medieval TextOn 10 and 11 May 2013, Merton College (Oxford) became the setting for Performing Medieval Text. Organized by two of the college’s doctoral students – Pauline Souleau (Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages) and Henry Hope (Faculty of Music) – this conference aimed to set a broad framework in which philologists, art historians, historians, and musicologists could discuss the multifac-eted relationships between text and performance in the European Middle Ages between c.1150 and 1450. The project intentionally crossed international and discipli-nary boundaries within academia, but also reached out to a wider public audience: indeed, the two invited in-ternational keynote speakers emblematically reflected these aims of internationality, interdisciplinarity and im-pact: Prof. Franz Körndle from the University of Augs-burg, and Dr Florence Bourgne from Paris-Sorbonne.

Besides the two keynote addresses, four panels – enti-tled ‘Performing Song in Context’, ‘Performance: Con-cept, Context, Genre’, ‘Manuscripts as Performance’ and ‘Performance Transformed’ – provided the backbone of the conference. During each of these sessions, graduate students gave 20-minute papers to which established aca-demics from the University of Oxford then responded. The value of the papers, both individually and as a set, was impressively underlined by the five respondents, whose disciplinary backgrounds were purposefully man-ifold: Prof. Elizabeth Eva Leach (music), Dr Sophie Mar-nette and Dr Helen Swift (French), Dr Almut Suerbaum (German) and Dr Jessica Berenbeim (art history). The papers effectively demonstrated the variety of topics that can be united in the name of medieval performativity: they ranged from Edward the Confessor to Old Beneven-tan chant; from Italy, Augsburg and France to the world of the Scandinavian epic; from dramatic to surgical per-formance; from Parzival to Machaut and Dante. The two keynotes both addressed fifteenth-century performative issues: Prof. Körndle examined the figure of the prophet Job in relation to the misconception of his iconographic and textual portrayal as a musician; and Dr Bourgne pre-sented various groups of manuscripts that reflect perfor-mance and theatrical practices in late-medieval England.

In order to ensure the accessibility of the conference’s ap-proach to medieval performance, a concert of medieval narrative songs (open to the public) was performed by the highly acclaimed Ensemble Leones (director Marc Lewon) in Merton College’s beautiful chapel. The en-tire conference (presentations, papers, responses, ques-tions and concert) was audio recorded with a view to opening up academic research to wider communities: these recordings are set to be uploaded as podcasts, be-ginning at the end of October, that will be freely avail-able to anyone interested in the Middle Ages and/or performance on the University of Oxford podcast page as well as on the conference website(http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/performingmedievaltext/); a col-lection of articles (print and online) arising from the conference discussions is currently also envisaged.

The organizers had allowed ample space for refreshments and a copious reception (thanks to the many generous sponsors – including the RMA), and these opportunities for extended exchange came together neatly with the en-gaging graduate papers, the insightful responses, the pro-found keynotes, the inspiring concert and the grand set-ting of Merton College and its lecture theatre. This allowed delegates to reassess the importance of performance for medieval art (literature, music, art), and to kickstart new interdisciplinary networks and research in this field.

Pauline Souleau and Henry Hope are currently both in the final year of their doctoral studies at the University of Oxford (Merton College).

RMA Study DayCelebrating John Dowland’s 450th AnniversaryOn 4 May 2013, the Royal Musical Association sponsored a study day at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, as the first part of a two-day event commemorating the 450th birthday of England’s famous lutenist –composer John Dowland (1563–1626). Other sponsors included the Lute Society and the University of Huddersfield.

The event drew a diverse range of more than a hundred delegates from varied backgrounds including lutenists, musicologists, theorists, cultural historians and members of the public. The papers on offer were as diverse as the crowd attending, demonstrating the wide variety of ways modern scholars and musicians have interacted with Dowland’s music and legacy. The study day comprised eight paper presentations, two concerts, one poster pres-entation, a masterclass and a lute taster session. Five of the presentations were by students or early-career researchers.

Introductory remarks from Elizabeth Kenny, acclaimed lutenist and editor of the Dowland anniversary issue of Early Music, marked the start of the study day, which was divided into three different panels: Dowland in the 21st Century; Dowland in Context; and Dowland: Text, Anal-ysis, and Performance.

The first session introduced a recently published biogra-phy by Thea Abbott on the twentieth century’s eminent Dowland researcher and biographer Diana Poulton, fol-lowed by the presentation of a composition for 11-string guitar and electronics by David Gorton, Forlorn Hope, based on Dowland’s fantasia of the same name. The panel closed with a demonstration of provisional computation-al tools aimed at assisting researchers in analysing large bodies of music in innovative and automated ways, using Dowland’s widely disseminated Lachrimae as a case study.

The second session, Dowland in Context, reflected on Dowland’s contemporaneous fame, beginning with a survey of his international reputation compared with that of his contemporaries, exploring composer–trav-eller identity and the meaning of foreign reputation. This was coupled with an examination of Dowland’s pedagogical activities and the way they shaped his identity and reputation, considering the cultural capi-

tal generated through student–teacher relationships.

The Text, Analysis, and Performance session evalu-ated material from Dowland’s contemporaneous in-fluences, which the composer borrowed and cleverly wove into his fantasias. Christopher Hogwood talked about keyboard transcriptions of Dowland’s music as sources of ornamentation and variation, arguing for their inclusion in keyboard repertory. The session con-cluded with a textual analysis of Dowland’s Lachrimae, re-examined within the context of Catholic liturgy, of-fering new insights into Dowland’s religious views.

Vivid performances from world-class musicians comple-mented the event, including a masterclass from Gram-my-nominated lutenist Paul O’Dette and two sold-out concerts in the bright and intimate Fitzwilliam College Chapel: the first featuring Nigel North playing Dowland lute solos and the second with Emma Kirkby and lutenist Jakob Lindberg performing Dowland songs originating from a variety of different sources.

Katherine Bank is a Ph.D. candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London, studying early seventeenth-century English secular vocal music.

Britten on Stage and Screen Benjamin Britten’s centenary was celebrated at the Uni-versity of Nottingham’s Department of Music 5 –7 July 2013 in the shape of a major international conference. Scholars from around the globe, including many from the USA, converged for three days of film screenings, aca-demic papers and live performances. A dynamic boys’ choir from Loughborough, the Burton Choristers, gave a rousing semi-staged performance of Britten’s vaudeville The Golden Vanity (written for the Vienna Boys’ Choir) in the Djanogly Recital Hall, and delegates were also treat-ed to a rare performance of the unpublished incidental music to W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s ex-perimental play The Ascent of F6 (1937). This includes an elaborate setting for voices, piano duet and percussion of Auden’s well-known Funeral Blues (‘Stop all the clocks’).

In collaboration with NMC Recordings and with fund-ing from the RMA and the Britten‒Pears Foundation, the conference resulted in the première professional recordings of both The Ascent of F6 and Britten’s simi-larly unpublished music to Auden and Isherwood’s play On the Frontier, and the resulting CD will be re-leased on Britten’s 100th birthday (22 November).

The conference additionally celebrated the completion of the sixth volume of Britten’s published correspondence, edited by Mervyn Cooke (Faber/Boydell). Cooke, a Not-tingham staff member and organizer of this conference, has served as co-editor of the series for more than 20 years.

Richard Wagner’s Impact on His World and OursThe year 2013 has seen a welcome proliferation of events marking the bicentenary of Wagner’s birth, but there have been surprisingly few academic conferences in the UK. Described in Wagner News as ‘among the most important gatherings in the Wagner Bicentenary year’, the RMA-affiliated international conference Richard Wagner’s Im-pact on His World and Ours (Thursday 30 May – Sun-day 2 June 2013) saw around 80 delegates descend on the School of Music, University of Leeds, for a programme of twenty sessions, three keynote lectures, three interactive performance workshops, two expert panels, a song recit-al and two film showings, delivered by 45 speakers from all over the world. Funding from the Royal Musical As-sociation, Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, and the Music & Letters Trust is gratefully acknowledged.

The event was opened with an expansive and broad-ranging contribution from Barry Millington (of the Wagner Journal) entitled ‘200 Not Out: Wagner the Ulti-mate All-Rounder’, the first of three excellent keynote lectures that punctuated the conference. An excellent performance of Wagner songs by soprano Atalya Ti-rosh and pianist Malcolm Miller, which featured the Wesendonck Lieder alongside more rarely performed early songs, concluded the first day, which had also afforded a group of delegates the opportunity to at-tend the Opera North orchestra’s Siegfried rehearsals.

The second keynote speaker, Michael Ewans (Univer-sity of Newcastle, Australia), gave a brilliant assess-ment of ‘Two Landmarks in Wagner Production: Pa-trice Chéreau’s Centenary Ring (1976) and Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s Parsifal (2004)’, in which the central role of the opera director in Wagner’s legacy became a theme to be explored in some depth in other sessions. Com-pleting the keynote trio was Heath Lees (University of Auckland, New Zealand), whose lecture ‘Transforma-tion at Tribschen: How a French Literary Trio became a Wagnerian Musical Trio’ featured an extraordinary extemporized demonstration of how Wagner, no great pianist himself (unlike the virtuosic Professor Lees), might have presented his operas to potential directors and singers – a masterclass in how live performance can bring an already stimulating topic to life. Although not advertised as a keynote, Tony Palmer’s personal intro-duction to his controversial film The Wagner Family on the final day of the conference was as thought-provok-ing as it was entertaining, and gave a fascinating insight into the research behind this significant documentary.

Two expert panels provided a contrast and an opportunity for audience participation. In the first, ‘A Ring for its Time and its place – Opera North’s fully staged concert version, 2011–2014’, Kara McKechnie (University of Leeds), Mar-tin Pickard (Opera North’s director of music) and Jenny Daniel (University of Leeds) provided an insight into the company’s ongoing performances of the cycle, stimulat-ing further debate about the role of the director and the relative importance of music, staging and visual decora-tion. The second panel, ‘Wagner and Israel’, assembled another formidable group of experts: Margaret Brearley

(former Holocaust adviser to the Archbishop of Canter-bury), Na’ama Sheffi (history professor at Sapir College, Israel), Noam Ben-Ze’ev (music critic with the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz) and Wagner scholar Malcolm Miller (Institute of Musical Research). Roberto Paternostro, the conductor who historically (and controversially) took the Israel Chamber Orchestra to Bayreuth in 2011, was unable to attend owing to illness, but sent an interesting summa-ry of his views on performing Wagner in Israel, a question that was debated keenly by panellists and audience alike.

The role of the director was again scrutinized in two of the three practical workshops. In the first, Christopher Newell (University of Hull), Martin Pickard and so-prano Rosamund Cole (Royal Northern College of Mu-sic) explored the complex relationship between direc-tor, singer and audience, and demonstrated how quite small changes in direction can radically alter interpreta-tion. The second workshop saw choreographer Kristina Selen (Opera Studio Oxford), soprano Cornelia Beskow and pianist Nigar Dadascheva interrogating, through practical experimentation, the so-called ‘Bayreuth Style’ espoused by Cosima Wagner, as set down in 1936 by Aus-trian soprano Anna Bahr-Mildenburg. By contrast, in the final workshop, choreographer Daniel Somerville (Uni-versity of Wolverhampton) posed the question, ‘What can moving the body to Wagner’s music tell us that other approaches to his work may not?’ Several brave conference delegates participated in what turned out to be a deeply moving and highly personal exploration of Wagner’s music through the medium of Japanese butoh.

These workshops, panels and lectures provided a frame-work around which individual papers probed and ana-lysed a multitude of topics ranging from ‘Wagner and In-cest’ to ‘Wagner and National Identity’ via many others. Although space precludes a full account of these papers, two contributions are worth noting. Irad Atir (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) created something of a stir (both at this conference and elsewhere) in his reassessment of Wagner’s anti-Semitism, asserting that for Wagner there were ‘good Jews and bad Jews’, just as there were ‘good Germans and bad Germans’. Peter Kupfer (Southern Methodist Univer-sity, Dallas) took a remarkable statistical approach, with data gleaned from some 5,800 individual performances between 1946 and 1990, to demonstrate the changing cultural value of Wagner performances in the GDR, and showed how digital empirical methodologies can be combined with historical techniques to powerful effect.

A Wagner-themed reception at the appropriately named bistro Behind the Town Hall provided a particularly en-joyable evening, complete with Wagner’s own favour-ite sparkling wine, speared dragons (crocodile kebabs with red-chilli-sauce ‘blood’) and golden rings (circular pretzels), rounded off with Freya’s golden apple pie.

Stephen Muir is a senior lecturer in music at the Univer-sity of Leeds, specializing in nineteenth-century Russian music and Jewish liturgical music (particularly of southern Africa).

Rethinking Poulenc: 50 Years OnOn Friday 21 June 2013, around 40 scholars and postgrad-uate students from the UK, Europe and North America gathered at Keele University for this three-day interna-tional conference. Keele’s leafy campus provided a pic-turesque setting for a highly enjoyable and intellectually stimulating event. Organized by Barbara Kelly (Keele), Christopher Moore (Ottawa), Deborah Mawer (Lancas-ter) and Sylvie Douche (Paris-Sorbonne), the conference was designed to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Poulenc’s death: an opportune moment to reassess his contribution to twentieth-century music.

The call for papers attracted a considerable number of abstracts, and the programme committee reported its dif-ficulty in choosing between them. The conference was the UK’s most significant tribute to the French composer this year. Notwithstanding a handful of other anniversary celebrations (including a special edition of BBC Radio 3’s Music Matters on 13 April entitled ‘Poulenc’s Legacy’, and the City of London Sinfonia’s mini Poulenc festival the same month), the limited number of commemorative events is indicative of Poulenc’s often overlooked status in the restructuring of French music and the arts after the First World War. This year’s Proms, for example, fea-tured only a single chamber work by Poulenc performed at Cadogan Hall: his Sextet, originally composed in 1932.

Yet the emergence of new studies of the composer and the publication of important primary sources in recent years call for a re-evaluation of Poulenc – of his rejection of cer-tain modernist trends, and of the scope and nature of mu-sical modernism itself. (See, for example, Hervé Lacombe, Francis Poulenc (Paris, 2013); Barbara Kelly, Music and Ultra-Modernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1913–1939 (Woodbridge, 2013); and Francis Poulenc, J’écris ce qui me chante, ed. Nicolas Southon (Paris, 2011).) At Keele, the di-versity of subjects and methodologies engaged with bore witness to the enduring and vibrant interest in Poulenc today. Papers were presented in both French and Eng-lish – a sign of the conference’s multinational perspective – and were grouped in sessions that dealt not only with Poulenc and his immediate environs, but also with broad-er issues of patronage, politics, religion and sexuality.

Musical geography was a recurring theme throughout the conference. In addition to the entertaining and illumi-nating keynote lecture by Nicolas Southon (Paris) on the importance of Touraine for Poulenc, a paper session on Saturday afternoon was devoted to the subject of Poulenc and Place. Michael Masci (State University of New York) began by examining the politics of flânerie in the compos-er’s songs of the late 1930s, with particular reference to ‘Montparnasse’. (This song was in fact one of the more discussed works during the conference, along with the opera Les mamelles de Tirésias and the ballet Aubade.) Sté-phan Etcharry (Reims) then explored Poulenc’s musical allusions to Spain, and Christopher Moore considered the composer’s creative interest in various forms of the pasto-ral. The session was chaired by Jonathan Hicks (Oxford), who also led the musical geographies session of Satur-day’s RMA postgraduate study day: Studying the ‘Tonal’ Avant-Garde: Methodologies of Twentieth-Century Mu-

sic, 1900–1960 (which also took place at Keele). Benefiting from the expertise of the many Poulenc scholars gathered at Keele the same weekend, postgraduates were invited to participate in workshops on themes including gender and camp theory, analytical approaches and archival study.

Another stimulating session on Saturday explored the banality of Poulenc’s Le bal masqué (Louis Epstein; Har-vard), the irony underlying so many of his musical works (Pascal Terrien; Université catholique de l’Ouest) and the composer’s anti-sublime agenda (Stephen Downes; Sur-rey). This last paper, in particular, attempted to refine the long-standing cliché of Poulenc as ‘half monk, half rogue’ (initiated by French musicologist Claude Rostand in 1950), and all three presentations pointed to the ambi-guity, complexity and even gravity underlying his frothy compositional facades. The conference also placed em-phasis on the performance of Poulenc’s music. American soprano Emily Hindrichs’s lecture-recital in the Univer-sity Chapel on Sunday was a highlight, featuring sung ex-tracts from her new performance edition of Les mamelles arranged by Britten for the 1958 Aldeburgh Festival.

No less than four concerts sponsored by the Keele Key Fund were staged throughout the weekend. The first and third of these focused primarily on Poulenc’s chamber and vocal music and featured a number of highly ac-claimed musicians: cellist Marc Coppey, clarinettist Vic-toria Soames Samek, mezzo-soprano Karen Radcliffe and pianists Roy Howat, Ronald Woodley and Michael Bell. An enlightening keynote presentation by Hervé Lacombe (Rennes 2) on Poulenc’s recycling of musical material in his score for Jean Anouilh’s Le voyageur sans baggage resonat-ed strongly with the sense of déjà entendu that one so often feels when listening to works by this composer. The sec-ond and final concerts were devoted to Poulenc’s L’histoire de Babar, le petit éléphant, narrated in French and English by Didier Francfort and David Amigoni, respectively.

Rethinking Poulenc was a decidedly upbeat and con-vivial event and the conference banquet on Saturday evening provided an excellent opportunity for discus-sion to continue over a delicious three-course meal. On Sunday, the numerous critical issues that had arisen over the course of the weekend were reviewed and debated in the round-table session Poulenc Scholarship Today. Although this culminating session was led by Philippe Cathé (Paris-Sorbonne), Barbara Kelly, Hervé Lacombe, Christopher Moore and Nicolas Southon, it was once again a very inclusive affair. Questions of historicism were deliberated and it was agreed that consideration of Poulenc’s legacy of writing and intimate reflections (some of which have only recently been made avail-able) is crucial in order to give credence to our scholar-ship. The conference at Keele both confirmed the endur-ing significance of Poulenc and suggested stimulating directions for future research in this field. Many thanks are due to Barbara Kelly and her programme commit-tee for organizing such a rich and rewarding event.

Emma Adlard is currently completing her AHRC-funded Ph.D. at King’s College London on women patrons of French musical culture during the early twentieth century.

Studying the ‘Tonal’ Avant-Garde: Methodologies of Twentieth-Century Music, 1900-1960On Saturday 22 June 2013, a group of postgraduate stu-dents gathered at Keele University for an RMA post-graduate study day focusing on methodologies of twentieth-century music. The study day ran alongside Rethinking Poulenc: 50 Years On, an event commemo-rating the fiftieth anniversary of Poulenc’s death. Draw-ing on the expertise of scholars attending the Poulenc conference, the programme committee (Jessica Beck, Barbara Kelly and Rebecca Thumpston; all from Keele University) selected four themes for the study day, each exploring a different methodological approach. The ses-sions were focused around five-minute position papers given by participants, designed to open out into wider discussion. This challenging format highlighted the dif-ficulties of presenting research in a compressed manner.

Opening the study day was a session devoted to gender/camp theory, facilitated by Christopher Moore and Philip Purvis. Surprisingly, this session attracted less interest than others, and Rebecca Thumpston’s paper, exploring pro-jections of masculinity in Britten’s Cello Symphony, was the only student contribution. There was plentiful time for discussion, with thought-provoking challenges and com-ments from Jun Zubillaga-Pow (King’s College London).

Session two, ‘musical geographies’, facilitated by Jona-than Hicks (Oxford), boasted a particularly broad range of papers. Daniel Regan (Keele) explored the ambient nature of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, the music itself providing a subtle, unobtrusive backdrop to his presen-tation; Jessica Beck detailed examples of the use of music

to represent landscape in Baz Luhrmann’s films; Tatiana Wood (Keel) and Joëlle Brun-Cosme explored aspects of place in Poulenc’s music; and Sam Murray gave a fas-cinating account of his doctoral work, which examines the relationship of music and city in Portland, Oregon.

Session three focused on archives. Following advice on archival research from Geoff Thomason and Sylvie Douche, Tamamo Nagai, Kirstie Hewlett, Daniel El-phick and Jo Taylor all spoke about their experiences of archival work. Certain difficulties encountered in this type of research became apparent: Taylor, for ex-ample, highlighted the difficulty of working with mu-sic manuscripts as a literature scholar, while Hewlett raised the issue of the problems scholars engaged with archival research face when constructing narratives through sources such as journals and correspondence.

The afternoon continued with a session on analytical approaches, led by Deborah Mawer (Lancaster) and Philippe Cathé (Paris-Sorbonne). This session featured contributions from Jun Zubillaga-Pow, Martin Curda, Naomi Perley, Peter Dear and Marie Bennett, and cov-ered a range of composers, styles and approaches. The day came to a successful conclusion with the workshop plenary, in which attendees were joined by delegates from the Poulenc conference for a stimulating discussion which sought both to tease out themes that had arisen during the day, and to explore the sometimes artificial boundaries that arise between sub-disciplinary categories.

Rebecca Thumpston is completing her Ph.D. at Keele University, researching theories of agency and narrativ-ity in twentieth-century British concertante cello works.

Call for Papers: Music, Circulation and the Public Sphere A Joint Study Day of the RMA and BFE, University of Manchester

Including invited papers by Byron Dueck (Open Uni-versity) and Estelle Joubert (Dalhousie University and University of Oxford), this joint BFE/RMA Study Day seeks to bring together researchers to engage in interdisciplinary discussions about the relationship between music, circulation, and the public sphere.

Notions of the public sphere, as laid out by Jürgen Habermas, depict it as a site falling between private lives and governmental authority, where individu-als meet to engage in critical, rational debate about public issues. Such discussions occur via face to face meetings as well as through the circulation of media. Historically speaking, these media have tended to be primarily literary but scholars are increasingly turn-ing their attention to the role played by music and sound in the formation of public culture. There have also been a number of attempts to rethink the notion of the public sphere itself, with talk of ‘counterpub-lics’ (Michael Warner) and ‘intimate publics’ (Lauren Berlant), in addition to various reassessments of the public/private divide. These ideas have been taken

up and adapted across analyses of jazz, popular music, the Proms, religious sermons, opera and hymnbooks.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers that help to develop and broaden these discussions across differ-ent historical periods, geographic areas and disciplines.

Themes that papers may address include:• The role of music in the formation of publics and

public practices• Modes of musical transmission in the public sphere

(audio and audio-visual recordings, notation, oral transmission etc.)

• Critical debates about music aesthetics in the pub-lic sphere

• Musical rethinking of the private/public divide• The affective work of music in the public sphere• The political potential of music in the public sphere• The involvement of the State in the musical life of

the public sphere• The circulation of digital music online and ‘virtual’

publics

Titles and abstracts of no more than 200 words should be sent to [email protected] by 17 January 2014.

Music in Nineteenth-Century BritainThe ninth biennial conference on Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (MNCB) took place at Cardiff University School of Music from 24 to 27 June 2013, in association with the RMA and the Royal Philharmonic Society. Attract-ing delegates from the USA, Canada, Australia, France and Germany, as well as the UK and Ireland, the confer-ence provided an opportunity for new and established scholars to reflect upon the growing field of nineteenth-century British music studies. In total, 74 papers (includ-ing two keynotes) were presented over the four days.

The first keynote was given by Simon Goldhill (Uni-versity of Cambridge), who invited us to reconsider, with reference to Victorian music critics, musicians and repertoire, what it is to know music and how mu-sic in turn can be ‘knowing’. In the second keynote, Leanne Langley (Institute of Musical Research) pre-sented a celebration of the Royal Philharmonic Soci-ety’s bicentenary, showing how musical narratives have been, and continue to be, preserved in public history.

The relationship between music and literature proved, perhaps surprisingly, to be a central theme of the confer-ence, with two panels convened by Maura Dunst (Car-diff). The first panel, on music and poetry, discussed selected works by Caroline Norton, Thomas Hardy, and Alfred and Emily Tennyson. In contrast, the second panel considered how musical practices were utilized within nineteenth-century prose. Dunst’s paper on music in the creation of New Woman fiction was particularly inter-esting as she used the work of George Egerton in order to define what she calls ‘melopoetic composition’. Such panels on music and literature promoted interdiscipli-nary participation, which resulted in fruitful discus-

sions on this important connection. The literary thread was highlighted further with a Dickens-themed evening concert, adapted by Christine Kyprianides (Indianap-olis Baroque Orchestra) and performed by Leon Conrad (narrator), Greg Tassell (tenor) and Gary Branch (piano).

Other themes that emerged include: music and communi-ty consciousness; Britishness, empire and identity; and the intersection between domestic music-making and aristo-cratic customs. In addition, a number of papers explored music and maritime culture. Sophie Fuller (Trinity Laban) presented a visual exploration of musicians based on the East Sussex coast in the late nineteenth century. Christo-pher J. Smith (Texas Tech) invoked an ethnomusicological perspective as he discussed the creolization of music in British maritime culture. A standout paper was delivered by Karen Leistra-Jones (Franklin & Marshall College) on Elgar’s Sea Pictures. Drawing upon ecocritical method-ologies, she argued how the cycle engages with the con-cept of the ocean drawn from Victorian fantasies (rather than stereotypical Romantic representations of the sea).

Despite its title, the conference was not limited to the study of music written by British composers or con-fined by geographical boundaries. The year 2013 rep-resents a milestone in musical history, celebrating the bicentenary of both Wagner’s and Verdi’s birth, as well as marking 150 years since the birth of Mascagni. Re-sponding to the call for explorations of nineteenth-cen-tury British responses to the music of such composers, Donna Parsons (University of Iowa) discussed how the writing of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, under the pseudonym Michael Field, was influenced by Wag-ner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, and how their perception of his operas was transformed by reading Nietzsche.

Plat

e: T

revo

r Her

bert

(Ope

n Uni

vers

ity) e

xpla

inin

g how

the o

rigi

nal

Cyf

arth

fa B

and

man

uscr

ipts

wer

e cre

ated

. Pho

to by

Rac

hel C

owgi

ll.

Christopher Scheer (Utah State University) explored the relationship between theosophy and the reception of Wagner in England, and Joanna Brook and Rosalie Bri-ant (both Cardiff) examined how the British reception of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and L’amico Fritz was af-fected by expectations from premières on the Continent.

Following a precedent from earlier MNCB conferences whereby a sense of local identity has been highlighted, a conscious effort was made to provide links to Wales and its culture. Scholarly debate on the music of Wales was catered for in its own panel with papers on the fol-lowing themes: musical canons; industry and identity in the choral tradition; politics and the National Eisteddfod; and imperialism and the Cardiff Music Festival. Trevor Herbert (Open University) delivered a fascinating ple-nary on the intersection between iron industry and mu-sical practice (with reference to the Cyfarthfa Band) in nineteenth-century Merthyr Tydfil. The session was aptly followed by an excursion to Cyfarthfa Castle, where dele-gates were able to view both the period brass instruments and a collection of the original handwritten manuscripts. However, the notion of Wales as a ‘land of song’ was not forgotten at the conference: John Hugh Thomas (Cardiff) held a singing workshop that utilized standard repertoire for amateur choirs in nineteenth-century south Wales. This well-attended session not only provided the perfect antithesis to midweek fatigue, but also afforded scholars a rare and enjoyable opportunity to perform together.

With such a diverse range of papers on offer, several del-egates commented that a decision on which parallel ses-sion to attend became tricky at times – surely the sign of a successful conference programme. As MNCB approaches its tenth meeting (to be held at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2015), action is being taken to digitize the programmes and abstracts of each of the previous meet-ings in the series. In addition to safeguarding the rel-evant materials within an online repository, the project will allow academics to trace the development of Brit-ish music studies as it progresses over the years. It was announced that a permanent website (www.mncb.org.uk; as yet it has not gone live) will be created to house the archive and to promote communication and network-ing opportunities between the biennial conferences.

Rachelle Barlow is a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology at Cardiff University, and is currently researching the choral tradition in nineteenth-century south Wales with particular emphasis on cultural, gendered and national identities.

Affiliation of ConferencesThe RMA welcomes proposals from conference organizers for the affiliation of their events to the Association.

Benefits of affiliation include free advertising of the event through the RMA website and Newsletter; free, or reduced cost circulation of information through RMA mailings to members; and access to advice and support from RMA Officers and members of the Proceedings Committee. For more information, visit http://www.rma.ac.uk/conferences/affiliation.htm.

Call for Papers:

Memory in Post-1980s Music History, Form, Perception

A Study Day for Research Students University of York22 Februrary 2014

Guest speaker: Michael Zev Gordon (Birmingham) Lunchtime recital: Joseph Houston (piano)

Proposals for papers are invited on any aspect of this topic. Possible areas for discussion include:

• Contemporary music in the context of earlier tradi-tions

• Quotation, allusion, parody

• The role of memory in musical perception

• Formal concerns of repetition and development

• Expressive nostalgia

• The impact of technology on issues of perception and memory

• The relationship between memory and subjectivity

• Memory in modernist, postmodernist and other worldviews

• Compositional approaches

The day will include a lunchtime recital by award-winning pianist Joseph Houston, playing Michael Zev

Gordon’s On Memory (2004), and a pre-concert talk by the composer. Abstracts of not more than 200 words should be submitted to Mark Hutchinson ([email protected]) by 29 November 2013 for consideration by the programme committee.

Registration fee: £10 (free for members of RMA or the University of York). To register in advance your inten-tion to come to this event please contact Mark Hutch-inson ([email protected])

Third Annual Conference of the RMA Music and Philosophy Study Group

From 18 to 20 July 2013, King’s College London welcomed 220 delegates for three days of widely diverse papers and engaging debates on what we mean by music and what we mean by philosophy. This year, for the first time, the usu-al two-day conference was extended to include an initial day of pre-conference activities, with 72 speakers involved across the whole event. Following feedback from previous years, the conference organizers made use of some of the larger lecture theatres at King’s, and this was appreciated.

The optional theme of ‘Embodiment and the Physical’ tied together the variety of papers given, with ontologi-cal issues an underlying theme of many of the talks. The opening plenary discussion panel on Friday morn-ing, Is Music a Bodily Art?, began with a talk by Jenefer Robinson (University of Cincinnati) which was centred on the dualism of music as structure and music as perfor-mance. She argued that we might hear music’s bodily functions foregrounded; however, her talk could have delved into the tension between the inherent dualism of structure and performance. Nicholas Baragwanath (Uni-versity of Nottingham) addressed some of these issues, while Jeremy Begbie (Duke University) argued that mu-sic was the most spiritual of the arts, and presented an embodied understanding of the its transcendental nature.

The first keynote by Peter Szendy (University of Paris West) on Friday afternoon asked what happens when one plays a piano in a department store. This rich and imaginative paper focused on the Marx Brothers film The Big Store, with questions about the theatre of bodily com-merce, underpinned by the philosophy of Jacques Der-rida and Karl Marx (‘the other Marx’). The response from Eric Clarke (University of Oxford) brought out debates regarding ‘infinite semiosis’ and ‘general fetishism’, and highlighted musical episodes from other Marx Broth-ers films that might be thought-provoking to consider.

A provocative and informative second keynote from Georgina Born (University of Oxford) on Sat-urday morning directly addressed many of the on-tological issues raised by the first keynote. Born discussed relational ontologies provoked by the con-sideration of the living presence in digital music. She called for a renewed attention to the social, in response to the rise of the actor–network theory and affect theory.

On the Friday afternoon following Szendy’s keynote paper, a session entitled Musical Understanding: A Di-alogue, with Nick Zangwill (Durham University) and Lawrence Kramer (Fordham University), chaired by Ju-lian Johnson (Royal Holloway, University of London), was held to close the day before the evening’s wine re-ception. The two papers opened a discussion on the na-ture of musical value. Zangwill’s controversial paper was a throwback to Hanslick (‘who was right’, he said). His argument was based on a tautology that in order to know what musical understanding is we must first know what music is. His talk provoked some unsettle-ment, perhaps best articulated by Lydia Goehr (Colum-

bia University), who advised against his discourse of ‘purity’ as an exclusionary term. Kramer gave a very dif-ferent paper in which he argued that understanding of music and understanding by music are almost identical.

One of the highlights from the day of pre-conference activities was Goehr’s paper on Continental philoso-phy, as part of a session of ‘Introducing…’ papers. Goehr’s stimulating and fluid talk discussed the nature of Continental philosophy while defending the the-sis of her seminal book The Imaginary Museum of Musi-cal Works. The Thursday-morning session opened with an introduction by Derek Matravers (Open University and University of Cambridge) to ‘Analytic Philosophy and Music’. He reiterated many of the stereotypes sur-rounding analytic philosophy, in order to provoke live-ly debate and some opposition among musicologists.

A personal highlight from the conference was the session on Schubert on Friday afternoon. Benedict Taylor (Oxford) and David L. Mosley (Bellarmine University) presented two very different approaches to Schubert’s music. Tay-lor’s stimulating paper argued for a reading in terms of memory and temporality, whereas Mosley engaged with debates surrounding landscape. A parallel session in-cluded a much-praised paper by Rachel Beckles Willson (Royal Holloway) on sound and complexities of listening.

Following Born’s keynote on Saturday morning, a ses-sion on Gesture and Touch was one of three paral-lel events focusing on ontological debates. I look for-ward to hearing more of the ongoing research featured in both papers: the first by Kristoffer Jensen and Søren R. Frimodt-Møller (both Aalborg University Esbjerg and NNIMIPA) on capturing the gestures of musi-cians in performance, and the second by Jana Weissen-feld (Basel University) on her exploration of conduc-tors’ gestures (staged or otherwise) in video recordings.

The final keynote paper by Stephen Davies (University of Auckland) on Saturday afternoon in many ways present-ed the culmination of ideas from three days of diverse talks. His paper focused on the theme of music and em-bodiment, and drew on a variety of ideas and examples. Davies argued that to understand what is ‘going on’ in music, it is necessary to ‘see’ what has happened, whether physically or in the mind’s eye. Mark Katz (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) responded by noting that seeing and understanding how music is ‘done’ only en-hances the appreciation of music. The discussion brought to an end three days of stimulating discussions within the sometimes precariously overlapping fields of music and philosophy, posing and attempting to answer difficult questions surrounding ontological debates. Many felt that the conference was the best yet, and next year’s con-ference will most definitely be very eagerly anticipated.

Ellen Davies is a D.Phil. student at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, researching musical temporality and philosophies of time in 1913 Paris.

Music since 1900From 12 to 15 September 2013, some 150 internation-al delegates travelled to a wet and windy Liverpool to take part in the Eighth Biennial International Con-ference on Music since 1900. Held at Liverpool Hope University’s Creative Campus, the sessions were split between the Capstone and Cornerstone buildings. This allowed delegates to see the beautiful gardens (when sunshine permitted) and to witness the impres-sive Capstone Theatre during the conference concerts.

Of pertinence to the contemporary study of music since 1900 are gender studies, which proved an important theme throughout the conference. The wonderful key-note speech by Caroline Potter (Kingston Univerity) on 1913 and Lili Boulanger’s success at the Prix de Rome was surrounded by an array of impressive papers on related subjects such as the history of women as com-posers, the centenary of 1913, and the nature of mas-culinity and desire in the works of Britten. There was a particular focus on interwar and post-war sensibilities.

Papers that I particularly enjoyed were a discussion by independent German scholar Dorothea Gail of contem-porary Christian music in American conservative culture, including her analysis of the imagery and message in, as well as the reception of, these popular song forms; Laura Seddon’s fascinating discussion of the Society of Women Musicians (1911–72); Joseph E. Jones (Chinese University of Hong Kong) on the use of non-Western instruments in the musical identity of Bear McCreary and his composi-tion for film, television and game platforms; Rachel Cow-gill (Cardiff University) discussing Ciro’s Club, 1914–19; and Emma Adlard (King’s College London) and Helen Julia Minors (Kingston) on Jean Cocteau’s ballet Le train bleu and Erik Satie’s Sports et divertissements respectively.

Especially noteworthy was a highly enjoyable lecture-re-cital, ‘Fabulists and Transcendentalists’, given by Joanna MacGregor (Royal Academy of Music/Liverpool Hope) which captured the essence and breadth of these compos-ers with particular success. MacGregor spoke with great openness and accessibility, introducing new and exciting work with a focus on women in music. She included com-posers such as Galina Ustvolskaya, Sofia Gubaidulina and Evelina Petrova (as both a composer and performer), as well as discussing Lili and Nadia Boulanger, Amy Beach and Ruth Crawford Seeger. Charles Ives was a surprising and welcome addition to the programme. It is difficult to obtain much of this music, and it is hoped that in the future this can be rectified. Despite an injury to the wrist, Joanna’s playing of select examples was a joy to listen to.

For those with an interest in electroacoustic music, Ma-nuella Blackburn (Liverpool Hope) programmed an im-pressively varied selection of pieces to be experienced in a listening-room – an element that ran for the duration of the Friday. I particularly enjoyed Amovi Alaan by John Nichols III, which uses field recordings from Chicago among many other sources, and provided an enveloping aural experience.

The Electroacoustic Concert presented on the MAN-TIS (Manchester Theatre in Sound) large-scale sound

diffusion system offered a variety of electroacoustic works. I was intrigued by Steven Naylor’s piece Ir-rashaimase: its sense of an unfamiliar place, using cul-turally unfamiliar sounds from Japan, was highly effec-tive, and approached the issues of place and memory through repetition, loops and small harmonic fragments.

The concert of the following evening from the lead-ing Indian arts organization Milapfest was hugely en-joyable. It featured the ensemble Tarang, which con-sists of emerging musicians who are making Indian music both accessible and relevant to modern Britain. The plenary session presented by the European Op-era Centre and their discussion of The Cunning Lit-tle Vixen provided a valuable insight into the reim-agination of an operatic work for the television screen.

Finally, two of the plenary sessions – Directions in Con-temporary Music; and Messiaen, Formation and the Can-on – resulted in lively discussion concerning the future of contemporary music making and the concept of borrow-ing and development of musical material. I was particu-larly struck by the discussion by Yves Balmer (ENS de Lyon/Paris Conservatoire) and Christopher Brent Murray (Université Libre de Bruxelles) of Messiaen’s borrowing of rhythmic, harmonic and melodic material, and their il-lustration of how these borrowings had been integrated into Messiaen’s own work, particularly from the 1940s. To close the conference proceedings, the keynote from Robert Piencikowski (Paul Sacher Foundation), ‘The Sniper, the Sheep and the Hounds’, was an illuminating discussion of Pierre Boulez’s motivations concerning aesthetic debates between 1945 and 1975. Piencikowski focused on the use/misuse of the term ‘avant-garde’ in relation to contempo-rary music. His voluminous knowledge of the time peri-od shone particularly during asides to the main paper, as well as during the question session afterwards, in which he provided illuminating answers to off-topic questions.

With such a full programme, planned with excellence and efficiency by Laura Hamer and Manuella Blackburn, the conference demonstrated that the study of music since 1900 is thriving. Continuing efforts to make available the work of under-researched composers are needed for the academic community and the public to more fully appreciate these artists for their scope and originality.

Carly Rowley is a third-year Ph.D. student at Liverpool Hope University whose research – funded by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester – concerns the interdisciplinary connections between music and literature.

Do you have an idea for a study day?The RMA’s regular study days are normally (though not exclusively) convened by postgraduate students, with the RMA providing advice and assistance, and fi-nancial support. We welcome proposals for study days from all members of the Association. If you have an idea for a study day, get in touch with the Student Liaison Officer:

• Susan Bagust ([email protected])

Student BlogThe RMA Student Blog launched in October 2012. Features include:• Life Post-PhD: The View from Parentland• Life Post-PhD: On Expecting the Unexpected• A Gigantic Introduction to Musicology and

Landscape • How to Get Published: A Beginner’s Guide• A PhD Abroad? An Erasmus Placement in Paris• Getting a ‘Post-Doc’: How Is It Even Possible?!

www.rma.ac.uk/students

Printed Directory of MembersThe Council of the RMA has decided to discontinue the practice of issuing a printed Directory of Members annually. Most members now avail themselves of the online Directory (in the members-only section of the RMA website at www.rma.ac.uk/members/), which is updated frequently. A computer printout, up to date only as of the preceding 31 December, may be ob-tained free of charge from the Executive Officer. Mem-bers are assured that the information given out in this printout will be (apart from future additions) only that specified in the past as being for the printed Directory.

Membership RenewalIndividual members are invited to renew their membership for 2014. Membership renewals are now being dealt with by the RMA directly in order to provide a more reliable and individual service. (Please note that there is no need for members of student groups to renew – this is done on your behalf by your institution.)

You can renew by visiting www.rma.ac.uk/renew/. The simple, on-screen instructions will guide you through the process. If you would prefer a hard copy renewal form please contact the Executive Officer (details below). Indi-vidual members who have not registered an email address with the RMA, or whose registered email addresses are not working, have been sent renewal notices by post.

When renewing online, you will need to log in first. Unless you have customized your username or password in the past, the username default is the email address we have on record and the password default is your membership number. Contact [email protected] if you have any problems or comments about logging in.

There are a number of ways to pay. We encourage members to pay by direct debit. The banking fees we are charged are lower for direct debit than for other payment methods, meaning that more of your subscription is available to support the work of the association. You can also pay by debit/credit card, bank transfer or cheque.

If you have a query about your membership or payment, contact the Executive Officer:

Dr Jeffrey Dean [email protected]

4 Chandos Road Chorlton-cum-Hardy Manchester M21 0ST

0161 861 7542

Music Research Consortium UKLeaders of professional organisations promoting research in music gathered at the Institute of Musical Research, Senate House, London on Friday 25 October, 2013 for the official launch of the Music Research Consortium UK (MRC-UK). Invited guests included scholars, indus-try professionals and policy makers from across the UK.

MRC-UK has developed links between eighteen bodies that promote musical research and the exchange of ideas. It aims to co-ordinate national and international initia-tives and responses concerning music research practice and policy on behalf of the participating organisations

in order to promote evidence-based policy and practice that draws explicitly on the latest international research.

Mark Everist, President of the Royal Musical Association and Convener of MRC-UK, said:

‘The establishment of the Music Research Consortium UK is a timely – perhaps overdue – initiative that brings together the highly-varied forms of musical research and gives them a forum for discussion and, when needed, a single voice’.

Visit www.music-research.ac.uk to find out more, includ-ing the aims of the consortium.

Conference Calendarwww.rma.ac.uk/eventsFull details for events listed here can be found on the RMA website. To list your event please send details to [email protected]. We list events held in the UK with substantial scholarly content relating to music.

November 2013

Opera Indoors and Outdoors

Rethinking Opera Reception - An RMA Study Day4 Nov 13University of Nottingham

SEMPRE Student Study Day

Music psychology and music education8 Nov 13University of Hull

Music and Empathy

SEMPRE Conference9 Nov 13University of Hull

Music and Psychoanalysis

13 Nov 13University of Liverpool

Researching music as process

Methods and approaches: An RMA Study Day22 Nov 13University of Oxford

Gesualdo 400th Anniversary Conference

23 Nov 13 - 24 Nov 13University of York

Exploring Collections at the British Library

Training Day in association with the British Library, IMR and the RMA29 Nov 13British Library

December 2013

Crosscurrents in Music and Theology

An RMA study day6 Dec 13University of Sheffield

January 2014

RMA Research Students’ Conference 2014

6 Jan 14 - 8 Jan 14University of Birmingham

The Visual Arts and Music in Renaissance Europe c.1400-1650

Second Annual Postgraduate Renaissance Symposium18 Jan 14Courtauld Institute of Art

Feburary 2014

Singing a Song in a Foreign Land

21 Feb 14 - 23 Feb 14Royal College of Music

Memory in Post-1980s Music

History, Form, Perception22 Feb 14University of York

March 2014

International Festival for Innovations in Music Production and Composition

13 Mar 14 - 14 Mar 14Leeds College of Music

Atlantic Sounds: Ships and Sailortowns

14 Mar 14 - 15 Mar 14University of Liverpool

Creativity, Circulation and Copyright

Sonic and Visual Media in the Digital Age28 Mar 14 - 29 Mar 14University of Cambridge

April 2014

Researching Music, Technology & Education

3 Apr 14 - 4 Apr 14Institute of Education, University of London

Music, Circulation, and the Public Sphere

Joint Study Day of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology and the Royal Musical Association11 Apr 14University of Manchester

Music and Mathematics

An RMA Study Day12 Apr 14University of Leeds

Routledge, the publishers of the Journal of the RMA, offer all RMA members a discount of 20 per cent on all their music titles. Visit www.routledgemusic.com, select the books you wish to purchase, and enter the code at checkout.

Ashgate, the publishers of the RMA Monographs series, offer RMA members a discount of 20 per cent on any Ash-gate book. To order books and claim your discount, visit www.ashgate.com, select the books you wish to purchase, and add them to your shopping basket. As you go through the checkout process, enter the code into the field marked ‘Promotional Code’.

Oxford University Press offer RMA members a discount of 20 per cent on all their music titles: www.oup.com/uk/sale/websocrma. The discount code will automatically be applied to purchases made from this link (alternatively, enter the promotion code ‘ ’ at the checkout). This offer applies to books on music only.

Wiley offer members a discount of 20 per cent on most titles (excluding German-language books and some ma-jor reference works). Use membership code in the promotion field in the Wiley.com shopping cart.

Musica Britannica offers members a discount of 20 per cent on volumes of the series. To order volumes, contact Stain-er & Bell, stating that you are a member of the RMA. Pric-es are in the online and printed catalogues. www.stainer.co.uk/acatalog/musica.html will take you directly to the Musica Britannica page in the Collected Editions section of the online shop. State your membership in the ‘messag-es box’. 20 per cent will be taken off at the time of process-ing; the discounted price will not be shown on the website.

University of California Press offer RMA members a discount of 20 per cent on all their music titles. To order books, visit www.ucpress.edu/go/music; at checkout, en-ter the code into the field marked ‘Source Code’, click ‘Update’, and your savings will be calculated.

Up-to-date details of all discounts are available in the Members Area of the website.

RMA Member Benefits

For further information on the above or for questions about membership please contact the Executive Of-ficer, Dr Jeffrey Dean, 4 Chandos Road, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester M21 0ST, England; fax: +44 (0)161 861 7543; e-mail: <[email protected]>.

Scottish ChapterThe RMA Scottish Chapter coordinates and publicizes RMA-affiliated events at the Universities of Aberdeen, Ed-inburgh and Glasgow, and at the Royal Conservato ire of Scotland. For more information contact Warwick Edwards ([email protected]) or click the ‘Scottish Chapter’ link on the RMA website.

JPASS: RMA member access to JSTORIn collaboration with JSTOR, the RMA is pleased to offer you a special, discounted fee for JPASS, a new JSTOR ac-cess plan for individuals.

JPASS is designed for independent scholars or those without institutional access to the JSTOR archival collec-tions. It is also valuable for faculty members at institu-tions with limited access to JSTOR, and for adjuncts with sporadic access to library resources. Regardless of your institutional affiliation, JPASS serves as your personal library card to the rich selection of journals on JSTOR.

JPASS includes access to the archives of the around 1,500 journals. However, books, primary sources, and current journal issues are not included. JPASS includes unlimited reading and 120 article downloads.

As part of your membership of the RMA, we are able to offer you the 1-year JPASS access plan for USD $99, a 50% discount on the listed rate.

Members with a home address in Wales or Scotland should note that free access to JSTOR (and other electronic library resources) is available through the National Library of Wales or the National Library of Scotland, respectively.

To use your member discount sign in to the ‘members only’ section of the website and choose ‘JSTOR/JPASS’ from the menu.

Research Students’ ConferenceJanuary 2014

The Royal Music Association (RMA) Research Stu-dents’ Conference is open to postgraduates studying in the UK or abroad. It offers students a chance to pre-sent research on any aspect of music and related areas in a friendly and supportive atmosphere.

The conference provides an opportunity for young researchers to meet each other, gain experience of the conference environment (as listeners, participants and chairs), hear papers, workshops and music, and gain insights into the profession.

The next Research Students’ Conference will take place from Monday 6 to Wednesday 8 January 2014 at the University of Birmingham. It will be based in the new Bramall Music Building, a £16m state-of-the-art teach-ing, research, performance and rehearsal facility.

Registration for the conference is now open. Places can be booked via our secure online shop:

http://bit.ly/GDswCF