City, University of London - Music Department Research Seminar Series - Summer Term 2018

    

    J.P.E. Harper-Scott (Royal Holloway, University of London): Somewhere or anywhere? Brexit, Britten and class in musicology

    

    Wednesday 16th May, 5.30-7.30pm

    Room AG09, College Building (ground floor) St John Street, London EC1V 4BP

    

    *IMPORTANT NOTE:This talk will take place on 16/05, a week earlier than previously scheduled. Nicholas Cook's talk in this series has moved to 23/05 and will not go ahead on 16/05 as previously advertised. See follow-up email.*

    

    Web version of this announcement with links:

    https://www.city.ac.uk/events/2018/may/jpe-harper-scott-brexit-britten-and-class-in-musicology/_nocache

    

    Abstract

    By the late 1920s, the Conservative Party in the UK saw ‘highbrow’ culture as a major threat to the British state and the capitalist world order. Under the leadership of Stanley Baldwin, they strengthened a ‘middlebrow’ movement whose aim was to promote an insular and identitarian view of English society and political economy, and to set up a barrier between the working classes and the dangerous isms (including modernism) of the Continent. This lecture examines the fortunes of Britten’s music in relation to the ‘battle of the brows’, then and now, and asks what the long view of the struggles between middlebrow and modernism, conservatism and radicalism, have to say in respect of the traumas of our present.

    

    About the speaker

    J. P. E. Harper-Scott is Professor of Music History and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published extensively on music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on twentieth-century British music and theories of musical modernism. A theorist, historian, and analyst, he writes from an explicitly Leftist perspective. He has produced five books, including three on Elgar and one on Walton, and his sixth, *Ideology in Britten’s Operas*, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.

    

    Next and final talk this academic year:

    

    23/05/2018: Nicholas Cook (University of Cambridge): Nettl’s Something: The Musical work as Performance

    

    

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    Dr Shay Loya

    Lecturer in Music

    City, University of London