The Music, Medicine and History Network’s next Wednesday Seminar will take place on Wednesday 15th November on Zoom from 3-4pm (GMT) – all welcome.
This month, Dr Fraser Riddell (Durham University) will be sharing his research on:
‘Musical under the touch of the Universe’: Aesthetic Liberalism, Music, and Vernon Lee’s Essayistic Art of Resonance
Abstract: This paper examines musical essays of the late-Victorian cosmopolitan aesthete Vernon Lee (1856-1935), in particular her piece on Cimarosa’s opera Gli Orazi e i Curiazi (1796). Lee’s essayistic writings on music are underpinned by an ethical commitment to modes of relationality that sustain a vibrant connection between self and world. For Lee, certain styles of Western art music – most notably eighteenth-century Italian opera – facilitate through their formal and affective affordances experiences of spiritual and moral healthiness: a heightened awareness of one’s personal agency and autonomy; an affirmed sense of stable, integrated selfhood; and a sympathetic openness to the claims of the other. Attending to the relational dynamics of Lee’s essays allows us to register more fully the range of affective modes her works inhabit, and to think more carefully about the relationship between her ethical commitments and her distinctive treatment of the essay form. It also enables a more careful consideration of the place of Lee’s writings on music within broader cultures of liberalism in the late-nineteenth century, one that manifests itself not only in the social and political claims made for music in her writing but also within the stylistic affordances of her experiments with essayistic writing.
Zoom link: https://newcastleuniversity.zoom.us/j/81170138883
Music, Medicine & History Network website: https://musicmedicinehistory.org/
With best wishes,
Hannah Scott
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Dr Hannah Scott
NUAcT Fellow in French Cultural History
Newcastle University
Chair of the Music, Medicine and History Network @MusicMedHistory
Please note my working days are Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
Latest publications:
-- Singing the English: Britain in the French Musical Lowbrow, 1870-1904 (London and New York: Routledge, 2022) https://www.routledge.com/Singing-the-English-Britain-in-the-French-Musical-Low-Brow-18701904/Scott/p/book/9780367416126
-- ‘The Singing Linguist: Popular Songs on Fin-de-siècle Language Learning’, Contemporary French Civilization, 46:4 (2021), 373–93
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