DIY queer feminist (sub)cultural resistance in the UK

This thesis examines the role of music, power and DIY (sub)culture involved in resistance to hegemonic discourses of gender, sexuality and feminism (re)circulated within dominant society and culture. In particular, attention is focused upon young peoples' experiences within riot gml and contemporary queer feminist music (sub )cultures situated within the fabric of social change and protest cultures of contemporary Britain. A critical interdisciplinary approach and set of qualitative methodologies were employed to understand music as collective social action that incorporated (i) oral histories of British riot gml, (ii) an auto/ethnography of DIY queer feminist (sub)culturallife, and (iii) case studies of queer and feminist amateur music-makers. I argue that music provides participants with a set of vital spatial, emotional and sonic resources to provoke radical political imaginaries, identities, communities and life-courses into being. In the context of a neo-liberal post-feminist consumer society, the creation of DIY queer feminist music (sub )culture attempts to resist the disarticulation of feminism and the dominant regulation of gender and sexual diversities. These social practices offer critical insights into the continuities of the (sub)cultural resistance of girls, young women and queers throughout modem history and demands the recognition of (sub)cultural resistance as crucial to British feminism within the wider transformations of protest and activism in contemporary society.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceESRCGBUnited Kingdo

Authority and Judgement in the Digital Archive

The transformative promise of the digital humanities is not without problems. This paper looks at digital archive curation using a database of 19th-century London concerts as a case study. We examine some of the barriers faced in its development, related to expertise, volume and complexity, the gap between cost and benefit, and the desire for an authoritative and complete dataset that forces a particular linear process of curation. We explore the potential for more radical approaches where curation and use are interleaved, and where digitally maintained provenance allows professional judgement to be applied to incomplete, crowdsourced, or automatically processed data

Democratising Digitisation : Making History with Community Music Societies in Digitally Enabled Collaborations

In post-COVID times we are focusing quite rightly on the plight of our major cultural institutions; but just as important are the local societies that enrich our community life, including amateur music societies, devastated by stringent social-distancing requirements and the health and safety implications of live performance in small spaces. We propose a vision of digitally enabled collaboration that may help these societies rebuild their sense of community and purpose, by working together with academics, archives, and a major US arts centre to reconnect with their past and enrich understanding of their own histories and traditions within a broader national context

Re-Gendering the Libertine; or, The Taming of the Rake: Lucy Vestris as Don Giovanni on the Early Nineteenth-Century London Stage

When Luigi Bassi entered the stage of the Prague National Theatre in 1787 to create the title role of Mozart and Da Ponte's Don Giovanni, he could have drawn inspiration from a rich tradition of theatrical, pantomimic and marionette representations of the legendary Don Juan, to which this new opera was the latest contribution. Previous incarnations had been shaped by the likes of Tirso de Molina, Molière, Shadwell, Purcell and Gluck; yet it is Mozart and Da Ponte's version that has for us become the definitive: the Don as paradox; an uncomfortable blend of the despicable and the admirable, hero and anti-hero. Lecher, rapist, liar, cheat, murderer, he is the brutal epitome of macho striving for power and domination, yet clothed with a seductive panache, conviction and bravado — the reckless-heroic libertine phallocrat who would rather face the fires of eternal damnation than curb his appetites

The Cradle of Music in Ireland, review of Barra Boydell, A History of Music at Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin

Although the late Brian Boydell and T. J. Walsh produced illuminating studies of opera and concert life in Georgian Dublin, for many of us knowledge of the city's role in the musical culture of the British Isles is limited to the circumstances of the first performance of Handel's Messiah. Yet because of its constitutional significance Dublin was arguably second only to London culturally and socially for much of the 18th and 19th centuries, and was an important training ground for young musicians, including Michael Balfe, William Vincent Wallace and Charles Villiers Stanford. Among the prominent musicians who established themselves there were Francesco Geminiani, Michael Arne and Matthew Dubourg; while Tenducci, Paganini and Joachim all found it worth their while to make extended visits to the Irish capital

Review of Brian Robins, The John Marsh Journals: The Life and Times of a Gentleman Composer (1752-1828)

From time to time a major new source comes to light with the potential to transform radically our understanding of the life and times of the author. Such was the case, for example, with the manuscript autobiography of the English lutenist and composer Thomas Whythorne (1528-96), discovered in 1955, or the diaries of Anne Lister (1791-1840), heiress of Shibden Hall in Halifax, which were drawn to national attention in 1984..

Performance Alfresco: Music-Making in English Pleasure Gardens

This essay – developed from a keynote delivered at the interdisciplinary conference ‘Vauxhall Revisited’ (Tate Britain, 2008) – draws on perspectives from architectural history, cultural geography, and the history of auditory culture in an exploration of the ‘soundscape’ of the eighteenth-century pleasure garden. Focusing on Vauxhall, the least investigated musically of London’s late Georgian commercial garden resorts, Cowgill explores how music was used to demarcate time and space, to articulate national/imperial identity and political affiliations, to create and manipulate illusion, and to regulate the movement and demeanour of audiences in a carefully constructed, multi-sensory night-time environment. Discussion is informed by detailed study of primary sources, including songsheets, scrapbooks, albums, bills, prints, periodicals and newspapers, and archival material from the Minet Library (Lambeth Archive) and British Library. Commentary on London’s pleasure gardens tends to leave off at the close of the eighteenth century, as if the nineteenth was simply a long, slow period of decline; yet the urban garden resort proved remarkably resilient amid a rapidly changing economic and social environment, and Cowgill highlights the musical transformations that helped to ensure this long-term survival. Finally, discussion broadens to examine the influence of pleasure-garden culture on the concert life and venues of the high Victorian period – including the Crystal Palace, Albert Hall and Alexandra Palace – and ultimately on the early history of the promenade concerts, bringing the narrative up to more recent times. The essay underlines the need for music historians to expand their frames of reference to include sound, rather than music alone, and argues that musical performance in the open air formed an important component of late Georgian entertainment culture. The collection to which this essay contributes was published in the series Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture, and features a number of established cultural historians including John Dixon Hunt and Peter Borsay

Mozart Productions and the Emergence of Werktreue at London's Italian Opera House, 1780-1830

Sole British contribution to international peer-reviewed volume originating from the interdisciplinary seminar 'Opera in Context', University of Iowa (2001). The collection is described as 'fresh, intriguing and insightful' (Classical Music, 26 November 2006) and was shortlisted for the 2007 AMS Ruth A Solie Award. (i) Originality: scholars of Italian opera find evidence of an emerging Werktreue aesthetic in Continental opera houses after 1830; but this article argues that a ‘work-concept’ began to regulate performances in London considerably earlier, in the 1810s–20s, and particularly in productions of Mozart. The inter-relationship of London’s operatic and concert spheres, and close links between literary romanticism and opera criticism, are among the factors discussed in accounting for this phenomenon. The article also addresses a significant gap in scholarship on London's Italian Opera, for which the period 1795–1830 has remained largely unstudied. (ii) Significance: the article has significance for the study of emerging canons in Western art music, particularly since it looks beyond autonomous instrumental music (where much of the theoretical work has been done). It models a ‘thick’ holistic approach to the study of opera production in history, informed by institutional archives, legal records, newspaper and periodical criticism, and close comparison of surviving printed and manuscript libretti held in the UK and US (relevant musical sources having mostly perished). Of direct relevance to specialists in reception studies and performance practice is the historicisation of changing attitudes towards the fluidity of the musical work. (iii) Rigour: this is apparent in the exhaustive collation, study, critique, and corroboration of surviving sources which inform the discussion throughout. Line-by-line comparison of different versions of the same libretto is just one example of the rigour demonstrated. This essay works towards a monograph investigating the English reception of Mozart's operas (2012)