In November, three music professors traveled to Denver to attend the annual national meeting of the American Musicological Society and present peer reviewed papers representing their current research. Founded in 1934 and boasting over 3,000 national members, the American Musicological Society seeks to expand the collective knowledge of music and sound through research, teaching, learning, and advocacy. Professors Justin Vickers, Chelsey Belt, and Thornton Miller were each selected by double-blind peer review to present papers representing their current research.
Distinguished Professor Dr. Justin Vickers presented a new research paper called “A breach in the postwar nursery: agency, trauma, and the binaries of operatic childhood in Benjamin Britten’s The Little Sweep.” Because opera studies as a discipline is almost exclusively adult-focused, there are no theories of childhood in the field. In his paper, Vickers set out fundamental aspects that will contribute to establishing theories of childhood centered around agency (the ability to think critically and morally for oneself, express those thoughts, and take action on them), around childhood trauma (which is on a clearly defined spectrum from adverse childhood experiences to various facets of trauma in its many forms), and attention to binaries as a primary visual and contextual example of how children learn (generally obvious constructs of this vs. that, relations to cause and effect, and consequences for actions). All of this is framed in operas that Britten wrote for audiences that were children, participants who were children, and subjects that were centered on childhood. The paper forms roughly a third of Vickers’s chapter for a book he is editing with Joy Calico (UCLA): Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary since 1900, for which Vickers and Calico recently signed contracts with Oxford University Press. “This project started over the Christmas holidays in 2020, when I happened to consider why I had not seen any musicological discourse on children in opera, let alone representations of childhood in opera,” Vickers says. “I always look for points of focused intersectionality in my work, ways in which I can benefit from a sort of Venn Diagram that radiates out from my central focus on Britten’s music and his entrepreneurial endeavors. For instance, my work on Britten’s childhood operas emerged from the research and writing process related to my monograph, The Aldeburgh Festival: A History of the Britten and Pears Era, 1948–1986 for The Boydell Press. And in another volume I am presently editing with Dr. Lucy Walker, Elizabeth Maconchy in Context for Cambridge University Press, I am writing about Maconchy’s children’s operas, a natural outgrowth of my Britten-centric research.”
Instructional Assistant Professor Chelsey Belt gave her paper “Archiving Orality: Notation and Mimesis of Acts of Poetic Recitation in Musical Print” on a panel devoted to oral traditions and Italian popular song. She presented a methodological framework for examining the ways in which music notation can unintentionally “archive” elements of previously or traditionally unwritten song practices such as the extemporaneous performance of poetry to instrumental accompaniment. Demonstrating findings from a variety of 16th- and 17th-century print sources, she discussed their implications upon the repertory of notated solo song that emerged in Italy around 1600. “I’ve been experimenting with the idea of music notation as archive in a few projects lately, and I’ve found it really helpful in articulating aspects of historical oral tradition that can be difficult to grasp,” Belt says. “My favorite example from this paper is a depiction of a Venetian courtesan improvising a poem about her, well, ‘professional experience’ in a comic song cycle from 1605. Aspects of typically unwritten performance practices usually end up in notation by accident, that is, for reasons other than their musical value, so it’s been a lot of fun to stumble across new cases as I explore different kinds of sources.”
Instructional Assistant Professor Dr. Thornton Miller gave his paper “Projecting Britishness to the Soviet Union: Music Coverage in Britain’s Russian-Language Journal Angliia” on the panel British Imaginings of the Other. Angliia was distributed in the Soviet Union by the British government and presented an idealized image of British culture to the Soviet people. This quarterly provided information on British history, politics, society, and cultural institutions, as well as developments in fashion, sports, and music. Through his reading of Angliia, Miller evaluated the position of music in Anglo-Soviet cultural diplomacy and examined how music coverage changed from the 1960s to the 1990s. In its first decade, Angliia focused predominately on the works of classical music composers (mainly Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett, Harrison Birtwistle, and Peter Maxwell Davies), the exchange of British and Soviet performers and ensembles, and on the development of institutions such as the English National Opera and the Royal Ballet. However, the journal’s coverage changed over time to reflect changing Soviet tastes. Starting in the mid-1970s, Angliia covered jazz and pop (particularly Cliff Richard and Elton John) with increasing frequency, which reflected the Soviet government’s growing receptiveness to popular music genres. “This magazine provides insight on how the British state exhibited itself in what was ostensibly propaganda designed to win over Soviet hearts and minds as an exercise of soft power in Cold War diplomacy,” Miller says. “While the resulting portrait of British life was undoubtedly propagandistic, the state tailored its presentation of British music and culture to fit what it surmised were the interests of Soviet citizens.” Miller finds that Angliia tells us not so much about Britain as it does what the British government thought Soviet anglophiles would appreciate.
Vickers, Belt, and Miller are continuing their research endeavors this spring. Vickers was invited to be a Visiting Fellow of Music at New College, University of Oxford in the U.K. for the 2024 Trinity Term, where he will continue to work on his many writing and editing projects, will work with the opera singers of the New Chamber Opera and New College voice students, and will appear in recital. Belt is currently working to complete her Ph.D. at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, with a dissertation on the transmission and practice of solo song in Early Modern Italy. Miller’s research on Angliia will be included in his upcoming book project that will explore how a network of composers, performers, publishers, concert agents, and government employees engaged in cultural exchanges between Britain and the Soviet Union.
