‘Ralph Vaughan Williams’ by William Rothenstein
Music and the myth of intelligibility: An ICE Workshop
Friday 17 May 2013, Wadham College, Oxford
In his 1938 poem, ‘The Composer’, W. H. Auden praises the immediacy of music, juxtaposing it with painting and poetry as arts that require mediation (‘All the others translate’) and reception (‘by painstaking adaption’). Auden’s poem is just one of the most famous articulations of the idea that, of all the arts, music is the one that requires no intervention to render it intelligible across time and space (as suggested equally by Longfellow’s reference to music as ‘the universal language of mankind’). This workshop aims to scrutinise this influential yet problematic myth with a particular focus on the period 1870-1920.
Programme
1000 Registration and coffee
1030 Welcome and introductions
1100-1230: Panel 1: Music: between the National and the International
Fabian Huss (University of Bristol): Some interrelations between local, national, imperial and cosmopolitan identities in early 20th-century British music and criticism
Jochen Eisentraut (Bangor University)Vaughan Williams’ English Music: Nationalism, Modernism and Accessibility
1230-1330 Lunch
1330-1500 Panel 2: Music and Myth
Anne Leonard (University of Chicago)The Universal Language as Romantic Echo: Representing Musical Creation
Diane Silverthorn (Birkbeck College, University of London) Music, Myth and the ‘Beethoven Exhibition’: Nietzsche’s immanent art
1500-1530 Tea
1530-1700 Panel 3: Music and the Forms of Internationalism
Helena Capkova (Waseda University) The Hawk Princess at the Hawk’s Well – circuits of translation connecting Japan and Euroamerica through the myth of universal language of the Noh theatre
Daniel Laqua (Northumbria University) Exhibiting and Debating Music after the Great War: The (Dis)Continuities of Internationalism
1700-1800 Final discussion, drinks
1900 Dinner
See here for more information.
