English Music Research Articles

Cabaret and decency: how contemporary definitions of cabaret are shaped by censorship

The abundant ‘cabaret’ events that populate London’s contemporary entertainment scene strategically adopt specific structures and aesthetics. Common points of reference include the Weimar Republic, Berlin clubs of the 1920’s, ‘salacious’ female nudity, ‘outrageous’ camp reveals and inevitable references to Bob Fosse’s ‘Cabaret’. The events often promise to provide a ‘high quality’ drinking and dining experience. In this way ‘nostalgia’ can be turned into financial success. This formulaic approach defines the contemporary understanding of cabaret, omitting vital aspects of the genre while turning it into a purely commercial commodity. My artistic practice as research interrogates the experimental nature of the cabaret of late nineteenth century Paris within a contemporary British context. Setting itself apart from the allure of ‘flesh and cash’ of the West End cabaret, Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret, regularly programmed at Hoxton Hall, London, since 2016, focuses on exploring an updated experience of European cabaret within the abandoned British Music Hall and Variety tradition. The wider cultural discourse fails to report on the possibility of different approaches to cabaret. I will draw on particular examples from my practice – how a 60-something performer clad in Y-fronts, for example, was regarded by a certain audience as obscene – to explore the subtleties of contemporary censorship and what it says about our cultural landscape. The ‘body reveal’ – one of the commercial selling points of West End cabaret replica productions – becomes unacceptable in the different context of Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret. This article examines how censorship operates in relation to contemporary experimental cabaret, providing an alternative account of the contemporary development of traditional cabaret and suggesting that there are different angles from which to approach discussion of the genre.

On the Translation of English Musical Songs from the Perspective of Skopos Theory

On the Translation of English Musical Songs from the Perspective of Skopos Theory

The Figure of the Ghost: Textual and Diegetic Haunting in Chatterton, Hawksmoor and English Music by Peter Ackroyd

The Figure of the Ghost: Textual and Diegetic Haunting in Chatterton, Hawksmoor and English Music by Peter Ackroyd

The British (and International?) Music Society: Australian Identity and Musical Internationalism in Interwar Sydney

Abstract In the aftermath of the First World War, Henri Verbrugghen founded the first Australian branch of the British Music Society. The BMS – a product of post-First World War cultural renewal – was established in London to ‘champion the cause of British composers at home and abroad’. In Sydney, these aspirations extended to promoting music from Australia, and through affiliation with the International Society for Contemporary Music, music of the rest of the world. This article explores the activities of the Sydney BMS, situating these within contemporary discourses of nationalism and internationalism in the construction of interwar Australian cultural identity. It argues that the sometimes conflicting aims of the society reflect a wider political and social ambivalence about Australia's place in the international landscape. While its primary goal was to champion local composers, this was held in uneasy balance with a desire to promote British music ‘proper’.

The Power of English Music to Improve Students' Listening Skills

This study looked at the effectiveness of using English music as a learning tool to improve listening skills in a group of 132 students. Snowball sampling was used to select a sample of 54 students. This research uses a quantitative research methodology, with two groups: an experimental group that uses English songs as a learning tool, and a control group that uses traditional teaching methods. This research should explain how English songs can improve students' listening skills. In addition, this research seeks to understand the causes of students' poor listening skills so that appropriate treatment can be implemented in the classroom. The research results revealed a significant positive impact on students' listening skills when learning through English songs. This method substantially improved the listening skills of the experimental group. This research shows that incorporating songs and lyrics into the classroom is the most effective method for improving students' listening skills. These positive results were caused by good student responses and improved listening comprehension skills. In conclusion, this study advocates the integration of English music into language education as a powerful tool for developing listening skills. Positive feedback from students and demonstrated improvements in listening comprehension underscore the effectiveness of this innovative pedagogical approach. This research provides valuable insights for language educators and curriculum developers seeking innovative and engaging methods to improve language acquisition.

Circularity and Circulation in Peter Ackroyd’s Life Narratives: Chatterton, English Music and The House of Doctor Dee

Through the rewriting of the lives of famous past British writers (or characters), contemporary author Peter Ackroyd’s works explore fictional elements while preserving a high level of referential accuracy. This implies a form of circularity as past texts are used again in the present providing access to the British literary canon. The past leaves a mark in and on the present that is permanent—as it keeps coming back, it almost becomes circular. This disruption of time is a key characteristic of the mode of the romance. The inheritance and re-enactment of the past call for circularity while the mode of the romance entitles an old literary mode to be used in modern times. Moreover, Ackroyd only writes about vulnerable people enabling the reader to open to the ethical dimension of the notion. Vulnerability calls for circularity through the characters’ going backwards owing to traumatic temporality as well as circulation—conveying the characters’ affects and the ethical dimension of the notion.

David Kennerley. Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780–1850. New Cultural History of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 240. $82.00 (cloth).

David Kennerley. Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780–1850. New Cultural History of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 240. $82.00 (cloth).

Knowledge Building in Early Modern English Music. Katie Bank. Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. xiv + 282 pp. + 17 b/w pls. $52.99.

Knowledge Building in Early Modern English Music. Katie Bank. Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. xiv + 282 pp. + 17 b/w pls. $52.99.

Enriching Spanish-Speaking English Learners’ Experiences in the English Music Classroom

According to the National Education Association, one out of every four children in the U.S. public education system will be an English Learner (EL) by 2025, with at least half of these students likely being Spanish-speaking EL students. As school populations become more ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse, current and future music teachers must increase awareness of the barriers that the growing population of Spanish-speaking EL students may encounter. In this article, the author describes the language acquisition stages that Spanish-speaking EL students typically go through, providing insights into possible strategies for addressing their language barriers and socio-emotional needs, as well as fostering a culturally responsive and sustainable environment in the music classroom. In doing so, the author describes several concrete methods that music educators could use to engage with and learn more about the rich Spanish-speaking communities. Thus, becoming more responsive to the current demographic changes and challenges.

A Correlational Study on The Relationship Between Students’ English Vocabulary Proficiency and Their Listening Habits in English Music

This study looked at the association between students’ listening habits to English music and their vocabulary knowledge. This was a quantitative study that used the correlation method. The population consisted of all second-semester students from a college in Mojokerto, which consists of two classes totaling 40 students. The sample consisted of 17 students chosen at random using the incidental sampling technique. The questionnaire and vocabulary test were used to collect data in this study. The questionnaire was used to collect information on students’ listening habits to English music, while the assessments were used to obtain information about students’ vocabulary competence. The researcher utilized Kendall’s tau b in the IBM SPSS Statistics 25 program for Windows to analyze the data. The study’s findings revealed a substantial association between students’ listening habits to English music and their vocabulary competence. Furthermore, there is a positive link with a moderate level of significance. As a result, pupils’ habit of listening to English music contributes to their vocabulary mastery.

A Qualitative Study on Examining the Features of Optimal Nurse-Patient Role-Playing Video

This project analyzed six videos from the "National Nursing English Music Videos (MVs) Competition in Taiwan" to identify key characteristics of optimal nurse-patient role-play videos. Nursing English teachers emphasized factors like vividness, linguistic fluency, humor, teaching tools, N-P interaction, dramatic effect, gender balance, and empathy. Nursing experts identified additional factors including physical assessment, nursing diagnosis, nursing procedures, nursing plan, and nursing evaluation as crucial. The study aimed to serve as a reference for nursing students creating professional nursing English videos, provide guidance for nursing English teachers supporting video production, and offer insights for nursing English for General Purposes (EGP) teachers enhancing teaching materials, particularly in terms of authenticity.

Британская хоровая музыка на рубеже XIX и XX веков: феномен английского музыкального ренессанса

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of the English musical renaissance, little studied in Russian musicology — a movement under which presently the formation of the British national compositional school of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries is comprehended. The author turns to the musical heritage of the leading composers of that period — Alexander MacKenzie, Hubert Parry, Charles Stanford and Sir Edward Elgar — with the aim of demonstrating the sources of the English musical renaissance and determining, what significance was exerted by the choral heritage by its main representatives on the subsequent evolution of choral music in Great Britain. Among the chief factors which influenced the English musical renaissance, the following are highlighted: the development of the choral festival movement, the establishment of the Royal College of Music, the directedness of the British professional education on the formation of the national school of composition, as well as Parry’s and Stanford’s active work in musical criticism and research. The peculiarities of the choral writing of each of the aforementioned composers are analyzed on the example of the most well-known works in the genres of the cantata and the oratorio. The author brings to light the general tendencies in the organization of the choral texture and timbre and the unique techniques the discovery of which is capable of making adjustments to the existent perceptions about the evolution of the choral music of the early 20th century. In particular, study of Elgar’s choral works makes it possible to confirm the composer’s interest in the textural and timbral techniques typical for the composers of the first and the second avant-garde in Europe, such as diagonal texture and non-standard unisons. The author’s conclusions make it possible to form a perception of the works by the composers of the “first renaissance trio” (Parry, Stanford, MacKenzie) and their younger contemporary Elgar as the greatest impulse of the formation of 20th century British choral music, which in the second half of the century became among the most on demand in world performance.

Colonial Mobility and the Cultural Replication of British Music: Granville Bantock’s Australian Tour, 1938–1939

ABSTRACT Legions of foreign musicians have toured Australia in an effort to transplant old musical cultures. One such tour was undertaken by Granville Bantock in late 1938 to further the examinations business of Trinity College of Music, London. As argued in this article, however, there was more to his visit than meets the eye: it was an attempt by Bantock to secure new audiences for his music. The press’s role in this tour was marked by fawning journalists reporting on the composer’s endorsement of local music-making as evidence of Australia’s musical maturity. Bantock’s music was celebrated by the press except for one journalist, who condemned his peddling of old-fashioned music in a modern Australia. Although Bantock’s visit to Australia in late 1938 was designed to promote Trinity College, it was in fact an exercise in cultural mobility, and the replication of a certain style of British music that invoked narratives concerning the cultural cringe in which Bantock, and most of the press, were complicit.

The Pavan in English Music of the 16th–17th Centuries

The article is devoted to recreation of the genre Pavan evolution in English music of the 16th–17th centuries. The research involved diverse sources such as early treatises, musical and practical manuals, old-printed musical editions and modern anthologies of the English music of the 16th–17th centuries that allowed to review the Pavan as a vivid representative of the genre system of 16th–17th centuries English instrumental music, to locate the main centers of its expansion (the Tudors and Stuarts Royal Courts, the Houses of English authoritative stripes and Inns of Court) and to concretize some idea about its functional and communicative features, to determine a range of English Pavan authors from William Byrd and Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder (who were silent trendsetters in the musical and artistic tastes at the English Court in the second half of the 16th century) to Henry Purcell (who became a leader in the development of English music in the last quarter of the 17th century marked by vanishing of national late Renaissance and early Baroque traditions in the chamber instrumental music-making). In the article there were defined the vectors for new treatment of dance genre, have been developing its composition from anonymous to author’s one with clearly recognizable individual style of writing. It emphasizes the systematics of the variety of surviving Pavans with different titles, which reflects the compositional-technological or figurative-emotional features of dance pieces. Apart from the others the “named” Pavans and the pieces related to them and created in traditions ‘In memoriam’ were examined. The results of scientific research could be used for the further development of the musical style questions and compositional method of English composers of the 16th–17th centuries related to the mutual cultural and historical tradition.

Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780–1850 by David Kennerley (review)

Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780–1850 by David Kennerley (review)

JUSTIN CONNOLLY IN INTERVIEW

AbstractIn this transcription of an interview between the former Editor of New Music at BBC Radio 3 and the composer Justin Connolly, Connolly discusses his life as a composer. He traces his development from childhood to studies at the Royal College of Music and Yale University and the influence of the composer Roberto Gerhard. Connolly's Poems of Wallace Stevens IV, his most recent work at the time of the interview, is considered in particular detail. The interview took place at the former British Music Information Centre in Stratford Place, London on 14 April 1993. TEMPO gratefully acknowledges the work of the Estate of Justin Connolly in transcribing the interview and permitting its publication.

The Context of the Development of British Musicals

Musical theatre (Musical) has been sought after since its birth, and after years of development, it has gradually become an art form that has taken the world by storm. The origins of musicals can be traced back to operettas, and early musicals were known as "Musical comedy". As one of the origins of musicals, this article helps us understand the past and present of British musicals and its development by sorting out the development of British musicals.

Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780–1850 by David Kennerley (review)

Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780–1850 by David Kennerley (review)

Dance, mobility and social change in Billy Elliot: The Musical

Billy Elliot: The Musical addresses the issue of class that, while seldom analysed as a theme in Broadway musicals, has been a key trope of the majority of British musicals since the première of The Shop Girl in 1894. The article examines how the dialectic of dance as an emblem of individual freedom opposed to the rigidity of the British class system is expressed through movement within the mining community of Easington. By utilizing various aspects of Rudolf Laban’s effort theory, including the kinetic personality patterns of his associate, Warren Lamb, the article examines the cultural gendering of movement via the strict regimes of boxing (for boys) and ballet (for girls). With brief references to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and Brecht’s praxis of Gestus, the article illustrates how Billy’s ability to embrace a supposedly ‘feminine’ kinetic vocabulary constitutes the flexibility to free himself from the rigid and inherently homophobic definition of conventional masculinity. In promoting movement beyond the confines of an outmoded tradition of working-class behaviour, Billy embraces a classless notion of postmodern masculinity represented in the bohemian milieu of the metropolitan artist. By ‘dancing’ his freedom for the Royal Ballet’s audition panel in ‘Electricity’, Billy embodies his own liberation from the repetitive pattern of movement that inevitably sends the miners to early graves while he flies upwards to defy the typical destiny of a miner. The article explicates key moments of movement and dance in order to exemplify the embodiment of the musical’s central tropes in kinetic terms.

The Victorian Salon and Pre-Raphaelite Melopoetics

The Victorian Salon and Pre-Raphaelite Melopoetics Mary Arseneau (bio) Phyllis Weliver's Mary Gladstone and the Victorian Salon breaks new ground in describing the political, intellectual, aesthetic, and social history of the important semipublic space of the Victorian salon. As Weliver's book illustrates, Mary Gladstone's influential weekly gatherings assembled political, intellectual, musical, artistic, and religious leaders and facilitated a network of liberal thought and activity. I believe that this very convincing approach and argument can be expanded to include another circle—the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates. Whereas in the Gladstone home illustrious and prominent statesmen, Anglican clergy, Oxbridge intellectuals, and artistic geniuses gathered,1 the Fitzroy Square set was decidedly more bohemian and unofficial: as Justin McCarthy describes in his Reminiscences, during the period contemporaneous with the Gladstones' salons, an artistic London Bohemia developed around Fitzroy Square, "the home of many painters and sculptors, authors and actors, journalists and politicians."2 As we shall see, Pre-Raphaelite associate and painter Ford Madox Brown was hosting regular gatherings at his Fitzroy Square home, "brilliant parties"3 that were held "[f]ortnightly from 1866 for about 8 years"4 and were regularly attended by the core group of the Pre-Raphaelite circle including Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and Christina Rossetti; William Holman Hunt; Algernon Charles Swinburne; William Morris; and many more. In Ford Madox Brown: A Record of his Life and Work, Madox Brown's grandson Ford Madox Ford (born Ford Madox Hueffer) goes on to say that "Music was represented by Theo Marzials and Dr. Hueffer, who championed the music of the future in those past days."5 In addition, there were a substantial number of social and artistic events that involved music—many of which have been largely overlooked in Pre-Raphaelite records and scholarship—events that gathered key figures in the Pre-Raphaelite circle as well as a broader network. It must be acknowledged that there is a pattern of omissions that resulted in a failure to record and include musical events in the Pre-Raphaelite [End Page 215] history; also ready to be acknowledged is a synergy between the Gladstone and Fitzroy Square salon circles, the individuals who moved between both these sets, and the important cultural outcomes fostered by both. Indeed, there were many intersecting salon circles in the 1870s, and many of these included music in their gatherings. There were certainly religious, aesthetic, poetic, and musical areas of convergence between the interests of these sets, such as, for instance, a July 6, 1887, concert of music based on Shelley's poetry, hosted in William Michael Rossetti's home for the Shelley Society, organized by his wife Lucy Rossetti and her friend, composer and professional musician Mary Grant Carmichael (who also set poems by Christina Rossetti and Oliver Madox Brown),6 and featuring an instrumental ensemble under the direction of Sir C. Hubert H. Parry performing his choral cantata, Scenes from Prometheus Unbound, among other works. Parry, in addition to being a regular and significant presence in the Gladstone salon, was a leading composer and later head of the Royal College of Music, who also set poetry by Christina Rossetti. Parry's composition Scenes from Prometheus Unbound (a work in which Shelley, music, and political circles and ideals coalesced in fascinating ways, as Weliver has demonstrated7) has been identified as the inaugural moment of the English Musical Renaissance.8 The English Musical Renaissance and the Royal College of Music, significant developments that were instrumentally supported by the Gladstone set, had enormous impact on the immediate and long-term presence and visibility of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, owing to the English Musical Renaissance goal of setting excellent English poetry to music and the Royal College of Music's mission to train excellent native musicians and composers. Pre-Raphaelite poetry enjoyed serious and continued attention, participating in this wave of musical development. There is a significant overlap too between the two salon circles' involvement in the English folk music revival. The Pre-Raphaelites also continued the vision shared by the Gladstone set of music as instrumental in civic and spiritual health—a movement that began in the 1840s as the rational recreation movement and blossomed...