Queen's Hall Research Articles

Queer Music in the Queen’s Hall: Teleny and Decadent Musical Geographies at the Fin de Siècle

Abstract This article examines the significance of music and musical performance in Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal (1893), an anonymous pornographic novel attributed by some scholars to Oscar Wilde. It draws upon historical material on late-Victorian concert venues, queer literary sub-cultures and sexology to illuminate the representation of musical spaces in the text. Teleny exists in two different versions: an English text, which is set in Paris, and a French text, which is set in London. The opening section of the article suggests that Teleny’s dynamic engagement with cosmopolitan cultural exchange between Paris and London is brought into sharper focus by situating the musical performances in the novel in the precise built environment of London’s Queen Hall. The second section explores the novel’s concern with queer geographies (the Orient, Eastern Europe) in the context of other texts that address music and homosexual identity in the period. The third section examines the significance of space in the novel’s presentation of musical listening, arguing that its focus on the materiality of sound and the haptic transmission of desire responds to sexological conceptions of embodied musical response by homosexual subjects. The significance of this sensory experience of listening is understood in the light of Sara Ahmed’s theorization of ‘queer phenomenology’. Finally, the article traces the significance of musical allusions to songs by Franz Schubert to show how they form part of the novel’s broader concerns with the spatial articulation of same-sex desire and the representation of queer urban geographies.

Menzies' road map for Asia still guides us today

This is an excerpt from the 2014 Sir Robert Menzies Lecture, delivered by the Honourable Josh Frydenberg, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and the Federal Member for Kooyong, on August 14, 2014, in the Queen's Hall at the Parliament of Victoria, Melbourne.

‘How little we know in this country of the music of Spain…’: Spanish music in Britain during the First World War

When the Spanish composer Enrique Granados died on board the Sussex in March 1916, his music was scarcely know in Britain; however, shortly after his death, his symphonic poem Dante was performed by Sir Henry Wood in the Queen's Hall concert series. Before the end of the war, Wood brought other four Spanish to the attention of British audiences: Joaquín Turina's La procession del Rocío, Isaac Albéniz's ‘Catalonia’ (from Suite populaire) and ‘Nivian's Dance’ (from Merlin), and Granados' Three Spanish Dances. For British audiences, this was one of their first significant contacts with the music of what some critics called the Spanish musical renaissance, and reviews of the works in the musical press are characterized by an attempt to understand and make sense of what reviewers were hearing. In order to do so, most critics – with the exception of Ernest Newman – tried to understand Spanish music as a national tradition, resorting to the notions of national music developed during the past decades in Britain and exacerbated by the Germanophobia typical of the First World War period. However, what reviewers and audiences heard did not always fit within these notions. On one hand, those works which did not make use of Spanish folksong but rather reflected central European musical traditions (Dante, ‘Nivian's dance’) had little success among audiences and were received with perplexity by reviewers. On the other, La procesión del Rocío, which made use of andalucista themes, was used to present Spanish music as part of a Latin alliance destined to counterbalance the hegemony of German music. After the end of the war, however, the increasing significance of a more internationalist perspective, together with the success of the premiere of Falla's The Three-Cornered Hat in Britain in July 1919, opened the door to a better understanding of Falla's, Granados' and Albéniz's eclecticism.

Reconnecting Music to Howards End: Forster's Aesthetics of Inclusion

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes For an overview of the choral or “sight-singing” movement, see Scholes 11–17; for the board schools, see Cox 19–21, 116–20, 162, and also Board of Education 254–55. For the lower-middle- and working-class makeup of the Promenades' audiences, see Langley 44–45. After the Queen's Hall was destroyed in World War II the Promenades moved to the Royal Albert Hall where they still take place today. I find Stone's argument convincing: “[s]ince nearly all of Forster's writings on art appeared after his last published novel, they are inevitably a comment (at least in part) on his own practice” (104). Trilling, too, found Forster's literary criticism and his novels to be of a similar intellectual “temper” (2). The theory of musical fiction in itself is not new. André Gide in Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925) and Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point (1928) overtly theorized musical novels in their own work, while, more recently, critics such as Calvin Brown (1948 Brown , Calvin. Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts . Athens : The University of Georgia Press , 1948 . Print. [Google Scholar]) and Werner Wolf (1999 Weatherhead , Andrea K. “Howards End: Beethoven's Fifth.” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 31.2–3 ( 1985 ): 247 – 64 . Print. [Google Scholar]) have explored musical fiction across a variety of literary genres. All of these writers, however, tend to de-emphasize the social implications of musical novels. Talking and moving during performances were prevalent, if often frowned upon, behaviors even until the late-nineteenth century, see Scholes 223–225. Though in 1910 individuals, such as Sir Henry Wood, were changing the elitist contexts of classical music through endeavors such as the Queen's Hall Promenades, most modernists continued to view classical music as part of what Thomas Burke once called a “luxury trade” intended for the rich (17). Cyril Ehrlich notes that though decent pianos could be rented by the late nineteenth century, “some hire purchased instruments were so shoddy that they became worthless before payment was completed” (98). I sympathize, for my playing has had similar effects. Rose discusses how many working-class individuals did engage with classical music and literature despite difficult living conditions, though he notes that many working-class parents associated education with effeminacy and indolence and discouraged their children from such pursuits, see Rose 179–80. For the formulation of the abstract power of absolute music in the nineteenth century, see Dahlhaus 6–7. See also W. A. Schlegel's interest in the interconnected nature of music and literature in his Lectures, translated and published in England in 1846, see W. A. Schlegel 43–44. Pater's Imaginary Portraits and Plato and Platonism actually examine the political and social benefits of music in the Platonic tradition. Critics, however, typically place Pater within the tradition of abstract “absolute” music due to his more famous comments in “The School of Giorgione” in The Renaissance, see, for instance, Herzog 125. See Brown 101, 211, 269–271 and Wolf 75–76, 83–85. On Howards End as a recreation of Beethoven's symphony see Foata and Weatherhead. Forster once observed that there was often an “awkward moment of transition” when moving “from the orchestral to the vocal” (“Word-Making and Sound-Taking” 104). Forster did not, in other contexts, abandon his interest in affordable classical music being provided for the masses, see his radio broadcast “New Year's Greeting” 218. See Hoffman and Ter Haar 46, 52–53. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid DeutschDavid Deutsch is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Ohio State University, where he is working on his dissertation entitled “The Epitome of the Arts: Historicizing Classical Music and Literary Modernism.”

'Lessons in sensibility': Rosa Newmarch, Music Appreciation, and the Aesthetic Cultivation of the Self

This article explores the work of Rosa Harriet Newmarch (1857-1940) as programme-note writer for the Queen's Hall concerts in the early twentieth century. It argues that her vividly poetic style was influenced by the legacy of Victorian Aestheticism, particularly the writings of Walter Pater. Although Pater rarely discussed music, Newmarch used his writings to challenge the influence of Eduard Hanslick, whose formalist approach to music criticism emphasized the primacy of the work itself. Comparisons are made with Vernon Lee, who, like Newmarch, stressed the crucial role played by the audience in constituting aesthetic meaning through the process of reception.

Ken Russell's The Debussy film (1965)

First telecast on 18 May 1965 as part of the BBC's Monitor series, The Debussy Film was Ken Russell's first fully-realized composer biopic—‘one of Russell's major contributions to the art of film b...

Henry Wood: the "Proms," and National Identity in Music, 1895-1904

Henry Wood, the “Proms,” and National Identity in Music, 1895–1904 Lawrence Poston (bio) Tell me, Mr. Wood, are you quite English? Your appearance is rather un-English" (qtd. in Jacobs, Wood 62). Queen Victoria directed this provocative question to the young conductor Henry Wood on the occasion of a command performance at Windsor Castle on 24 November 1898, perhaps motivated by the cut of his beard, modeled on that of Arthur Nikisch, the Austro-Hungarian conductor. The question was not necessarily an insular or xenophobic one, since a preference for German music had always prevailed among the royal family, dating back to the visits of Felix Mendelssohn half a century earlier. For this occasion, the queen had chosen five selections from Richard Wagner, rounding off the program with Engelbert Humperdinck's overture to Hansel and Gretel, and selections from two non-German composers, Camille Saint-Saëns and Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky. A later concert at Windsor was devoted entirely to music from Parsifal. Having spent sixty years on the throne in no way necessitated the queen's attention, it would seem, to sixty years of English music. One recent judgment that "the Victorians, it seemed, could do anything with music—except compose it" (Hoppen 394) follows a long line of obiter dicta that a lively scholarly dialogue in the twenty-five years has increasingly challenged. The Victorians composed a great deal of music, much of it better than the merely pedestrian and some of it of a quality that renders its neglect unjustifiable. Even in the current climate of scholarly revisionism, the study of such music, its reception, its performance history, and its role as cultural expression continues to lag well behind the study of other nineteenth-century music among musicologists, just as it has lagged behind literature, history, and the visual arts as objects of study among Victorianists.1 In the annals of this music, arguably only the death of the composer Arthur Sullivan in 1900 could be assigned a cultural resonance akin to that accorded the deaths of Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning.2 [End Page 397] I argue in this essay that Victorian music was preempted by Continental music before it properly registered its weight in late Victorian England. Evidence for this claim is, I believe, offered by the popular success and cultural importance of the early Promenade concerts at Queen's Hall, for which Robert Newman was the indefatigable proprietor, Wood the conductor, and Edgar F. Jacques the program annotator. From their inception in 1895, the "Proms" (to use the sobriquet which gradually attached to them as the twentieth century wore on) were consciously intended as a bridge between "serious" and "popular" taste, designed to promote greater musical appreciation. The Proms, even when they did not feature Victorian or even British music, constituted a distinctive and lasting ritual of British Victorian musical culture. I. Promenade concerts were well established on the London and Paris musical stages long before Wood made his first appearance (Weber, Music 108–13). Percy Scholes traces "the idea of standing or walking whilst listening to music, instead of sitting in solemn rows," to the great eighteenth-century and Regency gardens such as Vauxhall, Marylebone, and Ranelagh. The term itself probably came from France, where the musician Philippe Musard had developed concerts on the Ranelagh model in Paris in the 1830s (Scholes 1: 192). On 6 December 1838, the Musical World sardonically commented that "the chief interest lies in the elegant perambulators themselves, who wander in pairs, finished by the Stultz and the St. James Street milliners, and arranged to orchestral accompaniments by Strauss and Musard" (qtd. in Mackerness 180). By 1846 the popular French conductor Louis Jullien conducted nightly an orchestra of three hundred at the Surrey Gardens where polkas, operatic selections, and waltzes alternated with isolated movements from symphonies by Franz Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven; Jullien later directed concerts featuring similar programs and inviting similarly stylish strollers at Covent Garden in the 1850s. As the century wore on, promenade concerts became less a venue for social display than an attempt to bring concert music within the range of the pocketbooks of the middle classes. In Manchester, the...

Coleridge-Taylor and the Orchestra

If he had not achieved such an overwhelming success with The Song of Hiawatha, it is possible that Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's creativity would have taken another path. The most likely one would have been that established in his years as a student at Royal College of Music, where he made a considerable reputation as a composer of instrumental and orchestral music. The Longfellow cantata created an almost insatiable demand for more choral works. Coleridge-Taylor's orchestral skills would be exercised in these, but in a secondary role. Nevertheless, even here orchestra was arguably his prime concern. It was essential to his musical thinking, as can be seen in tenacity with which he negotiated his minimum orchestral requirements with Andrew Hilyer and other Washingtonians and thus delayed his first visit to United States. Inadequate players caused his resignation as conductor of Croydon Orchestral Society (Sayers 1927, 178-179). We must remember that Coleridge-Taylor was primarily a violinist--like Edward Elgar and Frederick Delius. And like these contemporaries, he had some keyboard skills, although with all three composers, violin came more naturally. This affected way in which they composed. Pianist-composers such as Ravel and Rachmaninoff wrote superbly for orchestra; a keyboard instrument offers a section through vertical, harmonic, aspect of a composer's work. But it can be a snare for unwary if effect of sustaining pedal is ignored. A transcription of a work written for piano would probably be unsatisfactory if this aspect is neglected. Certainly Charles Villiers Stanford, Coleridge-Taylor's professor at college, insisted that his students be proficient keyboard players, but in fact, composers with a good ear will hear work in their head and do not need a piano. Coleridge-Taylor had such an ear. Additionally, his ability as a violinist enabled him to write idiomatically for strings of orchestra, from violin down to double bass. After leaving college, Coleridge-Taylor was very much a hands-on musician, plunging into amateur orchestral world of southern England. This practical experience colored his whole approach to orchestral writing. He was aware of effect of gaps in orchestral fabric when instrumentalists were absent (or perhaps had not been recruited in first place). He knew which keys would make for less-than-perfect intonation in strings; how a nervous oboist might ruin a too-prominent solo; how out-of-tune brass might erupt and cause chaos. Eventually, inadequacies of his amateur brass and wind players became intolerable. Nevertheless, this amateur orchestral experience--and his own spells in string section of college orchestras--left a discernible legacy. This was heard in his orchestration: never less than effective, always solid, it made its points even when scaled down in arrangements (and played only moderately well). Coleridge-Taylor graduated from amateur to professional orchestras as he and his music traveled. He gained approbation of hard-bitten professional instrumentalists. They also welcomed him as a conductor who directed his own works and music of others. This was an era of variable qualities in British orchestras, encouraged by restricted rehearsal time to extent that in choral concerts, singers often met at first performance (Jacobs 1994, 39-40). Thomas Beecham (1879-1961) recalled that in 1902, on a two-month tour with his first opera company, the orchestra [was] quite most incompetent I have ever known, and he commented that outside Covent Garden, Queen's Hall (both in London), and Halle in Manchester, the average player was hardly equipped to tackle any music except that of a simple and straightforward kind (Beecham 1979, 65, 66). Henry Wood, conductor at Queen's Hall from its early days, employed instrumentalists from France, Germany, and Netherlands to reduce these problems (Pound 1969, 58). …

Marigold: the music of Billy Mayerl

Early life and environment from Southampton to the Savoy London, marriage, and jazz confusions syncopation at the Queen's Hall the music of the Savoy years Mayerl on stage the music around Marigold the song-writer the Billy Mayerl School the club - piano transcriptions other music of the 1930s the 1940s and 1950s the man and his legacy. Appendices: Queen's Hall progammes analysis of Mayerl's BBC Broadcasts Mayerl's PRS earnings, 1926-1998 Mayerl's desert island discs discography list of works.

Phyllis Grierson, Margaret Ross, and the Queen's Hall Girls: Intergroup Conflict Among University College Women 1910-21

Phyllis Grierson, Margaret Ross, and the Queen's Hall Girls: Intergroup Conflict Among University College Women 1910-21

“The Waning of the Light”: The Forcible-Feeding of Jane Warton, Spinster

On January 31, 1910, Lady Constance Lytton, a member of the Women's Social and Political Union, the militant branch of the English women's suffrage movement, appeared on the platform of the Queen's Hall to detail her prison experiences to the public. Earlier that month Lytton had disguised herself as “Jane Warton,” a spinster seamstress, and allowed herself to be arrested during a suffrage demonstration. During earlier imprisonments for suffrage activities. Lady Constance Lytton had gone on hunger strike but had never been forcibly fed because of her weak heart. However, when “Jane Warton” entered into a hunger strike, she was forcibly fed eight times before her release. As Lytton had anticipated, this treatment caused a strain to her health that would contribute several years later to a paralyzing stroke and an early death. As delivered by a martyr figure, Lytton's speech was a mimetic act through which she served as a liaison of identity between her Queen's Hall audience and the voiceless women in prison. This speech offers insight into the mimetic functions of martyrdom and the metaphors of vision naturally arising from the martyr's testimony.

Queen's Hall?

Queen's Hall?

Queen's Hall

Queen's Hall

Novelties at the Proms

The “appalling popularity” of music—to quote the phrase of the moment in the Most Advanced Circles—is nowhere more obvious than at the Promenade Concerts this summer.The days are gone when the knowing ones could walk into Queen's Hall with a ‘complimentary’ bestowed with almost desperate eagerness, or, at worst, with the certainty of being able to buy a ticket for any part of the house. Try now to buy a seat, a week after the box-office has opened—then join the army of those who will listen-in at home.

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Journal Article REVIEWS OF BOOKS Get access Queen's Hall: 1893–1941. By Robert Elkin. pp. 160. ( Rider, London, 1944.) 21s. S. G. S. G. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Music and Letters, Volume XXV, Issue 4, October 1944, Pages 247-a–247, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/XXV.4.247-a Published: 01 October 1944

Queen's Hall

Queen's Hall

Queen's Hall

Queen's Hall

The Organ in the New Queen's Hall

The Organ in the New Queen's Hall

Albert Hall Acoustics

THE changes made to house the recent season of Promenade Concerts have affected the appearance more than the acoustics of the Albert Hall. The subject has been discussed periodically ever since the Hall was built, but the oval ground plan and the great height are insuperable difficulties with reflecting surfaces. Most of the changes proposed, including that of Bagenal and Wood illustrated on p. 65 of their “Planning for Good Acoustics”, showing the source of sound placed far above ground–level, attempt to preserve the full seating capacity of the Hall. Recently conditions have changed considerably. For some time pugilists and politicians have been the chief users of the full capacity of the Hall. But now there are a number of recognized sporting–centres in London and politicians can address even larger audiences through the radio. Musicians have, however, lost the Queen's Hall and other concert halls.

New English Works at Queen's Hall

New English Works at Queen's Hall