Links to events relating to 18th-century music (will open new browser windows). Links to past events can be found here.
SECM sessions at ASECS 2019Multimodal Music (SECM panel)
This panel challenges the conception of music as simply an aural phenomenon during the eighteenth century. Instead, it reveals how music interacted with physical contexts—print, material, and performance culture—transcending sound, and circulating among the stuff of everyday life and artistic production. The papers on this panel consider books and poetry as media imbued with music, and medical texts and practices in performance halls as objects and spaces that contributed to musical experience. Taken together, they thus show eighteenth-century music to be a multimodal phenomenon. While musicians drew on linguistic, spatial, and visual realms, music in turn inspired artists’ activities and articulated experiences of everyday life.
Chair: Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden (University of North Texas)
Alison Desimone (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Songbook Miscellanies and Everyday Life in Early Eighteenth-Century London
Mary J. Greer (American Bach Society), Illustrated Bibles and Medical Books as Aids to Interpreting a Bach Duet
Sarah T. Weston (Yale University), “Too full of experiences to sing”: Recovering William Blake’s Relationship with Eighteenth-Century Musical Print Culture
Music and Mobility (Joint SECM/MSA panel)
This panel considers the diverse ways in which music moved in the long eighteenth century. Recent scholarship has shown that cosmopolitanism was a defining feature of eighteenth-century musical life. These papers add to this growing body of research and demonstrate how music flowed not only through major cities, but also across social classes. Traversing geographic regions from Germany, to England, and to early America, they show the myriad forms in which musicians, publishers, scores, reviews, and performances circulated. In doing so, the papers reveal various kinds of mobility—from professional, to social, and even aesthetic. This panel offers new insight into how music’s movement among people, places, and classes, constituted changes in music reception and education, while also contributing to major socio-economic changes in the late eighteenth century.
Chair: Ed Goehring (Western University)
Estelle Joubert (Dalhousie University), Computational Approaches to Opera Criticism and Canon
Elissa Edwards (Élan Ensemble) & Basil Considine (University of Tennessee-Chattanooga), “The Lady with a Harp”: Music and Women's Education in the Early United States
Ashley Greathouse (University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music), Bridging the Social Strata: Music on the Walks of Eighteenth-Century Tunbridge Wells