Conference Agenda

Selections from A Shropshire Lad, Victorian poet A. E. Housman’s collection of 63 poems, have been set to music by nearly every composer of early 20^th-century English art song, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, George Butterworth, and Arthur Somervell. The collection, which lingers on themes of tragic love and young death, was enormously popular, with many WWI soldiers carrying a copy of the slim volume in the trenches. Most were unaware of queer themes in the work that became widely apparent with the posthumous release of Housman’s papers in 1967, which revealed Housman’s lifelong unrequited love for his Oxford flatmate, Moses Jackson. While this was a subject of debate in critical scholarship for a time, recent criticism has accepted that Housman’s queerness is inseparable from the poetry and turned to examining his strategies of concealment – the ways in which he simultaneously presents and obscures queerness in the work, carefully containing it within the bounds of the poetry. The poems, which were written in the shadow of the Oscar Wilde trials, are short, regular, balanced, and rigorously end-stopped, marking a sharp contrast to Wilde’s own aesthetically effusive poetry.

These strategies of concealment, however, begin to break down when the poetry is set to music. Even in the act of selectively anthologizing texts into a cycle, composers dismantle Housman’s carefully constructed boundaries and weave the texts into a new artistic product. This paper will consider the beloved settings by Vaughan Williams and Butterworth, both as complete cycles and through analysis of their settings of “Is My Team Ploughing,” to show the different ways in which each composer complicates, reinforces, and breaks down Housman’s strategies of concealment. Butterworth compiles a set of texts that largely reflects the collection as a whole, and his music subtly draws out the concealed themes of the poetry. Vaughan Williams, however, chooses some of the more opaque texts, but his emotionally charged, impressionistic music shatters Housman’s restraint.

George Bernard Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite (1898) is best known today as a foundational text of leftist Wagnerism and post-war operatic production. Yet Shaw’s celebrated commentary on the Ring cycle was also the product of a formative career in music journalism, a career shaped by late-Victorian aesthetic liberalism and cultural paternalism, as much as it was guided by civic activism and Fabian socialism. Without denying the later legacy of Shaw’s reading of the Ring, this paper traces his musical politics back to the intellectual and social milieu in which he established his career as a critic in London in the 1880s and 90s. Drawing on research into the interdisciplinary networks afforded by Victorian journalism and print culture, I will explore how intellectual debates about musical value and expression constellated around the figure of Wagner and were often inseparable from concerns about a mass listening public and access to high culture.

The first half of the paper will outline the centrality of the concept of melody to a group of aestheticians and anti-Wagnerians: James Sully, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and Edmund Gurney. These authors developed philosophies of music grounded in physiological aesthetics and evolutionary science. In doing so, they utilized metaphors of health and sanitation prevalent in contemporary social commentary on the city. Gurney in particular contributed to wider debates then circulating about working-class access to music, revealing his affinities with the work of prominent social reformers based in London’s East End. The second half of the paper will examine Shaw’s relationship with the entwined movements of Wagnerism and so-called ‘music for the people’. On the one hand, Shaw’s distinctive interventions as a critic provide an insight into the problems and paradoxes of cultural paternalism and middle-class anxieties around urban mass culture. On the other hand, his agenda as a musical critic was not so untimely as he liked to make out. As I shall argue, his own campaign for an English Bayreuth indicates a broader intersection between Wagnerian and Victorian conceptions of music and nature as moral antidotes against the industrial metropolis.

From 1962 to 1993, the British government distributed the Russian-language journal Angliia in the Soviet Union and its successor states to inform their readership of British everyday life, explain how its political and economic institutions functioned, report on technological and medical advancements, and announce developments in fashion, sports, and music. This undertaking was a part of the Anglo-Soviet cultural exchange agreements, which resulted in the reciprocal travel of specialists and students in the sciences, humanities, and the arts. By analyzing the journal’s issues and records at the National Archives, it is possible to examine the role and prominence of music within Anglo-Soviet cultural diplomacy as a whole. In its first decade, Angiliia focused predominately on the works of classical music composers (mainly Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippet, 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 genres.

As a whole, Angliia was a heavily curated portrayal of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the exchanges between them, and this idealized narrative often resulted in the conspicuous absence of politically controversial musicians (such as the British communist composer Alan Bush). This project continues the work of Cameron Pyke, who has published on Britten’s involvement in cultural diplomacy with Soviet musicians, as well as on the appearance of British popular musicians in the Soviet Union. While Pyke focuses on the perspective of British musicians and agencies involved in cultural diplomacy, this paper analyzes what the British state intended to project to the Soviet public. While the journal was undoubtedly inspected by the Soviet state during the approval process, it still gave the British government an opportunity for relatively direct and unmediated access to the Soviet people, which made it an excellent asset in shaping Soviet perceptions of Britain.