Conference Agenda

London was Europe’s fastest growing city in the eighteenth-century and by 1800 had become its largest. Increasing numbers of foreign composers were drawn to the capital over the course of the century, attracted by independence from church and court employment and the opportunity to accumulate significantly greater wealth than at home. Concert activity accelerated rapidly from the 1750s, and the succeeding decades saw the commercialisation of the concert as a consumer product.

The connections between Britain’s wealth as a trading nation and the country’s leading role in the slave trade are now firmly established. It is also clear that the impact of the slave trade on British society extended far beyond purely economic and financial affairs. Recent studies have highlighted how slavery and colonial exploitation have shaped British identity and culture and, in particular, affected the nation’s social mores. The culture of taste in eighteenth-century England was increasingly built upon the connection between culture and commerce, and it became difficult to gain recognition as a member of the cultured class without money and status.

My examination of subscription lists to the Bach-Abel concert series in the 1770s offers a perspective on the financing of West End concert life from wealth based on colonial exploitation and slave trading. It was common and accepted practice for wealthy families and investors to participate in the slave-based economy and the names of many of the most powerful and privileged families appear in the 365 or so subscriptions recorded for each season. Whilst there was at the time little significant opposition to the slave trade, my presentation is a first step in acknowledging the reality of the economic environment in which eighteenth-century London concert life was conducted. Further research is surely warranted.

This paper presents results from a project investigating the rise of European free improvisation from a postcolonial perspective. Specifically, I describe the whiteness of free improvisation in the Netherlands and its negotiation by postcolonial migrant communities. During the 1960s, European musicians and critics began to distinguish so-called ‘free’ or ‘non-idiomatic’ (Bailey 1992) improvisation from improvisation based on jazz or other musical traditions. As Lewis (2004) and Banerji (2021) have argued, this supposedly neutral ‘free’ musical space constructs musical invention as implicitly white, in contrast to the more ‘conventional’ idioms of other(ed) musical traditions. Although Lewis and Banerji both refer to recent comments by musicians, I draw on jazz criticism from around 1970 to show that this logic was already at work in the discourse of the first generation of improvising Dutch musicians and their critics. I describe how they distinguished free improvisation from American free jazz around 1970. This distinction was predicated on the idea that European improvisers represented a logical next step in the autonomous development of music history, whereas African-American musicians supposedly only reproduced existing musical forms. This also affected musicians from former Dutch colonies migrating to the Netherlands around this time, who were similarly seen as purely reproducing their existing musical traditions, and so could not meet the Eurocentric standards of innovation in Dutch free improvisation. Bailey’s theorisation of non-idiomatic music perpetuates this implicit construction of the white subject as the agent of music-historical progress. Describing how different postcolonial migrant musicians in the Netherlands, before and after the emergence of ‘non-idiomatic’ music, have negotiated the relation between idiom and freedom, I suggest a conception of ‘idiom’ that considers it in terms of differentiation rather than convention. This includes Indo-Dutch jazz musicians in the 1950s, Surinamese kaseko-jazz musicians in the 1970s, and Maluku improvisers in the 1990s. I turn to Derrida’s (1998) aphoristic characterisation of idiom – ‘I only speak one language, and it is not mine’ – to extend the theoretical account of De Souza (2017) and develop an account of idiomaticity that is cognizant of colonial power structures.

This paper positions the Vienna Woods (Wienerwald) as essential to the material and discursive definition of Vienna as “Musikstadt” circa 1900. The Wienerwald has escaped much critical attention from musicologists, perhaps owing to the landscape's clichéd associations with canonic Viennese composers or tourist kitsch. I provide an overdue musicological perspective on this familiar landscape by examining how turn-of-the-century ideas of the Wienerwald and its relationship to metropolitan Vienna were perpetuated in popular music and illustrated musical objects. Drawing on ongoing archival research, I contend that the Wienerwald was essential to the iconographic and discursive construction of Vienna as a "city of music," while simultaneously popular music cemented and circulated a common musical-visual imaginary of these woods.

Around 1900, Vienna’s identity was increasingly embedded in its claim to being a “Musikstadt,” distinguishing it in a competitive European tourist economy (Nußbaumer 2007). Inspirational powers were ascribed to Vienna’s surrounding landscape, including the Wienerwald, to naturalize this mythology, and the woods were characterized in musical terms in diverse texts such as song lyrics, tourist guides, and essay collections. In the early 1890s, Vienna’s municipal boundaries formally overlapped with the woods as the city amalgamated its outlying suburbs. Excursions to nearby forested hills—protected in 1905 under the municipality’s Forest- and Meadow Belt—became more popular in this period, made easily accessible by municipal rail infrastructure. Favourite local peaks like the Kahlenberg facilitated temporary escape from Vienna while offering panoramic outlooks over the growing city. Moreso than musicologists, art- and cultural historians have interrogated such turn-of-the-century views from the Wienerwald, a landscape that constituted “both the means and the object of an urban gaze” (Gronberg 2007). As I show, musically rendered “views” also abounded: illustrations of St. Stephen’s Cathedral framed by leafy boughs decorated printed music title pages and postcards featuring melodies of well-known Vienna- or Wienerwald-themed songs. Assembling a varied archive of musical, material, and texted sources, I uncover music’s role in sustaining a reciprocal axis between city and woods, and outline how, partly via these musical views, the Wienerwald was integral to the Musikstadt idea.