Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:58:00am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Musical Childhood in the 20th Century Session Chair: James Leve | |
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From Benjamin Britten’s “Xmas Piece” to Errollyn Wallen’s A Christmas Miracle: Medieval Drama and Christmas Opera as Public Occasion (ca. 1969–2026) Illinois State University Errollyn Wallen, the Belize-born British composer and Master of the King’s Music, is developing a community opera, A Christmas Miracle (2026). This paper uses the project to rethink “Christmas opera” as more than a seasonal theme. I argue that Christmas operates as a ritual calendar-frame that shapes dramaturgy, creates recurring public occasions for opera, and makes intergenerational participation practicable across church, school, theatre, and broadcast settings. Wallen’s project makes this tangible: in workshops, her team has used handbells from Benjamin Britten’s original Noye’s Fludde, and the work is designed to travel, opening at Snape Maltings under conductor John Andrews and director Freddie Wake-Walker before going on to Orkney, where Wallen lives. The paper reads Wallen’s opera in counterpoint to Britten’s unfinished children’s Nativity work, known from libretto drafts as “A Christmas Sequence” and preserved in musical fragments labelled “Xmas Piece” in his short-score Phaedra notebook. Conceived for Pimlico School in the early 1970s and imagined as a Christmastime Noye’s Fludde, Britten’s plan returned to medieval drama as a living performance resource: like the Fludde, it drew on the Chester Mystery Plays, distributing sacred narrative through processional scenes and communal carols. In the Britten–Pears Archive, a Gresham’s School “English Note-Book” preserves cast and scene planning (GB-ALb 2-1000784), including a structure organized by multiple “nights,” punctuated by carols and discrete scenes (Annunciation, Magnificat, Joseph and Angel, Journey, Midwives). This evidence challenges the assumption that Britten’s “children’s operas”—so vital to his output—are necessarily compact, single-evening works: here, “Christmas” becomes not only subject matter but performance design rooted in ritual sequence. I then place Britten and Wallen alongside two post-war case studies that clarify Christmas opera’s public channels across the Commonwealth: Australian composer John Antill’s The First Christmas (ABC broadcast, Christmas Day 1969), which makes the season itself a distribution mechanism, and Scottish composer Thea Musgrave’s A Christmas Carol (1979), which translates the moral reckoning of the Christmas story into modern operatic dramaturgy. Methodologically, the paper combines archival documents, contemporary commissioning evidence, and interviews with Wallen to show how A Christmas Miracle revises and tests the seasonal framework Britten sketched but could not complete. | |