Conference Agenda

Although today best known as a composer, Gustav Holst (1874–1934) devoted much of his time and energy to teaching music at schools and colleges. From 1905 until his death, he taught at St Paul’s Girls School (SPGS) in Hammersmith, London, where he composed several works for his students, most notably the St Paul’s Suite (1912–13). This orchestral suite is extraordinary in comparison with contemporaneous works written for school-age girls (Green 1997; Solie 2004). Not only is it technically challenging, but it also contains numerous moments of a markedly boisterous nature—often requiring physically demanding bowing motions. The work is thus at odds with early-twentieth-century conservative attitudes surrounding young girls’ physical and social comportment.

This paper examines the St Paul’s Suite from the perspective of its original performers in the SPGS orchestra, treating Holst’s score as a set of instructions that dictate specific choreographies of movement. I theorize the schoolgirls’ experience of embodying the gestures involved in playing the Suite in relation to the gendered values taught at SPGS, as described by students and staff (Gray 1927; Hirschfeld 1955; Short 1990; Bailes 2000; Mitchell 2001). Drawing on theorizations of gender, gesture and agency, and social formation (Mauss 1973; Butler 1988, Cusick 1994; Noland 2009; Spatz 2015; Montague 2024), I examine how this embodied experience might impact performers’ habitus (Bourdieu 1977)—their way of interacting with the world through socially acquired habits. From here, I posit Holst’s music as a site for learning new kinesthetic knowledges through gesture. In prescribing movement types not customarily practiced by girls of this era, Holst’s composition provided a site of agency and resistance where Holst’s students could counteract the gender-based social conditioning of their bodies and minds. I argue that playing the Suite thus provided a physical education that, in turn, taught gender, allowing the musicians to perform novel modes of being that exceeded the typical limitations of pre-war girlhood. This paper expands Holst scholarship beyond its typical focus on biography, works, and reception to examine gender, pedagogy, performers, and embodiment. More broadly, bringing sociocultural specificity to the body nuances existing approaches to theorizing embodiment in musical performance.

This paper examines health as a structuring factor in the professional lives of female singers at the Paris Opéra between 1830 and 1870. Treating operatic performance as labor in a legal and institutional sense, it investigates how bodily and mentality alterations—from temporary hoarseness to chronic illness—shaped artistic production, income, and employment stability. While recent works has significantly advanced the study of operatic careers (MONNIER – 2012 ; GIROD – 2015 ; WHITE – 2018), questions of health have often been relegated to anecdote or retrospective diagnosis. We argue instead that health functioned as a central concern at the intersection of financial, administrative, and aesthetic considerations, with the power both to direct and to derail a singer’s career.

Our presentation will focus on female singers at the Paris Opera in the 19th century, based on a systematic examination of personnel files from 1830 to 1870. This serial approach, encompassing performers of different ranks—from principal singers to choristers—moves beyond exceptional or dramatic cases to illuminate everyday experiences of impeded labor. It demonstrates how illness-related absences, extended leave, and fines for missed performances materially affected careers. It also highlights situations specific to female performers, particularly pregnancy and menstruation. Under the watchful eye of healthcare professionals, whose power only increased in the 19^th century, women's bodies were scrutinized and examined through a lens of representations influenced as much by scientificity as by romantic fantasies (DASEN-MOULINIER-BROGI-HANAFI-CHAPERON – 2022). The development of an internal medical service within the institution reflects the growing medicalization of artistic labor.

Drawing on methods from the history of patients (RIEDER – 2010 ; PILLOUD – 2013), this study foregrounds the agency of singers in negotiating health-related constraints: interactions with administrators, the strategic use of medical certificates, and adjustments to repertoire or performance schedules. Rather than portraying these artists merely as fragile bodies subjected to medical authority, the archival record reveals their agency within a context of professional precarity.

By bringing together labor history, the history of health, and the history of occupational medicine, this paper reconceptualizes the Paris Opéra as a site where medical norms, gendered assumptions, and the material conditions of operatic production were continuously renegotiated.

To address the role that male danseurs and female danseuses en travesti held on the French stage, researchers like Marian Smith (2007) and Lynn Garafola (1985) argued that the popularity of Taglioni’s La Sylphide (1832) triggered a balletic gender bias with Parisian audiences craving alluring sylphide in ethereal tutus. They subsequently sought to challenge previous scholars’ sylphide myopia and showcase the impact male dancers had upon ballet history by exploring the role ballerinos played outside of the sylphide universe by focusing on different repertoire. This wave of anti-Sylphide-centric scholarship, however, accidentally creates alternate misconceptions regarding gendered balletic and operatic narratives by overlooking the gender fluid nature of sylph and the existence of countless winged danseurs.

Drawing on iconography, libretti, and press reviews, I dismantle current notions regarding the nature of male sylphs and female sylphides by examining dancing and singing sylph that flitted across the Parisian stages throughout the nineteenth century. Specifically, I focus on the Trilby craze that overtook the commercial theatres in 1823, comparing it with Taglioni’s La Sylphide (1832) and the vaudeville Follet, ou le Sylphe (1832). Furthermore, I examine sylph spectacles which contain both genders simultaneously: like La Fille de l’air (1837) and La Rose d’Or (1838), demonstrating how male sylph supposedly formed the ultimate seductors since their ability to shape shift allowed them to fulfil maiden’s sexual desires and fantasies. I also argue that female danseuses en travesti championed the sylph phenomenon since cross-dressing facilitated the realisation of sylphs’ queer elemental nature.