Conference Agenda

This paper examines how British theatrical tradition was musically reimagined in late colonial India through Safed Khoon(1907), an Urdu Parsi-theatre adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear by Agha Hashr Kashmiri (1879-1935), a prominent figure in North Indian performance culture. I argue that in Safed Khoon, music is not decorative but transformative, reshaping King Lear through vernacular theatrical conventions. Existing scholarship on Safed Khoon and Kashmiri has focused primarily on translation, narrative adaptation, and dramatic form; however, it has largely overlooked the constitutive role of music in shaping how the drama is heard in performance.

Performed in Urdu for Bombay’s heterogeneous theatre-going publics, Safed Khoon addressed audiences accustomed to musical performance and collective modes of reception. Rather than culminating in the devastation that defines King Lear, the adaptation redirects the drama through conventions of musical closure associated with commercial Parsi theatre traditions.

Using Hindustani musical forms familiar to Indian audiences, Safed Khoon stages lament as a collective experience, transforming suffering into a shared sonic experience rather than a solitary one. Close analysis of ghazal song sequences demonstrates how lament is shaped through elongated melodic lines, ornamentation, and lyrical repetition. Comic folk-style songs, marked by fast meters, short refrains, and exaggerated lyricism, further recalibrate moments of tension, redirecting tragic tension toward humor, rhythmic energy, and collective audibility. The paper also analyzes rhythmic (chhand) dialogue, showing how patterned speech blurs the boundary between song and speech. By musicalizing dialogue through metrical repetition and chant-like delivery, Safed Khoon replaces the tragic monologue’s isolation with collective audibility, converting Shakespearean interiority into something heard collectively. Performance recordings show how these sonic strategies elicit clapping and vocal interjections, making audience response part of how the play’s effects are produced in real time.

In this way, Safed Khoon relocates Shakespeare within a local and popular performance culture. Read in relation to theories of cultural translation, vernacular performance, and colonial modernity, this sonic reworking reveals Shakespearean adaptation as a site where British theatrical tradition was neither rejected nor merely inherited, but re-sounded through local musical practice.

Seventeenth-century Dutch liver verses (comedic riddles based on animal-liver puns) belonged to a distinctly vernacular musical practice. Although they survive today as jokes printed in miscellany songbooks, in historical practice, they prompted an improvisatory social game in which an animal liver was passed around the table, and whoever received it had to leveren (deliver) an impromptu verse incorporating the word lever (liver). Their humor relied on spontaneity and sonic cues, which explains why printed examples appear incoherent. Though easily dismissed as nonsensical textual ephemera, this paper argues that their significance lies in live, idiomatic performance.

When activated through music, liver verses derive their humor as much from sound as from their silly sentiments. Through text alone, they satirically promote gluttony, flouting broadly European Christian ideals of self-restraint that were articulated with particular urgency in Dutch Calvinist circles. Yet words were only half the joke. Within established musical frameworks, liver verses comically exaggerate misbehavior through lines that run too long, punchlines that arrive too late, and purposefully awkward phrasing. These calculated disruptions make breaches of decorum perceptible and audible by humorously staging what not to do: the verses are funny because they are deliberately badly composed, using behavioral and musical failure to define, by contrast, what counts as competence and skill.

By contextualizing liver verses within contemporary conduct literature and the improvisatory practices central to Dutch song culture, this paper positions them not as static, nonsensical jokes bound to the printed page, but as dynamic negotiations of social conduct realized through sound. Their meanings were produced through timed vocal delivery, regional idioms, and the responsive interaction of performers and listeners, while the performance setting allowed participants to enact the pleasures and consequences of misbehavior within a controlled, locally sanctioned context. Attention to these practices reveals how music functioned as a social medium through which communal values were negotiated and reinforced.

Unlike many composers from the provincial areas of southern Italy who relocated to Naples or other cultural centers, Pasquale Benintende (1878-1968) largely confined his career to his native Calabria. As a central figure in the musical life of Reggio Calabria, the composer promoted a living folkloric tradition through teaching and conducting individuals who moved to Reggio from rural communities. With his close contact with rural oral traditions and a conservatory education, Benintende mediated between the particular vocality of folk songs and their manifestation within a Western classical framework. This is reflected in complete arrangements of folk songs, the use of motivic, rhythmic, or harmonic material, and the portrayal of the folk through poetic themes. Sub-textual themes addressing the precarity of life in Calabria take on additional cultural meaning when combined with tarantella rhythms, ornamented melodies, and minor modes. Thus, negotiations of folkloric identity and moral values sit within a hybridized space wherein regional vocality is inscribed.

Focusing on a set of eight art songs for voice and piano composed between 1936 and 1942, this paper argues for a new understanding of how folkloric material can be inscribed in notation without losing its original social value. Collaborating with Calabrian poet Nicola Giunta (1895-1968), Benintende set poetry in both standard Italian and Calabrese dialect leading to a combination of cosmopolitan aesthetics and folklore that modify but do not mask traditional cultural origins. The juxtaposition between a classical vocal style and folkloric musical features contribute to ongoing discussions of cultural values and stereotypes as constructed through sound. (D’Aloisio, 2020) (Ferrarini, 2020) The audible presence of the Calabrese dialect voices a traditional origin within the constraints of standard western notation through text setting that highlights its idiomatic rhythmic cadence and sharp timbral quality. Thus, the songs inscribe a rural vocality as constructed through dialect and folkloric musical features.

The French romance, according to an anonymous author in 1833, had the “magic power” to influence souls. Using sentimental language, he claimed that “between our souls and the sounds that excite the air, there exists a sympathetic fiber” that allowed the salon songs to awaken a listener’s emotional memories. Others likewise positioned the romance as France’s preeminent sentimental musical genre. In his 1813 Du chant, Paul Thiébault claimed that the romance was “the song of sentiment,” adding that its sentimental potential depended upon “sincere expression” in performance. It was, in other words, in performance that the genre became sentimental.

In this paper, I explore the historical performance practices that rendered the early nineteenth-century romance sentimental, arguing that while the poetry and music were significant, the manner in which the songs were sung was key. I focus on timbre, referencing singing treatises by Antoine Romagnesi, Stephen de la Madelaine, and others to show that singers were expected to constantly vary the sound of their voices for expressive purposes. I then draw upon recent work on sentimentality by scholars like Rebecca Bedell, Margaret Cohen, and Stephen Downes to explore what singing the romance sentimentally meant more broadly, especially in the context of women’s education. I position the romance as an unusually potent tool to cultivate sentiment and sympathy. I show that because singers were encouraged to draw upon their own emotional experiences to convey the emotions of a romance’s protagonist, they were meant to feel with, or even emotionally become, that protagonist. As in other sentimental genres, singing a romance was understood to forge empathetic bonds, even across divides of race, class, and gender. Ultimately, focusing on performance transforms the romance from a genre that has been dismissed as trite into one with the powerful, even subversive, ability to reconcile the singing self with the other.