Dissertation

Sounding Commonwealth: Music as Geopolitical Pedagogy in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, musical emblems of British national identity foregrounded an imperial ethos. As the Empire began its labored decline after World War II, there was a need to refigure and reteach national identity to promote the United Kingdom’s new geopolitical arrangements, most notably the Commonwealth. I argue that teaching decolonization and Commonwealth identity was a sonic act, one that relied on music and sound to train Britons in new forms of global citizenship. Drawing on archival research, musical analysis, and educational media history, I explore how composers, broadcasters, and programmers used music and other sonic markers of nation—such as bell chimes and vocal accent—as educational technologies, teaching Britons of all ages about decolonization and the formation of the Commonwealth with varying levels of success. The trajectory of the dissertation tracks, historicizes, and analyzes the musical media a Briton would engage with over their life. I consider how two genres, opera and the radio feature, were adapted to reach age-specific audiences. I begin with children’s musical media, specifically children’s operas and school radio broadcasts, used to teach pluralism and increase awareness of diverse musical traditions across the British world. I then turn to music for adult audiences, specifically BBC light classical broadcasts and history operas about the Empire, demonstrating how recalcitrant beliefs about the importance of the Empire among adult Britons led to the Commonwealth being misunderstood and undervalued.

Committee Members: Lisa Jakelski (advisor), Anaar Desai-Stephens, Stewart Weaver

Peer-Reviewed Articles

Hearing Global Britishness on the BBC’s Commonwealth of Song (1953-1961)

Part of the United Kingdom’s national reconstruction following the Second World War was reforming its self-image as a global power in light of imperial decline. This recasting took place across political and cultural spheres and emphasized the Commonwealth, idealized as a friendly collection of current and former colonies linked by British culture. In this article, I demonstrate how music broadcasting functioned as a site of diplomacy, using white, middle-class taste for light entertainment to reinforce British values at the Empire’s twilight. I focus on musical depictions of the Commonwealth on the BBC radio programme Commonwealth of Song. Using archival records, I reconstruct debates concerning Commonwealth representation and its importance to British citizens. I argue that Commonwealth of Song was a site of testing and reformulating new sonic constructions of globally minded ‘Britishness’ in the 1950s, yet conflicting messaging about what musics and people should represent the Commonwealth led to a lukewarm response.

Published in Twentieth-Century Music Vol. 19, no. 2

Butterfly in Bombay: Operatic Culture And British Identity During the Raj and Beyond

Ethnomusicologists and music historians alike have sought to uncover the makeup of musical life during the British Raj. Scholars have argued that the performance of Western art music in occupied India played a crucial role in the creation of the British imperial imagination, yet these analyses primarily cite chamber and symphonic music performances, ignoring the role of opera. This move is particularly questionable considering the cultural cache of Italian opera in nineteenth-century Britain. I address this imbalance by reconstructing operatic life in Bombay from 1860 to the 1930s, drawing on coverage for the genre in the Times of India, the largest English-language newspaper on the subcontinent. I show how British expatriates in Bombay (Anglo-Indians) had a hunger for the art form—a desire which culminated in the construction of the city’s Royal Opera House. Furthermore, the complex history of opera in India influenced recent coverage of this space’s renovation and reopening in 2016. I argue that the idea of opera, more than its actual performance, served as a potent symbol of Western modernity for Britons separated from the metropole, and this valuing has influenced Indian cultural politics in some circles to this day. In addition to informing the global history of music, this article illuminates a neglected aspect of identity formation during the height of British imperialism.

Published in Ethnomusicology Review Vol. 22, no. 2

MA Thesis

The Dissident Dame: Alternative Feminist Methodologies and the Music of Ethel Smyth

While the works of women and other groups typically excluded from the canon are becoming more common in concert programs and historical survey texts, musicological interrogation into the subversive potential of these pieces lags far behind our colleagues in the humanities. This thesis serves as a framework for an intersectional approach to musicology, using the life and oeuvre of self-consciously feminist composer Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) as a case study. Much of her musical output remains understudied in relation to the social, political, and cultural climate of Victorian England and in the context of Western art music.

Each chapter takes a specific genre of Smyth’s music and uses a multidisciplinary approach to illuminate the political work of select, representative pieces. Chapter One draws on the fields of literature and narratology to unpack the feminist potential of minor-mode sonatas. In Chapter Two, I evaluate the lasting impact of Smyth’s choral literature, both apolitical and suffrage-oriented, in terms of their contributions to the British nationalist movement. Finally, I turn to Smyth’s operatic masterpiece, The Wreckers, in Chapter Three; I call on sociology, anthropology, and history to contextualize how the composer pits moral tropes against ideas about female sexuality.

Together, these chapters suggest that early feminist politics pervade Ethel Smyth’s music more than originally thought, thus encouraging music scholars to look more deeply at works that we have, as a field, perhaps dismissed too quickly as simple, straightforward, or even trivial.

Committee Members: Marcie Ray (advisor), Kevin Bartig, Aminda Smith

Other Writing