Keynotes
Stan Hawkins (University of Oslo, Norway): Institutionalizing Cosmopolitanism and White Masculinity: Dandyism in Popular Music
Rife were the revolutionary events in Europe for the emergence of dandyism during the late 17th century. An open display of pretension became part of the dandy’s controversial mission as the reactionary and the revolutionary, so much so that by the dawn of the 19th century this character stood for the dubious qualities of superiority and irresponsibility. Yet, ideologically, dandyism fused disparate ideas of invention in an effort to comment on bourgeois spirit of the time. In particular, le dandyisme in France was integrated within the intellectual community. It was the Battle of Waterloo and the fall of the emperor and the rule of Louis XVIII in 1814 that commenced a period of anglomania, with culture imported form the British Isles. Baudelaire and D’Aurevilly gained much of their inspiration from the alien temperament across the channel. The ambiguous spirit of the dandy fused together ideologies and attitudes in both countries. In 1952 a new group of British dandies, the Teddy boys, took Paris by storm in similar ways to their dandy predecessors in the early 1800s. Their look, their clothes – the fumée de Londres, vert anglais, bronze anglais and redingote lord Novart graphically symbolized the transition from the austerity of the 1940s to the prosperity of the 1950s in Britain. Ostensibly, the Teddy’s air of arrogance and pride was more than a nod to Regency dandies, whose display of eccentricity, wit, comic excess and vulgarity signaled for many unwieldy behavior. Central to my discussion is the surfacing of the dandy figure in popular music, right up to the present day. I also contemplate the enactment of gender, race, and class, as well as the social, cultural, and ethic enterprise of being cosmopolitan. In my presentation, popular music is considered as a resource for understanding the formation of aesthetic cosmopolitanism, and critiquing human adaptation and symbolic behavior as defined by dandyism, social class, history, gender, race and European identity.
Avra Xepapadakou (independent researcher, Greece): Towards the Institutionalization of Musical Life in Nineteenth-Century Greece and Southeastern Europe
This talk will attempt to trace the evolutionary path towards the institutionalization of music life in 19th c. Greece, a new European state, just recovering and struggling to re-connect with the Western world after more than 400 years of Ottoman occupation. Greece constitutes an especially interesting case study, as it functioned as a cultural cross-roads between East and West within a geographically wide and culturally complex space at the Southeastern edge of Europe, characterised by a still resonant ottoman past and a fast pace of westernization.
Within the area investigated, the gradual acquaintance with Western music is effectuated initially as a private activity, only later acquiring a public character through consecutive stages of institutionalization. Our overview will include landmarks such as the foundation of musical and music-theatrical institutions, as the cultivation of art music became inherently connected with the development of theatrical activity, and in particular the diffusion of opera and musical theatre. Consequently, the trajectory of art music in Greece will be connected with the development of Greek urban life and the continuous trend for westernization which characterized the Greek 19th century. Additionally, this talk will attempt to relate the path towards institutionalization with the developments in the cultural market in general, by examining factors which affect musical and theatrical activity in a decisive way, such as: the evolution of new social customs (evening entertainment), the introduction and gradual establishment of musical education, the commercialization of art, and the gradually increasing professionalism of the performers and artists.
Jim Samson (Royal Holloway University of London): Institutionalizing Music Theory: Two Historical Moments
The role of institutions in intellectual histories may be illuminated by way of two case studies in music theory.
The first concerns the transformations of music theory and pedagogy in early nineteenth-century European conservatories. These were fourfold: from aural to notated teaching models, from individual to class tuition, from prospective to retrospective modalities, and from genealogical to generational thinking. These four transformations played out in the conservatory movement across Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, beginning in Paris in 1795 and ending in Leipzig and Berlin in the 1840s.
The second concerns British and North American university music departments in the final decades of the twentieth century and focuses on the institution of music analysis. On the British scene there were two seismic shifts: the invasion of an empirical analytical tradition by American theory and the redefinition of analytical knowledge in light of ‘new’ or ‘critical’ musicology, with the latter shift again pioneered in the US. Either music theory collapsed inwards, effectively encased within its own institution, or dissolved outwards into a form of contextualism that demanded, and in the end acquired, its own institution.
By way of these case studies it is possible to attempt useful generalisations about the relationship between institutions, organisations, infrastructures and practices. The key relationship is between institutions and practices, which precede institutions but also outlive them.