Often the most invigorating conferences are those which bring together many different specialties and integrate them within interdisciplinary panels. Such was the case with the Forty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), which took place in March in Williamsburg, Virginia. The event was enormous, with over eight hundred presenters spread among 221 panels, in addition to seven plenary sessions and other special events such as the masquerade ball hosted by the Women's Caucus. Music and other performing arts were well represented throughout the weekend; both the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music and the Mozart Society of America sponsored panels, and many papers about the arts were included in other groupings. Given the large number of papers and other events, it was impossible to attend all or even most of the offerings. However, I will give an overview of my experiences in order to convey a sense of the conference's atmosphere.
Throughout the weekend I noticed several trends that distinguished this event from other large interdisciplinary conferences, including previous incarnations of ASECS itself. Whereas the papers featuring musicological topics are usually clustered in a few select sessions or panels, at ASECS 2014 they were refreshingly scattered amongst many different sessions with topics such as theatre, French history and the ‘digital humanities’. I credit this both to the participating scholars as well as those who put together the panels. Because the selection process is not centralized (panel ideas are first accepted by ASECS for inclusion in the conference, then the chairs attempt to fill the panel with individual presenters), not only did many musicologists have the initiative to submit to panels in other fields, but the chair of the panel then had to recognize the paper as an important and relevant contribution.
At least nine panels featured papers about eighteenth-century sonic culture. Several of these papers included some form of audience participation – music examples and dance steps were demonstrated by the speakers and then copied by some brave attendees. Thankfully, panels such as ‘Dance in Colonial Virginia’, chaired by Christopher Hendricks (Armstrong Atlantic University), advertised in the programme that the session would feature participation. Other audiences were not forewarned but were still willing to participate. For example, the presentation by Ruth Perry (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), ‘Songs of a Nation: Gender and Balladry in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, included a sing-through of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ whose lyrics differed from the commonly known version. These ‘experiential learning’ activities served a dual purpose: the audience was awoken from their after-lunch daze and they performed the topic they were learning about in a way that they will remember for far longer than if they were passively listening to a presentation. (The Friday-night ball was well attended by revellers, most of whom wore some type of period costume; the playlist was somewhat less ‘authentic’, consisting of trio sonatas by Telemann alongside Annie Lennox, Prince and the like. The dance steps from the panel were unfortunately not on display.)
Because of the way the conference was organized, many of the papers on musical topics were attended by scholars from other fields. Furthermore, the cohort of musicologists, most of whom were friends and colleagues, did not stick together as a unit but spread out according to their personal and professional interests. Indeed, this was necessary when two presentations on music occurred simultaneously. This had the dual effect of diversifying the crowd at each session and providing fodder for discussion when the musicological group reconvened during mealtimes; each person reported on the papers they heard and the museums and other attractions they experienced within Williamsburg itself.
A final trend I noticed was that many panels used major historical figures as the point of departure but focused on other people from their time period who interacted with them. Two of the many examples included ‘Mozart and His Situation’ (Mozart Society of America) and ‘Beyond Goya: Culture High and Low in Spain and the New World during the Reign of Carlos IV 1789–1808’ (Ibero-American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies). I found the former to be particularly engaging as it featured four papers that took Mozart's life and music as a theme but whose topics spread in different directions. The paper by Kathryn Libin (Vassar College), ‘Training a Mozartean Amateur in Eighteenth-Century Vienna: The Little Music Book of La Comtesse Wilhelmina d’Uhlefeld’, was especially interesting because of the circumstances surrounding the music book's rediscovery; Libin had come across it while working in the Lobkowicz Library, which belonged to Uhlefeld's family, and examined its musical-didactic contents and handwriting to see how the countess may have learned to play keyboard, and who may have taught her. Erick Arenas (San Francisco Conservatory of Music) gave the second paper, entitled ‘Colloredo, Haydn, and Mozart's Studio Particolare’, which reinterpreted Mozart's famous comments in his letter to Padre Martini of 1776 about the ‘special’ compositional methods for shorter masses required by the Archbishop of Salzburg, as well as comparing the masses written by Mozart and Michael Haydn for the Salzburg court.
The theme continued with the presentation by Peter Hoyt (Columbia Museum of Art), ‘The Priapean Tradition in Figaro’. Once the audience became comfortable (enough) with the subject matter, Hoyt revealed important connections between the mythological figure Priapus, property rights and the character of Count Almaviva in Beaumarchais's play – connections that can help explain some of the otherwise odd features of the count's behaviour. The final paper of the panel was given by Justin Mueller (Tufts University), ‘Opera-Film Hybridization in Kenneth Branagh's and Ingmar Bergman's Magic Flute Films’, in which he analysed the two films and their directors’ similar uses of stage techniques and cinematic technology to portray the magic of the opera. In the absence of Jessica Waldoff (College of the Holy Cross), the panel was chaired by Bruce Alan Brown (University of Southern California), whose own paper, ‘Opera in Italy and on the Moon, as Viewed by a Frenchman, Financier, and Philosophe’, given as part of another panel, examined Italian opera within the context of the querelle des bouffons. The Mozart Society of America's panel was scheduled concurrently with a paper by Julia Doe (Columbia University), ‘From Opéra-Comique to Comédie-Italienne: Fair Theater on the Privileged Stage’, which regrettably I missed.
The Society for Eighteenth-Century Music sponsored a panel that I organized and chaired, ‘Production and Reception of European Music in the Eighteenth-Century Americas’. Three excellent presentations covered music in the United States and Mexico. Bertil van Boer (Western Washington University) read ‘Music in the Service of Politics and the People: The Development of the Federal Overture in the New United States’, which addressed performances of medley overtures by Benjamin Carr and James Hewitt. Nikos Pappas (University of Alabama) gave his presentation, ‘Peter Pelham, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and the Production and Reception of European Music in Late-Colonial Williamsburg’ to an enthusiastic audience. Pappas's paper was one of the few during the weekend to examine a topic related to Williamsburg; the relative lack of papers about the specific area was disappointing. Finally, in ‘To Combat but not to Arms: Honoring King Charles III through Poetry and Music in 1760 Mexico City’ Drew Edward Davies (Northwestern University) discussed a coronation ode for the Spanish king composed by Ignacio Jerusalem, analysing the sources for the piece.
The third panel that consisted solely of music papers was ‘Women and Music: Composing, Performing, Listening’. While two of the presenters were musicologists, the two others hailed in fact from English departments. After Ruth Perry's paper, discussed above, Ellen Harris (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) presented ‘Anne Donnellan: An Amateur Singer Facing the Economic and Social Realities of Living Single’. Harris's paper was fascinating not only because of the unique character of her subject (an Irish singer who was a friend of Handel), but also because of the amount and variety of source material Harris had to deploy to trace Donnellan's biography, including correspondence and financial records. In ‘Music, Repertory Innovations, and Frances Brooke’ Paula Backsheider (Auburn University) examined how Brooke, an English theatre manager and librettist, developed her dramatic works in dialogue with contemporary composers’ operas as well as where and when they were performed. The discussion was brought into the Western hemisphere by Teresa Neff (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), with her ‘Catherine Graupner and Catherine (Graupner) Cushing: Boston Musicians at the Turn of the Century’.
The culminating event of the conference was a concert of instrumental and vocal music, ‘Transformations of Madrid Theater Style: Music from 17th- and 18th-Century Spain and Latin America’, performed by artists from the Washington, D. C., area and moderated by Drew Edward Davies, who gave short, informative introductions to each section of the programme. For me, the highlight of the concert was Juan Hidalgo's ‘Ay que sí, ay que no’, which soprano Emily Noël performed with the appropriate flair. The beautiful Wren Chapel at the College of William and Mary served as the venue and had excellent acoustics for its capacity audience.
The location for the event, Colonial Williamsburg, could not have been more appropriate. Besides the ideal weather and period-style food, the atmosphere was proper to the content of the conference. Williamsburg is fashioned as a piece of living history – inhabitants roam the streets dressed in late eighteenth-century attire, craftsmen work their trades and merchants sell replica items. Most interactions between these inhabitants remain within the bounds of what would have been typical in the 1770s. They take great pride in educating the public about Williamsburg's history. This weekend, however, they came into contact with people who are as immersed in eighteenth-century history as they are. Both parties seemed delighted to carry on a conversation with the other without breaking character.
