Music Department conference and concert celebrate English modernism

This week the Department of Music presents one evening concert in conjunction with a two-day conference, both of which are free and open to the public.

Organized by associate professor of music Annette Richards and graduate student Nicholas Matthew, "The Cultural Politics of English Modernism, 1920-1950" takes place Friday and Saturday, Sept. 20-21, in B20 Lincoln Hall (Neylan Rehearsal Hall). The discourse of British modernism across the arts is fraught with class tension, issues of national identity, gender politics and the question of high versus low culture, the organizers say.

Papers at this mini-conference, many of them by Cornell graduate students, will cover a mix of disciplines, with contributions from music, English, comparative literature and history, among others. Two keynote speakers will anchor the discussion: Valentine Cunningham, professor of English at Oxford University, and Terry Castle, professor of English at Stanford University.

Friday sessions run from 1:30 to 5:45 p.m. in B20 Lincoln Hall, with a screening of documentary films made by the GPO and Crown film units (including "Coal Face" and "Night Mail") that evening at 8 in the Film Forum of the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Saturday sessions begin at 9:30 a.m. and conclude about 5:30 p.m. (all in B20 Lincoln), with a concert by Ensemble X that evening at 8 in Barnes Hall.

The Ensemble X concert features soloists Graeme Bailey, Cornell professor of computer science, left, and Read Gainsford, assistant professor at Ithaca College.

Ensemble X presents two British works from this period: William Walton's Façade: An Entertainment (1921-29), with Graeme Bailey, Cornell professor of computer science, as reciter, and an instrumental ensemble of six musicians; and Constant Lambert's Concerto for Piano and Nine Players (1930-31), with soloist Read Gainsford, assistant professor of music at Ithaca College. Both pieces are conducted by Cornell Professor Steven Stucky. From 7:15 to 7:45 p.m., Brooks Kuykendall, Cornell graduate student in music, will deliver a lecture on the repertoire.

Walton's Façade is both bizarre entertainment and radical experiment. An exercise in the most subtle melding of spoken and musical sound, it verges at times on the manipulation of mere noise; its poems are avant-garde and nonsensical, yet simultaneously nostalgic forays into the realm of childhood; its music is a mixture of popular and high art, the lighthearted and the serious. From its first performances in the 1920s to its definitive published version of 1951, Façade underwent many changes, but it was this work that catapulted Walton to fame.

The Façade poems are the work of the famously eccentric poet Edith Sitwell. The poems, she wrote, were "enquiries into the effect on rhythm, and on speed, of the use of rhymes, assonances and dissonances, placed outwardly and inwardly ... and in most elaborate patterns." When her work was dismissed by a contemporary painter as "very clever, no doubt -- but what is she but a façade," Sitwell was delighted, and Façade became the title of her next volume of poetry.

Lambert composed his Piano Concerto in 1930-31. It is elegiac in mood, while exploring the jazz idioms that he found fascinating and intrinsically modern.

The conference is sponsored by the Cornell Council for the Arts, the Humanities Council, the departments of English and Music, and Philomela, an organization of graduate music students. For more information, contact Annette Richards at ar34@cornell.edu.