Having
been appointed Gresham Professor of Music, Christopher Page will deliver what
sounds like a very interesting series of six public lectures on Men, Women and Guitars in
Romantic England:
According to the press release, ‘The guitar is arguably the most widely
cultivated instrument in the world. At a time when fifty or more pianos are
broken up for scrap in Britain every week – sad relics of Victorian parlour
entertainment – sales of guitars have never been higher.Nonetheless, it has
been almost universally forgotten that there was an intense guitar craze in
England between about 1800 and 1835, spanning the lifetimes of Keats, Byron,
Shelley and Coleridge, and a craze whose history has never been traced.
Histories of English music and society in the nineteenth century continue to be
written as if it never happened, and yet the instrument was cultivated from the
royal family in the person of Princess Charlotte (d. 1817) down to the poorest
laundress. This is much more than the story of an instrument and its music: the
rise of romanticism, the creation of an urban poor hungry for self improvement,
the proliferation of newspapers, serialised fiction and printed sheet music,
the social position of women and other aspects of English society and culture
in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars all have a place within it.’
Each
lecture will last an hour, and will be open free to the public, taking place
between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. on selected Thursdays at the Church of St Sepulchre-Without-Newgate, Holborn:
The ‘Romantic’ Guitar (9
October 2014)
Being a Guitarist
in the time of Byron and Shelley (20 November 2014)
The Guitar, the
Steamship and the Picnic: England on the move (11 December 2014)
The Guitar and the
Romantic Vision of the Medieval World (8 January 2015)
Harmony in the
Lowest Home: The Guitar and the labouring poor (19 February 2015)
The guitar and ‘the
fair sex’ (23 April 2015)
In
addition, all lectures will be recorded and released online for free, so those
of us unable to attend will have a second (and indeed third) bite at the
cherry.
Click here
for further details.
