Description du projet
Une influence féminine pour des ballades de salon au temps de la reine Victoria et du roi Édouard VII
Entre 1860 et 1930, la Grande-Bretagne a connu un accroissement de la créativité féminine et de la sagacité commerciale pour le genre musical des ballades sentimentales de salon. Ce répertoire perdure de nos jours dans les compilations musicales, les disques et les enregistrements des producteurs, et il reste encore inexploré. Le projet WOMENSONG, financé par l’UE, étudiera le répertoire des ballades de salon chantées à l’époque victorienne et dans les années 1900 pour révéler l’histoire des voix musicales marginalisées. Il expliquera l’histoire musicale de Londres qui était une ville impériale transnationale. Le projet mènera à bien une recherche approfondie sur des études de cas individuels en examinant des autrices-compositrices; il testera des interprétations contextualisées similaires provenant de chansons et de compositrices privées habitant Londres et abordera l’héritage et l’immortalité de ces chansons-là datant du début du XXe siècle.
Objectif
Women Songwriters of the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Exploring the Sentimental Voice
This project contends that investigating an unexplored musical repertoire – that of Victorian and Edwardian parlour ballads – will uncover a larger story about marginalised musical voices, and will shed light on the musical history of London as a transnational and imperial city. The period 1860 to 1930 witnessed a flourishing of women’s creativity and commercial acumen within the popular genre of the sentimental parlour ballad. Today, much of this once ubiquitous repertoire now survives as historic sheet music collections, publisher’s records and sound recordings held in archives in the US and the UK. Through in-depth research into individual case studies, I propose to explore women songwriters and their networks within a burgeoning transatlantic music industry. The project entails three objectives, which are connected through a need to revaluate sentimentality as a defining aesthetic of parlour songs written by and for women. First, I will explore the figure of the popular woman songwriter within the context of modern musical discourse, drawing connections with critical attitudes to the sentimental in literature and film. Second, I will undertake contextualised close readings of individual songs and songwriters based in London, interpreting women’s compositional and performing voices in relation to race and colonialism. Third, I will address the legacy and afterlife of particular songs in the early twentieth century, exploring how aesthetics of sentimentality and nostalgia were mediated in performance through new technologies of sound reproduction. By combining archival research with critical theoretical approaches to the politics of musical voices, the research seeks to revise our understanding of a pivotal turning point in music history.
Champ scientifique
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Programme(s)
Régime de financement
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinateur
WC2R 2LS London
Royaume-Uni