WEDNESDAY 11 APRIL

Dr Richard Elliott (Newcastle University) will talk on From Sound Objects to Song Objects: Rethinking Sonic Materiality and Metaphor?

Recent years have witnessed an intense interest in the roles played by objects in the world, with many approaches recognising the vital interdependence of human and non-human actors. My current research aims to establish the importance of music (and sound more broadly) in this new terrain of scholarship by analysing how songs represent objects, how songs themselves become meaningful objects and how songs rely on a wide range of ever-changing objects to assure their survival. Using the connecting thread of materiality, I propose an approach to musical analysis that both connects with recent object-centred scholarship and overcomes existing musicological distinctions between music as thing and music as process.

This paper presents an analysis of the ‘song object’, a concept crucial to my research and which has connections to earlier theories of lyric substance as well as to Pierre Schaeffer’s objet sonore (sound object). What constitutes the song object? What kind of object is it? How do songs themselves comment on their construction, their parts, their physicality? I argue that songs are a particular kind of technology for ordering information and that they deploy particular technologies of object orientation in ways distinct from, but comparable to, those of paintings, sculptures, poems and books. Part of my analysis therefore consists of exploring material descriptors and metaphors connected to song, incorporating the artificial (hooks, bridges, etc.) and the natural (cells, viruses, weather systems). I’m interested in what these terms – and their application to song objects – can tell us about the materiality of sound.

Dr Richard Elliott is Senior Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University (UK). His current research focuses on issues of time, age and space in popular music as well as the relationship between music and materiality. He is the author of the books Fado and the Place of Longing (2010), Nina Simone (2013), The Late Voice (2015) and The Sound of Nonsense (2018), as well as articles exploring consciousness, memory, nostalgia, place and space, affect, technology and the relationship between popular music and literature.

WEDNESDAY 25 APRIL

Jessica Munns and Penny Richards will talk on Staging History: William Shakespeare, John Banks and Henry VIII: Sex, Gender and Spectacle.

This paper will discuss two plays, roughly sixty years apart, that dramatise the marriage of  Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in very different ways. We shall suggest that what can be seen in the different ways the “story” is staged is an epistemological shift with regard to the idea of what constitutes history, as well as a reconfiguration of gender that in itself rewrites history in what is, of course, an endless process of revision and erasure in the work of memory and forgetting.

Jessica Munns and Penny Richards have written and edited many books together, as well as currently editing the journal Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research. They have both given papers to the Gloucestershire Philosophical Society before.

 

WEDNESDAY 9 MAY

Dr Martin Wood (University of Gloucestershire) will talk on Jalaram Kathā: Exceeding the Capacity of Modern Historiography

Over a period of three evenings in January this year some fifteen hundred devotees of the Gujarati Hindu saint Jalaram Bapa gathered in a community function hall in north west London to partake in a katha or re-telling of the narrative of the life of saint and his wife Virbai Ma.

The key episodes in the narrative that underpin the traditions ethical and philosophical position such as the saint’s his previous lives and the miracles that he performed were narrated by the community’s priest and re-enacted throughout by a number of devotees. Furthermore, whilst the event focused solely upon the above themes at the same time a highly venerated and ritually installed copy of the Ramayana was placed in the centre of the stage which had to all intents and purposes been transformed in to a shrine.

This paper hopes to unpack the role of the katha in the community and the importance of the telling and retelling of the Jalaram narrative and consider the role of the Ramayana in its material form during the katha ritual. I also hope to illustrate how the performance of Katha opens the way for a much deeper religious experience as allows for the reality of transcendent presence and exceeds what we in the west might consider the capacity of modern historiography.

 

WEDNESDAY 23 MAY

Dr Erin Peters (University of Gloucestershire) will talk on Trauma and the English Civil War

‘The Great Civil War of 1642-46 was arguably the most traumatic experience that the English, Welsh and Cornish people had ever had…In many ways the nation never recovered from it’ (Ronald Hutton, 2004). While the actual scars left by this momentous conflict in British history have been subject to intensive scholarly investigation, my talk will investigate the public expressions of the traumatic effect of the Wars and will explore how the trauma caused by the violence and rupture of the Civil Wars eventually found expression in popular print sources. What my analysis of these sources will demonstrate is that commentators on the mid-seventeenth century conflict did acknowledged the presence of war trauma and that they showed an awareness of the therapeutic results of attempting to narrate cultural and individual trauma. I will demonstrate that alongside the official and authorised interpretation of disability as a physical impairment, a popular understanding of the disabling and disfiguring nature of psychological damage developed.

Erin Peters is a Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Gloucestershire, with specialist interests in seventeenth-century Britain. Combining historical research with an interdisciplinary background in Memory Studies, Erin studies early modern print culture, the history of trauma and nostalgia, and early modern forms of memory and post-conflict cultures_. Recently, she is the author of Commemoration and Oblivion in Restoration Print Culture, 1658-1667 (Palgrave, 2017), and ‘“The deep staines these Wars will leave behind”: psychological wounds and curative methods in the English Civil War’ (Manchester UP, 2018).  Currently, Erin is co-editing a collection of essays entitled Early Modern Trauma (forthcoming, Nebraska UP, 2019).

WEDNESDAY 6 June

John Ricketts (Gloucestershire Humanists) will talk on Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now

In what might be thought of as an extension of his “The Better Angels of Our Nature” he goes on from the question  “Are we less violent than we were?” to the broader “Is the world a better place than it was?”

For both questions the answer is “YES”

The strength of Pinker’s argument is that he backs up generalisations with facts (lots of them).

John will aim to present a random, maybe eccentric, selection from Pinker’s studies.

John Ricketts started his professional career (teaching biology in state secondary schools) in the early 1960s. This was also a time when he moved away from his C of E roots, and began to explore what a godless life might be like. For the past couple of decades he has been actively involved with Gloucestershire Humanists.

All sessions will be held at the Francis Close Campus of the University of Gloucestershire, Swindon Road, Cheltenham, at 7 p.m in room HC202AandB.