Concerts and conferences

Posted by Jenny Batt on Thursday, July 07, 2011 with No comments
Early Music Festival, York, 13 July

The 2011 York Early Music Festival, described by Gramophone as 'the Mecca of early music', runs from 8-16 July 2011. This year it celebrates the spirit of the 1951 Festival of Britain. In our first musical DMI event, Vivien Ellis and Giles Lewin, the musical consultants on the project, are performing a programme of music based on the Yorkshire Garland, a miscellany songbook acquired by our very own mid-century collector, Walter Harding. The programme gives us 'a peep through the casement into various aspects of life in eighteenth-century Yorkshire' - the stories of tragic love, family feuds, politics, horse racing and and gambling that made up the world of the popular miscellany. The concert will be introduced with a short talk by Abigail Williams on 'The Yorkshire Garland Revealed' which will look at collecting and musical miscelleneity. The DMI events are on Wednesday 13 July - the talk is 10.30-11.30, at Bedern Hall, and the concert is 1-2pm, St Olave's Church, Marygate. See www.ncem.co.uk for the full programme.




Conferences

The events at the Early Music Festival mark the start of a busy period for the DMI team. Following York, three of the team head to the biennial conference of the Defoe Society at the University of Worcester (14-16 July). The theme of the conference is 'The Culture of Grubstreet', and Abigail Williams, John McTague and I will be investigating what miscellanies might reveal about Grubstreet Culture.

The following week, I'll be talking about the project at two conferences which have strong focuses on miscellanies: firstly at the Early Modern Studies Conference at Reading (18-20 July); and secondly at the Early Modern Female Miscellanies and Commonplace Books Symposium at Warwick University (22 July).

At the end of August, it's the turn of Chris Salamone to take DMI research on the road. Chris will be talking about the place of Shakespeare in eighteenth century poetic miscellanies at a conference entitled Backward Glances: History, Imagination and Memory at University College Cork (31 August-1 September).