Philip Rupprecht, "Music, Bureaucracy, and the Production of Taste: Malcolm Arnold and the BBC in the 1950s"

February 12, -
Speaker(s): Philip Rupprecht
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Talk description:

I pursue the elusive topic of taste in two registers - cultural-historical, and documentary-bureaucratic. The culture is mid-twentieth century British: a landscape riven physically by wartime bombing, and culturally by hierarchies of social class and artistic genre. With his tuneful and seemingly light-hearted symphonies, Malcolm Arnold delighted audiences while disappointing establishment critics. I situate Arnold's art in the wider scene spanning modernist hostility to mass- or midcult productions, and the critiques of artistic elites voiced by Hoggart, Williams and others. As for the bureaucracy: enter BBC Radio, an institutional behemoth of taste-makers, programmers and producers, overseeing a national broadcasting network. Sampling the archive of 1940s and 50s BBC memos, I explore traces of an ongoing negotiation--whose music was played, and who decided?

Speaker bio:

Philip Rupprecht's books include Britten's Musical Language (2002) and British Musical Modernism (2015). His writings engage concepts of narrative and agency in both texted vocal and wordless instrumental genres, the trope of stereotype in the formation of national musical canons; and analyses of rhythm and groove. He was recently appointed co-editor of the "Music Since 1900" book series at Cambridge University Press.
Sponsor

Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI)

Co-Sponsor(s)

English; History; Music

Philip Rupprecht, "Music, Bureaucracy, and the Production of Taste: Malcolm Arnold and the BBC in the 1950s"

Contact

Rogers, Sarah
919-668-2401