Shakespeare and Music in a Changing World: “The rude sea grew civil at her song”

Conveners: Michelle Assay (University of Toronto, Canada) michelleassay@gmail.com, Alina Bottez (University of Bucharest, Romania) alina.bottez@lls.unibuc.ro / alinabottez@gmail.com, David Fanning (University of Manchester, UK) david.fanning@manchester.ac.uk

Continuing from the Shakespeare and Music Group’s established research and performance events, this seminar continues our core values of  interdisciplinarity / cross-disciplinarity and the dual focus on Shakespeare in Music and Music in Shakespeare, covering not only historical/performance practice but also the global impact of Shakespeare as a source of musical inspirationfor what Bolter and Grusin term ‘remediation’ whereby new media achieve their cultural significance by paying homage to, and refashioning, existing media. In this vein, appropriation and adaptation of Shakespeare’s works in music may be considered as indicators of changes in the cultural, aesthetic and even political/ideological tendencies of specific eras and areas.

The means germane to music have the power to enhance and even reconfigure the significances of the written/spoken text. In this way musical adaptations of Shakespeare’s works enrich the towering legacy of the poet, illustrating the change in mentality, politics, aesthetics, religion, and art according to the time and place in which they were composed. Our research aims to cover both how verbal significances change into non-verbal ones (in the case of instrumental music), and how music and words combine (on stage, screen and in song) to yield new works that are still somehow Shakespeare and yet something new. We invite researchers and practitioners, from a diverse background, to submit proposals with themes that include, but are not limited to:

• Shakespeare’s use of and reference to music
• Theoretical approaches to the musical adaptation of Shakespeare
• Composers contemporary to Shakespeare
• The role of translation in musical adaptations of Shakespeare
• Politics and ethics in musical adaptations/appropriations of Shakespeare
• The musical representation of gender/race/class in Shakespeare-inspired music
• Shakespeare and incidental/film, opera, ballet and concert music
• Shakespeare and musical nationalism
• Decolonisation of the Shakespearean music repertoire
• Shakespeare and music in education
• The European and global past “traduced” in the modern and contemporary musical adaptations Shakespeare
• Shakespeare and jazz/popular/folklore music
• Musical adaptations of Shakespeare in times of war or political conflict
• Changes in performance trends
• The afterlives of Shakespeare-inspired music

Please submit short 200-word abstracts and a short bio note.