Singing in the Age of Anxiety

Laura will be joined an expert panel to discuss the book and its
themes; Dr Benjamin Walton (Jesus, Cambridge), Professor Kate
McLoughlin (Harris Manchester, Oxford). Chaired by Professor Philip
R. Bullock (Wadham, Oxford). In New York and London during World
War I, the performance of lieder -German art songs- was roundly
prohibited, representing as they did the music and language of the
enemy. But as German musicians returned to the transatlantic
circuit in the 1920s, so too did the songs of Franz Schubert, Hugo
Wolf, and Richard Strauss. Lieder were encountered in a variety of
venues and media-at luxury hotels and on ocean liners, in
vaudeville productions and at Carnegie Hall, and on gramophone
recordings, radio broadcasts, and films. Laura Tunbridge explores
the renewed vitality of this refugee musical form between the world
wars, offering a fresh perspective on a period that was pervaded by
anxieties of displacement. Through richly varied case studies,
Singing in the Age of Anxiety traces how lieder were circulated,
presented, and consumed in metropolitan contexts, shedding new
light on how music facilitated unlikely crossings of nationalist
and internationalist ideologies during the interwar period. Laura
Tunbridge is Professor of Music and Henfrey Fellow and Tutor, St
Catherine's College, at the University of Oxford. Editor of the
Journal of the Royal Musical Association from 2013-2018, in 2017
she was elected to the Directorium of the International
Musicological Society. Laura’s research has concentrated on German
Romanticism, with a particular interest in reception through
criticism, performance, and composition. Among her publications are
the books Schumann’s Late Style (Cambridge, 2007) and The Song
Cycle (Cambridge, 2010). Laura will be joined an expert panel to
discuss the book and its themes; Dr Benjamin Walton (Jesus,
Cambridge), Professor Kate McLoughlin (Harris Manchester, Oxford).
Chaired by Professor Philip R. Bullock (Wadham, Oxford)