Royal Academy of Music hosts international Women and Musical Histories conference

From 2 to 4 September, the 'Women and Musical Histories: 1789-1914' conference brought together an international community of performers and scholars at the Academy. It explored the musical lives and historical legacies of women between the outbreaks of the French Revolution and World War One.

Delegates from institutions across the globe offered contributions, with presenters ranging from doctoral students to established scholars. The conference saw over 50 presentations, speeches and performances that spoke to different perspectives of the theme. Attendees and delegates explored history being made and shaped by musical women in the 19th century - not just performers and composers, but diarists, patrons, collectors and pioneering musical scholars.

The conference (which included highlights below) was directed by Dr Briony Cox Williams and Professor Emily Kilpatrick, was supported by academics from the Academy’s Research community, and by a team of PhD students. 

WEDNESDAY 2 SEPTEMBER: EARLY CAREER RESEARCHER DAY

The main programme was preceded by an Early Career Researcher Day, showcasing emerging researchers and championing career development and networking. Sessions included:

• Women of the Royal Academy of Music: Careers, Networks, Identities, Legacies, chaired by Sarah Callis, who opened the day with a talk on the Academy's doctoral programmes. This session featured a lecture-recital by student Xiaowen Shang on Fanny Dickens, one of the first female pupils at the Academy
• Publishing Routes in Music and Gender Studies, delivered by Anna Beer and Alyn Shipton, of Equinox Publishing
• Reappraising Canons: An opportunity to rethink and rewrite women in musical history, ranging from a reappraisal of Clara Schumann’s performing career through the lens of disability studies by recent PhD alumnus Isaac Shieh, to an exploration of women’s music-making in the royal courts of nineteenth-century India by Dolly Sharma of the School of Oriental and African Studies

THURSDAY 3 SEPTEMBER

Questions of identity, memory and legacy, collection and curation, agency and historical erasure were threaded through the day’s papers and lecture recitals which included: 

• Explorations of women negotiating performing identities as singers, violinists, theatre directors and pioneering double-reed players
• Challenges to traditional musicology and the ‘canon’ through reconsideration of women’s scholarship
• Lecture-recitals, including two that offered creative responses to the life and works of British composers Ethel Smyth (through a new opera) and the autobiographical songs of Josephine Lang

The day concluded with a keynote address delivered by Professor Sophie Fuller, a distinguished scholar of music and gender, titled Writing Herself into History: Lehmann, Prescott, Smyth and White. An evening concert celebrated the creative impact of nineteenth-century female students from the Academy, including rarely heard part-songs by Oliveria Prescott and Clara Macirone.

FRIDAY 4 SEPTEMBER

On the final morning of the conference, delegates were invited to join a tour of the conference exhibition, drawn from the Academy’s Museum and Collections, exploring the lives, legacies and impact of women of and beyond the nineteenth-century Academy. The exhibition remains on public display throughout the autumn term.

Among many highlights, particular themes of the day included:

• The importance of collectors and curators who undertook projects from anthologies of Hebridean song to encyclopaedic documentation of professional musical women in Paris
• The lives of women composers and performers who wrestled with domestic and societal constraints while negotiating public careers
• The role of women in shaping musical and historical narratives through salons, teaching and cross-cultural exchange
• Lecture-recitals offering portraits of performers such as violinist Marjorie Hayward (by recent PhD graduate Maho Harada), composers Sophie Menter and Amy Elise Horrocks, and Chopin pupils Charlotte and Mathilde Rothschild

Following a concert by PhD student Liubov Ulybysheva (cello) and Maiko Mori (piano), featuring music from Fanny Hensel, Clara Schumann and Nadia Boulanger, the conference concluded with a round table discussion looking to the future. 

The full conference programme, with all biographies and abstracts, is accessible via the Academy’s Research Catalogue portal. 

The conference was supported by the Convocation Trust of the University of London, and by the Music & Letters Trust.