Matthew Head: The American ‘lady composer’ in Hollywood musicals of the 1930s: Towards a history of fictitious female composers

Event details

Speaker: Matthew Head (King's College London) 

Date: 21 March 2019

Time: 5.15 - 6.30pm.  

Venue: Lecture Room A, Alison House, 12 Nicolson Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9DF

Abstract

On Broadway in the early 1930s, as operettas morphed into musicals, and live shows into sound-synchronised films, a brand-new fictional character appeared – the American lady composer.  There is no precedent within European opera and operetta for such a character, and, in so far as her authorship is treated as both positive and meaningful, little precedent in any medium.  The impetus was in part feminist and reflected a critical mass of published and professional female composers ‘on the ground’.  However, as a fictional character, she took on additional discursive roles.  On the one hand, she was sometimes an inscribed author symbolising newer jazz-influenced musical styles and an industry fantasy of the commercially compliant composer.  On the other hand, she was a personification of ‘music’ – otherworldly, remote from technology and the market place.  The tension between these contrasting figures can be traced to the diverse traditions that fed into the hybrid genre of the film musical. 

Biography

Matthew Head is Professor of Music at King's College London. His research focuses primarily on issues of gender, representation and sensibility in music of the long eighteenth century.  His single-author books are Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish Music (RMA, 2000), and Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in 18th-Century Germany (California UP, 2013).  An edited volume on the contemporary English composer Howard Skempton is in press with Boydell for 2019.  With a former teacher, he is also editing and contributing to the Cambridge Companion to Women Composers.