January 26, 2026
6 pm CET
Briony Cox-Williams: Rethinking Sentimentality in Victorian Song
Many of the songs written in Britain during the Victorian era, particularly those by women, have been dismissed since as sentimental or saccharine, with incompetent musical settings. The discomfort that is evident in a contemporary relationship with what is seen as sentimentality shows in this discourse, along with a parallel dismissal of a genre seen as domestic and female. The reputation of the Victorian ballad has thus suffered in three ways: first, through a devaluing of music making by amateurs and by extension, music that is technically and interpretatively within their reach; second, in an unease/suspicion around the textual material; and thirdly in the corresponding dismissal of the “everyday” as unhistoric, uneventful and undocumented. However, a more sympathetic focus on the songs suggests a new way of looking at these, particularly around emotional response to events that were personal particularly to women, as well as ways in which women paradoxically have been seen to enact that emotion rather than experiencing it.
This talk will look at the songs of four mid-century composers who underwent the same compositional training in the same institution, i.e. the Royal Academy of Music in London: Kate Loder, Helena Clint Miles, Kate Lucy Ward, and Clara Macirone. Starting with Sophie Fuller’s suggestion in ‘“The Finest Voice of the Century:” Clara Butt and Other Concert Hall and Drawing Room Singers of Fin de Siecle Britain’ that we no longer know how to listen to this repertoire, it will evaluate both the texts chosen and the compositional language employed served certain communicative purposes, and will explore how we might reclaim the underlying messages for contemporary audiences.
New Zealand pianist and researcher Briony Cox-Williams is a lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music in London. As a pianist she has given concerts both as a soloist and as a chamber musician, working with instrumentalists and singers, with a particular concentration on neglected repertoires, composers and performersof the nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. She has published articles on women composers such as Pauline von Decker, Fanny Hensel and Lili Boulanger, and on nineteenth-century performance practice in song. She is currently working on a book about the women students of the Royal Academy of Music in the nineteenth century. Other areas of research and teaching activity include nineteenth-century music aesthetics, concert programming, and the way in which gendered uses of language are coded into music theory and practice. Many of the PhD projects Briony supervises are based in these areas.
Jacy Pedersen: Identity and Nostalgia in Stefania Turkevych’s “Emigration Elegy”
Use of song as an expression of national identity and the desire for independence from foreign powers permeates Ukrainian history. Poet and First Vice-President of the Ukrainian Cultural Fund Victor Boiko describes the more than 200,000 documented Ukrainian folk songs, ranging from religious and ritual songs to historic and political songs, as a “generational encyclopedia of the Ukrainian experience.” Throughout her career Stefania Turkevych drew from the Ukrainian folk song tradition, composing works which included folk songs as themes or composing original melodies with foundations in folk tradition. Especially emblematic of her style, the fusion of folk and expressionist elements stands firmly opposite of the music permitted by the Doctrine of Socialist Realism. The inclusion of text in her songs—in some cases by poets with a strong political views, either towards Ukrainian national identity or feminism—clearly expresses Turkevych’s positive-bent rebellion against the trends of historiography and Ukrainian erasure due to the Russian grand narrative. In her song “Emigration Elegy,” Stefania Turkevych expresses Ukrainian national identity and nostalgia through text-painting, a folksong-like melody over non-tonal triadic harmony, and harmonic/melodic disconnection within hybrid phrase structures. Drawing upon the work of William Caplin, Joseph Straus, Joti Rockwell, and Svetlana Boym, I argue Turkevych’s style of juxtaposing twentieth-century and folk musical techniques, use of Ukrainian language, and frequent target audience of Ukrainian émigrés expresses nostalgia and national identity in ways which actively push against historical and twentieth-century efforts to eliminate it.
Jacy Pedersen is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Wichita State University. She received her Ph.D. in music theory from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in 2023. Her primary research focuses on acts of rebellion through music composed by women in the Soviet Union. Her work often uses an interdisciplinary methodology which combines music theory with gender studies, literary theory, analysis of drama, and Slavic studies. Additionally specializing in the study of film and video game music, she has presented her research at conferences nationally and internationally, including the International Musicological Society, the Society for Music Theory, the North American Conference on Video Game Music, and Music and the Moving Image.
Madlen Poguntke: Reframing Artsong: Transcultural Perspectives from Korean Gisaeng to European Salon Culture
“The state of female artists is very good. But the very definition of art has been biased in that ‘art’ was what men did in a European tradition and ‘crafts’ were what women and natives did. But it’s actually all the same.” – Gloria Steinem. Taking Steinem’s remark as reference, this paper disputes the limited, Eurocentric portrayal of artsong and redefines it from a transnational and transcultural angle. This study is a part of my Ph.D. research on female composers in Germany and South Korea, which deals with the question of how gendered authorship in song traditions has been the subject of definition, valuation, and transmission across diverse cultural settings.
The term artsong in the history of European music is generally linked to the 19th-century Kunstlied, which is deeply rooted in the male-dominated concert tradition and is maintained by a large number of notated works. Nevertheless, in Korea, gisaeng, i.e., highly educated female artists, were creating and performing poetic songs a few hundred years prior with several 16th-century-documented examples and historical evidence signifying that the origin was much earlier. Although these works were of the same quality in the combination of text and music, they have seldom been purposed in the same conceptual frame, partly due to them being in oral and performance-based traditions and not in written score.
The paper reveals the ways in which different methods of preservation, performance, and cultural validation have shaped our understanding of what counts as “artsong,” by contrasting the formalized European Kunstlied tradition with the Korean gisaeng practice. It does so through historical research, cultural comparison, and feminist musicology which altogether expand the genre definition beyond one that acknowledges the artistry of women’s song traditions universally and the historical oppressions of non-Western and orally transmitted repertoires. By this reframing, one can see the connections between different and even opposite music histories, but also the common ways wherby women haved used lyric song to be able to express their personal lives, make cultural commentary and to resist in a subtle way against limitations of their social worlds, no matter what time or place.
Madlen Poguntke is a flutist and musicologist whose work bridges artistic practice and academic research. She holds two Bachelor of Music degrees and the Staatsexamen in secondary school music education from the University of Regensburg. She earned two Master of Music degrees in flute and traverso at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich and a Master of Arts in musicology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research focuses on historical performance practice, socio-historical aspects of music, and the impact of AI on music. She is currently pursuing a PhD in music education in Munich and a PhD in musicology at Seoul National University. She has received multiple awards and scholarships and was honored for her artistic achievement as a cultural representative of her hometown. In addition to her artistic work, she contributes reviews and essays to leading music journals, engaging in scholarly discourse on music.
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AGiD Session 6
an online lecture