The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.239  Monday, 25 May 2015

 

From:        Michelle Assay <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Date:         May 24, 2015 at 10:22:12 AM EDT

Subject:    Call for Panel Presenters: ‘Shakespeare and Nordic Music’ as a part of ‘Shakespeare and Scandinavia’ Conference

 

Call for Panel Presenters: ‘Shakespeare and Nordic Music’, (deadline for abstracts 1 July, 2015)

 

International Conference 'Shakespeare and Scandinavia', Kingston University, 8-11 October, Kingston-upon-Thames

 

http://blogs.kingston.ac.uk/ssku/calls-for-panel-presenters-deadline-for-abstracts-1-july-2015/

 

From the songs of Christoph Ernst Friedrich Weyse and Peter Arnold Heise to Finnish folk-rock group Apulanta (‘Today Shakespeare was born and died’) Shakespeare has figured in many branches of Nordic music without ever gaining the kind of prominence that major operatic settings accorded him in other European cultural centres. Probably the most significant contribution is Sibelius’s score for The Tempest (1925-26) consisting of more than an hour of some of his finest music. But lesser-known contributions by Sibelius’s compatriot Aulis Sallinen (King Lear opera, 2000), his Danish contemporary Carl Nielsen (incidental music for Shakespeare celebrations, 1916), Norwegian Arne Nordheim (a Tempest ballet in 1979, incidental music to King Lear in 1985, various vocal/ensemble settings with electronic background), and even Grieg (‘Watchman’s Song’ from Macbeth, c. 1867) begin to suggest a more significant picture than has been passed down to us.

 

Papers are invited on any aspect of Shakespeare and Nordic Music, covering all genres, styles and historical periods, and techniques of reworking, not excluding musical responses less concrete than text-settings or tone poems directly on Shakespearean themes. Questions of national temperament may also be addressed: is it mere essentialism to propose, for instance, that Nordic artists are instinctively drawn to those dramas that stress elemental natural forces and emotional bleakness – as the examples cited above would seem to indicate – rather than to, say, Shakespeare’s ‘Southern’ subjects?

 

Panel conveners: Michelle Assay (Universities of Sheffield and Paris Sorbonne) and David Fanning (University of Manchester)

 

Please forward abstracts of no more than 500 words, and a brief bio (2-3 sentences), to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 1 July, 2015.

--

 

Michelle Assay

Université Paris Sorbonne, University of Sheffield

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

Subscribe to Our Feeds

Make a Gift to SHAKSPER

Consider making a gift to support SHAKSPER.