Hartley Residency - Professor Christopher Chowrimootoo Seminar

Day 1, Tuesday 7 February

Presentation by Christopher Chowrimootoo – Sacred Secularism: Music and Religion in Middlebrow Culture

If the twentieth century was marked by the steady march of secularization, why did so many canonical works of Western music draw on sacred texts, rituals, registers, and styles? What is the significance of “religious music” in the supposedly secular space of the concert hall, opera house, and movie theater? What are we to make of the long “middlebrow” tradition—from Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) to Adams’s Gospel According to the Other Mary (2012)—of replicating this paradox within the works themselves: of mixing traditional religious forms with flagrantly secular material; high with low; the transcendent with the everyday?

In this talk, Dr Chowrimootoo began to address these questions by examining a selection of twentieth-century case studies. He asked how we might define “religion” otherwise to take seriously the fervent contemporary responses to each work.  In doing so, he mounted a partial defense of these middlebrow works from their dismissal as a fake sublimity for a disenchanted urban elite. On a broader level, though, the talk aimed to challenge interrelated modernist and secularization narratives: to foreground the enduring importance of transcendence and uplift to twentieth-century classical music; and, more radically, to view this these registers not as a substitute or pseudo-religion but as a viable form of religion itself.

Day 2, Wednesday 8 February

Postgraduate seminar – Music and the Middlebrow, led by Christopher Chowrimootoo

Readings circulated in advance included:

“Introduction,” from Christopher Chowrimootoo, Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2018.

Selections from the Colloquy "Musicology and the Middlebrow,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 73 (2020).

Presentations by University of Southampton staff members

Neil Gregor (History) – Audiences, Tastes and Judgements: Locating the 'Middlebrow' in Interwar Germany

This paper approaches the idea of the 'middlebrow' from the perspective of ordinary concertgoers in interwar Germany.  Examining a range of ego documents produced by individual audience members in the period, it asks how far the attendant assumptions regarding quality, accessibility, modes of listening and consumption reproduced themselves in the practice and speech of members of the 'middling sort' who constituted the public for art music. It asks after the political and cultural work that ideas of the ‘middlebrow' undertook in the period, what the idea of the 'middlebrow' enables us to see and what it might get in the way of us seeing too.

Erin Johnson-Williams (Music) – Sonic Congregating: Hymns and the Imperial Middlebrow

This presentation explores how British hymn singing, both historically and today, constitutes a kind of nostalgic middlebrow spectacle. I suggest that several strands of hymnic aesthetics have developed directly in dialogue with entrenched systems of colonial mission education, and propose that the hymn, as a mode of middlebrow respectability, actively participates in reinforcing discourses of racialised Salvationism, across both sacred and secular contexts.

Round Table – Sacred Entertainments

Christopher Chowrimootoo (University of Notre Dame), Neil Gregor (History, UoS), Erin Johnson-Williams (Music, UoS), Kendrick Oliver (History, UoS)

Preliminary readings included:

Richard Taruskin, "Sacred Entertainments" Cambridge Opera Journal, 15, (2003), 109–126

“Introduction” from Kendrick Oliver, To Touch the Face of God: The Sacred, the Profane and the American Space Program, 1957-75 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).