Symposium : Black music : its circulation and impact in eighteenth-century London / a symposium hosted by the Yale Center for British Art and co-organized with the Historic Royal Palaces, Handel & Hendrix in London, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art ; with generous suppport from Laura and James Duncan.

[New Haven] : [Yale Center for British Art], [2019]

20 unnumbered pages : illustrations ; 22-28 cm + Includes lyrics to the musical performances.

Program pamphlet for a musical concert and sympsium held at the Yale Center for British Art, Lecture Hall on Thursday, April 25, 2019 at 5:30pm (Music performance) and Friday, April 26, 2019 at 9am-5pm (Symposium).

"Recent research shows that indigenous musical traditions from Africa were known to eighteenth-century audieces, both elite and popular in Britain and on the Continent, as well as European colonies in the Americas. Findings establish that Christian missionares, as well as writers of early travel accounts, attempted to recod music that they heard performed by communities of enslaved Africans in the Americas and by North African peoples living in servitude in Iberia. Eighteenth-century London became increasingly mulicultural and its black community was invested in reinventing the urban soundscape. The fraught relationship between black and white communites was explored musically in the theater and opera. As a part of early abolitionist initiatives, songs were composed about the plight of the enslaved African for fashionable white audiences at Vauxhall, and for domestic music-making among the emerging middle class, with the intention to shock, and thus to mobilize support. This concert of musical excerpts, and the symposium which follows ahs arisen from research carried out for the exhibition 'Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World, held at the Yale Center for British Art between February and April of 2017."

Black music : its circulation and impact in eighteenth-century London

English

June 14, 2021