The Ithaca Music Forum will present a talk by Dr. Julia Hamilton, Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology, entitled "British Abolitionism on the Marketplace for Musical Scores." This talk will be held Friday, Feb. 23, at 5 pm in the Nabenhauer Recital Room in the Whalen Center for Music. The talk is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a reception.
During the first wave of antislavery activism in Britain (1787 to 1807), the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST) sponsored the printing of dozens of new nonfiction works about the inhumane practices of the slave trade. The creation of musical scores, by contrast, was never on the official agenda of this committee. Nor was music a top priority for the SEAST’s successors at the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions (1823 to 1838). Yet in both phases of antislavery agitation, many British composers produced musical settings of antislavery poetry. Their songs imagined the emotional experiences of enslaved Africans and called on Britons to mobilize against the nation’s involvement in slavery.
While historians have long explored the relationship between abolitionism and capitalism in trades such as pottery and printing, the music trade has been left out of this narrative. This talk therefore highlights the changing relationship between official antislavery business and the marketplace for musical scores during two phases of the British antislavery movement. Reading the letters of contemporary abolitionists alongside the corpus of musical scores produced before 1807, I argue that opponents of the slave trade recognized in the musical marketplace a set of practices that might be harnessed for the good of the cause. Upon reading a particularly popular antislavery poem, the thinking went, a composer might seize the opportunity to produce an antislavery score—without any prompting from activists. This was the opinion of Liverpool abolitionist Dr. James Currie, whose hopes for his own antislavery poem-turned-song were, I show, well-founded. By way of example, I take the listeners on a tour of popular London shopping streets, showing just how many music shops sold songs with abolitionist lyrics. In the latter part of the talk, I turn to the period of renewed antislavery agitation in the 1820s and 1830s. Here, I read musical scores for evidence of a new relationship between composers, music-sellers, musical scores, and the funds of antislavery societies. Rather than collecting the full profit of their antislavery songs, I show, composers began to connect their scores to the fundraising efforts of local antislavery societies.
